From Christian missionary publications to the media strategies employed by today’s NGOs, this interdisciplinary collection explores the entangled histories of humanitarianism and media. It traces the emergence of humanitarian imagery in the West and investigates how the meanings of suffering and aid have been constructed in a period of evolving mass communication, demonstrating the extent to which many seemingly new phenomena in fact have long historical legacies. Ultimately, the critical histories collected here help to challenge existing asymmetries and help those who advocate a new cosmopolitan consciousness recognizing the dignity and rights of others.

From Christian missionary publications to the media strategies employed by today’s NGOs, this interdisciplinary collection explores the entangled histories of humanitarianism and media. It traces the emergence of humanitarian imagery in the West and investigates how the meanings of suffering and aid have been constructed in a period of evolving mass communication, demonstrating the extent to which many seemingly new phenomena in fact have long historical legacies. Ultimately, the critical histories collected here help to challenge existing asymmetries and help those who advocate a new cosmopolitan consciousness recognizing the dignity and rights of others.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Humanitarianism and Media: Introduction to an Entangled History
Johannes Paulmann

PART I: HUMANITARIAN IMAGERY

Chapter 1. Promoting Distant Children in Need: Christian Imagery in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Katharina Stornig

Chapter 2. “Make the Situation Real to Us without Stressing the Horrors”: Children, Photography and Humanitarianism in the Spanish Civil War
Rose Holmes

Chapter 3. Humanitarianism on the Screen: The ICRC Films, 1921–1965
     Appendix I: List of ICRC Films, 1921–1965 (Original Titles)
     Appendix II: ICRC ‘Humanitarion’ Films, by Director/Cameraman
Daniel Palmieri

Chapter 4. “People Who Once were Human Beings Like You and Me”: Why Allied Atrocity Films of Liberated Nazi Concentration Camps in 1944–46 Maximized the Horror and Universalized the Victims
Ulrike Weckel

Chapter 5. The Polemics of Pity: British Photographs of Berlin, 1945–1947
Paul Betts

Chapter 6. The Human Gaze: Photography after 1945
Tobias Weidner

PART II: HUMANITARIAN MEDIA REGIMES

Chapter 7. On Fishing in Other People's Ponds: The Freedom from Hunger Campaign, International Fundraising, and the Ethics of NGO Publicity
Heike Wieters

Chapter 8. Advocacy Strategies of Western Humanitarian NGOs from the 1960s to the 1990s
Valérie Gorin

Chapter 9. Humanitarianism and Revolution: Samed, the Palestine Red Crescent Society, and the Work of Liberation
Ilana Feldman

Chapter 10. Mediatization of Disasters and Humanitarian Aid in the Federal Republic of Germany
Patrick Merziger

Chapter 11. NGOs, Celebrity Humanitarianism, and the Media: Negotiating Conflicting Perceptions of Aid and Development during the “Ethiopian Famine”
Matthias Kuhnert

Chapter 12. The Audience of Distant Suffering and the Question of (In)Action
Maria Kyriakidou

Index