The International Red Cross was the inspiration - the dream - of Henri Dunant, a 31 year old Swiss businessman appalled by the butchery and lack of medical care for injured soldiers during the battle of Solferino in 1859. He set out to create an international organization which was not only to alter, irrevocably, the fate of all those wounded in every war, but which moved rapidly into international humanitarian law, refugee work, prison conditions and the tracking of people parted by warfare. Today the Red Cross has 137 national societies and 250 million members. Yet it remains an inscrutable institution - very much the same animal today as in the 1870s - governed by the Swiss alone.

Traditionally isolated from mainstream European affairs, in 1914 the Dutch had no major allegiances that bound them to any one side of the conflict. Geographically and economically caught between two of the major belligerents, Great Britain and Germany, the Netherlands was constantly vulnerable to attack from either side. In adopting a position of neutrality at the beginning of the war, the Dutch took a huge gamble. The internment of approximately 50,000 foreign troops in the Netherlands, some for almost the entire four years of the war, provided an important showcase for the Dutch Government to demonstrate its adherence to international law and its impartiality towards the all of the belligerents.

This book provides a modern and basic introduction to a branch of international law constantly gaining in importance in international life, namely international humanitarian law (the law of armed conflict). It is constructed in a way suitable for self-study. The subject-matters are discussed in self-contained chapters, allowing each to be studied independently of the others. Among the subject-matters discussed are, inter alia: the Relationship between jus ad bellum / jus in bello; Historical Evolution of IHL; Basic Principles and Sources of IHL; Martens Clause; International and Non-International Armed Conflicts; Material, Spatial, Personal and Temporal Scope of Application of IHL; Special Agreements under IHL; Role of the ICRC; Targeting; Objects Specifically Protected against Attack; Prohibited Weapons; Perfidy; Reprisals; Assistance of the Wounded and Sick; Definition of Combatants; Protection of Prisoners of War; Protection of Civilians; Occupied Territories; Protective Emblems; Sea Warfare; Neutrality; Implementation of IHL.

Interviewing war criminals and their victims, Neuffer explains, through the voices of people she follows over the course of a decade, how genocide erodes a nation's social and political environment. Her characters' stories and their competing notions of justice-from searching for the bodies of loved ones, to demanding war crime trials, to seeking bloody revenge-convinces readers that crimes against humanity cannot be resolved by simple talk of forgiveness,or through the more common recourse to forgetfulness.

Civil war has been a fact of political life throughout recorded history. However, unlike inter-state wars, international law has not traditionally regulated such conflicts. How then can we explain the post-1945 emergence and evolution of international treaty rules regulating the conduct of internal armed conflict: the 'Civil War Regime'? Negotiating Civil War combines insights derived from Realist, Rationalist, Liberal, and Constructivist approaches to International Relations to answer this question, revisiting the negotiation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, the 1977 Additional Protocols, and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. This study provides a rigorous, critical account of the making of the Civil War Regime. Sophisticated and persuasive, it illustrates the complex interplay of material, ideational, social, and strategic factors in shaping these rules with important lessons for the making and unmaking of international law in a rapidly shifting international political, economic, and security environment.

From the brink of dissolution in 1945 to the triumph of the Geneva Conventions in 1949, via the Nuremberg Trials, runaway Nazis, and furious battles with communist critics on the eve of the Cold War, this is the intriguing and remarkable story of the International Red Cross - and how it survived its ambiguous relationship with the Nazis during the Second World War. The Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is one of the world's oldest, most prominent, and revered aid organizations. But at the end of World War II things could not have looked more different. Under fire for its failure to speak out against the Holocaust or to extend substantial assistance to Jews trapped in Nazi camps across Europe, the ICRC desperately needed to salvage its reputation in order to remain relevant in the post-war world. Indeed, the whole future of Switzerland's humanitarian flagship looked to hang in the balance at this time. Torn between defending Swiss neutrality and battling Communist critics in the early Cold War, the Red Cross leadership in Geneva emerged from the world war with a new commitment to protecting civilians caught in the crossfire of conflict. But they did so while defending former Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials and issuing travel papers to many of Hitler's former henchmen. These actions did little to silence the ICRC's critics, who unfavourably compared the 'shabby' neutrality of the Swiss with the 'good' neutrality of the Swedes, their eager rivals for leadership in international humanitarian initiatives. In spite of all this, by the end of the decade, the ICRC had emerged triumphant from its moment of existential crisis, navigating the new global order to reaffirm its leadership in world humanitarian affairs against the challenge of the Swedes, and playing a formative role in rewriting the rules of war in the Geneva Conventions of 1949. This uncompromising new history tells the remarkable and intriguing story of how the ICRC achieved this - successfully escaping the shadow of its ambiguous wartime record to forge a new role and a new identity in the post-1945 world.

For more than a century the Canadian Red Cross Society has provided help and comfort to vulnerable people at home and abroad. In the first detailed national history of the organization, Sarah Glassford reveals how the European-born Red Cross movement came to Canada and took root, and why it flourished. From its origins in battlefield medicine to the creation of Canada’s first nationwide free blood transfusion service during the Cold War, Mobilizing Mercy charts crucial organizational changes, the influence of key leaders, and the impact of social, cultural, political, economic, and international trends over time. Glassford shows that the key to the Red Cross's longevity lies in its ability to reinvent itself by tapping into the concerns and ambitions of diverse groups including militia doctors, government officials, middle-class women, and schoolchildren. Through periods of war and peace, the Canadian Red Cross pioneered new services and filled gaps in government aid to become a ubiquitous agency on the wartime home front, a major domestic public health organization, and a respected provider of international humanitarian aid. Opening a window onto the shifting relationship between voluntary organizations and the state, Mobilizing Mercy is a compelling portrait of a major humanitarian organization, its people, and its ever-evolving place in Canadian society.