Idealism beyond Borders

Eleanor Davey's research is currently funded by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (2014–17) and explores the relationship between humanitarianism and national liberation. Prior to joining the University of Manchester, she worked in the Humanitarian Policy Group at the Overseas Development Institute (HPG/ODI), one of the leading research centres working on humanitarian action, where she headed a project on the uses of history in humanitarian practice and policy. She is currently an adviser to research projects underway at ODI and Save the Children UK.

• Introduction; Part I. Idealism beyond Borders: 1. A revolution in aid: the creation of sans-frontiérisme; 2. Aiding the revolution: influences on tiers-mondisme; Part II. Violence and Morality: 3. The struggle for international justice: tiers-mondiste engagement on the outskirts of May; 4. Complicity, conscience and autocritique: reconfiguring attitudes to political violence; 5. A rhetoric of responsibility: Vichy, the Holocaust, and suffering in the third world; Part III. Ethics and Polemics: 6. Idealism beyond borders: the turn to sans-frontiériste spectacle; 7. Controversy in a humanitarian age: attacks on tiers-mondisme in the 1980s; Conclusion; Notes; Index.

'Humanitarian agencies, including Médecins Sans Frontières, often struggle to understand current political processes and live in a 'perpetual present'. This creates major difficulties in recontextualising political processes that could help humanitarian workers and organizations have a better understanding of modern dilemmas and constraints during their daily activities. By describing two activist moments in France, tiers-mondiste and sans-frontièriste, and the process by which one came to displace the other as the dominant way of approaching suffering in the Third World, Eleanor Davey helps us to see how the past is connected to the present, identifying a failure that she rightly underlines as shaping many analyses of humanitarianism. This book is a very interesting account of the intellectual roots of current humanitarianism, and helps us create links between recent 'humanitarian thinking and longer political and intellectual processes of change'.' Caroline Abu Sa'Da, Médecins Sans Frontières, Switzerland