Introduction: Socialist Humanitarianism

This special issue places the socialist world at the centre of the modern history of humanitarianism. The contributions bring together a wide range of perspectives to explore the meaning, purpose, and practices of socialist humanitarianism at different scales and across continents. Closely examining practices and discourses from socialist contexts and actors across Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America expands definitions of humanitarian action, highlights aid flows that upend traditional assumptions about unidirectional Global North-Global South transfer, and proposes alternative chronologies for tracing the development of the international humanitarian sector. This short introduction explores why the socialist world has been sidelined within international historiographies on humanitarianism and argues that placing it at the centre can offer new ways of understanding the evolution of humanitarian ideas and practices across the second half of the twentieth century.