Humanitarianism, Estrangement and Intimacies during the ‘long’ Second World War. New Historiographical Perspectives

This chapter explores how the notion of intimacy provides a new way of approaching the history of humanitarianism. It takes ‘intimacy’ to mean any form and instances of relatedness, which shape people’s senses of selves, their feelings, their attachments, and their identifications. After reflecting on how various strands of historical scholarship on ‘intimacies’ offer a potential complement to the literature on gender, affects and humanitarian care, it argues that the notion of intimacy provides a productive methodological approach to move across scales of analysis, from the global to the local, an opportunity to rethink the boundaries between the public and the private and a way to interrogate humanitarians’ relations to the norms and normative. This chapter demonstrates that to think about humanitarianism intimately means to go beyond a grassroot and biographical approach to the history of humanitarianism, to consider archival material that are not usually associated with emotions, affects or bodies and to attempt to make affective connections between the past and the present. Using the history of transnational medical care in the Resistance as a case study, it reflects on the promises and core difficulties in foregrounding ‘intimacies’ in global histories of humanitarianism. Crucially, drawing together diverse historiographical perspectives, it points towards new directions of future research in the field.