A category “easy to liquidate”: The league of nations, Russian refugee children in the 1920s and the history of humanitarianism

This chapter looks at the work of the League of Nation’s High Commission for Refugees with child refugees from the Russian Civil War. It evaluates the HCR’s principles and working practices and addresses the debate on whether the interwar period contributed to or defineda new form of humanitarianism, which was a precursor of the human rights regime in the post-war era. Two diffeent schemes are examined: giving control over the children’s education to a British organisation, and sending them to France to work on farms, helping in the post-war reconstruction of agriculture. Thechapter suggests that the work of the HCR was often arbitrary, paternalistic and controlling, and little influencedby ideas of rights or respect for the agency and choices of refugees

Related Subject(s): Economic and Social Development