Battle Of Solferino Research Articles

The Militargrenze from the Battle of Solferino before the beginning of Demilitarization: three views out of Russia (F.F. Tornau, N.I. Krasnov, B. Katalinich). Part III

The Militargrenze from the Battle of Solferino before the beginning of Demilitarization: three views out of Russia (F.F. Tornau, N.I. Krasnov, B. Katalinich). Part III

From Tourist to Planner: Preparing for Affect in Henri Dunant’s A Memory of Solferino

Henri Dunant visited Italy to find Napoleon III in order to make a financial appeal. Shortly after Dunant’s arrival, he witnessed the 1859 Battle of Solferino, a particularly brutal moment in the attempts to unify Italy. From witnessing the battle and the care for the wounded, Dunant wrote A Memory of Solferino to call for a peacetime organization that would better administer care for the wounded. In his appeal Dunant counts on significant affective responses from his audience, yet he emphasizes administration and planning as the way to manage and channel the overwhelming affective responses that come from war.

Tutti Fratelli? Perspectives and Challenges for International Humanitarian Law

This article is based on addresses given in The Hague, Wellington and Auckland in 2009 to mark the 150th anniversary of the beginnings of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. Out of a dreadful day of war, the Battle of Solferino, was born a great humanitarian institution which later became the International Committee of the Red Cross. The author discusses seven matters from the early years of the organisation: first was the importance of simple humanity; second was the principle of non-discrimination; third was a positive obligation to collect and care for the wounded and sick; fourth was about the rights and responsibilities of the individuals involved in warfare; fifth was the importance of getting peace agreements before hostilities began; sixth was establishing of national societies for the relief for the wounded before the same; and finally, the law was inherently humanitarian in nature. The author then discusses the implementation of international humanitarian law, arguing for two main methods: education and training programmes, and compliance through negotiation with governments. The author stresses the importance of adhering to laws during times of warfare by emphasising the values on which the law is based.

Operationalizing the Responsibility to Protect—the Policekeeping Approach

At battle of Solferino, Henri Dunant was so appalled by loss of life that he founded what became International Red Cross movement to mitigate most barbaric effects of modern warfare. His concept was that an agreement between states, Geneva Conventions, could regulate conduct of combatants along more humane lines. Since then, transformation from conflict between states to conflict between peoples within states has fundamentally altered moral and political space within which such initiatives take place. In Srebrenica, Rwanda, and a long list of orphaned conflicts, neutrality has often cost lives rather than saved them. Doing no harm has sometimes meant doing nothing at all, whereas aggressive military operations in support of humanitarian objectives in Somalia and Iraq have produced their own conflicts. (1) Understandably, consensus has increasingly been that if humanitarianism is to retain credibility it must devise better methods to safeguard human security: it needs a third way. To resolve dilemmas of state failure that emerged in 1990s, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked for an International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). Its 2001 report, The Responsibility to Protect, argued that in cases of severe humanitarian emergency, territorial sovereignty would yield to an international responsibility to protect, including use of military force to enforce peace. (2) Such a responsibility, however, could not be exercised lightly and was to be accompanied by equal obligations to prevent or react to conflict and to rebuild postwar states, a reinvigoration of what Burke described as the dual mandate of trusteeship. (3) The Responsibility to Protect represents most sophisticated attempt at establishing a moral guideline for international action in face of humanitarian emergency. It predicates legitimate intervention on welfare of populations subjected to persecution rather than on calculations of national interest and security; it is multilateral in vision and it advocates UN's role in authorizing intervention and in guiding path to peace; it warns of use of force as an option of last resort while endorsing pragmatic merits of coalitions of willing and regional security arrangements. It is a practical guideline that, now more than ever, requires our support. However, operationalization of The Responsibility to Protect has been captive to traditional dual deadlock of establishing a permanent international military capacity and well-founded fears of nonconsensual intervention that could facilitate less salubrious forms of political exploitation. Military aspects of intervention may remain ad hoc and continue to be subcontracted to coalitions of willing and capable among UN member states. Full-scale transformation of societies through international administration, reconstruction, and security assistance will likely continue to occur selectively in those situations where national interests intersect with international media attention to human rights abuses. Nor for that matter is military intervention a panacea for internal conflicts; diplomatic pressure can produce results if applied judiciously. However, in those cases where international community does commit to transformation, such as Kosovo, East Timor, and Iraq, much could be done to make intervention more effective, and by implication more affordable, thus allowing and perhaps inspiring wider engagement internationally than is currently case. Substantial progress could be made in two fields in tandem with Brahimi reform process: rule of law and transitional administration. (4) As identified by UN's recent High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, lack of a coherent approach for rule of law has been a pivotal impediment to regeneration of peace and centralization of authority in postwar situations. (5) The organization of policing operations has received little attention--as realized too late in Balkans and spectacularly day after regime change in Iraq. …

The journalist's right to information in time of war and on dangerous missions

It is commonplace to say that we live in an age of instantaneous information and communication. During the occupation of Iraq by the United States and its allies, pictures taken in the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad and showing members of the US Armed Forces and Iraqi detainees in disgraceful circumstances could be seen within minutes all over the world. The message carried by those pictures changed the discourse on the Iraq war of 2003–2004.We have become used to instant information through real-time reporting on events occurring in the various corners of the world. This flow of news is taken for granted, and we expect our favourite radio or TV station to deliver the latest news at every moment of the day. Seeing pictures taken inside a well-guarded prison in a war a few thousand kilometres away is no longer a surprise.Wars have always attracted writers eager to report on what happens when men fight against men. Some of these reports have become immortal works of world literature. Some may even have influenced the course of history. Only a few memorable examples are Homer's epic poem on the fall of Troy, Julius Caesar'sDe bello gallicoor the Indian epicMahabharata. On a different level, who knows that Winston Churchill, at the age of 25, was a war correspondent reporting from the Boer War in 1899?An accidental war correspondent deserves to be mentioned here, Henry Dunant, who happened to witness the aftermath of a particularly murderous battle, the Battle of Solferino in northern Italy in 1859.

"Last Austrians" in "Turn of the Century" Works by Franz Grillparzer, Joseph Roth, and Alfred Kolleritsch

Radical shifts in a nation's ontological and/or sociopolitical landscape, whether actual or merely perceived, often roughly coincide with the turn of the century. This is certainly true of Austria in the past two hundred years. With the death of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II in 1792, Austria's fifty year flirtation with the Enlightenment came to an end. When Franz II succeeded to the throne in that year, the era of at least modestly progressive reforms that began with the reign of Maria Theresa in 1740 gave way to an age marked by repression, reaction, and stultified monarchic absolutism. With the exception of a few brief periods characterized by halfhearted accommodations to outbreaks of revolution and nationalism, this long period of corrupt imperial rule in Austria dominated the nineteenth century. Its demise was reflected in the work of the nation's literary intelligentsia at the outset of the twentieth, though the official year of its death was 1918. As the twentieth century came to a close, the very notion of Austria's identity-what it means to be an Austriancame into question. These shifts over the course of three fins de siecle are reflected in works by three authors-Franz Grillparzer, Joseph Roth, and Alfred Kolleritsch-who experienced them. The transition from the mildly reformist Josephinian era to the recalcitrant suppression characteristic of the age of Metternich marked Grillparzer's youth and finds highly refracted symbolic expression in his dramaLibussa (completed 1848, first published 1872). The 1848 revolution brought Franz Joseph I to the throne, and while Libussa subtly bemoans his accession, Roth's Radetzkymarsch (1932) nostalgically mourns the demise of his rule, a nostalgia generated by Roth's witnessing of the birth of a new, far more horrific form of government. In Der letzte Osterreicher (1995), Kolleritsch brings into being a protagonist born in the twilight of the dual monarchy, an artist whose supranational, antimodernist tendency and highly developed personal subjectivity condemn him to be, as the novel's title indicates, the true representative of his generation. As the twentieth century came to a close Kolleritsch created not so much a Austrian, but a Austro-Hungarian, whose vitriol, not unlike that of some of Roth's protagonists, is largely directed at his nation's German nationalists. The double set of quotation marks in my essay's title reflects a twofold proviso. Grillparzer's Libussa, Roth's Carl Joseph von Trotta, and Kolleritsch's unnamed artist are not literally last Austrians, but rather final instances of a specific mode of Dasein in their country made possible through their imbibing of political, ontological, and aesthetic values that come to a close with the conclusion of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Indeed, in the narrowest sense of the term, neither Libussa nor Carl Joseph are Austrians at all; the former is the mythological Bohemian duchess credited with founding the city of Prague, and the latter is the Slovenian progeny of Franz Joseph's fictional savior at the battle of Solferino in 1859. Only Kolleritsch's Der letzte Osterreicher was written at the turn of a century. However, Grillparzer's drama and Roth's novel both evoke and articulate epochs of sociopolitical disruption roughly coincident with a fin de siecle, albeit with two contrasting levels of explicitness. Grillparzer's tale of Bohemia's supernaturally endowed pre-Christian leader is one of a number of German-language works inspired by the Libussa legend. Others include a poem by Hans Sachs (1537), a fairy tale by Johann Karl August Musaus (one of his Volksmarchen der Deutschen [1782-1787]), and Clemens Brentano's well-known drama Die Griindung Prags (1815).' Though different in tone, purport, and structure, the overall plot of these tales is similar; at the outset, Libussa is shown living in harmony with her sisters Tetka and Kascha. Because their father Krokus has just died, the Bohemians require one of the three young women to become their leader, and Libussa is chosen. …

Dunant's dream: war, Switzerland and the history of the Red Cross

The International Red Cross was the inspiration - the dream - of Henri Dunant, a 31-year-old businessman appalled by the butchery and lack of medical care for injured soldiers during the battle of Solferino in 1859. With Gustave Moynier, another Swiss, Dunant 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. The original Geneva Convention of 1864, for which the Red Cross was directly responsible, is one of the most important international instruments of humanitarian law ever formulated. 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, but highly dependent for its diplomats and staff on foreigners - all of whom are required to sign a pledge of secrecy. This text traces the origins of the Red Cross, its main areas of work including some of its most difficult and contentious interventions, and its work with refugees. It investigates the secretive paranoia of the headquarters and uncovers some truths about the Red Cross and its relationship with some of the most horrific and barbaric political regimes of the 20th century. It also examines the concept of neutrality - central to the Red Cross - and its feasibility in the modern world.

The historical foundations of humanitarian action

After nearly 130 years of existence, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement continues to play a unique and important role in the field of human relations.Its origin may be traced to the impression made on Henry Dunant, a chance witness at the scene, by the disastrous lack of medical care at the battle of Solferino in 1859 and the compassionate response aroused in the people of Lombardy by the plight of the wounded. The Movement has since gained importance and expanded to such a degree that it is now an irreplaceable institution made up of dedicated people all over the world.

The Geneva Conventions and medical personnel in the field

To speak of the Geneva Conventions and medical personnel in the field is truly to return to the very source of international humanitarian law, for the event which led to the birth of that body of law was the tragedy suffered at the battle of Solferino in 1859 by the wretched masses of wounded soldiers on both sides who received no care whatever.

The development of the idea of peace in the thinking of Henry Dunant

Henry Dunant first came up against the problem of war at the battle of Solferino. The impact of the experience remained in his memory for ever and decided the course of his life. Spurred on by a deep repugnance for violence, he then set out on the long road which would lead him to propound ways and means first to protect victims of war, then to restrict the circumstances wherein war could arise, and finally to abolish war altogether. These three approaches—protection, restriction and abolition—complemented each other; they were not alternatives. To Henry Dunant's way of thinking they formed a cohesive system aimed at curbing the excesses of war while at the same time preventing its appearance and eradicating its causes.

Voluntarism within the Red Cross

“Tutti fratelli”, cried with emotion the women of Castiglione when, with Henry Dunant, they tended the wounded after the battle of Solferino. In this cry from the heart, this testimony to human solidarity in distress and to voluntary assistance to men who surfer, is to be found the origin of a movement which has so widely expanded during the years and which is called the Red Cross

The International Red Cross

the eve of the XVIIIth International Red Cross Conference, being held in Toronto between the 26th of July and the 7th August 1952, it may not be superfluous to recall the history and legal status of a body which, although its emblem1 is as familiar as their national flag to people of all lands, is often better known for its countless and widely differing local welfare programmes than for its international scope. Yet the idea which gave rise to the present Red Cross movement was the result of an experience of battle between soldiers of many nationalities and from the very beginning aimed at alleviating human suffering on a supra-national level. For centuries the care of war-casualties had been left to religious communities or to rudimentary army medical services which were generally inadequate to deal with the aftermath of any but the smallest skirmishes. Not until the outbreak of the Crimean war, when Florence Nightingale on the British side and the Grand Duchess Helena Pavlovna on the Russian side were pioneers in establishing regular nursing services behind the lines, was any organised effort made to give the wounded medical attention. The vision of expanding these services to include all armies, by setting up in every country a voluntary aid society recognised and protected by the belligerent powers, was born five years later in the mind of Jean Henry Dunant, a young Swiss banker travelling in June 1859 through Lombardy where the united forces of Napoleon III and Victor Emmanuel of Sardinia were campaigning against the Austrian army led by Francis Joseph. Born on Jtme 8, 4B28 at Geneva of an old family, Henry Dunant had led a life of peaceful prosperity. Then, one early summer, intent on reaching Napoleon III in the hope of obtaining from the victorious emperor certain concessions his colonial authorities were unwilling to grant to a Swiss company in Algeria, he accidentally witnessed the battle of Solferino. In military and political history its date, June 24, 1859, marks the opening of the modern era of warfare. Owing to faulty intelligence, the encounter took place unexpectedly at dawn, finding most of the