Relief Campaign Research Articles

A Visit to the Exhibition of All Nations: The Chicago World’s Fair and the United States in Vasily Sidorov’s Travel Writing

The Chicago World’s Fair represented a continuity of the World’s Fairs as key international events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which were widely covered, including in travelogues for home readership. The Russian Empire showed considerable interest in participating, especially after Americans organized a relief campaign during its famine a year ago. While the Russian government supervised the exhibits and sent specialists to study the American economy and society, many Russians visited the Fair individually, and some published travel accounts. This article explores the account titled America. Travel Notes and Impressions (1895) written by novelist and botanist Vasily Sidorov. Traveling with a group of European tourists, he admires American nature and praises American technological progress, mobility, and freedoms that could be potentially borrowed but shows uncertainty about major cities and excesses of industrialization and technological development, to a degree repeating what was pointed out by earlier Russian visitors. He evaluated the Fair and most of what he saw through the image of Europe which was also employed to emphasize his sense of cultural superiority.

The Relief Campaign for the 1954 Yangzi River Flood and Rural Collectivization in Early Communist China

Abstract: In 1954, a devastating flood struck the entire Yangzi River basin, causing the first major natural disaster in the newly established People’s Republic of China (PRC). The young regime had just embarked on its First Five-Year Plan, aimed at achieving rapid economic development and industrialization. The flood swept across several provinces, displaced populations, and submerged farmlands, posing both a new challenge and an opportunity for the regime to shape the socioeconomic landscape of the affected regions. This article uses a localized perspective to examine how the rural society of Hubei Province, the hardest-hit area, responded to the disaster. The central government’s self-help doctrine delegated much power to local governments and communities. Local officials and rural cadres had considerable leeway in managing the relief campaign as they simultaneously followed the state macroeconomic policy of rural collectivization. The 1954 flood in Hubei Province serves as a case study that illustrates the complexities of disaster management in the early years of the PRC.

Christian Humanitarianism, Refugee Stories, and the Making of the Cold War West

AbstractThis article argues that refugees and the Christian humanitarian organizations supporting them, particularly Catholic ones, helped to construct the Cold War West. Christian NGOs valued these refugees, not only for their needs or their suffering, but for the power of their stories. Refugees’ stories served to encapsulate and dramatize the horrors of communism, transforming it from an abstract ideological threat to a vivid personal danger. Their suffering and sacrifice, and the efforts to relieve this suffering, helped to forge ties of solidarity across Western Europe and North America. Christian groups fuelled this solidarity through the dissemination of information about communist persecution and the courage of refugees seeking to escape it, mobilizing the faithful to contribute through donations, prayers, and relief campaigns. The vision of the West which emerged from these campaigns emphasized religious freedom as the cornerstone of Western societies. It promoted solidarity across national borders by emphasizing Christian unity, although there were tensions between different denominations and Catholics were often the most active supporters of anti-communist humanitarianism. It also, strikingly, had little to say about democracy, something that becomes particularly evident when we examine the participation of Franco's Spain in Christian refugee relief.

The Controversial Hispanic-French Alliance of 1627: Reasons and Objetives of the Relief Campaign

Even though in the second half of the 1620’s the relationship between the Hispanic Monarchy and France were damaged and the confrontation between them both threatened with the outbreak of war, in 1627 they put aside their differences and signed an agreement to help the French Monarchy against the English attack. This paper analyzes that controversial agreement, aiming to explain the reasons behind it, how it was developed and the consequences that it had between the two powers.

The Role of Media in Humanitarian Interventions and Relief Campaigns on the Example of Slovak non-profits Response to the Conflict in Ethiopia

Despite promising democratization reforms in 2018 and awards from abroad in 2019, in November 2020, Ethiopia (Africa’s second most populous country) once again fell into the abyss of authoritarianism culminating in ethnically-driven violence and subsequent humanitarian disaster the Tigray Region in the north of the country. In this paper, the Slovak intervention by members of Ambrela – Platform for Development Organizations with its relief campaign Together for Ethiopia (March–April 2021) is analyzed. It also focuses on the role of media coverage in aid intervention and its impact on donors behavior.

Medical crowdfunding and COVID-19: awareness and perception of healthcare professionals and role of crowdfunding platforms in India

Background: In developing countries like India, where out-of-pocket expenditure forms a large part of overall health spending, crowdfunding can be an alternative to ease peoples’ financial burden. The COVID-19 pandemic in India imposed a huge financial strain on people causing many to turn to crowdfunding to pay for their medical expenses. Health professionals can play an important role in raising awareness among people regarding medical crowdfunding. The aim of the study was to assess the awareness and perception about crowdfunding among health care professionals and analyse COVID-19 relief campaigns run by selected crowdfunding platforms in India.Methods: A mixed methods study was conducted including cross-sectional online survey among healthcare professionals and secondary analysis of COVID-19 relief campaigns run by crowdfunding platforms in India.Results: Among 155 participants in our study, 121 (78%) were aware about crowdfunding and most of them (93%) had come to know about crowdfunding during the pandemic. Participants who had previously known someone who required funds to support their medical treatment had greater knowledge regarding crowdfunding (p=0.04) and believed that crowdfunding can reduce individual financial burden (p=0.02). However, 30% participants did not trust online crowdfunding platforms to be genuine. Three crowdfunding platforms (Ketto, Milaap and Impact Guru) were analysed for COVID-19 relief campaigns- most campaigns were run to raise funds for medical oxygen/oxygen concentrators.Conclusions: We found that previous experience of unmet financial need affects both knowledge and trust in medical crowdfunding. There is a need to improve awareness and confidence related to crowdfunding among health care professionals.

Resilient Assessment During COVID‐19

Resilient Assessment During COVID‐19

Migrants into Humanitarians: Ethnic Solidarity and Private Aid-Giving during Romania’s Historic Flood of 1970

This article studies the involvement of Western diaspora communities of Transylvanian Saxons in the humanitarian campaign for Romania during the flood disaster in 1970. It shows how the Saxons’ private relief campaigns established new forms of connectivity and exchange across the Iron Curtain through a transnational regime of care, ethnic solidarity, and charitable work. The article argues that the contingent and precarious situation of such spatially divided ethnic communities refashioned a generation of World War II refugees and migrants from “speechless” objects of humanitarian intervention into passionate advocates, effective mediators, and surprising champions of private aid giving in postwar Europe.

Helping relief campaigns: Social cognitive factors underlying important issues using structural equation modelling

Natural disasters happening around the world have caused a huge burden on local and international charities in recent years. This study tended to examine and explore factors, which cause the migrat...

ARA relief campaign in the Volga region, Jewish anthropometric statistics, and the scientific promise of integration.

ArgumentThe article builds a case for the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population (Obshchestvo Okhranenia Zdorov'ia Evreiskogo Naselenia [OZE]) as a project of medicalized modernity, a mass politics of Jewish self-help that relied on a racialized and medicalized vision of a future Jewish nation. Officially registered in 1912 in St. Petersburg, it created the space for a Jewish politics that focused on the state of the collective Jewish body as a precondition for Jewish participation in any version of modernity. OZE futurism survived the years of World War I and the Russian Civil War, when the organization had to concentrate on rescue and relief rather than on facilitating the development of new bodies and souls. New archival evidence reveals how race science, medical statistics, and positive eugenics became composite elements of the Jewish anticolonial message and new subjectivity.

Social exclusion influences on the effectiveness of altruistic versus egoistic appeals in charitable advertising

In three experiments, the authors study charitable behaviors and demonstrate that consumers who feel socially excluded react more positively to altruistic, other appeals rather than egoistic, self-benefit appeals. In Study 1, a child poverty relief campaign with a message persuasiveness variable, consumers who feel socially excluded are more persuaded by other-benefit appeals, but other appeals and self-benefit appeals have equal effects on consumers who feel socially included. Study 2 replicates the findings in a cancer research campaign with an amount-to-donate variable: consumers who feel socially excluded allocate more dollars to the charity in response to other-benefit rather than self-benefit ads, but the effects are not observed among consumers who feel socially included. Study 3, a campaign for providing drinking water, further validates the findings with a donation intentions variable: other-benefit ads rather than self-benefit ads drive consumers who feel socially excluded to be more willing and likely to donate, but the effects are not observed among consumers who feel socially included and those in the baseline control condition.

AMERICAN WAR RELIEF, CULTURAL MOBILIZATION, AND THE MYTH OF IMPARTIAL HUMANITARIANISM, 1914–17

This paper reassesses American opinions and sentiments during the period of neutrality in light of the one endeavor that involved millions of Americans in the European conflict long before official U.S. belligerency: war relief. Tracing some of the “humanitarian narratives” employed in the relief campaigns for the Central Powers, the Allies, and neutral Belgium, humanitarian involvement, it will be argued, not only expressed prevalent ethnic, cultural, and political affinities, but shaped American attitudes toward the different belligerents. Contrary to contemporary claims, humanitarian pursuits were never even remotely impartial, but drew Americans onto the different sides of the war like few other endeavors. Indeed, relief work must be taken serious as a force of “cultural mobilization” (Horne), which affected American “visions of the war and its outcome.” By involving Americans actively on the different sides of the European war, it helped forge discrete moral and emotional alliances across the Atlantic. In trying to understand the complicated and acrimonious process by which Americans moved from peace to war, their relief work thus deserves attention.

At War with Water: The Maoist state and the 1954 Yangzi floods

AbstractThis article offers a critical reappraisal of the Maoist state's response to the 1954 Yangzi floods. It uses a variety of sources, including previously classified government reports and oral history testimony, to challenge the official narrative. It argues that, far from being a remarkable victory for the new government, the flood was a humanitarian catastrophe that caused almost 150,000 deaths. Government hydraulic policies were partly to blame, as the vast majority of disaster victims were located in rural areas that were flooded deliberately in order to protect cities. In addition to revealing the true scale of the flood, this article uses the disaster as a prism to examine the early Maoist state. The government's combative environmental policies turned disaster governance into a war on water. This approach had certain benefits, particularly in terms of organizing an effective urban relief campaign. Unfortunately, campaign politics fostered an atmosphere of distrust, which encouraged many citizens to resist disaster-prevention policies. The example of the 1954 flood reveals the profound impact that a political context can have upon the outcome of a supposedly natural disaster.

Robust optimization for relief logistics planning under uncertainties in demand and transportation time

• An emergency logistics model for relief logistics planning in post-disaster stage is proposed. • A robust optimization approach is adopted to cope with uncertainties in demand and transportation time. • A numerical example is utilized to investigate the application of the proposed model. • Sensitivity analyses explore the trade-off between optimization and robustness. • The robustness of the solutions generated by the robust model is assessed by comparing with the deterministic model. Emergency logistics is an essential component of post-disaster relief campaigns. However, there are always various uncertainties when making decisions related to planning and implementing post-disaster relief logistics. Considering the particular environmental conditions during post-disaster relief after a catastrophic earthquake in a mountainous area, this paper proposes a stochastic model for post-disaster relief logistics to guide the tactical design for mobilizing relief supply levels, planning initial helicopter deployments, and creating transportation plans within the disaster region, given the uncertainties in demand and transportation time. We then introduce a robust optimization approach to cope with these uncertainties and deduce the robust counterpart of the proposed stochastic model. A numerical example based on disaster logistics during the Great Sichuan Earthquake demonstrates that the model can help post-disaster managers to determine the initial deployments of emergency resources. Sensitivity analyses explore the trade-off between optimization and robustness by varying the robust optimization parameter values.

Interactive effects of dispositional empathic concern and message framing on international relief campaigns

We investigated the interactive effects of dispositional empathic concern (DEC), which occurs when a person feels emotional concern about others in need, and message framing (gain vs. loss), which is used to persuade people to engage in helping behavior, on international relief campaigns. Participants were 161 university students who completed measures of DEC, issue involvement, and their previously held attitude toward international relief activities at the first stage. After 7–10 days they read a stimulus framing message focused on international relief campaigns against child hunger, and then rated message attitudes, intention to support children in need, and perceived manipulation intent. Results showed that there was an interaction effect between DEC and framing on responses to messages advocating international relief activities. Further, this interaction was mainly the result of gain, rather than loss, framing, with more favorable responses elicited from individuals with greater DEC.

Idealism Beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954—1988 by Eleanor Davey

Reviewed by: Idealism Beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954—1988 by Eleanor Davey Roland Burke (bio) Eleanor Davey, Idealism Beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954—1988 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) ISBN: 978-1-107-06958-9, 337 pages. Any study of the French Left is an intimidating enterprise, and the history of post-war humanitarianism and its fissiparous politics at least co-equal in terms of the scale of challenge. Eleanor Davey, in her first monograph, has prepared a superb study that traces the arc of French humanitarian idealism—which was, at key moments, not so ideal, and still less humane—but always revolutionary. Charting and characterizing the relationship between support for third-world revolution (tiers-mondisme) and revolutionary humanitarianism (sans-frontierisme), Idealism Beyond Borders takes, as its prime inquiry, "the way in which the ideas of tiers-mondisme and sans-frontierisme rose, fell, and interacted."1 It is this final term that affords it great novelty—presupposing at least some degree of overlap and simultaneity to the movements. While some of the episodes are addressed in the book, the most emphatic is the relief campaign in Biafra, which has been studied extensively, often by those who participated in it. The principal difficulty in this history is in finding and mapping the sinews, intellectual, political, and personal, across four decades.2 Spanning Algeria in the 1950s to Asmara in the 1980s, Idealism Beyond Borders finds its greatest contribution to knowledge in stitching this piecemeal, associational narrative into one of coherence and doing so outside the pejorative frame that has typically attended investigations of tiers-mondisme. Electing to privilege "conceptual relevance over fidelity to an individual trajectory," Davey renders this history in a dimension that foregrounds ideas, as opposed to the collage of events and roughly sorted basket of personalities through which French post-war humanitarian thought was [End Page 750] previously, and opaquely, understood.3 Mythology is parsed and interleaved with history, an approach which finds its finest showcase in the author's treatment of the Biafran Secession, which witnessed the birth of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the ascent of its icon, Bernard Kouchner, and the genesis of temoignage.4 Davey takes myth as an entity worthy of historical study in its own right, a decision which yields much for this hyper-mythologized moment in the canonical sans-frontiers origin story. For a history which holds such sweep and explicitly disavows any sustained pursuit of individuals, Davey does exceptionally well to retain a meaningful sense of individuation, of agents navigating the world amidst the global drama of Algeria, Biafra, Munich, and Tehran. Their intellectual worlds are pinned to real places with shopfront addresses, notably La Joie de Lire, the commercially catastrophic but intellectually profitable book shop which served as a nucleus for early discussions. Its proprietor, Francois Maspero, was the literal and literary gateway to a revolutionary world—that of the FLN and Fanon, Che and Debray, Marcuse and Mao. Maspero was a vector for the ideas that coalesced around national liberation outside Europe, broadly encompassed under the canopy of tiers-mondisme, which would animate more than a generation of intellectuals. While the birth of tiers-mondisme had been a migration from one exhausted revolutionary cause to another, the terminal moment of that cause produced instead the dramatic reconfiguration of revolutionary aspirations. Its part sibling and partial successor, sans-frontierisme, was a refurbished and innovative extension of the humanitarian project, but as Davey argues, "it did not provide an answer to failed revolutionary hopes so much as another model for engagement with the third world."5 The character of this transformation and the profound rupture in the positions and orientation of so many of the key figures is a rich target for uncharitable analysis—and, as Davey notes, overly reductionist maritime metaphor. To her great credit, the author seeks to understand, and not to moralize, the political evolution undertaken by her subjects. Such restraint furnishes the reader with ample basis for developing their own appraisals of the morality, or otherwise, of the gallery of tiers-mondiste luminaries. Michel Foucault's extraordinarily problematic reporting on the...

자존감과 보상 유형의 상호작용이 국제구호 캠페인의 효과에 미치는 영향

본 연구는 개인의 자존감과 메시지가 제시하는 보상 유형의 상호작용이 국제구호 캠페인의 효과에 미치는 영향에 대해 조사하였다. 자존감은 스스로 얼마나 가치 있는 존재로 느끼는지를 나타내고, 보상은 긍정적 대가를 의미하며 내적/외적 보상으로 구분하였다. 실험은 184명을 대상으로 실행되었으며, 2단계로 나누어서 실행되었다. 1단계에서는 참여자들의 개인 성향과 경험에 관한 설문을 진행하였고, 2단계에서는 유형별 메시지를 제시한 후 나타나는 반응을 평가하였다. 연구 결과, 캠페인 태도에서 자존감 수준이 높은 사람들은 외적 보상보다 내적 보상 정보를 접했을 때 더 호의적인 캠페인 태도를 보여주었고, 자존감이 낮은 사람들은 차별적 반응을 보여주지 않는 것으로 나타났다. 행위 의도에서는 유의미한 결과가 도출되지 않았다. The current study investigated the impact of interaction between self-esteem and reward type on the effects of an international relief campaign. Self-esteem refers to how worthy a person feels about the self. Reward is differentiated by intrinsic or extrinsic type. An experimental research was conducted with 184 subjects by self-esteem <TEX>${\times}$</TEX> reward type. This research was progressed with two stages. At the first stage, questionnaires relative to participants' self-esteem and past experiences were distributed. At the second stage, the participants rated their responses after exposure to the campaign. Individuals with higher self-esteem showed more favorable message attitudes towards intrinsic reward type, yet those with lower self-esteem did not show a significant difference. Analyses for behavioral intention did not produce any significant result.

The Difference in Accepting an International Relief Campaign Resulted from the Interaction of Gender and Message Framing

본 연구는 국제기아 돕기 캠페인을 대상으로 성별에 따라 긍·부정 프레이밍의 소구력에 차이가 있는지 조사하였다. 긍정적 프레이밍은 돕기 행위를 통한 생명 구제를, 부정적 프레이밍은 돕기 행위를 하지 않아 발생하는 생명 손실을 강조하는 표현 구성을 의미한다. 124명의 참여자를 대상으로 돕기를 촉구하는 영상 캠페인을 보여주고, 성별과 긍·부정 프레이밍을 집단 간 변인으로 교차하여 실험하였다. 그 결과 국제기아 돕기에 대한 태도와 행위 의도에서 성별과 긍·부정 프레이밍의 상호작용이 도출되었다. 상호작용은 주로 여성에게 긍정적 프레이밍보다 부정적 프레이밍이 더 효과적으로 작용한 결과에서 기인하였다. 남성은 긍·부정 프레이밍에 차별적으로 반응하지 않았다. 그리고 성별과 긍·부정 프레이밍의 상호작용은 공감 반응이 매개하는 것으로 나타났다. 본 연구는 성별과 메시지 프레이밍의 조화에 관한 탐구를 돕기 영역으로 확대하고, 그 과정에 영향을 미친 공감 반응에 관하여 조명한 측면에서 의미를 찾을 수 있다.

Rationales of Humanitarianism: The Case of British Relief to Germany, 1805–1815

Rationales of Humanitarianism: The Case of British Relief to Germany, 1805–1815 This article examines the British humanitarian relief campaign initiated by the Committee for Relieving the Distresses in Germany and Other Parts of the Continent (1805–1815). It demonstrates the significance of two aspects for the campaign: the activism of London-based immigrant communities on the one hand, and British solidarity with allied countries during the Napoleonic Wars and the related matter of national mobilisation against France on the other. While immigrant activism was a major driving force of the campaign, its impact depended on the integration of immigrants into British society and on the mobilisation of Britons. Moreover, while the alliance with German states was often underlined in the publicity efforts of the campaign, wider humanitarian concerns were also addressed.

Clerical Mutual Aid and Famine Relief during Russia’s Crop Failure of 1905

The clerical estate (soslovie) of late Imperial Russia was legally segregated from the rest of the population, subject to separate systems of education, justice, taxation, and access to employment. The state permitted participation in free associations within the clerical soslovie in order to encourage the practice of mutual aid among clergymen and their families. By the late nineteenth century, the parish clergy had begun to use these mutual-aid associations to provide education, charity, and disaster relief to the non-clerical communities on which they and their families depended for tithes. By using their own mutual-aid networks as tools of pastoral work, the parish clergy expanded those networks, in terms of both beneficiaries and participants, beyond the limits of the clerical soslovie. Key reforms of the diocesan structure in 1905 both loosened central control over the clerical networks and authorized the direct participation of non-clergy in their work. The associations of the parish clergy thus obtained unprecedented independence and social integration at the moment when they were confronted with the humanitarian disaster of 1905. Focusing on the dioceses of Moscow and Tver, this article examines the parish clergy’s use of their own soslovie networks to provide famine relief to fellow clerics and the general population between 1905 and 1909. This famine relief campaign demonstrated the independence and initiative of voluntary associations in late Imperial Russia. It also revealed the potential for cooperation and social integration among seemingly disparate communities, even within the divisive framework of the soslovie system.