The history of humanitarian efforts in times of famine and other emergencies has become a vibrant field of academic study, but there have been few attempts to delineate chronological patterns. This chapter seeks to contribute to a discussion by emphasizing societal factors (including culture, media structures, and economics) to a greater extent than research has hitherto. It illustrates its argument with three cases of famine relief in different periods, geographical locations, and political circumstances: the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s, the famine in Soviet Russia in 1921–1923, and the famine in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s. Through these examples, this research takes a fresh look at humanitarian appeals, the allocation of relief, and aid accounts through the concept of moral economy. This chapter identifies three distinct phases of humanitarian action, which are termed ad-hoc humanitarianism, organized humanitarianism, and expressive humanitarianism.

This article analyses knowledge production about itinerant groups such as Nightmen, Roma and Travellers in Denmark between 1800 and 1950. It puts forward the thesis of a Danish Sonderweg in this regard, not only compared with Germany, but also the Scandinavian neighbours. This Sonderweg was characterized by an underdeveloped interest of science and state authorities for respective groups and culminated into a rejection of forced eugenic measures. The analysis is based on key texts from three periods: a national romantic one from approximately 1800 onwards, one shaped by the Danish Gypsy Lorist Johan Miskow at the beginning of the 20th century, and one eugenic from 1938. Special interest is given to continuities and fractions in narratives of purity vs. mixture. 

Dieser Artikel behandelt die Wissensproduktion über nichtsesshafte Bevölkerungsgruppen wie Nachtmänner, Roma und Reisende in Dänemark zwischen 1800 und 1950. Hierbei wird die These eines dahingehenden dänischen Sonderweges vertreten, nicht nur im Vergleich zu Deutschland, sondern auch zu den skandinavischen Nachbarn. Dieser äußerte sich in einem unterentwickelten Interesse von Wissenschaft und Staat für entsprechende Gruppen und mündete in einer Ablehnung eugenischer Zwangsmaßnahmen. Die Analyse dieses Sonderweges erfolgt anhand von Schlüsseltexten aus drei Perioden: einer nationalromantischen ab ca. 1800, einer durch den dänischen Gypsy Lorist Johan Miskow geprägten zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts und einer eugenischen ab 1938. Ein besonderes Interesse gilt hierbei Kontinuitäten und Brüchen in Narrativen von Reinheit vs. Vermischung.

In this article we examine how a particular 'Gypsy friend' persona was adopted and developed by two pioneering pre-war Gypsylorists, the Finn Arthur Thesleff (1861-1920) and the Dane Johan Miskow (1862-1937). The 'Gypsy friend' persona, we argue, was a compound of the fearless explorer, the missionary's selfless paternalism, the disinterested, questing scientist and the eccentric anti-bourgeois bohemian. After looking at how this masculine persona was expressed in earlier scholarship, not least the influential Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, we turn to Thesleff and Miskow to see how they adopted, applied and revised the trope, with attention, finally, to its implications for inter- and postwar treatment of Scandinavian Roma.

The hypothesis of psychological egoism is a commonplace in disciplines like economics, psychology and biology. As an explanatory model it includes prosocial behaviour such as providing aid for distant strangers. However, philanthropic research has found mixed results regarding the effectiveness of appeals to the self-interest of donors. This article analyses the use of self-interest in appeals for humanitarian aid during the Russian famine of 1921-1923 and points out the need for the systematic inclusion of historical experience in philanthropic research. It concludes that the specific conditions surrounding the international campaign favoured the widespread use of appeals to donors' self-interest. A categorization of such appeals into four groups - national, economic, group-specific, and psychological - is proposed as an analytical tool for similar studies.

Social media has created new public spheres that provide alternative sources of social and political authority. Such “digital authority” has conventionally been interpreted in metric terms, without qualitative distinctions. Based on Twitter data from four different Swedish state agencies during the first 15 months of the COVID-19 crisis, this paper looks at the different kinds of modes of interaction Twitter enables and their impact on state agencies digital authority. Theoretically this paper applies Valentin Voloshinov's classical theory on reported speech, developed in the 1920s, to the concept of digital authority in the Twitter-sphere of the 2020s. Besides these theoretical contributions to media and communication studies, the main findings are that retweets are generally used to affirm and spread information thus strengthening the digital authority of the origin of the tweet whilst replies and quote-tweets are used to undermine the credibility of the sender and the content of the original tweet, often by resorting to irony. As the COVID-19 crisis prolongs, we observe increasing share of critical commentary and diminishing overall attention to government actors in Sweden. The roles of different state agencies are mirrored by the type of interaction they generate. This article also shows the usefulness of qualitative study of social media interaction in order to reveal the dynamics of digital authority construed in social media.

This is an innovative new history of famine relief and humanitarianism. The authors apply a moral economy approach to shed new light on the forces and ideas that motivated and shaped humanitarian aid during the Great Irish Famine, the famine of 1921-1922 in Soviet Russia and the Ukraine, and the 1980s Ethiopian famine. They place these episodes within a distinctive periodisation of humanitarianism which emphasises the correlations with politico-economic regimes: the time of elitist laissez-faire liberalism in the nineteenth century as one of ad hoc humanitarianism; that of Taylorism and mass society from c.1900-1970 as one of organised humanitarianism; and the blend of individualised post-material lifestyles and neoliberal public management since 1970 as one of expressive humanitarianism. The book as a whole shifts the focus of the history of humanitarianism from the imperatives of crisis management to the pragmatic mechanisms of fundraising, relief efforts on the ground, and accounting.

Since the mid-1930s, theNazi regime concerned itself with the systematic registration and identificationof Roma. At the 1935 Copenhagen Interpol Conference participating states backedthe initiative proposed by the German police regarding the creation of aninternational registry of Roma. It had been easier to classify Jews for recordsheld by religious communities were readily available to the state. Many Roma inEurope were nomadic and ID-less. The study focuses on measures ofidentification and registration of Roma undertaken in sovereign Sweden and therole of experts and census takers in transnational context. On 25 September1942, the government of Sweden ordered inventory of Roma and Travellers. Thepurpose of the registration was to solve “a problem” by mapping both thesegroups. In Sweden the census did not proceed smoothly, because of the conflictswithin the experts’ community. The paper focuses on the transnational studiesof registration of Roma undertaken in the fully-sovereign Sweden and the roleof experts in ‘scientific’ legitimation of this process.