Histories of Military Humanitarianism: Connecting Aid Operations and Occupation
Brian Drohan, U.S. Military Academy, West Point, USA and Margot Tudor, City University of London, UK
Although the study of humanitarian aid during periods of military occupation has become a key theme recently, much of this scholarship has remained focused on what might be considered ‘traditional’ forms of military occupation – that is, the presence of a clear, perhaps legally recognized, occupying force that handles governance, structures social interactions, and otherwise dictates the ‘rules’ by which the occupiers and occupied interact. Organized by Brian Drohan (U.S. Military Academy – West Point) and Margot Tudor (City St George’s, University of London) and with comments given by Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck, University of London), our panel for the July 2025 Occupation Studies Research Network conference at King’s College London, examines several points of connection between humanitarian organisations and military actors in order to reevaluate what constitutes ‘occupation.’
By exploring military and humanitarian action in contexts such as military ‘assistance’ in the guise of crisis intervention, United Nations peacekeeping operations, and medical practitioners’ humanitarian efforts in refugee camps, the papers in this panel advance two lines of inquiry: First, they explore the liminality of humanitarian and military action in practice and the fluidity of ‘military’ and ‘humanitarian’ identities. Second, these instances of military humanitarianism help to challenge the idea of occupation as a wartime or immediately post-war activity, revealing the slipperiness between wartime/peacetime boundaries.
The first paper, given by Lewis Defrates (Maynooth University) and entitled “Stretching the Protections of Citizenship: US Citizens in Liberia at the Dawn of World War I,” explores connections between occupation and humanitarian intervention. Defrates’ paper centres on the US government’s decision to ‘protect foreigners and their property’ by sending a gunboat to put down an indigenous uprising. “Occupation,” in this example, can be conflated with the notion of “protection.” Studying the position of Americans in Liberia highlights the need for historians to connect more clearly the rise of international humanitarian aid with the increasingly stark limits set on which overseas nationals were eligible for protection. This restriction, which was in part driven by ethnic and racial prejudice, directly coincided with the rise of a humanitarian sensibility that believed it the duty of people to render aid to all individuals in need, regardless of membership of a national community.
The next two papers address different aspects of the relationships between United Nations peacekeeping and military occupation. Margot Tudor’s paper “Patriarchal Occupations: Military Masculinities, Recreation, and Competition during the United Nations Emergency Force, 1956-1967” uses the case study of the UN Emergency Force (UNEF, 1956-67), initially deployed during the Suez Crisis, to examine the influence of field-based international staff in shaping the organisation’s vision of liberal internationalism. Focusing on recreational activities organised for and by the UN peacekeepers at the UNEF headquarters in Gaza and in Egypt, this paper examines the gendered and racialised politics of managing boredom in a protracted context of occupation – as in Gaza – and precarious peace – as in Egypt. Using troop-produced magazines, photographs, and previously classified UN documents, this paper moves beyond inter-state histories of the UN and its contributors to show how the UN’s own ‘agents of internationalism’ shaped dynamics from the ground up.
Brian Drohan’s paper, ‘A Peacekeeping “Proving Ground”: Military Occupations, Transnational Circulations, and the Making of UN Peacekeeping in the Eastern Mediterranean’, explores how the long-term occupation presence of UN peacekeepers in the region facilitated the standardization and routinization of a particular concept of “peacekeeping” rooted in a technocratic, apolitical vision of conflict resolution. The International Peace Academy (IPA), a non-governmental organization established by a mix of peacekeeping scholars and practitioners, played an outsized role in this process. The IPA leveraged relationships with UN officials, scholars, national diplomats and politicians, military officers, and aid workers to function as a kind of adjunct to official UN bodies. Studying the interactions between ‘unofficial’ IPA and ‘official’ mission personnel reveals how peacekeeping practices were internalized, adjusted, and replicated. In this sense, the longevity of UN peacekeeping missions in the region proved vital to the circulation and entrenchment of cohesive ideas about the conduct of peacekeeping.
The final paper – ‘The Politics of Humanitarian Psychiatry: Occupation, Encampment, and Trauma in Europe and Southeast Asia’ – given by Baher Ibrahim (University of Glasgow) connects the study of military occupation with the medical history of twentieth century psychiatry. Using case studies of Displaced Persons (DP) camps in post-Second World War Europe and the encampment of Cambodians on the militarised border with Thailand throughout the 1980s, Ibrahim’s paper explores how both situations presented problems of homelessness, dependency, and victimization that generated new theoretical paradigms and psychiatric problematizations elaborated to respond to them. How exactly psychiatrists went about problematizing refugees, and how they understood concepts such as ‘human rights’, depended on how they understood their roles as political actors. By comparing these two crises, this paper draws the experience of occupation into the same discursive sphere as humanitarianism, military history, and medical practice.
Humanitarian and military actors did not belong to discrete categories in conflict contexts. Blurring between these groups was especially common during periods of occupation. By bringing these different contexts into conversation, we draw attention to the tensions, ambiguities, and difficulties of defining ‘humanitarian action,’ particularly in contrast to military operations. Building on an emerging trend of critical humanitarian historiographies – challenging the historiographical framing of humanitarians as impartial or apolitical – the papers in this panel challenge the dominant, top-down approach in international history that casts military actors as a homogenous group and field-based humanitarian actors as passive intermediaries between armed groups and the recipients of aid. Examining this nexus enables a more nuanced understanding of how humanitarians and military actors behaved in the field and, indeed, used their liminal position to increase their power in the field and influence. Our approach therefore treats the concept and practice of ‘occupation’ broadly, which highlights the intersections between these histories to show how these interactions enrich our interpretations of conflict, power, and international hierarchies.
Panel speakers and presentations
Chair/discussant: Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck, University of London)
Lewis Defrates (Maynooth University): Stretching the Protections of Citizenship: US Citizens in Liberia at the Dawn of World War I
Margot Tudor (City University of London): Patriarchal Occupations: Military Masculinities, Recreation, and Competition during the United Nations Emergency Force, 1956-1967
Brian Drohan (U.S. Military Academy, West Point): A Peacekeeping ‘Proving Ground’: Military Occupations, Transnational Circulations, and the Making of UN Peacekeeping in the Eastern Mediterranean
Baher Ibrahim (University of Glasgow): The Politics of Humanitarian Psychiatry: Occupation, Encampment, and Trauma in Europe and Southeast Asia
Photo credits:
Cover picture: Two U.S. soldiers deliver USAID
Source: U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Ian Ferro
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