Enemigos por accidente, neutrales de rebote: diversidad y contingencia en el nacimiento del humanitarismo de guerra, 1862-1864

• Autores: Guillermo Sánchez Martínez
• Localización: Asclepio: Revista de historia de la medicina y de la ciencia, ISSN 0210-4466, Vol. 66, Fasc. 1, 2014 (Ejemplar dedicado a: War, empire, science, progress, humanitarianism. Debate and practice within the international Red Cross movement from 1863 to the interwar period)
• Idioma: español
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• Resumen

  • The historiography of the origin and early years of the movement of societies of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent is, in general, highly pervaded by a narrative whose main architect was Henry Dunant himself. So much so, in fact, that there is no satisfactory explanation as to how the attempt to develop medical a technology ended up involving the implementation of a legal technology, namely, Humanitarian Law. In an attempt to critically revise this narrative, a description is made here of that journey, providing evidence on the way in which a technology, even one as highly regarded as the 1864 Geneva Convention, may arise contingently without being intended, not even imagined, within the circles in which it emerged, through diversity interplaying as a collective action, with no need to resort to any explanatory artifice that might demand that the outcomes should actually be the result of any successful intentional route.