Laboratories of Humanitarianism: Aid, Intervention, and the End of the Soviet Union, 1985–2000
Research summary
Laboratories of Humanitarianism (LabHum) explores the transformative impact of humanitarian crisis and intervention on the USSR’s disintegration and the reconfiguration of the post-Soviet space.
The project team examine humanitarianism at multiple scales using case studies from across the vast territory of the Soviet Union, paying attention to linguistic, cultural, and environmental diversity.
In focusing on the USSR, the project places an underexplored region at the centre of the modern history of humanitarianism.
Project overview
In the late 1980s, the USSR experienced a sharp status inversion from a superpower and major donor of global humanitarian aid to one of its primary recipients.
As radioactive fallout from Chernobyl contaminated the land and skies of the country’s western borderlands and a deadly earthquake unfolded in Armenia, millions of the country’s citizens grappled with the wide-ranging consequences of disaster.
Under the conditions of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, information on humanitarian crisis reached enormous audiences both at home and abroad, Soviet citizens rapidly mobilised their own networks of relief, and international NGOs entered the USSR for the first time since the advent of Soviet power.
These moments of crisis and their aftermaths turned the country into a laboratory of humanitarian action, wherein new forms of intervention were implemented in response to displacement, disaster, and the collapse of welfare states, and humanitarianism became intertwined with new forms of political and economic governance.
LabHum investigates these processes using case studies from across the former Soviet Union.
LabHum is funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant.
People
- Dr Siobhán Hearne
The University of Manchester
View Siobhán's research profile
Publications and further information
- Siobhán Hearne, ‘AIDS and the End of the Soviet Union’, Past & Present, 267:1 (2025): 276-309.
- Siobhán Hearne, ‘Transnational HIV-AIDS Action and Citizen Diplomacy in the Late Soviet Union, 1988–1991’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 34:2 (2025): 242-264.