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1/ It's kind of amazing to me that no one has done a study of the imperialist entanglements of Gustave Moynier, the de facto founder of the International Red Cross, who ran it for decades. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1917/red-cross/history/
2/ Moynier is a major figure in my ongoing work for his nervous relation to peace ideals movements. Alas, I have no time for further research of my own on his African interests, but a few notes in case anyone out there is interested!
3/ There's tons of laudatory literature on Moynier, mostly by nationalist Swiss scholars. But it leaves this dimension of his life and work essentially out.
4/ In fairness, Moynier has been very poorly treated amidst the even more hagiographic (also mostly Swiss) treatments of Henry Dunant, first (co-)Nobelist who disappeared while Moynier did all the hard work. https://www.redcrossmuseum.ch/en/expo-temporaire/henry-dunant-gustave-moynier-friends-and-foes/
5/ In 1879, Moynier founded "L'Afrique explorée et civilisée," a monthly periodical. From the first, it affiliates with Belgian King Leopold II's exploration aims, whose first 1877 conference in Brussels Moynier had attended. https://www.e-periodica.ch/digbib/volumes?UID=aec-001
6/ Good stuff from early issue...
7/ Moynier, also a cofounder of the Institute for International Law, urged it to get involved in the runup to the Berlin Conference of 1884-5 that parceled Africa out among the great powers and famously gave the Congo to Leopold personally for twenty-five years.
8/ During those twenty-five years, Moynier worked for Leopold in Geneva, explaining that his rubber colony marked a stage in which whites had finally come to their senses and could run progressive empires.
9/ But we know very little about what Moynier actually did. He never mentioned the now notorious atrocities and extermination in the Congo, including in the chapter on his African interests in his memoirs "Mes heures de travail" (1908).
10/ It has been alleged that Moynier burned any documentation of his work. https://www.swissinfo.ch/fre/philanthropie-et-colonisation_sur-les-traces-des-suisses-au-service-de-l-infernal-congo-de-l%C3%A9opold-ii/43325184
11/ But the most serious scholarship on this was done more than fifty years ago, and mainly shows what we don't know about Moynier's relationship to Leopold's private colony and what went on there. http://www.alexandria.admin.ch/Les%20Relations%201876-1908.pdf
12/ I would speculate that Moynier was something of a useful idiot of empire. We do know that early on he was troubled by the devolution of the Congo into an exclusively commercial (not also humanitarian) cause he initially envisioned. But his association with Leopold continued.
13/ But there is undoubtedly more to know/say. Anyway, anyone who wants to nail down the relationship of one of the founders of the dream of more humane war with African colonization in the era has a big opportunity.
14/ Why has no one has investigated this? Our historiographical imagination is changing, for one thing, but there is also undoubtedly a desire not to "pollute" the history of the international laws of war with more interesting stories.
