Margarita H. Petrova
Although the role of NGOs in global governance is often associated with their work on environmental protection or human rights (Ruhlman 2019), from early on they have also been closely involved in hard security issues, such as those pertaining to the conduct of war and the imposition of weapons limitations or prohibitions. This article briefly examines the wide-ranging contributions that NGOs have made in this area: from providing relief in warzones and post-conflict settings, advocating for disarmament or the adoption of international legal norms regulating the conduct of armed conflict, providing legal expertise and drafting treaty texts, to monitoring state and non-state actors’ compliance with established norms. For an extended review of NGO roles in disarmament, see Petrova (2019), “NGOs and Peace” in Thomas Davies (ed.) Routledge Handbook of NGOs and International Relations.
In 1863, Henry Dunant, having witnessed a few years earlier the horrific suffering of wounded soldiers many of whom perished for lack of medical care after the battle of Solferino, created the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as an organization to coordinate medical relief by volunteer national societies and to advocate for a treaty that would allow Red Cross members to provide medical relief on the battlefield (Finnemore 1996; Forsythe 2005). Over time, the ICRC has expanded its work to humanitarian assistance and protection of victims of international and internal armed conflict, most recently turning its attention to situations of urban violence (Forsythe & Rieffer-Flanagan 2007; Bradley 2016, 2020). In the 20th century, more medical relief organizations, such as Doctors Without Borders and Doctors of the World, emerged, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a host of NGOs were set up for the specific purpose of mine clearance and mine victim rehabilitation in the wake of conflicts in Angola, Cambodia, Mozambique, and Colombia (Rutherford 2011).
