Arriving at the Archives of the ICRC

4Working at the Archives at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) during the waves of the pandemic, I found a place to anchor. As an archive of science in contemporary India, the archives at NCBS hold the personal papers of scientists. On most days, there was no separation between my home and here. Most days, I arrived at the archives before breakfast to open its doors to visitors, and left after dinner. In addition to my work with the material, I spent time writing, reading, and becoming acquainted with the wider bubble of the research institute in which the archives were ensconced. Through the steady, repetitive acts of organising, classifying, numbering and describing material, I picked up the bare bones of the archiving process. I found a sense of belonging doing these tasks which seemed to others to be a little esoteric at its best and incredibly boring at its worst. Outside the door of the archives hung a large poster which read ‘Find, Tell, Share Stories’. I soon began to learn how stories animated the archives. These stories were the loudest in the various letters, photographs and ephemera of scientists that had been donated to the archives. However, through careful uncovering, I learned about the space of the archives at NCBS itself, starting with why it was built at the site of a defunct biology laboratory. Soon, these stories grew - around families of scientists who had found material in their cupboards one day and decided to donate it, around staff who helped us keep the space free of pests and told us about the everyday happenings of the institute, around visitors who were thrilled at stumbling across a particular object and spent hours recounting a tale, around other archivists who had moulded the space in particular ways long before I arrived. When I arrived in a new city, overwhelmed with the challenges of tethering to a completely new place, finding another archive was seemingly the most obvious thing to do. So, I sought familiarity within yet another archive to counter unfamiliarity.

5At the Grand Morillon Student Residence, I often saw a flag with a red cross from the bridge waving placidly in the wind. Soon, spotting the symbol of the cross across the city became a sort of exercise – on trams, billboards, and posters scattered around Cornavin. Between the Institute and the Residence, this circling the headquarters of the ICRC remained inescapable, constant and perpetual – its presence firmly imprinted in the everyday.

6I understood the many layers of this urban presence when I encountered the Humanitarian Trail of the Red Cross created by HC with the International Museum of the Red Cross and the Société du Henri Dunant. The trail spanned effectively had two parts – the first was constructed around various plaques and busts in Old Town, and the second revolved around sites related to its present headquarters in Nations. The trail in Old Town began with the bust of Dunant. In October 1888, Rue Sous-la-Treille in Geneva was renamed Rue de la Croix-Rouge. The Municipal Administration Report for 1888 notes that this renaming was ‘at the request of the International Committee of the Red Cross and on the twenty-second anniversary of its founding’.1 Before one begins the uphill walk up the road, a bust of Henri Dunant can be spotted – partially hidden underneath the trees and relatively minuscule compared to the massive statue of Henri Dufour towering over the intersection. Entering the Parc des Bastions, one encounters a range of plaques and busts – placed on specific buildings where founders were born, lived, or gathered for key events that marked the forming and evolution of the ICRC. In a corner of Parc des Bastions, a sculpture by Jacques Probst shows a large angel protecting a wounded soldier and a refugee mother with her children which was presented to the city by the ICRC as a monument to Dunant commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the ICRC. On a cloudy day, daycare staff wheeled children in buggies to this site and watched over them as they played in the dirt in front of the angel. Within a three-kilometre radius of Old Town, each founding father rested in isolation and separation, watching over central Geneva's consistent but never too loud humdrum. Upton writes how statues and monuments form the ‘ubiquitous setting of our everyday lives’, cannot be fully understood as single entities, and need to be examined as part of assemblages within a particular place where they mutually reinforce each other’s presence.2 The humanitarian trail represents an institutional effort towards creating this assemblage. It renders the statues visible and sensible in relation to each other – signifying that the ICRC has always shaped what ‘peace’ has meant to Geneva. Following the physical markers of the ICRC’s history in the forms of the statues, busts and plaques, one confronts the question of how the ICRC gives form to its own origin stories and where the basis of these stories lies.

7In many ways, archives are a cradle for understanding the origins of institutions – where stories become intertwined with ‘recorded evidence’, persistent storytellers and the constructed categories of ‘institutional memory’. We turn to the archives to understand which origin stories (or even which strand of a single story) circulate within an institution. What connects the various statues, busts and plaques is that they find their basis in a document or record, preserved in an archive. The archives of an institution allow us to see where origin stories are tethered, how they materialise in various sites within and beyond the institution and, in turn, how they shape the very spaces of the archives they emerge from. The archives as a space, though fuelling this movement around stories, often obscures into the background. Situating ourselves within the portal offered by archives allows us to see particular institutional dynamics at play.

8The ICRC’s General Public Reading Room has no windows. No sunlight illuminates the moment one opens a box to riffle through documents. Instead, a kind of vacuum slowly sets in where the passage of time is not felt. Upon entering, one cannot leave the vicinity of the reading room without being accompanied by an archivist possessing an access badge and one must then prepare to set up camp in the reading room with adequate water, food, and supplies. However, this tiny basement room is far from a place of stasis and has its own story. It exists today as a space where anybody from the public is permitted to enter to view a portion of records – an act which was not possible until 1996.

9This paper emerges from reflections and sustained observations about objects, people, and ideas circulating within and beyond the archives. The public reading room of the archives is not the only space inhabited by archival records. At the present headquarters in Geneva, one can access to various degrees in principle documents, photographs, films and other archival objects in the reading room described above of the General Public Archives, the library, the audiovisual archives, archives of the central tracing agency and the International Museum of the Red Cross and Red Crescent. Navigating between these places is difficult without help as they sometimes remain hidden in view from each other. After repeated visits, the need to understand these spaces became inescapable. This paper explores how the archives of the ICRC came to be and the process of their creation. I ask what reasons are behind the emergence of multiple spaces of archives, the processes that created them, which competing institutional logics shaped their formation and why archives are essential to situate within the broader politics of humanitarianism.

10If the statues, plaques and busts showcase the birthplace of the ICRC within Geneva, the evolution of the wider ‘Red Cross movement’ takes the distinctive, recognisable appeal of the Red Cross far beyond. The term ‘movement’ describes the emergence of various actors, including the ICRC, the International Federation of the Red Cross Societies (created in 1919, formerly known as the League, abbreviated as the IFRC) and the National Red Cross Societies. At various points, the IFRC's evolution and the expansion of national societies have intersected, diverged, clashed and intertwined with the ICRC. Rather than indicating homogeneity, the usage of ‘movement’ indicates a disparate spread of actors who, at various points, converge and diverge in their interpretation and practice of the humanitarian principle. Wiley et al. cast the Red Cross movement not as a single, cohesive entity but rather as an ‘arcuate delta’ where the main body bifurcates into numerous distributaries, or channels, which follow their course, at times converging, at other times diverging.3 I aim to expand these attempts at grappling with the spatiality of the movement to show that even within Geneva and the headquarters, thinking about spatiality enables us to theorise the lesser- examined aspects of record-keeping and its relationship to bureaucratic structures. Through this, I show how various sites holding records within the ICRC can be understood as an archival archipelago.

11In the following chapters, I intend to lead the reader through a rendering of the form of this archival archipelago and its subsequent evolution. I construct this form based on weaving insights from ethnography and archival research. In the first chapter, I elaborate on what it means to conduct an ethnography of the archives and the possibilities which emerge when this ethnographic approach is brought into conversation with archival research to study the sociality of an archive.

12In the following chapter, through a historical reconstruction of the archives of the ICRC since its construction, I show how they emerged as islands. I recast the Foucauldian concept of the ‘carceral archipelago’ to show the existence of an archival archipelago within the ICRC. Archiving often involved intricate and laborious processes of tracing, finding and consolidating records from various entities across the movement to create the archives and relied heavily on the ability of the archivist to navigate and negotiate the politics of constantly shifting structures of the ICRC and the broader Red Cross movement. In this manner, the archivist-cartographer emerges as a central actor in this chapter. I develop the notion of institutional cartography to show the crucial role that archival labour played in sustaining these islands.

13The next two chapters stem from this reconstruction and delve into the specific dynamics of islands and the relationship between them. By focusing on two kinds of archival objects – documents and photographs – I reveal how the islands that evolved around each other were driven by competing institutional logics of confidentiality versus communication. Chapter Four concentrates on the operation of confidentiality and how it led to the emergence of archival anxieties. These anxieties, rooted in the very construction of the archives, shifted their loci from archivists to researchers as they continued to move through the island. Tracing these manifestations of archival anxieties allows us to witness the staggered evolution of access policies to the islands and the implications of the ‘public opening’ of the archives. Chapter Five takes a different structure to explore the relationship of photographs to the archival archipelago. It shows glimpses of archival decision-making at two moments in time – the Second World War and the Biafran War. By comparing the function of photography in these two phases, as evidence versus communication material, we see how the ICRC viewed the role of photography within its operations. This, in turn, affected the extent to which photographs were seen as ‘archivable’ objects – causing them to be dispersed widely and not being brought into the islands.

14The final chapter provides concluding reflections on the current state of the archival archipelago. The growing literature on the ICRC has often played into the ICRC’s sophisticated institutional attempts at ‘communicating’ their histories, leading to the ICRC dominating historiography of the Red Cross movement.4 Asking why this is the case leads us to examine how notions of history and institutional memory have always been entangled within the structures of the ICRC. I show the existence of contesting voices and interpretations around the purpose of an archive. These differences underlie a state of flux, which is crucial to acknowledge not just for the future of the archival archipelago but for how we proceed to think about the evolution of humanitarian action.