Philanthropy, Conflict Management, and International Law

The focus of this book lies on the Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, published in Washington in the early summer of 1914 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The authors reassess the document—one of the first international non-governmental fact-finding missions with the intention to promote peace—from a variety of perspectives. Their approach connects southeastern European regional history, the military and diplomatic history of the Balkan Wars, and the historiographic strand called New International History.

The studies consider the report from the perspective of the belligerent countries: how they handled the inquiries of the Carnegie Commission and how the report has come down as part of the remembrance of the wars. The analysis of the liberal internationalist strategy of the Carnegie Endowment, and of the commission members' professional, political, and ethnic background explains the report's orientalist conclusions, which considered both the Ottoman Empire and the Balkan nation-states insufficiently civilized to wage wars within the limits of codes of conduct of international law.