ABSTRACT
INGOs and philanthropies greatly matter for historians’ take on the “global interwar.” Most prominently, they engaged globally in the fields of humanitarianism, pacifism, women’s, and critical non-Western activism. A systematic historical view on the different strategies and effects of paradigmatic individual INGOs and philanthropies between 1918 and 1939 shows that they were both emanations and driving forces of many differing, partly coalescing and partly rivaling, internationalisms. Some were harbingers of a more participatory transnational civil society; others supported more exclusive, occasionally even illiberal, visions. Their founders and members, their supporters and opponents anticipated national as well as transnational, imperial as much as anti-colonial, liberal as much as communist or authoritarian, world orders at the very same historical moment. With diverse agendas, human and capital resources, and geographical range, INGOs and philanthropies epitomized the contradictory synchronicity of the interwar.
