Mott expanded the late-nineteenth-century Student Christian Movement into a worldwide enterprise, advocating religious brotherhood that transcended nationality and race. He spearheaded the formation of the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF), sending university students abroad for mission and social service. During World War I, through the YMCA he provided prisoners and soldiers with reading rooms, postal services, and sports facilities, helping sustain morale and reduce hatred at the front. After the war he represented religious bodies in advisory roles to the League of Nations, developing programs for reconciliation and mutual understanding. These activities are regarded as forerunners of today’s intercultural education and international volunteer work.

John R. Mott emerged from the Evangelical Revival and at the 1895 Ithaca Conference proclaimed the goal of “the evangelization of the world in this generation.” Using the YMCA and WSCF as hubs, he built a global network integrating mission, education, and relief, employing database-like membership records and periodic conferences for information sharing. During World War I his Geneva office mediated prisoner exchanges and family correspondence, serving as an informal channel of humanitarian diplomacy. In the interwar years he resonated with Kelsen’s ideas of a peace through law and attempted to link interfaith dialogue with international legal structures, culminating in the 1937 Oxford-Edinburgh Conference. His methods are regarded as a prototype for today’s Sport for Peace diplomacy.

Mott built a “Religious Track” that complemented official diplomacy through a transnational Protestant network. His fundraising model pooled decentralized resources from U.S. philanthropic foundations and European Protestant churches, creating a mechanism for rapid response in disasters and wars. The YMCA field units’ front-line services included statistical monitoring of soldier morale, anticipating ergonomics-based rest-and-recuperation models. His concept of “brotherhood across national boundaries” corresponds to bridging social capital in social-capital theory, functioning as soft power to mitigate interwar hostilities. Mott’s work stands as a crucial antecedent for studies on how faith-based organizations (FBOs) contribute to post-conflict resilience.