[1] According to their constitution, SCI "believes that all people are capable of living together with mutual respect and without recourse to any form of violence to solve conflicts".

[1] SCI was founded by Swiss pacifist Pierre Cérésole, who had taken part in the peace conference organised by the Fellowship of Reconciliation at Bilthoven in 1920.

[3]: 7–8 [4] Cérésole, together with English Quaker Hubert Parris, put the idea into practice with a workcamp in the French village of Esnes-en-Argonne, which had been badly damaged during the Battle of Verdun.

Forty volunteers from different countries spent three weeks in August 1924 rebuilding a house, building a bridge and clearing a stream.

[5]: 25–26  This was followed by a workcamp to help rebuild Someo, a village in Switzerland that had been damaged by a landslide, where for the first time unemployed men were recruited.

[5]: 25 The largest disaster relief camp of the early history of the organisation took place in 1928 in Liechtenstein, after the river Rhine had burst its banks in October 1927 and left farmland covered in silt and stones.

Through the support of British Quakers and friends of Gandhi, among them Charles Freer Andrews, he was able to set up the first workcamp in India in 1934 to do disaster relief work in the Bihar region, which had been affected by the 1934 Nepal–Bihar earthquake.

[8] In 1937, SCI joined a number of International relief organisations working in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

Under the name Ayuda Suiza and coordinated by SCI activist Rodolfo Olgiati, Swiss SCI volunteers including Elisabeth Eidenbenz, Ralph Hegnauer und Idy Hegnauer evacuated women and children and distributed food and clothing in parts of the Spanish Republic.

Volunteers including Simone Tanner Chaumet and Mohamed Sahnoun were involved until 1968 in rebuilding the village of Beni Hamou and setting up medical and primary education services in the district of Sebdou.

[9] During the 1970s, SCI re-evaluated its role in society, moving away from the mainly developmental aid model of workcamps towards one of raising social and political awareness.

Regional working groups exist for Africa (AWG), Asia (AIWG), Latin America (Abya Yala) and South Eastern Europe (SAVA).

The archives of SCI are held in the municipal library of La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, and were founded by Ralph Hegnauer in 1975.