The Paradox of Humanitarianism: The League of Nations’ Efforts to Rescue Trafficked Women and Children in the Middle East, 1920-1927

Drawn from Prof. Watenpaugh’s forthcoming book, Bread from Stone: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, this talk examines
the League of Nations’ efforts on behalf of displaced Armenian, Greek, and
Assyrian women and children in the early post-World War I period. It
presents a case in which the rescuing of trafficked survivors of genocide
and civil violence–a seemingly unambiguous good–was at once a
constitutive act in drawing the boundaries of the international community,
a critical moment in the definition of humanitarianism, and a site of
resistance to the colonial presence in the post-Ottoman Eastern
Mediterranean. These efforts helped to bind the international community to
Armenian communal survival and served as an ex post facto warrant for the
World War. They also threatened late-Ottoman ethnic, religious, and
gendered hierarchies, and the unalloyed dominance of post-Ottoman society
by Turkish and Arabic speaking Sunni Muslims.

Keith David Watenpaugh is Associate Professor of Modern Islam, Human
Rights, and Peace in the Religious Studies program at the University of
California, Davis. He works on the multiple intersections of the modern
international human rights regime, Islam, and colonialism in the
20th-century Arab Middle East. Trained at UCLA, Prof. Watenpaugh has lived
and conducted research in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and Iraq.
He is the author of Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution,
Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton University
Press, 2006) and is now writing a book on international humanitarian
efforts and the modern Middle East.

hm 10/28/09