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.