Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism
Keith David Watenpaugh
Abstract
Bread from Stones explores how modern humanitarianism evolved in the face of the historical experience of mass violence, starvation, human trafficking, and the displacement of millions in the early twentieth-century eastern Mediterranean. Using a vast array of archival, literary, and visual sources, the book juxtaposes the inhumanity of war, civil conflict, and genocide with the creation of forms of aid for the victims of violence, the establishment of institutions to resettle displaced peoples, and the elaboration of novel, international legal regimes for refugees. It traces the origins of mo ... More
Bread from Stones explores how modern humanitarianism evolved in the face of the historical experience of mass violence, starvation, human trafficking, and the displacement of millions in the early twentieth-century eastern Mediterranean. Using a vast array of archival, literary, and visual sources, the book juxtaposes the inhumanity of war, civil conflict, and genocide with the creation of forms of aid for the victims of violence, the establishment of institutions to resettle displaced peoples, and the elaboration of novel, international legal regimes for refugees. It traces the origins of modern humanitarianism from the perspective of its implementation in the eastern Mediterranean as both practice and ideology, and it connects it to the other dominant ideologies of the interwar period—nationalism and colonialism; it defines humanitarianism’s role in the history of human rights and addresses how the concept of shared humanity informed bureaucratic, social, and legal humanitarian practices.
Keywords:
humanitarianism,
human rights,
genocide,
refugees,
relief,
American Near East Relief,
League of Nations,
World War One,
Middle East history,
Armenian history
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780520279308 |
Published to California Scholarship Online: January 2016 |
DOI:10.1525/california/9780520279308.001.0001 |