The Form and Content of Suffering: Humanitarian Knowledge and Genocide in the Early 20th Century Middle East

Debates about the intertwined nature of humanity, human rights and humanitarianism have brought historians into new fields bridging social, international, legal and colonial history. Keith David Watenpaugh’s book Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (University of California, 2015) contributes to this debate from the unique perspective of the First World War and its aftermath in the Middle East. In this talk, he argues that international and local efforts to address mass violence against the Ottoman Empire’s ethnic minorities gave rise to a new form of conceptualizing and writing about human suffering and human need ?humanitarian knowledge. Humanitarian knowledge was not only necessary to the design and implementation of humanitarian programs for rehabilitation and relief, but was a critical element in the process of naming genocide and comprehending its vast, multigenerational consequences for humanity.
Keith David Watenpaugh is a historian and director of the UC Davis Human Rights Initiative. He is author of Being Modern in the Middle East (Princeton, 2006), and his articles have appeared in the American Historical Review, Social History, the Journal of Human Rights, Humanity, as well as Perspectives on History, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Huffington Post.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Middle East Studies, the Department of History, and the Department of Global Studies
hm 5/19/15