Lecture: "Give or we Perish:” Humanitarian Neutrality, Genocide and Refugees in the Middle East
with Keith David Watenpaugh, Professor and Director, Human Rights Studies, UC Davis
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Abstract:
"Humanitarianism is supposed to be neutral – isn’t it? Then again, from the border between Colombia and Venezuela, the short-lived Republic of Biafra, to the Gaza Strip, humanitarianism has never been neutral. Do we even want it to be neutral when neutrality, to paraphrase Elie Wiesel, tends to buttress oppression, disempower survivors and extend human rights abuse?
Drawing from his award-winning book, Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, Watenpaugh argues that the humanitarian response to the 1915 genocide of the Ottoman Armenians, was not driven by neutrality, but rather by a complex and often misguided sense of what we now would call restorative justice and social equity.
While that humanitarian approach guaranteed Armenian survival, it also created conditions under which massive displacement and uncertain citizenship status was made permanent.
Then, building from Watenpaugh’s ongoing work addressing refuge higher education in the wake of the war in Syria, he moves the historical question to one of how humanitarian neutrality operates to disempower and foster abuse in the contemporary Middle East."
Biography: Keith David Watenpaugh is Professor and Director of Human Rights Studies at the University of California, Davis.
A leading American historian of the contemporary Middle East, Human Rights and modern Humanitarianism, he is an expert on Genocide and its denial, and the role of the refugee and displaced peoples in world history.
Since 2013, Watenpaugh has directed an international multi-disciplinary research project to assist refugee university students and scholars fleeing the war in Syria. This project has garnered support from the Carnegie Corp. of New York, the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation. He recently won the IIE Centennial Medal for his efforts.
He is author most recently of the multiple award-winning Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (California, 2015). His articles appear in the American Historical Review, Perspectives on History, Social History, Journal of Human Rights, Humanity, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, and the Huffington Post. He has lived and worked in Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Armenia, Iraq and Egypt.
Watenpaugh teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Human Rights, Genocide, and Humanitarianism.
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