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.
