The League of Nations' Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920–1927

The essay centers of the efforts by the League of Nations to rescue women and children survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. This rescue -- a seemingly unambiguous good -- was at once a constitutive act in drawing the boundaries of the international community, a key moment in the definition of humanitarianism, and a site of resistance to the colonial presence in the post-Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean. Drawing from a wide range of source materials in a number of languages, including Turkish, Armenian, and Arabic, the essay brings the intellectual and social context of humanitarianism in initiating societies together with the lived experience of humanitarianism in the places where the act took form. In so doing, it draws our attention to the proper place of the Eastern mediterranean, and its women and children, in the global history of humanitarianism. The prevailing narrative of the history of human rights places much of its emphasis on the post-World War II era, the international reaction to the Holocaust, and the founding of the United Nations. yet contemporary human rights thinking also took place within practices of humanitarianism in the interwar period, and is necessarily inseparable from the histories of refugees, colonialism, and the non-West.