Aid to Armenia: Humanitarianism and intervention from the 1890s to the present

By Manchester University Press

Interventions on behalf of Armenia and Armenians have come to be identified by scholars and practitioners alike as defining moments in the history of humanitarianism. This volume reassesses these claims, critically examining a range of interventions by governments, international and diasporic organizations, and individuals that aimed to ‘save Armenians’.

Drawing on perspectives from a range of disciplines, the chapters trace the evolution of these interventions from the late-nineteenth to the present day, paying particular attention to the aftermaths of the genocide and the upheavals of the post-Soviet period. Geographically, the contributions connect diverse spaces and places – the Caucasus, Russia, the Middle East, Europe, North America, South America, and Australia – revealing shifting transnational networks of aid and intervention. These chapters are followed by reflections from leading scholars in the fields of refugee history and Armenian history, Peter Gatrell and Ronald Grigor Suny.

Aid to Armenia not only offers an innovative exploration into the history of Armenia and Armenians and the history of humanitarianism, but it provides a platform for practitioners to think critically about contemporary humanitarian questions facing Armenia, the South Caucasus region and the wider Armenian diaspora.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Oct 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526142221

Book preview

Introduction

Jo Laycock and Francesca Piana

Recognising humanitarianism: Armenia and the Aurora Prize

In April 2016, one year after the centennial of the Armenian Genocide, the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity was inaugurated in Yerevan, capital of the Republic of Armenia. Initiated by Armenian-American and Russian philanthropists Vartan Gregorian, Noubar Afeyan and Ruben Vardanyan, the prize recognises ‘any individual or group that commits an extraordinary act of humanity’.¹ The first prize was awarded to Marguerite Barankitse for her long-term engagement in saving, sheltering and educating orphans and refugees in the ‘Maison Shalom’ in the aftermath of civil war in Burundi.² Aurora Laureates like Barankitse are awarded a $100,000 grant and are given the opportunity to donate a further $1 million to other humanitarian organisations or initiatives of their choice.³

Judged by a panel of leading international figures in the worlds of humanitarian aid, human rights and genocide prevention, the launch of the Aurora Prize garnered a great deal of international attention, not least because of its celebrity co-chair of judges, the American actor George Clooney.⁴ Alongside the prize, the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative created the online ‘100 Lives, project’, which charted the stories of 100 Armenians descended from genocide survivors. It also founded the ‘Aurora Dialogues’, which bring together leading figures from the worlds of aid, philanthropy, business and media in order to discuss urgent challenges facing contemporary humanitarianism. Since the initial prize the Aurora Initiative has broadened the scope of its work. In 2017, it established the Aurora Humanitarian Index, an international study of public attitudes towards humanitarian actions, along with funding a number of Aurora ‘Gratitude Projects’, which provide scholarships for students from the Greater Middle East and North Africa.⁵

The work of the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative reflects much about the nature and dynamics of contemporary humanitarianism. The publicity for the prize demonstrates the growing importance of an online presence for humanitarian organisations, in particular social media-based fundraising. This has been connected to more longstanding practices such as the forging of connections with highly visible celebrity advocates.⁶ It also mirrors a wider trend towards bringing to the fore the voices of individuals, both humanitarians and the recipients of aid, who have been crowded out of historical writing and public discourse by the narratives of a few major humanitarian organisations. The creation of the Humanitarian Index meanwhile echoes an increasing focus on visibility, accountability and transparency across the sector, with particular emphasis placed on the measurement and communication of humanitarian ‘effectiveness’. Finally, the Aurora dialogues embody an emerging willingness of humanitarian actors to critically, and sometimes publicly, reflect on their aims, motivations, effectiveness and shortcomings.

Other aspects of the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative connect with more problematic aspects of humanitarianism and its history. For example, the name of the initiative is inspired by two female figures, the Roman Goddess of Dawn (Aurora), and, as is perhaps more well known, an Armenian survivor, Aurora Mardiganian.⁷ Mardiganian was orphaned during the genocide of the Ottoman Armenians when, between 1915 and 1923, more than a million Armenians were systematically exterminated by the Ottoman authorities against the backdrop of the First World War and Ottoman and Russian imperial collapse.⁸ Against the odds Mardiganian survived this ordeal and fled through Russia to the USA. After her arrival in America, Mardiganian’s story was turned into a ‘memoir’, Ravished Armenia. The young woman later starred in a fundraising film based on her experiences, Auction of Souls. The film recounted the experiences of Aurora Mardiganian in graphic detail, emphasising themes of sexual violence, abduction and the suffering of young women.⁹

Aurora Mardiganian is presented in publicity materials associated with the prize as the embodiment of Armenian bravery and survival, bearing witness to the horrors of the Genocide to the world. Some scholars have, in contrast, approached her experience in a more critical manner, suggesting that it could be better characterised as the exploitation of a vulnerable young woman.¹⁰ The use of her image prompts wider questions regarding the ethics of the graphic visual representation of female victimhood in humanitarian campaigns.¹¹ Moreover, the Aurora Prize’s focus on identifying humanitarian ‘heroes’ or ‘heroines’, while unquestionably drawing attention to acts of outstanding personal bravery, risks obscuring the structural and political factors that not only lead to ‘humanitarian disasters’ but also determine the conditions behind the nature and effectiveness of aid.

Awarded ‘on behalf of the survivors of the Armenian Genocide and in gratitude to their saviours’, the Aurora Prize reflects an emerging trend of connecting the aftermaths of the Armenian Genocide to the ideals and practice of humanitarianism past and present.¹² The emergence of the Aurora Initiative also reflects a desire on the part of some sectors of the Armenian community to shift the terms of contemporary debates on the Armenian Genocide and its recognition (or lack of thereof by Turkey). Initiatives like the Aurora Prize frame the Genocide and its aftermaths not simply as an Armenian national cause. Instead they connect it to pressing global questions of humanitarianism, rights and genocide prevention. In the words of its founders, the Aurora Initiative represents ‘a continuing effort to transform the Armenian experience from that of victim to dignified, active global citizen’.¹³

We suggest that just as considering the activities of the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative can reveal much about humanitarianism’s present, examining the history of interventions on behalf of Armenians can shed light on its past. Research addressing humanitarian responses to the Armenian Genocide and its aftermath has now been developing for more than a decade.¹⁴ Building on these developments, this volume broadens the chronological and geographical scope in order to reflect on a range of actors and interventions aimed at aiding Armenia and Armenians, from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Aid to Armenia, we suggest, provides a vantage point from which it is possible to reflect critically on four main areas: definitions, chronologies, geographies and actors, which we develop in more depth below.

Definitions

‘Humanitarianism’ has proved notoriously difficult to define. This difficulty extends from practitioners, who have periodically tried to reflect on their activities, to academics, who, especially since the end of the Cold War, have increasingly turned their attention to humanitarianism’s history.¹⁵

Scholars from various disciplines have seemed preoccupied with providing a definition of humanitarianism and, while recognising the challenges of such an exercise, determining what types of ideas, actions, daily practices and interventions may be considered ‘humanitarian’. Anthropologist Didier Fassin defines humanity as ‘the generality of human beings who share a similar condition (mankind) [and] … and affective movement drawing humans towards their fellows (humaneness)’.¹⁶ To him, ‘humanitarianism has become a language that inextricably links values and affects, and serves both to define and to justify discourses and practices of the government of human beings’.¹⁷ Political scientist Michael Barnett meanwhile ‘treat[s] humanitarianism as a morally complicated creature, a flawed hero defined by the passions, politics, and power of its times even as it tries to rise above them’.¹⁸ Historian Johannes Paulmann does not provide ‘clear-cut definitions of humanitarianism’ but rather tries to disentangle and historicise ‘a complex constellation of terms and concepts’ by focusing on what he calls ‘conjunctures’, which he understands as turning points or moments of change.¹⁹ More recently, Fabian Klose has stressed the importance of disentangling between different types of action that have been described as ‘humanitarian’, arguing for the need to distinguish military and diplomatic ‘humanitarian intervention’ from other forms of relief and assistance.²⁰

Over the past few years Armenia, and in particular the post-genocide relief of Armenians in the Middle East, has come to be accorded an almost iconic place in examinations of the origins and nature of humanitarianism. In part, this reflects the sheer scale of the Armenian Genocide and the relief effort that followed in its wake. Growing interest in the case of Armenia is also perhaps a product of the centenaries of both the Genocide and the First World War in 2015, which were accompanied by a wave of publications on humanitarian responses to these disasters.²¹ For example, in his examination of humanitarianism after the First World War, through a set of juxtaposed biographies of exceptional men and women, among them figures such as Fridtjof Nansen, who were closely engaged in post-genocide relief, historian Bruno Cabanes has argued that the concepts and practices of human rights and humanitarianism share a common genealogy.²² Michelle Tusan and Keith Watenpaugh have similarly turned to the examination of interventions in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide in attempts to illuminate the intersection of humanitarianism, human rights and state-building processes in the Middle East. However, they have drawn rather different conclusions, with Watenpaugh convincingly arguing against conflating British interventions on behalf of the Armenians with the ‘human rights regime’ that emerged later in the twentieth century.²³

While our volume is informed by these and other efforts to establish the ‘boundaries’ of humanitarianism, our aim is not to provide another, or a narrower definition of this term. Rather, through the case study of Armenia and Armenians, we emphasise the diversity, complexity and contradictions of discourses and forms of aid and intervention in the aftermath of different crises. The volume pays particular attention to how different actors, both institutions and individuals, defined their own work, and the different ends that they sought to achieve through projects that appear to fall into the broad category of ‘humanitarianism’.

By bringing together scholarship on different kinds of interventions and paying attention to interactions between individuals and organisations over the course of more than a century, this book highlights the blurred boundaries and tensions between ‘relief’, ‘rehabilitation’, ‘development’ and ‘reconstruction’, as well as ‘charity’, ‘philanthropy’ and ‘peacebuilding’. Rebecca Jinks, for example, examines the humanitarian activities undertaken by five students of Smith College, hired by the American relief organisation, Near East Relief (NER) in the aftermath of the Genocide. Her chapter unpacks the different meanings of ‘making good’ in the Middle East for particular individuals working for the organisation.²⁴ Laurence Broers, meanwhile, through looking at the much more recent question of Nagorny Karabakh from 2003 to 2016, reflects on how in the very different context of post-Soviet ‘de facto statehood’ international responses to conflict and displacement have been transformed and have assumed new practices and priorities. Here ‘peacebuilding’ has emerged as the principle means of carving out a neutral space for international intervention – no easy task in what continues to be a highly charged political context.

As a whole, this volume demonstrates the importance of carefully contextualising humanitarian interventions within specific political, social, economic, ideological and gendered contexts. The case of Armenia provides a framework through which to analyse the often-contested relationship between ideas and practice and to examine how understandings of key concepts such as reconstruction and rehabilitation have changed over time. It does not lead us to a clearer definition of what humanitarianism ‘is’ but rather restates the extent to which humanitarianism is plural and fragmented, depending on the contexts and the actors involved. What seems clear from the various case studies we present is that, now as then, the majority of organisations and associations that have intervened in Armenia have been keen to frame their activities as being apolitical, often in order to have access to delicate situations. However, humanitarianism is and was a highly political project. An in-depth examination of the case of Armenia reveals the multiple ways in which practices of relief and reconstruction may be implicated in overlapping and sometimes contradictory imperial, national and diasporic projects.

Historiographies and chronologies

Humanitarian interventions on behalf of Armenians have coincided with, and in some cases are understood as characteristic of, moments identified by practitioners and in the historiography as ‘watersheds’ in the history of humanitarianism, namely the end of the First World War and the end of the Cold War.²⁵ The emphasis placed on such ‘turning points’ in the Armenian case is, in part at least, a product of a broader preoccupation in histories of humanitarianism with periodisation and origin stories. Michael Barnett, the first scholar who has attempted to periodise the long-term history of humanitarianism, identifies three ages: the ‘imperial’, extending from the beginning of the nineteenth century to 1945; the ‘neo-humanitarian’, extending from the end of the Second World War to the end of the Cold War; and the ‘liberal’, which started with the end of the Cold War in 1989.²⁶ From her end, historian Silvia Salvatici rather suggests a more fluid understanding, stressing elements of change and continuity between one period to another and in relation to the different institutions and contexts studied.²⁷

Recently, Bruno Cabanes has seen in the First World War and its aftermath the beginning of a new era, when humanitarianism was transformed into a modern, technical, transnational and secular endeavour.²⁸ Along similar lines, Keith Watenpaugh has argued for the exceptionality of Western humanitarian interventions on behalf of post-genocide Armenians in the Middle East, stressing the extent to which a process of transformation in humanitarian practices took place.²⁹ Both Cabanes’ and Watenpaugh’s arguments claim a significant shift from wartime to post-war humanitarian operations. However, such an emphasis on this period as a ‘break’ tend to obscure significant elements of continuity in practices and agents from the pre-war into the inter-war period. In this volume, we recognise the importance of paying attention to relief efforts and interventions on behalf of the Armenians during and in the aftermath of Genocide for understanding the evolution of humanitarian discourses and practices in the twentieth century. In their chapters, Asya Darbinyan, Rebecca Jinks, Inger Marie Okkenhaug and Joy Damousi provide, in very different ways, fresh perspectives on this critical period.

By adopting a longer chronology and simultaneously expanding the range of institutions, agents and spaces under scrutiny, we demonstrate the problems inherent in attempts to provide a single comprehensive chronology of humanitarianism’s history. Together, the chapters speak to the challenge of adopting such a general chronology: they instead highlight the significant ways in which patterns of continuity and change varied according to the contexts, institutions and actors analysed. For instance, the periodisation that sees the end of the First World War as a caesura leading to modern and secular post-war humanitarian aid is challenged by Okkenhaug’s examination of the work of Scandinavian women in the Ottoman Empire, who relied on pre-genocide networks to organise their post-genocide humanitarian work.³⁰ Not only had some of these Scandinavian missionary women started working on behalf of Armenians at the turn of the century, they also continued to pursue their activities in wartime and for several years afterwards, in both inter-war mandate Syria and Lebanon and the Soviet Republic of Armenia.

While existing analyses of the place of the Armenians in humanitarianism’s history have focused on the aftermaths of genocide, interventions on their behalf can also reveal much about earlier and later periods. Our longer-term approach offers the opportunity to nuance ‘grand narratives’ regarding the history of humanitarianism. We challenge a teleological approach according to which humanitarianism has experienced a linear progressive process, from religious, hence supposedly unprofessional, aid practices to non-religious, truly ‘scientific’ forms.

Moving the gaze backward, the ‘Hamidian’ massacres of Ottoman Armenians during the 1890s have usually been approached from a political/diplomatic history perspective as a facet of the ‘Eastern Question’ or by focusing on the evolution of a specific tradition of ‘humanitarian intervention’.³¹ Chapter 1, by Stéphanie Prévost, offers a new approach, providing a comparative transatlantic analysis of the intersection of fundraising practices of American and British organisations, which are usually addressed in isolation. Her analysis also troubles assumed boundaries between relief ‘in the field’ and political diplomacy. Moving the gaze forward, despite the common assumption that the international response to the Armenian earthquake in 1988 represented another ‘turning point’ in the history of relief, little work has been carried out on post-Soviet humanitarian interventions on behalf of Armenians. By spanning the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Soviet Union and beyond, this volume provides insights into longer-term dynamics of continuity and change. Sossie Kasbarian’s analysis of responses to Syrian Armenian refugees resettled within the Republic of Armenia demonstrates that even in the context of a very different international ‘refugee regime’ important continuities with the practices of the post-genocide period may be traced. As Peter Gatrell has shown, history matters for refugees, and the consequences of displacements a century ago continue to shape the paths taken by Syrian Armenian refugees, as well as the response of the Armenian authorities to their fate.³²

Geographies

The history of Armenia and the Armenians has been written from an almost overwhelmingly ‘national’ perspective. This national focus is a consequence of genocide and its denial, which have profoundly shaped not only the experiences of Armenia and the Armenians but also the ways that the history of these experiences has been remembered and narrated. In the aftermath of the Genocide, surviving Armenians were divided between new diaspora communities in the Middle East, Europe, the USA and beyond and a new Soviet Republic of Armenia in the South Caucasus. In the diaspora history writing has often functioned as a means of ‘national preservation’, of countering ‘white massacre’ (the loss of Armenian identity through assimilation into ‘host’ societies). This has frequently led to the framing of the Armenian past in narrowly national terms, despite a long and rich history of Armenians as a dispersed and mobile group, which forged connections across and between empires well before the cataclysmic events of 1915.³³ In the face of systematic state-sponsored denial of the Genocide on the part of the Turkish Republic, the focus of many Armenian historians, from the 1960s at least, has unsurprisingly been providing ‘evidence’ that genocide occurred.³⁴ This has ranged from the quest to find a ‘smoking gun’ (proving intent of genocide on the part of the Committee of Union and Progress) to the gathering of testimonies of eyewitnesses and survivors.³⁵

In the Soviet Republic of Armenia meanwhile, the writing of Armenian history was dictated by the principles of Soviet nationalities policy.³⁶ Histories of the Genocide and its aftermaths were woven into a narrative of the Soviet Union as the ‘saviours’ of Armenians not only from Ottoman violence but also from the self-interested policies of the other European imperial powers. During the last decades of the Soviet Union’s existence history writing in Armenia became increasingly dominated by primordialist national narratives.³⁷ With the outbreak of conflict with Azerbaijan over the territory of Nagorny Karabakh in 1988 such narratives flourished as a means of defining and defending Armenian ‘national interests’ and they continue to do so. History writing has become increasingly politicised, focused on justifying claims to territory by tracing the unbroken presence of the Armenian nation back through the mists of time.³⁸

The trends described above, though understandable in the context of denial, have isolated the history of Armenia and the Armenians from broader and comparative historical contexts. The historiography of humanitarianism is, in contrast, by nature transnational, mapping connections and relationships between places, institutions and peoples that are often distant from one another.³⁹ This volume navigates these quite different narratives, connecting local, national, regional, imperial and international frames and considering how an ostensibly narrow case study can open up a wide range of geographies and global connections. Many of the international and Armenian actors that are addressed in this volume framed their actions in explicitly national terms or engaged in interventions which claimed particular territories as Armenian ‘national’ space. We are therefore particularly informed by the work of historians who have emphasised that paying attention to the nation state does not ‘stand in opposition’ to a transnational or international approach.⁴⁰

For the most part, research on humanitarian connections with Armenia has echoed broader trends in the history of humanitarianism, focusing primarily on Anglo-American and European interventions.⁴¹ This volume has a more ambitious geographical scope, encompassing the South Caucasus, the Russian Empire, Western Europe, South America and Australia as well as the Middle East. We engage with recent research that has begun to challenge normative visions of humanitarian relief as a straightforward transfer from the ‘west’ to the ‘global south’, by drawing attention to different sets of connections and encounters.⁴² In particular, by bringing to the fore ‘donors’ from parts of the world other than Europe and the United States, this volume helps challenge both the geographical frameworks that continue to underpin most histories of humanitarianism and the assumptions and hierarchies which they perpetuate. For example, aside from the notable example of Peter Gatrell’s A Whole Empire Walking, the humanitarian ideals and practices of imperial Russia are conspicuous by their absence from wider histories of humanitarianism.⁴³ Asya Darbinyan’s chapter begins to redress the balance by examining local responses to Armenian refugees at the edge of the Russian Empire.

The case of Australia also remains somewhat marginalised in the current literature on the history of humanitarianism. Joy Damousi’s chapter not only draws our attention to another, different national player on the field of humanitarian action, but also demonstrates to the importance of trans-imperial connections and networks (in this case across the British Empire) in shaping the nature of humanitarian engagements. Heitor Loureiro’s chapter on the Brazilian government’s engagement with the Armenian Question around the time of the First World War meanwhile highlights the extent to which Brazil instrumentalised humanitarian aid to strengthen its diplomatic position both in the Americas and globally. It draws attention to the important role played by diasporas and the significance of individual personalities in shaping which kinds of crises ‘mattered’.

Institutions and agents

From the late nineteenth century onwards Armenia and the Armenians became the concern of a number of what are now recognised to be major missionary and humanitarian agencies, not least the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the American Red Cross and, after the First World War, the Save the Children Fund. Examining the Armenian case also requires us to turn our attention to humanitarian actors and agencies that are now publicly less well known but were historically no less significant. Near East Relief (now the Near East Foundation), for example, responded to the needs of displaced Armenians in the aftermath of the Genocide on an enormous scale. The fate of displaced Armenians also preoccupied the League of Nations and the International Labour Organisation, which responded by extending the ‘Nansen passport’ system of providing travel documents to stateless Armenians in 1924 and by developing (with limited success) schemes for agricultural colonies of refugees in the Middle East and the Soviet Republic of Armenia.

It is impossible to write the history of aid to Armenia without engaging with the story of such a large constellation of international organisations and relief agencies. What sets the volume apart from existing literature is that the chapters are grounded in extensive archival research in a large number of repositories of governments and international organisations, as well as on extended fieldwork and professional experience in the South Caucasus. By drawing on this range of evidence, this volume shifts the focus from stories of familiar international agencies to look at other actors, less frequently addressed in narratives of humanitarianism’s history. In order to do so, our chapters draw on perspectives from a variety of disciplines, not least anthropologies of displacement and diaspora, and politics and international relations theory. They also draw on sources from a range of hitherto unexplored or under-explored international archives – the archives of diaspora organisations and Russian imperial archives, the records of smaller campaigning groups such as the National Armenian Relief Committee and the Armenian Relief Fund. The later chapters bring a different set of sources and methods to bear on the subject – oral history and ethnographic interviews.

The issue of archives and actors brings us quickly back to the question of humanitarian boundaries. Can we, for example, speak of the transnational Armenian diaspora philanthropic agency, the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) in the same terms as Save the Children or the International Committee of the Red Cross?⁴⁴ When does missionary work become humanitarianism, and when does humanitarianism foster missionary goals? How do we understand the distinction between ‘non-state’ or ‘private’ and ‘state’ actors, especially when the boundaries between them were blurred and they engaged in joint projects of relief or reconstruction? What does it mean when, as in the case of Katja Doose’s chapter on responses to the Soviet Armenian earthquake, a state regarded as authoritarian or repressive engages in practices of relief and cooperates with international agencies that define themselves as non-political? As a whole these chapters reinforce claims that there was never a golden era of ‘humanitarian space’. Politics, state-building and relief have, for the last one hundred and fifty years at least, been interconnected or even interdependent.

The chapters in this volume suggest the need to go beyond understanding the character or actions of particular agencies and to consider the functioning of networks of concern and action that spanned a range of different agencies and the processes by which, despite their differences, they were able to come to a consensus over ends if not means.⁴⁵ They also point to the need to consider more fully the different actors and motives within institutions. Jinks’ chapter on the ‘Smith Girls’, who were employed by the Near East Relief, for example, demonstrates how different motivations could exist within one organisation, revealing the often-contested relationships between organisations and individuals who engaged in relief work on their behalf. More generally, the chapters in this volume address tensions between principles and practice, showing how different actors, both institutions and individual relief workers, made decisions in particular social and political settings according to unexpected circumstances and day-to-day encounters.

Existing scholarship on interventions on behalf of Armenians has focused on ‘Western’ organisations and mostly those associated with a particular ‘liberal’ protestant tradition.⁴⁶ Considering how and why Armenia and the Armenians came to be considered worthy recipients of ‘Western’ aid, we suggest, can reveal a great deal about the ways in which religious and orientalist discourses, as well as imperial geopolitics, shaped humanitarianism(s).⁴⁷ However, some of these perspectives have tended to take for granted the place of the Armenians as recipients of aid, rather than acknowledging that it was often Armenians themselves who provided aid to Armenia. Building on emerging research on Armenians as humanitarian actors, and examining the neglected role of a range of Armenian actors (Soviet Armenian as well as diasporic) in responding to crisis and conflict, this volume complicates established images of donors and recipients.⁴⁸ Vahé Tachjian and Sossie Kasbarian’s chapters explore the different ways in diasporic actors responded to displacement and engaged in reconstruction projects in Soviet and post-Soviet Armenia. These chapters demonstrate how these interventions were shaped by particular articulations of Armenian identity and belonging. They also underscore the importance of philanthropy, disaster relief and other forms of aid in the construction of diasporic identities and the maintenance of connections with homelands.

By focusing on the roles of Armenians as actors this volume challenges reductive images of Armenians as simply victims of violence. Building on recent perspectives which have highlighted the ambivalent and sometimes hostile responses that recent ‘civil society building’ interventions in contemporary Armenia have provoked and the alternative visions of activism they have generated, the chapters in this volume highlight humanitarian interventions as sites of complex and shifting power relations.⁴⁹ They pay attention to the capacity of the displaced, and victims of violence and disaster to shape their own lives, by contesting or renegotiating the decisions made on their behalf, albeit in circumstances of extreme hardship.⁵⁰ In doing so the chapters not only frame Armenia as a place of conflict and crisis, but rather examine how particular spaces defined as ‘Armenian’ became the site for multiple and sometimes contested visions and projects for the reconstruction of individual lives, families, communities and states, from within and outside the Armenian community.

Structure

The volume follows a broadly chronological structure. It is not intended to provide a comprehensive history of modern Armenia or of humanitarianism. Instead the chapters focus on a series of moments of crisis when the fate of Armenia and Armenians became an international concern. During the late nineteenth