The Middle East and Human Rights: Mass Violence, Refugees, and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism.

A historian and associate professor of Modern Islam, Human Rights and Peace in the Religious Studies program at the University of California, Davis, Keith Watenpaugh is completing a book that will bring the Middle East into the larger history of human rights. His book will shed light on how the international community has conceptualized minority-majority relationships in Muslim societies and sectarian and ethnic differences in the Arab world. It will focus on the multiple intersections of the modern international human rights regime, genocide and Islam in the twentieth-century Middle East.

Watenpaugh was trained at UCLA, and has lived and conducted research in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq. He conducted research in Iraq both before and after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and occupation. In June 2003 he traveled to Iraq to lead the first independent assessment of Baghdad's libraries, research centers and universities. His team's efforts took the form of the widely used report, Opening the Doors: Intellectual Life and Academic Conditions in Post-War Baghdad. He served on the Middle East Studies Association's Committee on Academic Freedom in the Middle East and North Africa (2003–2006), and has worked with the Scholars at Risk program on behalf of Iraqi academic refugees as well as the University of California Initiative on Human Rights.