EMPATHY, HUMANITY AND THE “ARMENIAN QUESTION” IN THE INTERNATIONALIST LEGAL IMAGINATION
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While the historiography of the “Armenian Question” has been largely subsumed in scholarly treatments of the “Eastern question”, dynamics between Turkey, the Great Powers and le droit public de l’Europe, and the failure of the League of Nations to safeguard an Armenian national home, narratives of Armenian suffering have been seen neither as integral to the history of Europe, the history of imperialism or even the history of humanitarianism. The chief aim of this article is to unearth instead how a range of interwar legal and diplomatic texts have discursively reproduced the imperial contexts within which Armenian suffering and Armenophile empathy have been framed and deployed in constituting the contradictory logics of solidarity and exclusion inherent in what some scholars have recently called, following Michel Foucault’s work on governmentality, “humanitarian government”. Through two case studies on nineteenth century “humanitarian interventionist narratives” and debates on Armenian nation- and state-building in the League, it is argued that around an imagined “Armenia” was deployed a discourse of humanitarianism through which techniques of governmental power invested and gave legal meaning to suffering and dead Armenian bodies and took charge of their “precarious lives”. Far from displacing distinctions based on race, civilization, nationalism and religion in favour of a moral paradigm of humaneness, however, a sentimentalist discourse of “humanity” permeating the international legal imagination has firmly rested on them, making it possible to group together solidarity with fellow human beings and “an inequality of lives and hierarchies of humanity”, which constitute “an aporia of humanitarian governmentality.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.091 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".