In the summer of 1925, the Druze of southern Syrian sparked what would soon become a countrywide rebellion against the French mandate government. The 1925 revolt was just one response to the failure of the mandates system to embody the spirit of anti-imperialism that the League of Nations ostensibly represented. Syrian activists on and off the battlefield petitioned the League of Nations, calling to end French abuses and hasten self-determination. Such petitions utilized the language of anti-imperialism and international law, endowing the League of Nations with power as an international body. Yet, the relationship of oppositional Syrians to the League of Nations was a fraught one. Both in discourse and practice, Syrian hopefuls acted in ways to also undermine the League of Nations and the mandate government it upheld. While buying into the nation-state project, Syrians were not impervious to various alternative internationalist networks that operated—to differing degrees—outside the logic of the League of Nations framework. Even as Syrians petitioned the League and negotiated with the French, they recognized the potentially strategic role that the alternative internationalist movements could play in countering a Eurocentric international order. Utilizing French intelligence reports, petitions to the League of Nations, as well as Arabic newspapers, this paper uncovers the broad reaching efforts by Syrians to gain support and resources from liberal, Leninist, and Muslim circles. A common anti-imperialist agenda brought together these diverse networks, even when their specific ideologies and goals stood at odds with one another. In their quest for independence, Syrian efforts to bridge the national and international demonstrate the porosity of ideological and strategic networks during the interwar period. By shedding light on these various actors, the Syrian Revolt of 1925 can be read as multivalent in nature, holding meaning for divergent but overlapping “internationalist” movements, not all of which considered the nation-state framework as their dominant paradigm.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the social and political role of the League of Nation in the realms of criminal justice and human welfare, supposedly marginal to the larger political processes of the time. Two of the League's Advisory Committees marked Egypt as international hub for illegal traffic – the international traffic in drugs (cannabis, opium, heroin and cocaine); and traffic in women for prostitution. Egypt's strategic location as a crossroad between oceans and continents; coupled with the Capitulations – the legal privileges that foreign nationals enjoyed on Egyptian soil until their abolition in 1937 – indeed attracted to Egypt outlaws of all kinds, and made it a regional, even global center for illegal traffic. The Advisory Committee on Traffic in Women and Children (CTW) noted the migration of prostitutes and procurers to Egypt; and the Opium Committee seriously discussed the dangers of the Capitulations to international drug traffic. The proposed paper examines, first, how Egypt looked like from Geneva – how both committees saw the drug traffic and traffic in women in the Egyptian case, and how these committees' policy recommendations and conventions were affected by the Egyptian case. Here, I show how central Egypt was in the CTW's mapping of the Mediterranean; and in the Opium committee's understanding of cannabis. From there, it questions how the League's deliberations and reports affected Egyptian public opinion and official policies. Egyptian feminists and Islamists used the CTW's reports to pressure the British authorities to abolish licensed brothels. With regards to drug traffic, Russell Pasha, the head of the Egyptian Police, used the Opium Committee to place Egypt (and particularly himself) on the forefront of international war on drugs – and to change drug policies in Egypt itself.

On March 28, 1949, Ibtihaj Qaddura addressed a crowd of foreign dignitaries about women’s rights in the newly independent state of Lebanon. The occasion of Qaddura’s speech was the Third Session of the United Nation’s Commission on the Status of Women (UNCSW) hosted in Beirut. Qaddura and her peers used the attention of the international women’s rights community at the UNSCW meeting to present an alternative vision of women’s rights, an “Eastern” vision. “Eastern” women’s rights were grounded in the family rather than in the individual. “Eastern” was a gendered, regional women’s rights framework that emerged in the early twentieth century and gained wider support in the 1920s and 1930s as Arab women tried to counter Western hegemony in discussions about women’s rights. Despite their efforts, women’s rights were internationalized through the League of Nations as individual rights; the United Nations absorbed this women’s rights framework. This paper draws from research conducted in the UN and League of Nations archives as well as personal family archives in Lebanon. The petition presented at the UNCSW session in Beirut provides a window into Syrian and Lebanese women’s efforts to develop an alternative vision of international women’s rights that merged Eastern and Western notions of women’s rights. Their efforts did not succeed, but the petition reflects the multiple conceptualizations of women’s rights that circulated during the League of Nations era and into the early UN period.

In order to achieve its objective of promoting health and wellbeing on a global scale, the founders of the World Health Organization (WHO) espoused a principle of “regionalization” (or “decentralization”) wherein members states would form subsidiary organizations based on pre-determined geographic regions. Six resulting regions were constituted: Europe, America, Africa, Southeast Asia, Western Pacific, and the Eastern Mediterranean. The political impetus for this arrangement was to interrupt colonial relationships and to foster cooperation between neighboring countries that shared cultural, and more importantly, health concerns. This issue of what “neighboring” countries were, however, was not self-evident, and perhaps most strongly affected Israel’s desire to remain in the Eastern Mediterranean region, where it was assigned in 1949. When the Arab League voted in 1951 not to attend regional conferences in which Israel was invited, Israel refused to switch to the European region, even with the prodding of WHO Headquarters. I will investigate the following thirty-five years of tension, particularly how debates over the “regional problem” represented two coexisting and competing forces that collectively shaped Israel’s development: a desire to operate on the world stage and a desire to secure a position within the Middle East. While Israeli government officials were adamant about not allowing Arab states to figuratively remove Israel from the Middle Eastern map, they often argued in private that Israel’s health concerns were more in line with European states. Using material from the Israel State and WHO archives, the research questions my paper would seek to answer are: How did Israel imagine itself to be part of the Eastern Mediterranean, and what were the diplomatic strategies employed to keep Israel within that region despite boycott from the Arab League? What were the practical health outcomes from this contentious regional relationship? Why did Israel no longer find being in the Eastern Mediterranean necessary and become part of the European region in 1985? I argue that Israel insisted on maintaining part of the Eastern Mediterranean in the WHO, even if in other spheres of diplomatic relations it shifted to a European orientation, partly because of the symbolic significance of medical expertise and aid as a neutral path towards acceptance in the region. By the 1980s, numerous debates over the health of residents of the West Bank and Gaza plagued the World Health Assembly, and the Israeli Foreign Ministry could not longer pretend that medical benevolence had any political meaning.