A quick overview of the recent events and present situation in the Turkish-Syrian-Iraqi borderlands seems to suggest several similarities with the interwar developments examined throughout this project: a state of widespread violence involving state and non-state actors, the weak presence of the Syrian and Iraqi state authorities in the northern borderlands, competing ideological projects, porous borders, significant flows of refugees and smuggled goods across the region, Ankara’s discourses on external threats coming from Turkey’s southern borders and thus the ‘right’ of Turkey to have a say in Syrian and Iraqi internal affairs, among many others. Obviously, today’s context and actors are not the same and some dynamics are actually new. Thus, from a historical viewpoint, some strips of the international borders drawn in the Middle East in the interwar era have recently become ‘thicker’ than ever before. In addition, refugee flows have taken a reverse direction. While in the 1920s and 1930s, thousands of refugees originating from Turkey and Iraq sought shelter in the Syrian lands, nowadays, millions of Syrians of all ethnic and religious backgrounds have become either internally displaced people (IDPs) or refugees in neighbouring countries – Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and, more significantly, Turkey. Taken together, however, these similarities and discrepancies allow us to draw some general conclusions about state- and border-making processes in the post-Ottoman Middle East, topics which were at the heart of this project.
First, past and present dynamics in the Turkish-Syrian-Iraqi borderlands confirm the pertinence of adopting a borderland perspective to study the two above-mentioned processes. A decentred perspective allows us to argue for the need of departing from Western models and more importantly highlight that the latter is indeed not a model but an instance of historical experience. In the same vein, states in the post-Ottoman Middle East are instances of specific historical configurations marked by three related yet distinct developments; namely, the slow collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the violent encounter with growing interventionist European powers in the region and the rise of the local anti-colonial movements (nationalist and religious).
Epistemologically, a history of border-making that pays attention to how borderlanders played off state powers and developed trans-border networks of violence and exchange allows us to combine local, transnational and trans-imperial approaches, too. After all, these frontier disputes were intertwined, not only because the resistance movements against Western occupation performed regionally, but also because the evolution of boundary negotiations in one instance had immediate consequences on the other.
More broadly, because borders are always in motion, borders and borderlands are constantly being re-imagined, contested and reconstructed through discourses as well as legal and material measures to better monitor (at times accelerating, at others obstructing) border-crossing and mobility. In that sense, human and non-human mobility (pests and diseases), together with borderlanders’ acts and strategies became significant drivers for states to expand their (uneven) presence in the borderlands and reformulate official discourses about the Self (and the Other). Hence, refugees, travellers, Bedouins, smugglers, merchants, transnational Sufi orders and landowners possessing plots of land in the border zone contributed to shape both the process of implementation of international borders and territorialisation in the post-Ottoman Middle East, by either resisting or coping with this new reality.
