Periodic Reporting for period 4 - BORDER (Towards a decentred history of the Middle East: Transborder spaces, circulations, frontier effects and state formation, 1920-1946)
Reporting period: 2022-03-01 to 2022-08-31
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.
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.
Throughout the duration of the project (60 months), the team (3 doctoral students, a post-doc fellow and the PI) has conducted intense archival research as well as production of knowledge in different settings and forms. Concretely, we did archival research at the National Archives, at Kew (London), Saint Antony’s College (Oxford), the French Diplomatic archives (Paris and Nantes), the US national archives (Maryland), Turkey’s Republican archives (Ankara), and the League of Nations (Geneva). Collections in Erevan, Istanbul, Newcastle, Boston, Berlin and Köln were also analysed. Last but not least, the archival material was complemented by newspapers and secondary sources held at the American University of Beirut, and libraries in Istanbul and London.
As for the results, besides the multiple papers presented at several workshops and conferences, the team produced 19 papers (journal articles or book chapters) in academic journals such as Journal of Borderlands Studies, Journal of Migration History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Middle East Studies, Journal of Contemporary History, 20&21. Revue d’histoire as well as by Publishers such as Edinburgh University Press, Brill, and Palgrave MacMillan. In addition, we convened two international workshops (2018, 2019) at the University of Neuchâtel. The proceedings of the two events were published as a Special Issue (Journal of Migration History, 2020) and as an edited volume (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). Finally the PI has submitted a book manuscript that has been accepted for publication (scheduled by May 2023) with Edinburgh University Press.
In terms of dissemination amongst different audiences, the team has been involved in a number of activities: the Migration History Talks (History Department in conjunction with the nccr-on the move at the University of Neuchâtel), a series of panels on “Borders: Past and Present” in conjunction with the CCDP or Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva), which also targeted non-academic audiences; in particular NGOs experts and the public in general. The team also worked for the dissemination of results using different means: podcasts, maintenance of a website devoted to the project, and interviews in media outlets and online platforms to explain the main ideas and achievements of the project to a larger audience. Taken together, all these activities have helped the team members to expand their academic networks, gain experience, and develop skills (communication, academic writing, etc.).
As for the results, besides the multiple papers presented at several workshops and conferences, the team produced 19 papers (journal articles or book chapters) in academic journals such as Journal of Borderlands Studies, Journal of Migration History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Middle East Studies, Journal of Contemporary History, 20&21. Revue d’histoire as well as by Publishers such as Edinburgh University Press, Brill, and Palgrave MacMillan. In addition, we convened two international workshops (2018, 2019) at the University of Neuchâtel. The proceedings of the two events were published as a Special Issue (Journal of Migration History, 2020) and as an edited volume (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). Finally the PI has submitted a book manuscript that has been accepted for publication (scheduled by May 2023) with Edinburgh University Press.
In terms of dissemination amongst different audiences, the team has been involved in a number of activities: the Migration History Talks (History Department in conjunction with the nccr-on the move at the University of Neuchâtel), a series of panels on “Borders: Past and Present” in conjunction with the CCDP or Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva), which also targeted non-academic audiences; in particular NGOs experts and the public in general. The team also worked for the dissemination of results using different means: podcasts, maintenance of a website devoted to the project, and interviews in media outlets and online platforms to explain the main ideas and achievements of the project to a larger audience. Taken together, all these activities have helped the team members to expand their academic networks, gain experience, and develop skills (communication, academic writing, etc.).
The project calls for surpassing the traditional binary nation-state versus borderlands-based history and adopt, instead, a historical narrative that views states and borderlands – including human and non-human actors – as a part of a dialectic relationship. Therefore, the project highlights the necessary conceptualisation of borderlands as spaces and places that were at once marginal and integral to the processes of globalisation and state-formation that took place during the first half of the twentieth century. In other words, scholars need to acknowledge that, far from being peripheral by definition, the ‘centrality’ or ‘de-centrality’ of borderlands in the Middle East, as elsewhere, is context-specific rather than geographical. All in all, the project suggests that any historical narrative of borderlands needs to be open-ended in order to capture how structure and individual and/or collective agency intertwine, affect each other and, at times, generate unforeseen consequences.