Voici les éléments 1 - 6 sur 6
  • Publication
    Accès libre
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Republic of Conspiracies: Cross-Border Plots and the Making of Modern Turkey
    In August 1935, British authorities tipped off Ankara about a team of assassins who were allegedly headed for Turkey to assassinate its president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Within a month, the Turkish authorities arrested a number of suspects in the Turkish-Syrian borderland, and began to pressure London to extradite the Circassian masterminds of the plot who were then living in the British mandate territories of Palestine and Transjordan. This article examines how the British tip-off quickly evolved into an episode fully publicized by the Kemalist regime, exploring the ways in which the alleged conspiracy helped consolidate Ankara’s ideological positions at home and pursue its long sought-after policies abroad. This curious episode illustrates the political and socio-economic relevance of imperial networks that continued to crisscross the post-Ottoman Middle East. On a more analytical level, the conspiracy helps us understand the complex interaction between intelligence and rumors, and in so doing, shows both empirical limits and opportunities in approaching them as a field of historical inquiry.
  • Publication
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    The Great Depression and the Making of Turkish-Syrian Border, 1921–1939
    This article explores how the Great Depression in 1929 led to the expansion of illicit circuits globally, and examines the ways in which the introduction of anti-smuggling campaigns came to consolidate the border regimes in Turkey and French Syria. The global economic downturn in the late 1920s led states to embrace protectionist measures such as heightened tariffs and import quotas, all designed to protect local industries and maintain a favorable trade balance. The introduction of such measures, however, often resulted in the emergence of highly profitable illicit circuits, including in the borderland between Turkey and Syria. Here, a sturdy coalition of producers, shop owners, smugglers, trackers, and peddlers began to smuggle into Turkey a range of goods from silk textiles to cigarette papers, while funneling out narcotics into Syria. By seeking the global trajectories of such commodity flows, this article examines the impact of these borderland mobilities on the making of Turkey's southern border by exploring the local and bureaucratic responses to a rapidly changing world economic order in the aftermath of the Great Depression.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    The Special Issue ‘Forced Migration and Refugeedom in the Modern Middle East’ Towards Connected Histories of Refugeedom in the Middle East
    This special issue approaches the study of refugees and forcibly displaced persons in the Middle East beyond the analytic bounds dictated by states, nations and regions. Each author is interested in showing connections, influences, and far-reaching consequences that cut across analytic boundaries. By challenging state-centred accounts and instead placing refugees, institutions, and states in a mutually interactive framework, each contributor frames refugees as the driving force behind various historical processes. By providing a range of case studies drawn from the Middle East, the volume also marks a step away from the Euro-centrism that so often defines the study of refugees and shows the centrality of the developments in Europe for the Middle East and the developments in the Middle East for Europe. We therefore propose the connected histories of refugeedom as the historiographical way forward in the study of refugees.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Settlement Law of 1934: Turkish Nationalism in the Age of Revisionism
    There is a strong tendency in Turkish historiography to approach Kemalist policies as purely domestic affairs that emanate from the centre in a top-down manner, reflecting the clear ideological positions of Ankara. The existing scholarship on the Settlement Law (1934), too, has read the development of Kemalist demographic policies in ideological terms, framing them in top-down modernist trajectories that were long in the making since the late Ottoman times. These perspectives often remained analytically singular and nation-centred, failing to engage with the broader transnational developments that were in fact crucial to the making and timing of a range of Kemalist policies. As such, the processes of demographic engineering are framed as devoid of historical conjuncture and immune from unintended consequences or the constraints presented by state capacity. In this article, I seek to overcome such limitations by situating the Settlement Law within its due transnational context of heightened interstate rivalries since the 1930s. Unfolding in myriad ways across the borderlands of Eastern Europe, the complex dynamics of interstate competition created the necessary push and pull factors that started dislodging the Balkan Muslims from those areas coveted by various territorially revisionist states in the region. The demographic engineering their arrival triggered in Turkey, I argue, was therefore as much national as international.