Regimes of Mobility: Borders and State Formation in the Middle East, 1918-1946

Review

Ultimately, the volume provides a fresh perspective on understanding how the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire impacted on the borderlands of the newly emerged states and transformed regimes of mobility. -- Arda Akıncı, University of Salamanca ― Diyâr, 4. Jg., 2/2023Regimes of Mobility offers a much-needed historical perspective on the current crisis in the eastern Arab world, where states have collapsed and societies have shattered, and where the world’s largest concentration of permanent refugees grows ever larger. Contrary to previous state-centered histories, these cutting-edge essays engage the bottom-up story of how Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq emerged as states, created by the League of Nations after World War I. ― Elizabeth F. Thompson, Mohamed S. Farsi Chair of Islamic Peace, American University in Washington[...] Regimes of Mobility makes a important contribution to the border literature, both because it focuses on the border construction processes in a specific historical period and because it touches on the state formations of almost all states in the Middle East. -- Hakan Ünay ― Journal of Borderlands StudiesRegimes of Mobility is a welcome addition to our knowledge on the history of the mainly Arab and Kurdish mobile societies and groups in the Arab East who adopted a mobile existence between Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey and Palestine. [...] Both the authors and the editors should be congratulated for crafting such a coherent narrative, usually difficult to achieve for an edited volume. -- M. Talha Çiçek, Istanbul Medeniyet University ― Middle Eastern StudiesConceiving the post-Ottoman space less through hard borders than porous borderlands, and highlighting the interests of both local and colonial actors, Tejel and Öztan develop "regimes of mobility" into a percipient rubric for the mandate period. Framed by an astute introduction and afterword, eleven case studies trace how traders, nomads, priests and refugees negotiated customs controls, quarantine regulations and national churches amid competing notions and uses of territory. This is a timely study of both the disconnections and redirections that define eras of deglobalisation. ― Nile Green, Professor of History and Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History, UCLADeparting from the premise that borders move as well as people and that regimes come and go, Regimes of Mobility is an outstanding contribution to what Europeans designated "Middle Eastern" historical studies. This highly readable volume also provides invaluable insights into processes of bordering, multiscalar networking, state-making, mobility, individual agency, and imperial hard and soft power. ― Nina Glick Schiller, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, University of ManchesterThis volume brings together a fantastic group of scholars whose top-notch articles, based on multilingual and transnational research, provide nuanced accounts of the emergence of Middle Eastern states and their boundary regimes. Tejel and Öztan’s volume is a must-read for those interested in the history of subaltern groups, territoriality, mobility, nationalism, and state and identity formation in the post-Ottoman and inter-war Middle East. ― Sabri Ates, Associate Professor of History, Southern Methodist UniversityThe volume brings together a set of articles of generally impressive quality that offer a simultaneously concise and detailed overview of trends in Middle Eastern borderland studies joining a movement away from the nation state towards regionalization and micro levels of analysis in global history. -- Peter Wien, University of Maryland ― Die Welt des IslamsThis volume is an ambitious contribution to the growing field of borderlands and mobility studies by bringing together a set of case studies that collectively challenge conventional narratives about the making of the modern Middle East. Rather than treating borders as static lines imposed by colonial powers or as mere administrative boundaries, the contributors consider them as dynamic, contested, and deeply interconnected spaces where state formation, identity, and everyday life were negotiated in the interwar period. -- Arturo Marzano, Roma Tre University ― Humanities and Social Sciences Online

From the Back Cover

Reinterprets the making of the modern Middle East by studying its borderlandsThe emergence of the modern Middle East is the result of three complementary historical developments: the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the institution of British and French control in its stead and the nationalist challenges to this colonial scramble. The introduction of international borders that accompanied this process is commonly portrayed as the drawing of lines in the sand, an artificial partitioning that brought diplomatic closure to an otherwise contested historical space. For the past two decades, insights gained from the burgeoning field of borderlands studies have enabled a new generation of scholars to challenge such popular depictions. For them, the region’s borderlands were not sites of peripheral activity, but rather liminal spaces criss-crossed by global flows and circulations central to state- and nation-formation across the Middle East. Regimes of Mobility offers a select number of case studies that highlight the connectedness of the politics of borderlands throughout the interwar Middle East.Key features•Evidence-driven case studies cover borderlands in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Palestine,and Transjordan•Informed by discussions in borderland and mobility studies, and by global and environmental history•Brings late Ottomanists into conversation with historians of the interwar Middle EastJordi Tejel is Research Professor in Contemporary History at the University of Neuchâtel.Ramazan Hakki Öztan is Assistant Professor at the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Bogaziçi University, Istanbul.