Arie Dubnov and Laura Robson, eds., Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (New Texts Out Now)

Arie Dubnov and Laura Robson, eds., Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (New Texts Out Now)

Arie Dubnov and Laura Robson, eds., Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (New Texts Out Now)

By : Arie Dubnov and Laura Robson

Arie Dubnov and Laura Robson (eds.), Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism (Stanford University Press, 2019).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this book?

Arie Dubnov and Laura Robson (AD & LR): We were both participants (in different years) in an international seminar on decolonization that ran at the Library of Congress for ten years under (among others) William Roger Louis and Dane Kennedy. It is not too much to say that this seminar trained a generation of scholars across a wide variety of fields to think in coherent and broadly comparative terms about global processes of decolonization. Naturally, partition is one of the themes that emerges from such a study of decolonization, especially once it is studied across territories and time periods. We were both eager to learn the dynamics that made the division of lands into one of the paths for gaining independence for postcolonial states. The seminar gave us the idea, and the tools, to explore the connections among its different iterations and what they might tell us about the end of empire and the birth of a new postcolonial era. 

Partition is anything but a natural solution to a long-standing and intractable problem.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

AD & LR: Our shared goal was to put together the first coherent collective history of the idea of partition, tracing its emergence in the aftermath of the First World War and locating its genealogy in the politics of twentieth-century empire and decolonization. It brings together several well-known scholars from three continents to examine the three most prominent instances of partition—Ireland, India, and Palestine—in tandem. The contributors deploy a wide variety of local perspectives and methodological approaches, as well as a broad spectrum of archival sources in a variety of languages, to answer the question of why and how this “moment of partition” occurred—that is, why partition emerged as a proposed solution for perceived or real ethno-national conflict across these totally disparate geographical and political spaces at this particular historical moment. 

More specifically, we wanted to look historically at the peculiar idea of political and physical separation of peoples—how people came up with the idea, and when, and why. At the end of the journey, we can point to three significant conclusions. First is the need to understand how essentially modern both these conflicts and this solution are; both partition and the problems it purported to solve are, basically, twentieth-century phenomena. Secondly, our work revealed how deeply embedded the notion of ethnonational separation is in the politics of twentieth-century empire and decolonization. Thirdly, it has become clear that historical actors at one corner of the empire were acutely aware of “partition experiments” elsewhere and were obsessively comparing themselves to other sites. 

Ultimately, we concluded that the idea of partition as “conflict resolution” is deeply flawed. Partition is anything but a natural solution to a long-standing and intractable problem. Instead, it is traceable to a very particular historical moment and explicable within the specific historical framework of British imperial collapse. When people promote it today, they do so for their particular political reasons and not because there has ever been any evidence that partition serves as a solution to anything. 

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

AD & LR: We have both worked—from rather different angles—on what might be called the politics of identity within an imperial and post-imperial context: how ethnic, communal, and national identities come to exist within imperial frames and often serve to support imperial causes. Laura has worked extensively on the politics of minorities in the colonial and postcolonial Arab world, with a particular focus on the imperial promotion of ethnonational identities and the violent consequences of such practices. Arie was trained as a historian of political thought, with emphasis on the history of Jewish nationalism and its ties with Britain. Working his way backward, from the history of Cold War liberalism to interwar politics, he was eager to see how the idea of partition was bundled up with notions of sovereignty, statehood, and postcolonial independence. In particular, he was curious to see whether the concept was imported in a top-down manner from the imperial metropole, or whether there were also local participation and promotion of partition politics.  

For both of us, this project involved diving into entirely new literatures in other parts of the world—especially, of course, South Asia and Ireland, but other places as well—and thinking much more broadly and comparatively about transnational phenomena. It has been a hugely rewarding and intellectually exciting project, and it was really wonderful to work with so many tremendous scholars who were so knowledgeable about areas outside our usual ken. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

AD & LR: Well, we hope it will be read by students and scholars, of course, of the Middle East, of South Asia, of Europe, of empire and decolonization generally. But beyond that, we hope that this book will spark a reconsideration of the political idea of partition among political scientists and policy-makers, who have been much more sanguine about the prospects of partition as a solution to ethnic conflict than we, as historians, think they should be. If this book does anything, it points to the fact that partition, historically speaking, has never served as a “solution” to anything; in fact, it has invariably been associated with violence of the most extreme kind. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

AD & LR: Laura is finishing up a history of mass violence in the twentieth-century Middle East that will hopefully be out in the next year or so, as well as looking towards another book project about the origins of global refugee resettlement schemes. Arie is currently writing a monograph that will examine how ideas concerning imperial federalism gave rise to a new understanding of British imperial politics after WWI and how key Zionist thinkers from the period formed their own visions in response to it. And we are looking for another opportunity to collaborate, perhaps on a less depressing topic! 

J: Given its many failures across the twentieth century, why do you think partition has retained its appeal as a possible “solution” for ethnic conflict? 

AD & LR: It is true that partition has had a remarkably long shelf life, and continues to appear as a policy proposal for all kinds of places, especially in the Middle East—not just Palestine/Israel, but also Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere. But partition is not being proposed because it works to reduce bloodshed. Instead, we would argue it regularly resurfaces because it continues to be both rhetorically and practically useful to a wide variety of external actors intent on maintaining and expanding their positions in places like Syria and Iraq. “Solutions” like partition elide external responsibility for contemporary postcolonial violence by assigning primordial sectarian origins to state collapse and civil war. They buttress the idea, valuable in so many different contexts, that the Middle East—and other places—are so fundamentally divided that security there is impossible without an external force acting as mediator. They offer both a rationale and a means for exerting physical influence on the ground. And when it goes wrong and turns violent—as partitions and transfers inevitably do—it can be presented as yet another example of why external political and military intervention will, unfortunately, be needed for the foreseeable future.

 

Excerpt from the book:

From the introduction

Partition is having a moment. In the past twenty years, the idea of physically dividing territories along ethno-religious lines as a solution to communal strife has suddenly reemerged, conveniently divorced from its disastrously violent history, as a fashionable technique of “conflict resolution.” From the 1995 Dayton accords that brought an end to the ruthless wars in the former Yugoslavia to the savage civil war and refugee crisis in Syria today, from the ongoing negotiations over Israel-Palestine to the recent carving up of Sudan, varying forms of internationally organized, ethnically based re-divisions of territory have repeatedly been proposed – and in some cases implemented – as a useful tool for solving intractable ethnic conflicts. Such contemporary discussions depict partition as a natural and even inevitable, if regrettable, answer to widely divergent but equally intractable problems of ethnic conflict across the globe. 

It was not always so. Far from representing a natural solution to ethnic conflict, the concept of partition is no more than a hundred years old, a product of the exceptional violence of the twentieth century. It first emerged out of the new conversations surrounding ethnicity, nationhood, and citizenship during and immediately after the First World War, unfolding against a backdrop of European imperial politics. The wartime collapse of the old central European and Ottoman empires and the emergence of new notions of the nation-state highlighted an essential paradox: the rise of new anti-colonial nationalisms and a formidable discourse of national sovereignty at precisely the same moment that the power, authority, and ambition of the British and French empires were reaching their zenith. Facing this difficulty, the political and diplomatic leadership of the old “Great Powers” began envisioning a new global order comprising self-consciously modern, sovereign, more-or-less ethnically homogenous states under the continued economic authority of the old imperial players. 

Partition, then, represented one piece of an imperially sponsored remaking of the global order along ethno-national lines, one that could also encompass other modes of aligning national populations with political borders: population transfer, mass deportations, and forcible denationalization, accompanied by a political narrative of self-determination for national populations and protections newly designated “minorities.” The multiple treaties of the immediate post-WWI era – encompassing Versailles, Sèvres, and Lausanne, the many minorities treaties with eastern Europe, and the League of Nations “mandate” agreements under which much of the Middle East would be governed for the next three decades – all provided a venue for articulating a new “internationalist” vision that bore the imprint of both nationalist discourse and imperial ambition, with the intention of containing the former and extending the latter. These agreements sought to construct a new political language of ethnic separatism alongside an equally novel language of self-determination, while protecting and disguising continuities and even expansions of British and French imperial power. The division of Ireland in the early 1920s thus cannot be disentangled from simultaneous conversations about mass population resettlement in Iraq and Syria; brutal population exchanges between Bulgaria and Greece and between Greece and Turkey; and the emergence of new boundaries and new categories of “minority” and “majority” in Poland, Romania, and other former Habsburg and Russian imperial territories. The idea of partition emerged alongside other hybrid approaches like the mandate system – that awkward “compromise between partisans of imperial annexation and those who wanted all colonies placed under international control,” as historian Susan Pedersen has it – and similarly encouraged colonial subjects to use the language of nation-statehood to advocate for sovereignty.

Unlike the mandates, these partitions mostly did not involve new internationalist bodies like the League of Nations; they were products of dialogue and negotiations along, within, and across the traditional metropole-colony axis. Partition, as an idea and strategy, belonged firmly within the imperial realm; it was less a vehicle for internationalization than a novel, sophisticated dīvide et īmpera tactic that sought to coopt the new global tilt towards the ethnic nation-state. As such, the meaning of partition necessarily shifted after a second world war and the concomitant collapse of British imperial rule. Schemes that were originally conceived as part of a new type of imperial governance in the guise of internationalism turned out to offer quick and dirty exit strategies and the possibility of continued post-colonial influence for Britain, and began to interest policymakers in extra-British contexts. Following the Second World War, two further partitions were proposed and partially enacted in the decolonizing territories of India-Pakistan and Israel-Palestine, accompanied by a level of violence and dislocation unprecedented in either place (though perhaps matched by the brutality of the almost simultaneous mass population expulsions in eastern Europe). By midcentury, the political “solution” of partition had arrived with a vengeance.

This volume examines the three earliest and most prominent instances of partition – Ireland, India, and Palestine – in tandem. Our goal is to understand why and how this “moment of partition” occurred – that is, why partition emerged as a proposed solution for perceived or real communal and ethno-national conflict across these totally disparate geographical and political spaces at this particular historical moment. Making use of the transnational framework of the British Empire, the central originary space for the idea of partition, it seeks to go beyond side-by-side comparison to find concrete connections among the three cases: the mutual influences, shared personnel, economic justifications, material interests, and political networks that propelled the idea of partition forward, resulted in the violent creation of (theoretically) ethnically specific post-colonial political spaces, and set the stage for subsequent partitions in Germany, Korea, and Vietnam, among others. Such a juxtaposition of cases allows us to understand partition more accurately as a transnational rather than a local phenomenon, a consequence of decolonization and the global upheavals of the interwar era, rather than an expression of permanently incompatible ethnic or religious identities in benighted areas of the world. In other words, this volume seeks to move the scholarship beyond “area studies” as well as the nationalist frameworks that served in the first instance to promote partition as a natural phenomenon and have buttressed its political formulations ever since. 

Jun 10, 2019 Lebanon

Neha Vora, Teach for Arabia: American Universities, Liberalism, and Transnational Qatar (New Texts Out Now)

Neha Vora, Teach for Arabia: American Universities, Liberalism, and Transnational Qatar (Stanford University Press, 2018).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Neha Vora (NV): I was conducting research for my first book, Impossible Citizens, in Dubai in 2006. Many of the young South Asians I interviewed were graduates of private universities—many partnered with US institutions—that had been growing in the United Arab Emirates under the rubric of “knowledge economy development.” I found the experiences of these college graduates to be different from those of my other interlocutors; specifically, going to college in the United Arab Emirates allowed them to stay uninterrupted in the Gulf, whereas previously they would have had to leave the country for higher education. This allowed for a greater sense of belonging to place. Their college lives also included direct interaction with Emirati peers, which was uncommon in their generation due to segregated neighborhoods and schooling environments. This direct interaction included several instances where South Asian students felt discriminated against by Emirati students, even as they recounted friendships they had built across ethno-national and religious lines. I found that many of these young people described their identity differently from other South Asians I had spoken to, particularly in making claims to “second-class citizenship,” which both sounded like a way of asserting belonging to the United Arab Emirates (something their parents might disavow), and as a form of liberal politicization that may have come out of the discourses that circulated within their American/Western institutions. These findings made me interested in exploring further how the influx of foreign private higher education was impacting citizenship, identity, and belonging among diasporic youth in the Gulf, as well as among nationals, who were also encountering different people and ideas in these spaces.

Around the same time, I noticed that academics in the United States were becoming highly critical of the proliferation of international partnerships, especially in so-called “illiberal” contexts like the Gulf states. While many of these critiques linked globalized American higher education to larger neoliberal trends in the university, they also reproduced exceptionalizing and orientalist ideas about the region and its residents. I was frustrated with the top-down geopolitical dichotomies that US-based academics mobilized, which did not reflect my field experiences—I was steeped in the ordinary and varied lives of my interlocutors, lives that did not seem much different from what they might have experienced in the United States or other “Western” contexts. I wanted to know about the everyday encounters that took place within American-style university settings and how they produced meanings about the liberal, the illiberal, the United States, and the Gulf. Education City in Doha, with its concentration of elite US branch campuses, seemed like a great location to focus my research. My first job after graduate school was at Texas A&M University, which has a campus in Education City. This allowed me to teach for three consecutive summers at Texas A&M Qatar and enabled my research to get off the ground. I finished research in fall 2014, after I had left Texas A&M. Because the research was spread out over four years, I was able to see how student and faculty demographics changed, and the way that various institutions responded to pushback the Education City project was receiving from some segments of Qatari society. 

... these ideas also create narrow understandings of “Qatariness”...

J:  What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

NV: While my work is grounded in ethnographic research, I am an interdisciplinary scholar who draws from a wide range of scholarship to understand what I am observing in my fieldwork encounters. The book engages literatures from critical university studies, postcolonial anthropology, gender studies, American studies, and Gulf studies, among others. I was interested when writing this book in having it intervene in the crisis narratives coming out of US academia that I mentioned above, while simultaneously providing information about how everyday life in Education City both reflected and reassembled the social dynamics of Doha. I do this by considering the branch campuses both as extensions of US university structures and hierarchies, and as localized effects of urbanization and nation-building in Qatar. The book’s chapters explore how ideas of liberalism and liberal education circulate within Education City, and how these ideas also create narrow understandings of “Qatariness” that are taken up as well as contested by Qatari and non-Qatari students. In addition to students, I also focus on the role of administrators and faculty, of Qatar Foundation, and the Qatari state.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

NV: Scholarship on the Gulf, including my previous work, has tended to be either citizen or migrant focused, thus reifying a dichotomy between the two. One of my intentions with this book was to move away from this paradigm, highlighting non-citizens as everyday immigrants to Qatar alongside the heterogeneity of the citizenry, and considering how different people interact with each other on a daily basis in Doha even as there are forms of hierarchy and segregation. I hope this book highlights how difference is not static and bounded but rather produced through ever-changing encounters between individuals, communities, government actors, political groups, and corporate interests, many of which extend beyond the boundaries of the territorial nation-state. I was particularly invested in highlighting the active role that Western and elite “expatriates” play in the production of systems of inequality in the Gulf, and in the production of the categories through which residents, journalists, and academics “know” the region. Implicating this form of expertise and its entanglements with state and corporate actors helps to unpack terms like liberal, illiberal, authoritarian, kafala, rentier state, and knowledge economy.

Teach for Arabia continues interventions into accepted knowledge about the Gulf that I have explored in my other work, namely de-exceptionalizing the region, considering its connections to other parts of the world historically and in the present day (and to British and US empire), and exploring citizenship beyond the limits of legality and the nation beyond the limits of state rhetoric and policies.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

NV: This book is for those interested in Qatar and the Arabian Peninsula, for my interlocutors, and for US-based academics who are thinking about what this seemingly recent turn to the global means for higher education. More broadly, it is a project that asks readers to question the kinds of value systems that fall under the rubric of liberalism and the often violent and exclusionary histories and presents that they unwittingly reproduce. Because Qatar and the Gulf are so overdetermined by the presumptions that circulate about them, I hope all of my audiences are to some degree disappointed and challenged by this project. At the same time, no project is closed or without its own blind spots, so I am nervous as well as eager to receive feedback that can push my scholarship further. 

Also, since starting this project I have switched jobs to a liberal arts college, which has inspired me to think a lot more about pedagogy, how to decenter elite white students, and what a decolonized university might look like. Therefore, I hope that this book will find purchase well beyond area studies—in anthropology, American studies, and among those interested in ideas about liberalism and liberal education more generally. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

NV: I have just completed a co-written book with Amelie Le Renard and Ahmed Kanna that interrogates Gulf exceptionalism and the ways that reflexive ethnography can move beyond certain recurring tropes within representations of the people, places, governments, cities, and forms of capital in the Arabian Peninsula. This project condenses, as well as moves beyond, the interventions all three of us have been trying to make throughout our careers in area studies as well as our disciplines (Amelie is a French sociologist and Ahmed and I are US anthropologists). 

I am also continuing the trajectory of moving into American studies that I started with Teach for Arabia. My next research project places contemporary labor and immigration regimes within broader frameworks of migration, diaspora, recruitment, and employment. Although seemingly quite different, the technologies and actors that create and maintain kafala in the Arabian Peninsula are almost identical to those that proliferate and profit from temporary visa regimes in the United States, especially as they relate to Indian migration. For example, H1-B skilled workers are often employed and exploited by Indian and Indian-American firms, which utilize similar tactics to Indian middlemen in the Gulf.

J: But what about labor exploitation in the Gulf? What about academic freedom? Are you ignoring these topics?

NV: By bringing attention to how structures and processes of labor and knowledge are transnational and include multiple actors, both as migrant workers and as those who benefit from the work that migrants do, I am discussing exploitation in ways that do not resort to culturalist explanations of Gulf Arab authoritarianism or modern-day slavery. These latter frameworks close off rather than enable inquiry into how inequality and power play out on the ground and have differential and changing effects. They also keep us from seeing the heterogeneity of resident lives in the Gulf and the ways that disenfranchised groups assert agency. The book is very much about labor and forms of laboring, as well as how institutions profit from maintaining labor hierarchies in the Gulf. It is also deeply invested in questions of which people and which areas of research find purchase within the academy, but in ways that challenge the locations from which we think freedom emanates, and the erasures of colonial pasts and unequal presents that supposedly universal liberal ideas like academic freedom are built upon and perpetuate.

 

Excerpt from the Book

In Summer 2010, I taught Introduction to Cultural Anthropology at Texas A&M Qatar, a course that met daily for five weeks. I had never taught outside of the United States before, and anthropology had never been offered at the branch campus, where liberal arts classes were limited to topics that fulfilled common core requirements for the students’ engineering degrees. Although I was uncertain how certain topics I taught at the main campus in College Station, Texas, such as patriarchy and intersexuality, would go over in a classroom I presumed would be more conservative, I decided to keep my syllabus basically the same, adding some content about the Arabian Peninsula and wider Gulf region to make the class more relatable. I also assigned a popular introductory textbook, hoping that the book’s accessibility would mitigate second-language learner difficulties that the denser articles might pose.

Like many anthropology textbooks, ours utilized cross-cultural examples in order to denaturalize assumptions about how societies are organized. Deploying comparative examples to “make the strange familiar and the familiar strange” is a common way to explain cultural relativism to undergraduates. But to make its points, our textbook unquestioningly centered a US reader familiar with American racial categories, American gender norms, and American politics. My students were confused by some of the book’s examples, which I clarified in class. This did not pose a great challenge until about midway through the term, when we read the kinship chapter. To highlight how marriage and family were cultural and not universal, the book asked readers to abandon their preconceived notions that cousin marriage is incest, since in some parts of the world, people practice it. As it turned out, we were in one of the parts of the world the textbook used as a primary example. Several of my Qatari students were either already engaged to their cousins or expected to be.

The class—who were about half Qatari citizens and half foreign residents who had grown up in Doha—arrived the morning after reading the chapter uniformly offended; they had clearly had a group conversation prior to our meeting. They told me the reading did not speak to them and also presented them or their classmates as exotic. Overall, they were fed up with the textbook. It seemed that they were also upset at me for assigning it. Just when I felt that I had made an irredeemable error, the class discussion shifted into a sophisticated unpacking of the parochialism of anthropology as a form of knowledge and how it continued to perpetuate American exceptionalism. The students then moved on to tell me how their other classes—STEM classes—contained similar moments of tension, sometimes in the curriculum and sometimes due to their professors’ presumptions about what Qataris, Arabs, and/or Muslims were like.

Instead of turning into a failure, our class dynamic grew stronger because of the frank conversation we had that day and in the days following. We continued to discuss not only anthropology but also the American university, the Education City campus where Texas A&M Qatar and other American branch campuses were located, and their role as students within the country’s growing knowledge economy. The students amazed me with their willingness to cross rigid social boundaries in order to learn about Doha residents they normally did not have the chance to engage. For their final group ethnographic projects, they researched topics including unauthorized migrant labor camps, shifting gender roles within Qatari marriages, Palestinian diasporic identities, and the experiences of bidoon (stateless) people. I heard after I left that some of them went to the dean to request that anthropology be offered again at Texas A&M Qatar; I believe this enabled me to return to teach for the following two summers. Anthropology was eventually added as a full-time line.

Whenever I design a course now, I am reminded of that class in Doha and how much it pushed me outside my comfort zone. It challenged me to question who I center and who I marginalize through my choice of readings and assignments, the language I use in delivering my lectures, how I assign group work, and my overall interactions with students. Today, I am a tenured faculty member at an elite liberal arts institution in the United States that markets itself as invested in critical thinking, undergraduate research experiences, diversity, and global citizenship training. The students at this institution will rarely get to experience these learning outcomes to the extent that I have witnessed students experience them at the American branch campuses in Doha, due to the diversity of students, quality of resources, and number of hands-on learning opportunities available there.

Since I began research for this book project, conversations have been swirling within US academic communities about what the transplant of liberal education into so-called illiberal countries such as Qatar and other Gulf States means for the future of the American academy. Very rarely, however, do we hear about the experiences on the ground of what happens within these transplant institutions, and how different actors engage with liberalism as both a universal and parochial project. My students understood the parochialism of liberal ideologies much better than their professors and the critics of branch campuses. They were quite aware of the branch campus as a space of encounter that rested on longer histories of entanglement that produced East and West, liberal and illiberal, universal and parochial, global and local, anthropologist and native. Their engagement with our anthropology textbook showcased this understanding of how ongoing knowledge transfer co-constituted Arabia and America as mutually exclusive.

There are many unique and spectacular things to write about the multibillion-dollar buildings of Education City, the variety of learners and laborers that inhabited its confines, the uneven transfer of institutional norms, and the local contestations and changes that took place over the seven-plus years that I worked on this project. Pushing beyond these easy targets and thin descriptions, I decided instead to introduce the experience that best animates the stakes of this book. Schools are critical sites for social reproduction, for citizenship training, and for identity formation. They are also spaces where the technologies of governance, surveillance, belonging, and exclusion that exist in the broader social context are rehearsed, negotiated, and contested by various actors. Enabled by an American university in a state where higher education was increasingly seen as a public good, my students embraced certain aspects of liberal education while also challenging the geopolitical and historical inequalities that liberalism relies on.

Offering an ethnographically grounded account that centers the unique experiences of different actors as they navigated branch campuses in Education City and their relationships to identity formation, citizenship, nation building, and imaginings of the future, this book discusses the role of liberal higher education in the making of transnational Qatar. At the same time, examining the inherent contradictions of American academia from the vantage point of Qatar highlights how ideas about the liberal and the illiberal were constantly emergent, contained within them their own undoing, and revealed investments from both sides of the globe by particular actors in maintaining mythologies of liberalism and its others.