Jordi Tejel and Ramazan Hakkı Öztan, eds., Regimes of Mobility: Borders and State Formation in the Middle East, 1918-1946 (New Texts Out Now)

Jordi Tejel and Ramazan Hakkı Öztan, eds., Regimes of Mobility: Borders and State Formation in the Middle East, 1918-1946 (New Texts Out Now)

Jordi Tejel and Ramazan Hakkı Öztan, eds., Regimes of Mobility: Borders and State Formation in the Middle East, 1918-1946 (New Texts Out Now)

By : Jordi Tejel and Ramazan Hakkı Öztan

Jordi Tejel and Ramazan Hakkı Öztan (eds.), Regimes of Mobility: Borders and State Formation in the Middle East, 1918-1946 (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). 

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

Jordi Tejel (JT): This volume is one of the most important outcomes of an ongoing research project (BORDER) on borders and state formation in the post-Ottoman Middle East, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and hosted at the History Department at the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland). As part of this project, we have organized a number of scholarly events over the past few years and this volume is the result of an international workshop held in Neuchâtel in October 2019. Scholars who attended the event discussed how borders were introduced to the Middle East, their impact on the existing socio-economic networks and on the flows of people (for example, smugglers, Bedouins, refugees, outlaws, merchants, and peasants), goods, and ideas. We interpreted these developments as part of a wider evolution marked by the collapse of diverse empires, the emergence of new nation-states, and the final stages of the first wave of globalization. Most scholars often address these entangled developments by either focusing on a specific case study or from a macro perspective. In this volume, however, we explore these processes through a borderland perspective. In doing so, we used the notion of “regimes of mobility,” which Nina Glick Schiller coined some years ago, as a way of proposing a dynamic and connected historical account.

Ramazan Hakkı Öztan (RHO): As Jordi mentioned, the book is a result of the workshop we organized in Neuchâtel before the start of the pandemic. This was an excellent gathering and this is not just nostalgia for pre-pandemic times talking. All the participants of this meeting really helped create an amazing intellectual synergy of scholarly reflection and intellectual exchange that motivated us all in bringing this collection of essays to a happy conclusion. Even though each piece is authored individually, we hope that the readers can therefore appreciate the volume as a collective conversation on borders, mobilities, and state formation in the interwar Middle East. In this sense, the volume also captures the voices and perspectives of the current generation of scholars on these issues and provides clues as to where the scholarship is headed. I would like to take this chance to thank once again all our contributors for making it really easy for me and Jordi to put this volume together. It was certainly a pleasure not only working with them but also learning from their insights throughout the entire process.

... the observation of cross-border mobilities confirms that state formation and globalization were, actually, mutually formative processes.

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

JT: Regimes of Mobility is engaged in conversation with several historiographies. First, as we mentioned earlier, is the profound belief that while we cannot disregard the nation-state framework or the respective political centers, alternative approaches are necessary for a renewed understanding of the making of the modern Middle East which includes, among many others, processes of boundary-making, refugee management, transportation policies, or discourses on national identity and territoriality. In that sense, borderland history allows us to rethink these processes by embracing cross-border mobilities as a point of departure, which highlights the potential of studying the cross-regional. In short, the chapters in this volume argue that borderlanders as well as a wide range of non-state actors trading, travelling, and at times subverting state policies in the borderlands played a relevant role in both shaping the state formation and globalization processes. Crucially, the observation of cross-border mobilities confirms that state formation and globalization were, actually, mutually formative processes.

The volume is also informed by all sub-disciplines of history—global history, connected history, transnational history—that underscore the significance of flows, connections, and itinerancy, without neglecting fixity, and therefore the potential contradictions these two apparently opposed dynamics can provoke. After all, the introduction of new borders and the reshaping of new regimes of mobility in the region had different repercussions depending on different factors, such as the context as well as the identity and/or the social status of borderlanders and trespassers. This issue is central, too, and I think contributors have successfully avoided conveying a sort of a-critical and, sometimes, celebratory narrative about globalization and time-space compression.

Finally, Regimes of Mobility is in conversation with environmental history. After all, human mobility is influenced, although not determined, by environmental factors such as droughts, pests, and diseases, as the current Covid pandemic has shown us. Obviously, as historians of empires have demonstrated, the prevention and regulation of movement to contain or deal with environmental crises has a long history in the region. Yet, the multiplication of new borders, new state authorities, and new international organizations made cross-border mobility—for Bedouins, smugglers, traders, travellers, pilgrims, but also cattle, insects, and germs—an even more sensitive issue from the 1920s onwards. In that sense, diverse chapters in this volume explore how non-human factors can also become the driving forces of mobility regimes, border-making processes, and ultimately the emergence of the modern nation-states in the Middle East.

RHO: To be sure, borders, mobilities, and state formation are themes that are central to the research of all our contributors, but as will be clear to the readers from the get-go, each author has a particular thematic, regional, temporal, and theoretical focus in their chapters. As such, the conversations and debates they are engaged with naturally vary. In general terms, however, it is possible to point out some of the generalities that underpin these individual research agendas. For one, any research on the interwar Middle East needs to come to terms with how one should approach the transition out of the empire and the gradual emergence of more national presents. The care with which our contributors frame this transition intimately speaks to the methodological and analytic discussions of the past few decades. As such, the contributions in the volume are informed by the critical scholarship that appreciates the extent of imperial resilience (and its implications after the collapse of the empire) and the very real ruptures introduced in the interwar years.

Perhaps the second element I could highlight is the willingness on the part of our contributors to look at the local. The readers of the volume will quickly notice, for example, that we have a motley of chapters that center on borderland communities and border-crossers alike, ranging from diseases to nomads, rebels to camels, cars to caravans, clergy to documents.  Even the chapters that squarely seek to bring the state back in and therefore focus on discourses and policies of political centers are informed by the central insights of borderland studies. Such a focus on the local I think successfully sharpens the way one could rethink the making of the modern Middle East. It is also a welcome empirical contribution that hopefully sets the volume apart from some of the more traditional historical accounts on the region. 

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

JT: I have been working on the Kurdish issue in the interwar period for more than twenty years. The relationship between the border and the Kurds, on the one hand, and between the so-called political center and their respective peripheries was always present in my research. Yet, with my research project I wished to make the border and cross-border dynamics (violence, contraband, refugees, religious networks, and so on) the focus of interest. Instead of departing from the center to study the periphery, I wanted to start from the border zones and attempt to explain the state formation process in the Middle East from a borderland perspective. The issue of cross-border mobility was of course a part of it. 

RHO: In addition to working on the borders in the Middle East, I have been studying late Ottoman revolutionaries, with a focus on the Balkan regions of the empire which I see as a heated theater of revolutionary politics during the reign of Abdulhamid II. I am particularly interested in understanding the impact of the introduction of new technologies of violence to the region, such as modern weapons and explosives, and explore what this tells us about the dynamics of violence in general. Studying the ways in which Ottoman revolutionaries tapped into illicit commodity circuits certainly informed my approach to territoriality, mobilities, and borders, which has been of course critical in editing this volume.

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

JT & RHO: We hope that the volume will bring late Ottomanists into conversation with historians of the interwar Middle East and, more broadly, historians of the contemporary Middle East with borderlands and mobility studies scholars. The chapters are also written in accessible prose which hopefully should make the volume appealing to non-area specialists and global historians, and useful in classrooms. 

J: What other projects are you working on now? 

JT: I am preparing a monograph on the Turkish-Syrian-Iraqi borderlands between 1920 and 1945, which is also related to the current ERC project on the borderlands and state formation in the interwar Middle East. Hopefully, it will come out next year. And of course, I am already thinking of a new research project, but now it is too early to spell it out…

RHO: I am currently involved in two book projects. The first is a study that focuses on revolutionary politics of violence in the late Ottoman Empire. I hope to finalize the book manuscript this year. The second is a book-length project on the making of the Turkish-Syrian border, the history of which I approach from an angle of political economy. I have already made some strides in this second project, but I would like to focus on it fully after I finish my first monograph.

 

Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, p. 25) 

As the contributors to this volume make it clear, borders are where global flows meet regional and local, and the personal criss-crosses the institutional. As zones characterized by such a variety of networks, actors and interests, borderlands are home to multiple narratives and historicities. ‘Regimes of mobility’ therefore provides a useful tool to analyse similarities and differences across different border zones, even when borders that define these relationships may differ in their materiality and nature. As such, this volume seeks to move away from the tendency to study state-formation and border-making in singular case studies and instead highlights the interconnectedness of these processes across the region. This certainly does not mean that there is a single type of Middle Eastern border. Nor do we suggest that there is a preconfigured path of historical development, devoid of local variation.

The discussions in this volume instead help us flesh out two broad conclusions on border, mobilities and state formation in the Middle East. First, the transition to nation states in the post-imperial spaces required the renegotiation of legal, commercial, personal and religious networks and legacies. Older geographies of mobilites and well-trodden networks inherited from the Ottoman Empire certainly proved difficult to dismantle, but the developments throughout the interwar period also helped transform them. In this process, states not only sought to prevent mobilities but also to re-channel them in ways serving their own interests. Second, tracing individual trajectories, such as those of merchants and sheikhs, or institutional networks, such as those of churches and businesses, is a productive way through which we can uncover the agencies of borderlanders and illustrate the ways in which they came to interact with the authorities on both sides of borders. As such, borders transformed mobilities, while mobilities made border; states, on the other hand, drew their authority from the regimes of mobility they had sought to implement.

New Texts Out Now: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein, guest eds. "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis." Special Issue of Conflict, Security & Development

Conflict, Security and Development, Volume 15, No. 5 (December 2015) Special issue: "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis," Guest Editors: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you compile this volume?

Mandy Turner (MT): Both the peace process and the two-state solution are dead. Despite more than twenty years of negotiations, Israel’s occupation, colonization and repression continue–and the political and geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian people is proceeding apace.

This is not news, nor is it surprising to any keen observer of the situation. But what is surprising–and thus requires explanation – is the resilience of the Oslo framework and paradigm: both objectively and subjectively. It operates objectively as a straitjacket by trapping Palestinians in economic and security arrangements that are designed to ensure stabilization and will not to lead to sovereignty or a just and sustainable solution. And it operates subjectively as a straitjacket by shutting out discussion of alternative ways of understanding the situation and ways out of the impasse. The persistence of this framework that is focused on conflict management and stabilization, is good for Israel but bad for Palestinians.

The Oslo peace paradigm–of a track-one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution–is therefore in crisis. And yet it is entirely possible that the current situation could continue for a while longer–particularly given the endorsement and support it enjoys from the major Western donors and the “international community,” as well as the fact that there has been no attempt to develop an alternative. The immediate short-term future is therefore bleak.

Guided by these observations, this special issue sought to undertake two tasks. The first task was to analyze the perceptions underpinning the Oslo framework and paradigm as well as some of the transformations instituted by its implementation: why is it so resilient, what has it created? The second task, which follows on from the first, was then to ask: how can we reframe our understanding of what is happening, what are some potential alternatives, and who is arguing and mobilizing for them?

These questions and themes grew out of a number of conversations with early-career scholars – some based at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem, and some based in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere. These conversations led to two interlinked panels at the International Studies Association annual convention in Toronto, Canada, in March 2014. To have two panels accepted on “conflict transformation and resistance in Palestine” at such a conventional international relations conference with (at the time unknown) early-career scholars is no mean feat. The large and engaged audience we received at these panels – with some very established names coming along (one of whom contributed to this special issue) – convinced us that this new stream of scholars and scholarship should have an outlet.  

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures do the articles address?

MT: The first half of the special issue analyzes how certain problematic assumptions shaped the Oslo framework, and how the Oslo framework in turn shaped the political, economic and territorial landscape.

Virginia Tilley’s article focuses on the paradigm of conflict resolution upon which the Oslo Accords were based, and calls for a re-evaluation of what she argues are the two interlinked central principles underpinning its worldview: internationally accepted notions of Israeli sovereignty; and the internationally accepted idea that the “conflict” is essentially one between two peoples–the “Palestinian people” and the “Jewish people”. Through her critical interrogation of these two “common sense” principles, Tilley proposes that the “conflict” be reinterpreted as an example of settler colonialism, and, as a result of this, recommends an alternative conflict resolution model based on a paradigm shift away from an ethno-nationalist division of the polity towards a civic model of the nation.

Tariq Dana unpacks another central plank of the Oslo paradigm–that of promoting economic relations between Israel and the OPT. He analyses this through the prism of “economic peace” (particularly the recent revival of theories of “capitalist peace”), whose underlying assumptions are predicated on the perceived superiority of economic approaches over political approaches to resolving conflict. Dana argues that there is a symbiosis between Israeli strategies of “economic peace” and recent Palestinian “statebuilding strategies” (referred to as Fayyadism), and that both operate as a form of pacification and control because economic cooperation leaves the colonial relationship unchallenged.

The political landscape in the OPT has been transformed by the Oslo paradigm, particularly by the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Alaa Tartir therefore analyses the basis, agenda and trajectory of the PA, particularly its post-2007 state building strategy. By focusing on the issue of local legitimacy and accountability, and based on fieldwork in two sites in the occupied West Bank (Balata and Jenin refugee camps), Tartir concludes that the main impact of the creation of the PA on ordinary people’s lives has been the strengthening of authoritarian control and the hijacking of any meaningful visions of Palestinian liberation.

The origin of the administrative division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip is the focus of Tareq Baconi’s article. He charts how Hamas’s initial opposition to the Oslo Accords and the PA was transformed over time, leading to its participation (and success) in the 2006 legislative elections. Baconi argues that it was the perceived demise of the peace process following the collapse of the Camp David discussions that facilitated this change. But this set Hamas on a collision course with Israel and the international community, which ultimately led to the conflict between Hamas and Fateh, and the administrative division, which continues to exist.

The special issue thereafter focuses, in the second section, on alternatives and resistance to Oslo’s transformations.

Cherine Hussein’s article charts the re-emergence of the single-state idea in opposition to the processes of separation unleashed ideologically and practically that were codified in the Oslo Accords. Analysing it as both a movement of resistance and as a political alternative to Oslo, while recognizing that it is currently largely a movement of intellectuals (particularly of diaspora Palestinians and Israelis), Hussein takes seriously its claim to be a more just and liberating alternative to the two-state solution.

My article highlights the work of a small but dedicated group of anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli activists involved in two groups: Zochrot and Boycott from Within. Both groups emerged in the post-Second Intifada period, which was marked by deep disillusionment with the Oslo paradigm. This article unpacks the alternative – albeit marginalized – analysis, solution and route to peace proposed by these groups through the application of three concepts: hegemony, counter-hegemony and praxis. The solution, argue the activists, lies in Israel-Palestine going through a process of de-Zionization and decolonization, and the process of achieving this lies in actions in solidarity with Palestinians.

This type of solidarity action is the focus of the final article by Suzanne Morrison, who analyses the “We Divest” campaign, which is the largest divestment campaign in the US and forms part of the wider Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Through attention to their activities and language, Morrison shows how “We Divest”, with its networked, decentralized, grassroots and horizontal structure, represents a new way of challenging Israel’s occupation and the suppression of Palestinian rights.

The two parts of the special issue are symbiotic: the critique and alternative perspectives analyzed in part two are responses to the issues and problems identified in part one.

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

MT: My work focuses on the political economy of donor intervention (which falls under the rubric of “peacebuilding”) in the OPT, particularly a critique of the Oslo peace paradigm and framework. This is a product of my broader conceptual and historical interest in the sociology of intervention as a method of capitalist expansion and imperial control (as explored in “The Politics of International Intervention: the Tyranny of Peace”, co-edited with Florian Kuhn, Routledge, 2016), and how post-conflict peacebuilding and development agendas are part of this (as explored in “Whose Peace: Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding”, co-edited with Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper (PalgraveMacmillan, 2008).  

My first book on Palestine (co-edited with Omar Shweiki), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-development and Beyond (PalgraveMacmillan, 2014), was a collection of essays by experts in their field, of the political-economic experience of different sections of the Palestinian community. The book, however, aimed to reunite these individual experiences into one historical political-economy narrative of a people experiencing a common theme of dispossession, disenfranchisement and disarticulation. It was guided by the desire to critically assess the utility of the concept of de-development to different sectors and issues–and had a foreword by Sara Roy, the scholar who coined the term, and who was involved in the workshop from which the book emerged.

This co-edited special issue (with Cherine Hussein, who, at the time of the issue construction, was the deputy director of the Kenyon Institute) was therefore the next logical step in my research on Palestine, although my article on Jewish-Israeli anti-Zionists did constitute a slight departure from my usual focus.

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

MT: I would imagine the main audience will be those whose research and political interests lie in Palestine Studies. It is difficult, given the structure of academic publishing – which has become ever more corporate and money grabbing – for research outputs such as this to be accessed by the general public. Only those with access to academic libraries are sure to be able to read it – and this is a travesty, in my opinion. To counteract this commodification of knowledge, we should all provide free access to our outputs through online open source websites such as academia.edu, etc. If academic research is going to have an impact beyond merely providing more material for teaching and background reading for yet more research (which is inaccessible to the general public) then this is essential. Websites such as Jadaliyya are therefore incredibly important.

Having said all that, I am under no illusions about the potential for ANY research on Israel-Palestine to contribute to changing the dynamics of the situation. However, as a collection of excellent analyses conducted by mostly early-career scholars in the field of Palestine studies, I am hopeful that their interesting and new perspectives will be read and digested. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MT: I am currently working on an edited volume provisionally entitled From the River to the Sea: Disintegration, Reintegration and Domination in Israel and Palestine. This book is the culmination of a two-year research project funded by the British Academy, which analyzed the impacts of the past twenty years of the Oslo peace framework and paradigm as processes of disintegration, reintegration and domination – and how they have created a new socio-economic and political landscape, which requires new agendas and frameworks. I am also working on a new research project with Tariq Dana at Birzeit University on capital and class in the occupied West Bank.

Excerpt from the Editor’s Note 

[Note: This issue was published in Dec. 2015]

Initially perceived to have inaugurated a new era of hope in the search for peace and justice in Palestine-Israel, the Oslo peace paradigm of a track one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution is in crisis today, if not completely at an end.

While the major Western donors and the ‘international community’ continue to publicly endorse the Oslo peace paradigm, Israeli and Palestinian political elites have both stepped away from it. The Israeli government has adopted what appears to be an outright rejection of the internationally-accepted end-goal of negotiations, i.e. the emergence of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. In March 2015, in the final days of his re-election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which is regarded as illegal under international law. Reminding its inhabitants that it was him and his Likud government that had established the settlement in 1997 as part of the Israeli state’s vision of a unified indivisible Jerusalem, he promised to expand the construction of settlements in East Jerusalem if re-elected. And in an interview with Israeli news site, NRG, Netanyahu vowed that the prospects of a Palestinian state were non-existent as long as he remained in office. Holding on to the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), he argued, was necessary to ensure Israel’s security in the context of regional instability and Islamic extremism. It is widely acknowledged that Netanyahu’s emphasis on Israel’s security—against both external and internal enemies—gave him a surprise win in an election he was widely expected to lose.

Despite attempts to backtrack under recognition that the US and European states are critical of this turn in official Israeli state policy, Netanyahu’s promise to bury the two-state solution in favour of a policy of further annexation has become the Israeli government’s official intent, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading ministers and key advisers.

[…]

The Palestinian Authority (PA) based in the West Bank also appears to have rejected a key principle of the Oslo peace paradigm—that of bilateral negotiations under the supervision of the US. Despite a herculean effort by US Secretary of State, John Kerry, to bring the two parties to the negotiating table, in response to the lack of movement towards final status issues and continued settlement expansion (amongst other issues), the Palestinian political elite have withdrawn from negotiations and resumed attempts to ‘internationalise the struggle’ by seeking membership of international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), and signing international treaties such as the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. This change of direction is part of a rethink in the PA and PLO’s strategy rooted in wider discussions and debates. The publication of a document by the Palestine Strategy Study Group (PSSG) in August 2008, the production of which involved many members of the Palestinian political elite (and whose recommendations were studiously discussed at the highest levels of the PA and PLO), showed widespread discontent with the bilateral negotiations framework and suggested ways in which Palestinians could ‘regain the initiative’.

[…]

And yet despite these changes in official Palestinian and Israeli political strategies that signal a deepening of the crisis, donors and the ‘international community’ are reluctant to accept the failure of the Oslo peace paradigm. This political myopia has meant the persistence of a framework that is increasingly divorced from the possibility of a just and sustainable peace. It is also acting as an ideological straitjacket by shutting out alternative interpretations. This special issue seeks a way out of this political and intellectual dead end. In pursuit of this, our various contributions undertake what we regard to be two key tasks: first, to critically analyse the perceptions underpinning the Oslo paradigm and the transformations instituted by its implementation; and second, to assess some alternative ways of understanding the situation rooted in new strategies of resistance that have emerged in the context of these transformations in the post-Oslo landscape.

[…]

Taken as a whole, the articles in this special issue aim to ignite conversations on the conflict that are not based within abstracted debates that centre upon the peace process itself—but that begin from within the realities and geographies of both the continually transforming land of Palestine-Israel and the voices, struggles, worldviews and imaginings of the future of the people who presently inhabit it. For it is by highlighting these transformations, and from within these points of beginning, that we believe more hopeful pathways for alternative ways forward can be collectively imagined, articulated, debated and built.