Zozan Pehlivan, The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024)
[This review was originally published in the Fall 2025 issue of Arab Studies Journal. For more information on the issue, or to subscribe to ASJ, click here.]
From Mount Lebanon to Cilicia, from Bulgaria to the upper Euphrates valley, the Ottoman Empire witnessed the rise of sectarianism, nationalism, and mass violence in the nineteenth century. Especially in the Hamidian period (1876–1909), imperial authorities increasingly resorted to coercion and punitive campaigns to suppress secessionist movements and reassert central control. In certain places and times, communities of faith turned on each other, leading to widespread violence. Understanding how relations among Ottoman citizens of different ethnic, confessional, religious, and linguistic communities deteriorated has long occupied scholars of the late Ottoman world. Much of this literature—whether focused on the Hamidian massacres, crises in the Balkans, or conflicts in the Arab provinces—has illuminated how the project of imperial modernization crystallized ethno-confessional difference. Zozan Pehlivan’s The Political Ecology of Violence enters this conversation by reframing a familiar question: what made mass intercommunal violence possible in the final decades of Ottoman Empire? Rather than locating the answer primarily in ideology, constitutionalism, or identity politics, Pehlivan joins a growing chorus of Middle East historians directing attention to the environment.
Focusing on Ottoman Kurdistan from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, Pehlivan argues that environmental shocks—especially those associated with the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO)—played a central role in unraveling the historically symbiotic relationships between Christian Armenian peasants and Muslim Kurdish pastoralists. The core thesis of the book is that a series of droughts, famines, and epizootics in the second half of the nineteenth century produced an “ecological and socioeconomic disequilibrium” between agricultural and pastoral communities. Whereas the Ottoman state directed relief to sedentary agriculturalists—through grain provisioning, tax deferments, and agricultural loans—pastoralist communities suffered more permanent losses as animal herds died off. The uneven recovery from these shocks generated deep economic disparities between the two groups, exacerbating intercommunal tensions. Pehlivan contends that these environmental and economic stressors laid the structural groundwork for large-scale state-sponsored violence in the 1890s, in which Kurdish militias known as the Hamidian Light Cavalry played a decisive role.
Pehlivan’s intervention is most clearly in conversation with two overlapping bodies of scholarship: the historiography of late Ottoman violence and the growing field of Middle East environmental history. In the first domain, her work builds on studies by Bedross der Matossian, Ronald Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek, Uğur Ümit Üngör, Taner Akçam, Hans-Lukas Kieser, and Janet Klein, who have analyzed the social and political preconditions of the Armenian genocide and earlier waves of anti-Christian violence. Whereas these studies often emphasize identity politics, political economy, and state modernization, Pehlivan adds a crucial explanatory layer based on climate and environmental history. Her approach resonates with global environmental histories, such as Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts, that link ENSO cycles to famine, social breakdown, and state failure.
The book also expands on work by Sam White and Alan Mikhail, who have explored the environmental dimensions of early modern Ottoman social, economic, and political crises, focusing on the climate as an important factor that influenced provisioning, population, and welfare. She refocuses this lens on a rural part of the Ottoman Empire, illuminating stories of peasants and agriculturalists who experienced climatic changes, epizootics, and government measures differently. In doing so, she contributes to a newer wave of scholarship, including work by Samuel Dolbee and Chris Gratien, on how ecology, economy, state, and society were co-constituted under the modernizing Ottoman Empire.
The Political Ecology of Violence is methodologically ambitious, combining Ottoman archival material with British consular reports, veterinary records, and climate science, including dendrochronological studies and ENSO event data. This interdisciplinary approach allows Pehlivan to substantiate correlations between climatic anomalies and patterns of economic and social disruption. She deftly uses the archival record to reconstruct both state policy and local responses to environmental crises.
The first chapter establishes the environmental and demographic context of Ottoman Kurdistan, introducing the “landscape trilogy” of mountains, pastures, and plains. Pehlivan provides a detailed account of topography, sub-ecological zones, and seasonal land use, paired with a demographic analysis of the region’s ethno-confessional composition. Here she introduces the idea of an ethno-confessional division of labor: Armenians primarily as settled agriculturalists, Kurds and Arabs as pastoralists. Pehlivan identifies a longstanding symbiosis between these groups, yet leaves mostly implicit the contours of that relationship before its breakdown. What Pehlivan could have arguably emphasized more is the role of legal and fiscal institutions—such as the kışlak or wintering system—in mediating the relationship between agriculturalists and pastoralists, especially in the pre-crisis period.
Chapter 2 elaborates on Kurdistan’s “four-legged capitalism” by analyzing the region’s pastoral economy. Pehlivan argues that animal husbandry was not marginal or isolated, but a central driver of regional and imperial capitalism, facilitated by networks of pastoralists, peasants, and urban entrepreneurs. These groups invested in animals as a source of labor, food, transport, as well as profit. In particular, urban-based proprietors financed the operation and outsourced animal care to pastoralists and peasants, profiting from herding without owning land or directly supplying labor. Whether “capitalism” is the proper name for the decentralized, largely subsistence-based economy that Pehlivan describes is open to debate. The label, in my opinion, risks flattening key distinctions between participation in markets and capitalist transformation. Without clearly showing how surplus value was extracted from human or animal labor, it remains uncertain whether the system operated through capitalist exploitation or rather through a subsistence economy punctuated by market-oriented transactions.
In chapter 3, Pehlivan traces a series of crises in the 1870s and 1880s, a period marked by food shortages, animal mortality, and mass displacement. She provides vivid accounts of peasant and pastoralist coping strategies, including seasonal migration, land abandonment, and food hoarding. She is especially attentive to the gendered dimensions of survival, noting how women became primary food collectors and caretakers of weakened livestock. The chapter makes three key points: environmental disasters affected peasants and pastoralists unevenly, pastoralists were far more vulnerable to the effects of drought and cold weather, and their survival strategies—such as crop theft—fractured intercommunal coexistence. Peasants and pastoralists entered the trajectory of “ecological disequilibrium” that worsened with each subsequent environmental catastrophe.
The book’s core argument is most thoroughly developed in chapters 4 and 5. The fourth chapter turns to the Ottoman state, showing that the central government’s relief efforts were inconsistent and often politically driven. These efforts redirected grain to urban markets or strategic provinces while neglecting rural and minority regions like Kurdistan. When aid did arrive, it favored farmers over herders, reinforcing the “ecological and socioeconomic disequilibrium” between the two groups (183). Pehlivan shows how top-down provisioning policy led to suffering and resentment on the ground, calling into question whether it really offers a better alternative to market-based solutions to grain distribution.
In the final substantive chapter, Pehlivan offers a case study of the 1894 Sasun massacre, which marked the beginning of the nearly two-year wave of Hamidian massacres that devastated Armenian communities across Ottoman Kurdistan. Challenging interpretations that reduce the violence to either a state crackdown on Armenian revolutionary activity or timeless Kurdish-Armenian enmity, she traces its roots to decades of ecological degradation, socioeconomic marginalization, and selective state provisioning. What began as tensions over land and grazing rights became militarized and racialized through state intervention. The incorporation of Kurdish tribal groups into the Hamidian regiments allowed the Ottoman state to instrumentalize rural grievances and convert environmental insecurity into political violence. She adapts Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence”—harm that is gradual, invisible, and structural—to show how the violent event was preceded by violence that was unfolding incrementally, through livestock loss, land depletion, and administrative neglect.
Though The Political Ecology of Violence is a major contribution, its argument sometimes veers toward environmental determinism. Pehlivan convincingly demonstrates that ecological factors contributed to the erosion of social cohesion, but the leap from subsistence stress to ethnic violence is not always clearly articulated. More attention to mediating institutions—such as the law, taxation, and organized religion—could have better clarified how structural pressures became communal antagonisms. Additionally, while Pehlivan cites a range of Ottoman and British documents, the voices of Armenian peasants are muted, particularly in comparison to the vivid attention given to the experiences of pastoralists. One wonders what the Armenian peasants had to say about Ottoman relief measures, relations to their pastoralist neighbors, and the wave of violence that erupted in 1894.
Despite these limitations, Pehlivan’s work broadens the historiographical conversation about late Ottoman violence. By placing climate change and environmental crisis at the center of the analysis, she forces us to reconsider the material foundations of intercommunal conflict. In doing so, she offers not just a regional study, but a framework for thinking about the intersection of climate, empire, and violence in other contexts. Pehlivan’s work invites further inquiry into how environmental pressures have historically shaped—and continue to shape—the dynamics of governance, resource distribution, and violence.