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

For the past two decades, insights gained from the burgeoning field of borderlands studies have enabled a new generation of scholars to challenge popular depictions of the emergence of the modern Middle East. For them, the region’s borderlands were not just mere 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. This volume analyses case studies on Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Transjordan that highlight the connectedness of the politics of borderlands throughout the interwar Middle East.

Jordi Tejel is Research Professor in Contemporary History at the University of Neuchâtel. Between 2017-2022, he has led a European Research Council (ERC, Consolidator Grant) research project on the borderlands of the interwar Middle East. He has notably authored La question kurde: Passé et présent (2014), Syria’s Kurds: History, Politics and Society(2009), and co-edited with Ramazan Hakkı Öztan Regimes of Mobility: Borders and State Formation in the Middle East, 1918-1946 (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), and with Peter Sluglett, Hamit Bozarslan and Riccardo Bocco Writing the History of Iraq: Historiographical and Political Challenges (2012). He has also published in journals such as British Journal of Middle East Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, European Journal of Turkish Studies, Iranian Studies, Journal of Borderlands Studies, Journal of Migration History, Middle East Studies, and 20&21. Revue d’histoire.

Ramazan Hakkı Oztan is Assistant Professor of History at the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul.