Rethinking State and Border Formation in the Middle East: Turkish-Syrian-Iraqi Borderlands, 1921-46

While the wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, alongside the establishment of the so-called "Islamic Caliphate" have brought the debate about the crisis of the territorial nation-state in the Middle East once again to the fore, this issue cannot be simply understood as the logical consequence of either an imported political construction or the purported artificiality of Middle Eastern borders. Instead, the process of state formation in the region has been a complicated course that involved different institutional traditions, managing societies marked by varying degrees of political loyalty to central power, and dealing with colonial interference. Rethinking State and Border Formation in the Middle East seeks to disentangle some of these complexities by proposing both a decentred and dialectic approach. Taking its cue from the bourgeoning field of borderland studies and a variety of historical sub-disciplines, this monograph pays attention to the circulation of people, goods, diseases and ideas as well as to the everyday encounters between a wide range of state and non-state actors in the borderlands laying between Turkey, Syria and Iraq. The goal is to provide a much more holistic yet finely-grained understanding of the formation of the territorial state in 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.