This special issue approaches the study of refugees and forcibly displaced persons in the Middle East beyond the analytic bounds dictated by states, nations and regions. Each author is interested in showing connections, influences, and far-reaching consequences that cut across analytic boundaries. By challenging state-centred accounts and instead placing refugees, institutions, and states in a mutually interactive framework, each contributor frames refugees as the driving force behind various historical processes. By providing a range of case studies drawn from the Middle East, the volume also marks a step away from the Euro-centrism that so often defines the study of refugees and shows the centrality of the developments in Europe for the Middle East and the developments in the Middle East for Europe. We therefore propose the connected histories of refugeedom as the historiographical way forward in the study of refugees.
This conceptual chapter frames the turn of the twentieth century at the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire as an ‘age of rogues’, when the shaky foundations upon which the modern Balkans, Middle East and Caucasus were forged. By building on the example of the imperial and revolutionary setting of Ottoman Macedonia and the life history of ‘Young Turk’ leader Enver Paşa, we define the age of rogues as a particular geopolitical and historical context within which imperial rivalries gave birth to a cast of parapolitical and paramilitary agents in frontier regions whose violent autonomy and culture of transgression managed to transform the legitimate norms of politics and the formal institutions of state sovereignty. The term rogue not only signifies capability of transgression, but also denies any pre-configured historical consequence. Rogues can be both heroes and villains, bandits and bureaucrats, rebels and rulers, revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries. Their brand of what we call transgressive politics, which we locate at the analytical intersection of contentious politics and parapolitics, particularly flourished on the frontiers of empires and modernity, where violence became the effective form of interaction not only between coercive regimes and their subversive opponents but also among rivaling empires and competing rogue groups.
In August 1935, British authorities tipped off Ankara about a team of assassins who were allegedly headed for Turkey to assassinate its president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Within a month, the Turkish authorities arrested a number of suspects in the Turkish-Syrian borderland, and began to pressure London to extradite the Circassian masterminds of the plot who were then living in the British mandate territories of Palestine and Transjordan. This article examines how the British tip-off quickly evolved into an episode fully publicized by the Kemalist regime, exploring the ways in which the alleged conspiracy helped consolidate Ankara’s ideological positions at home and pursue its long sought-after policies abroad. This curious episode illustrates the political and socio-economic relevance of imperial networks that continued to crisscross the post-Ottoman Middle East. On a more analytical level, the conspiracy helps us understand the complex interaction between intelligence and rumors, and in so doing, shows both empirical limits and opportunities in approaching them as a field of historical inquiry.
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