Regional Fracture and Its Intractability in World Politics: The Case of the Late Ottoman Empire

Abstract

Scholars have long grappled with the puzzle as to why some regions become peaceful and resilient while others crumble into perpetual insecurity. Much of the scholarship that they produced viewed regional formations as extensions of the state system. This work argues that state-centric tools to study regionalism have precluded us from uncovering regional forms of engagement under hierarchical relations of empires. They have privileged great power politics, at the expense of the political agency of non-state actors, such as minority communities, constitutional assemblies, and political parties, among others. This work highlights the lack of conceptual tools to capture historical continuity in the regional fabric of world politics. The bulk of the article engages in the methodology of concept development for regional fracture, in an effort to advance comparative regional studies historically and systematically. The concept development is then applied in the context of the Eastern Anatolian region of the late Ottoman Empire.

‘Illiberal Peace’: Oxymoron, Political Necessity, or Old Wine in a New Bottle

“…In terms of the first, elsewhere in my research I have discussed in detail and provided the methodology for boundary definitions of a system at a regional level. (Ohanyan 2022a(Ohanyan , 2022b. I will summarize it here as it relates to this research.…”

“…Unit organizational coherence Hegemonic influences and overlay/geopolitical embeddedness Organizational density and diversity of units Unit coordination, intra-regional bargaining, and security orders Systemic coherence of regional flows Table 2 Second-level dimensions of the regional fracture concept (Ohanyan 2022a) a competing balance between peace systems and war systems" (Reagan 2013: 349). War systems were then defined as a collection of institutions and behaviors that push toward war as an outcome or a policy.…”