Abstract
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.
Highlights
The Middle East’s encounters with refugees date back to the late 1850s when the Ottoman Empire was flooded by the influx of Muslim refugees fleeing the violence and warfare that ran havoc throughout the Caucasus.[1]
Ramazan Hakkı Öztan University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland ramazan.oztan@unine.ch. 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
By providing a range of case studies drawn from the Middle East, the volume 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
Summary
The Middle East’s encounters with refugees date back to the late 1850s when the Ottoman Empire was flooded by the influx of Muslim refugees fleeing the violence and warfare that ran havoc throughout the Caucasus.[1]. The introduction of sovereign territoriality was accompanied by the efforts of the emerging ruling elites in the region to re-define who belonged to the nation and thereby what determined the criteria for citizenship These terms of inclusion, specified the terms of exclusion, as some groups were defined out of state, leading to their categorisation as refugees and aliens. As such, creating refugees and welcoming them was a mutually constitutive process that reproduced discourses of governmentality and justified the modern territorial state, while redefining the limits of belonging.[2] This special issue pursues a discussion about these themes around three clusters of research questions. To what extent did the nineteenthcentury experiences of refugee settlement shape/influence the making of the refugee regimes in the later interwar period?
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