Near and Middle Eastern Studies

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://digital.lib.washington.edu/handle/1773/4946

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Affective Lifeworlds: Iranian Gamers vs the Islamic Republic of Iran
(2025-08-01) Cohoon, Melinda; Osanloo, Arzoo
This dissertation examines the complex relationship between Iranian gamers and state Internet control policies through the lens of digital ethnography. Drawing on four years of fieldwork, the research investigates how Iranians navigate state information controls, particularly in response to the controversial Internet User Protection Bill. Through analysis of memes, digital artifacts, and resistance practices during the Woman Life Freedom movement in 2022, the study reveals how gamers construct alternative digital spaces and develop tactical responses to state surveillance. The research makes three significant contributions to scholarly literature. First, it advances understanding of cyberspace and ICTs by demonstrating digital technologies’ dual nature as tools for citizen empowerment and state repression. Second, it enriches Middle Eastern game studies by providing one of the few ethnographic accounts of Iranian gaming communities, illuminating how virtual spaces become sites of cultural and political negotiation. Third, it extends affect theory by examining how gamers’ emotional and social experiences shape their responses to digital authoritarianism. Through a multi-sited ethnographic approach combining qualitative methods, the study reveals how Iranian gamers create affective lifeworlds that enable resistance and normalcy under systemic constraints. The findings demonstrate how technological adaptation and digital resistance practices emerge within authoritarian contexts, contributing to broader discussions of digital sovereignty, sociotechnical systems, and the global affectosphere.
Entangled: Identity, Control, and Depictions of Hair in the Ancient Near East
(2025-08-01) Nichols, Corinna E; Noegel, Scott B.
This dissertation examines how the portrayal of hair in Mesopotamia, New Kingdom Egypt, and the Hebrew Bible expresses identity and enacts control. Hair offers a basis for comparison across these three different but interconnected cultures: it is uniquely symbolizable, being visible, malleable, and ubiquitous. This study draws on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus: the cultural, historical, and social norms that influence and produce individual practice, even without the individual’s conscious awareness. It also understands ancient Near Eastern texts and images as performative, that is, as active agents that shaped reality. This work uses a series of thematic case studies, examining depictions of the hair of foreigners, of kings and elites, and of liminal figures for each of the three cultures. It draws on both textual sources, e.g., New Kingdom love poems, and visual sources, e.g., the Neo-Assyrian palace relief sculptures. Each case study examines how these portrayals of hair, seemingly ornamental, are intertwined with and bring about three kinds of control. First, an exemplar may depict real-world control, as with a soldier grabbing an enemy by his beard. Second, these portrayals control their audience, molding their habitus and behavior into the desired form envisioned by the elitecreators of these works. Third, these depictions themselves enact cosmological control, shaping reality, whether by legitimating a king or repelling the chaos of the foreign. By examining hair across cultures, this dissertation reveals both shared strategies, such as the careful differentiation of foreign hair, and unique inflections, such as the uniformity of Neo-Assyrian hair across class and gender. Moreover, by attending to the details of how hair is depicted, this dissertation demonstrates that focus on a common feature can serve as a productive point of comparison across media, time, and cultures. While the scholarly conversations of Egyptology, Assyriology, and Biblical Studies are often distinct, this dissertation uses the motif of hair to illuminate the repetition of key themes across cultural boundaries, highlighting a shared worldview, shaped by elite values and concerns.
The Early Christianization of Marriage: Sex, Procreation, and Ritual
(2023-09-27) Hunter, Jennifer Rene; Williams, Michael A
This dissertation tells the story of how the ritualization of Christian marriage antedated the appearance of episcopal blessings at Christian wedding ceremonies in the fourth century CE. Various forms of the Christianization of marriage date from the very earliest centuries of Christianity. Many of these efforts were centered on ritualizing the sexual procreative relationship of married Christian couples. Christians used what they viewed as the superior ritual efficacy of their marriages to valorize Christianized marriage as extraordinary action that benefitted both the couple and the children they bore. Christians considered this to set their marriage apart from the marriages of traditional polytheists and Jews. Each chapter reveals a different way that Christians characterized Christian marriage in ritualized terms. Chapter one discusses the Christian position that desire should be controlled in both body and mind within marriage and reveals some of the ritualized means Christians touted for the control of desire, including acts of contemplation. This chapter also reveals that Christians viewed the control of desire within marriage as more than a moral imperative; they also extolled Christian marriage itself as a type of apotropaic therapy that keeps both desire and demons away. The second chapter provides a different and more gendered story of desire. Despite the plentiful anti-desire rhetoric highlighted in chapter one, Christians did not view all desire as destructive. Like traditional polytheists and Jews, Christians embraced the belief that a woman’s gaze shortly before or during coitus could impact the characteristics and abilities of the child that she conceives in that moment. The third chapter elucidates the Christian belief, often based on 1 Cor. 7:14, that Christianized marriage acts as a source of sanctification for both a married couple and any children they bear. This marital sanctification was rooted in, and at times even competed against, other forms of Christian ritual life, especially that of baptism. The fourth chapter highlights the belief among early Christians that their marriage possessed a theurgic efficacy due to humans’ status as the image of God. And it demonstrates how they characterized this theurgic efficacy in ritualizing terms that cast Christians’ image-producing procreation as efficaciously superior to the devotional image-making undertaken by traditional polytheists. The final chapter provides a more narrowed focus by exploring the heavily ritualized nuptial language of the Gospel of Philip from the fourth century CE Nag Hammadi collection. By situating the gospel’s nuptial language in broader discourse on marriage in late antiquity, the chapter reveals the role of materiality in the gospel as it pertains to the Christianization of marriage within the text. In so doing so, this chapter not only affirms the importance of the Gospel of Philip in the study of early Christian marriage, but also contributes to Nag Hammadi studies by establishing how the study of the ritualization of Christian marriage at large casts important new light on the meaning and purpose of the Gospel of Philip’s nuptial imagery, including providing new insights on its use of the specialized Greek nuptial terms numfôn, pastos, and koitôn.
Marriage Across the ‘Color’ Spectrum: Making Commitment Palatable in Iran
(2023-09-27) Sahebjame, Maral; Osanloo, Arzoo
In the twenty-first century, marriage practices in the Islamic Republic of Iran have evolved rapidly as unfulfilled expectations of intimacy in marriages have caused an increase in divorce rates, and the tendency to postpone marriage and engage in unsanctioned intimate partner relationships. In the past decade, the emergence of ‘white marriages,’ or cohabitation, has made these unsanctioned relationships more publicly visible. This practice exacerbates what the state has for decades called a marriage crisis. Prominent clerics and state officials condemn white marriage because it violates Islamic principles. Still, some Iranians prefer this conjugal arrangement to sanctioned permanent or temporary marriages. Through an ethnographic analysis of narratives from clerics, legal experts, and practitioners of white marriage in Iran, this project reveals that through their everyday practices, white marriage practitioners have sparked a public discussion on the politics of intimacy and forced state actors and clerics to revisit legal and Islamic debates about marriage and more broadly, about gender. It also examines the relationship between Islamic jurisprudence and the civil legal code, and the implementation of the state’s hybrid Islamico-civil laws, beyond what is in the official discourse. At a time when state repression and gender oppression are used to justify isolation or military intervention throughout the Middle East, this project brings to light the co-constitutive power dynamic between the state and society, where white marriage practitioners contribute to social non-movements that effect social change. In so doing, this work asks us to reexamine the dichotomous language that scholars often use when talking about liberal, illiberal, or authoritarian legal orders.
‘Without a Purpose, Misfortune Will Befall Our Land:’ Discourses of Nation in Late Ottoman Kurdistan
(2023-08-14) Sims, Michael; Kasaba, Reşat
In the final decades of the Ottoman Empire, Kurdish and Assyrian nationalists sought to improve their communities’ situations. This dissertation demonstrates the historical factors that shaped the discourses of these nascent nationalist movements, situating them as localized developments rather than the importation of modular nationalisms from Europe. It also uncovers vital new insights into the social history of Kurds and Suryani in Southeast Anatolia in the Late Ottoman Empire. It thus contributes to Syriac Studies, Kurdish Studies, Ottoman Studies, and Nationalism Studies. Drawing on multiple archives of the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate totaling thousands of documents, on the full run of journals produced within these movements, and on published and unpublished memoirs, it presents these movements as responses to historical events in the regions of Diyarbakir, Harput, Mardin, and Tur Abdin. It uniquely utilizes Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Kurdish, Classical Syriac, and Turoyo source material to place the region’s voices in dialogue, enabling a deeper understanding of the processes underlying these discourses. It analyzes these movements through an ethno-symbolist approach, focusing on the symbols drawn from the past and reconfigured by nationalist intellectuals to address contemporary concerns and to mobilize their audiences towards reform. The dissertation’s narrative centers mostly between 1880 and 1925. It argues that the Hamidian Massacres (1894-1896) served as the catalyst that set both movements in motion, forcing a politics of difference between the Suryani and Armenians, and a Kurdish ethno-religious discourse that emphasized Islamic identity and the existential threat posed by foreign invasion. It then demonstrates how, in the following years, nationalists and reformers identified education as the most meaningful route for change and that this focus deeply informed the subsequent two decades of nationalist thought. The dissertation continues by illuminating how nationalists employed a variety of symbols to argue on points of ethnicity, national history, language, religion, and gender. It then presents a detailed history of the Heverkan and DekşurÃ® confederations of Tur Abdin, presenting how these communities navigated the complexities of the politics of identity, obligation, and patronage in which they live. In doing so, this dissertation provides critical insights into the Seyfo, or Assyrian Genocide.
From Crises to Ordinary Precarity: Palestinian Youth as New Practitioners of Humanitarian Governance in Amman, Jordan
(2023-08-14) Ege, Gozde Burcu; Robinson, Cabeiri D; Perez, Michael V
Displaced in both 1948 and 1967, Palestinian refugees in the Middle East now number over 5 million and have lived in exile for decades with no sign of a permanent solution. Despite the duration of their displacement, Palestinian refugees remain marginal to prevailing literature on long-term displacement. Deemed exceptional within much of the relevant discourse on refugees, their placement under UNRWA has exacerbated their status as a “unique” case of protracted refugeeism. However, given that protracted refugee situations have become normative globally, the Palestinians are paradigmatic. As a community of refugees living in exile for decades, Palestinians have been forced to adapt to the diminishing availability of aid, to shifts in humanitarian governance, and to conditions of precarity in urbanized camps which are increasingly incorporating new refugees. This dissertation examines localized humanitarian practices in the Palestinian refugee camps of Jordan and focuses particularly upon a repertoire of care known locally as ʿamal fityani (boys’ work). It traces the history of this repertoire, analyzes the contested memories of its origins, examines its intercamp and gendered youth networks, and investigates how its notions of care are negotiated on the ground and have then been re-negotiated in the context of the Syrian refugee response and localization agendas. Drawing on mixed qualitative methodologies such as archival research, participant observation, interviews over two-and-a-half years in multiple associations across the refugee camps of Jordan, it argues that young refugees strive to overcome their precarity and find the tools for this in the community and in relation to one another, defying the governing structures of INGOs that treat them as market-oriented humanitarian objects. Relatedly, it demonstrates the complexities facing camp-based aid organizations, such as navigating social, economic, and religious norms and factors of their camps, and shows how taxonomies of religion and secularity do not account for the complexity of these negotiations. By considering intersectional factors like overlapping displacement, histories of care, and an evolving and gendered camp identity, my findings contribute to many fields including Refugee Studies, studies on humanitarianism in the Global South, and the anthropology of youth in the Middle East and North Africa.
Precarious Identity, Tenacious Stereotype: The Making of Romani Alterity in Late- and Post-Ottoman Turkey
(2023-04-17) Tunaydin, Pelin; Kasaba, Reşat
This dissertation is a study of the generative power of categories and the state practices based upon them. The case of the Roma in the late Ottoman and early Republican contexts illustrates the productive role of definition and repetition in turning contingent, historical social categories into ahistorical “truths” that are assumed to be always-already there. The dissertation explores the construction of difference in late- and post-Ottoman Turkey by focusing on the making of Romani alterity in its separate but overlapping religious, ethnic, and racial registers––an alterity produced by legislation, implemented by administration, negotiated by the Roma, and represented in the press and in literary form to be consumed and reproduced by the non-Roma as the intended audience. Moreover, this study views the Roma as agents, historical actors among a plurality of late-Ottoman and early Republican actors. It does so by prioritizing their direct interactions with the state, insofar as the sources permit, in order to show how they negotiated the terms of their membership in society in spite of the latter’s often active resistance and exclusionary policies.Conceived as an ambiguous socio-fiscal category in the early modern period, Romani alterity and the state’s preoccupation with it became more pronounced in the nineteenth century as the centralizing Ottoman state began employing such modern demographic technologies as censuses and identity documents. In turn, the Roma negotiated their belonging to the larger Muslim community through the use of the long-standing tradition of petitioning. Spatial and mobility practices were just as generative of an increasingly distinct Romani identity. The late nineteenth century saw the reification of a “nomadic Gypsy culture” concurrently with its subordination to hegemonic sedentarism, often framed as a “civilizing mission.” It was during the early decades of the Turkish Republic that the Roma, and particularly those that were assumed to be nomadic, were targeted in legislation, further inscribing Romani alterity within the ethnic program of the nation-building period. As the Turkish state engaged in demographic engineering, the Roma were once again intent on professing and performing their belonging through petitions, even as legislation and its practice rendered them more visible and vulnerable to the state’s intervention. The reification of Romani “difference” through inscription in official documents was further reinforced by its intellectualization in literary and lexical texts. The repeated dissemination of resilient stereotypes about the Roma in popular publications collectively constructed a distorted image of the Roma in conversation with each other. These cultural idioms of alterity, themselves a product of the social imaginary of their time, had a reproductive function in not only influencing further circulation, but also informing the consciousness of the legislators, and added an authoritative discursive layer to the construction of an increasingly ethnicized and racialized, and unmistakably subordinated Romani identity.
Constructions of Jewish Modernity and Marginality in Izmir, 1860-1907
(2022-07-14) Bolel, Canan; Naar, Devin; Kasaba, Resat
Izmir, an Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean port city, underwent significant changes during the wide-ranging Ottoman reform movement, Tanzimat (1839-1876). By the end of the nineteenth century, the emerging picture was a rapid cultural, social, and technological transformation of the local government and the local Jewish community accompanied by a heightened awareness of marginals’ visibility and mobility. In the body of a Jewish marginal, Ottoman officials, Jewish religious and secular leaders saw not only the threat of social disorder but the potential of imperial and communal disintegration. While conceptualization of marginality was embedded in the social, moral, and political concerns, it was inextricably tied to the articulation of European modernity as a regulatory category. Therefore, any discussion of Ottoman and Sephardi Jewish modernization efforts of the nineteenth century is bound to include marginal groups as a reminder of efforts to define new corporeal norms and ideals along the rhetorics of modernization and civilization. Rich historiography has explored the broader debates surrounding Jewish communities of the late Ottoman Empire, yet their marginal members have been almost entirely ignored. This dissertation investigates the complexities of being poor, diseased, criminal, foreign, or religious convert as markers of Sephardic Jewish selfhood in the overlapping realm of the urban public space, community, and family; focuses on ideas and practices surrounding Sephardic Jewish modernity. By doing so, it maps a new methodological terrain by placing the marginal’s body at the center. Drawing extensively on previously untapped Ottoman and Ladino archival material, it offers a new read on the increasing awareness of marginality to distinguish “normal” from “abnormal,” “appropriate” from “inappropriate.” In this dissertation, first, I argue that the emergence and dissemination of codes of marginality with corporeal manifestations appeared and evolved in relation to contemporary imperial and communal anxieties of the period that also reverberated across the geographic map. Second, contrary to the existing scholarship, which has depicted the margins and marginals as isolated spaces and beings on the verge of modernity, I argue that the Jewish marginals of Izmir resided at the heart of the urban center and were tightly embedded in the modern dynamics of their time. Scrutinizing the familiar and focusing on the underbelly of Jewish urban life, this dissertation challenges prevailing paradigms in Jewish Studies and Ottoman Studies. It also reveals that neither the Sephardi culture nor Ottoman Sephardi modernity was monolithic nor tangential to the larger Jewish world.
Fez & Sherwani: Consumption, Self-fashioning and Ottoman Influence in South Asia, 1826-1911
(2022-07-14) Bamber, William; Kasaba, Resat; Yang, Anand
This dissertation examines how novel forms of ‘South-South’ transnational connection operating through image-print and popular consumption shaped a new ideal and aesthetics of modernizing manliness across a wide global geography during the later nineteenth century. It does so by tracing the rise and popularization across a swathe of late nineteenth century Asia of a particular style of male dress based around the fez and the long, high-buttoned coat known variously as the istanbulin or, in South Asia, sherwani. By documenting the origins, associations, and one particular trajectory of the fez and istanbulin/sherwani style’s travel, from Ottoman Istanbul to the Indian city of Hyderabad, it shows how ways of thinking about identity and belonging across nineteenth century Asia became reshaped by novel circuits of globalizing visual and material interaction, and the new opportunities for mass consumption. Drawing on over two years of fieldwork in archival, museum and library collections across Istanbul, Delhi, Hyderabad and London, it intervenes in debates around imperialism, gender and social reform by showing how localized renegotiations of identity, far from being restricted to a dialectic of colonial civilization versus proto-national tradition, exploited the opportunities of mass consumption to index intensely varied visions of aspirational personal modernity. As the popularization of a non-European, Ottoman style illustrates, changing constructions of urban class and gender were intrinsically transnational, formed in close relation to new epistemologies of global political knowledge, and a contemporaneously emerging globalizing aesthetics of urbane masculinity. While the fez and istanbulin/sherwani style was widely adapted across different groups and contexts to invoke different shades of association, its straight-lined symmetry and manly seriousness evoked a striking contrast with both more ornate earlier nineteenth century styles, and European-imperial male dress. Its adoption among many Jews, Christians, Hindus and varied other sects, moreover, problematizes generalizing paradigms like ‘pan-Islam’ by showing how claims to participation in a cosmopolitan global modernity cut across communal lines. The dissertation brings together debates from art, transnational and literary history by highlighting novel of forms ‘South-South’ visual and material connectivity enabled by everyday technologies like the camera, lithographic press and sewing machine. Expanding transnational history’s stress on trade and migration to emphasize movements of ideas and aesthetics, it explores how the development of a nascent global visual sphere operating through illustrated journals, photos and popular portraiture dramatically reshaped imaginations of the world among the non-travelling majority in Ottoman and Indian cities from the 1870s on. The transnational spread of Ottoman styles was predominantly a phenomenon of localized imitation rather than physical exchange, illustrating the power of imagery to generate internationalist identification. While histories of print and nationalism have emphasized literary-lingual communities, this project highlights the openness and ambiguity of visual transnationalism, and its close interrelation with material experience. This is exemplified by the fashion’s evolution in the South Indian city of Hyderabad, where it became adapted to local fabrics and material sensibilities to emerge as the emblem of an assertively localized ideal of manliness and revitalized South Indian-Deccani regional identity.
Negotiating Illegality: Bypassed Minorities’ Access to Infrastructure in Middle Eastern Democracies
(2019-10-15) Bakkalbasioglu, Esra; Migdal, Joel S; Kasaba, Resat
What happens when democratic governments distribute infrastructure systems perceived as prerequisites for economic prosperity and modernization, such as systems providing water and electricity, to disadvantage their minority communities? How do bypassed communities react to the state’s discriminatory distribution practices? Public goods distribution literature argues that democracies do not distribute resources discriminatorily. The premise of this dissertation, comparatively examining the distribution of infrastructure in peripheral mixed regions of Israel and Turkey, asks how politicians who disadvantage minorities during infrastructure distribution later comply with these groups’ subsequent illegal access if the group holds significant electoral power. In other words, in democratic countries, bypassed communities’ ability to illegally access denied resources is determined by their electoral weight. With greater electoral weight comes greater state tolerance of illegal resource use. If minority groups do not wield such power in their region, illegal access is not tolerated, and they are left to engage in more conventional political actions, such as demonstrations, litigation, or advocacy. I develop this argument through comparative case studies of infrastructure distribution between 1970s and 2015, in the mixed regions of two Middle Eastern democracies, Israel and Turkey. In building these case studies, I draw on textual analysis of administrative records and newspapers, in-depth interviews, and participant observations conducted during 14 months of ethnographic field research conducted in the Bedouin populated Negev/Naqab region of Israel and Kurdish populated Southeastern Anatolia region of Turkey. Several empirical observations distinguish my theory from existing scholarship, which overlooks bypassed communities, who, it is assumed, either do not struggle against discriminatory distribution policies or, if they struggle, do so in the same ways. My research, in contrast, shows that: 1) infrastructure distribution is not a purely technical decision—politicians intervene at various stages to decide when and where to provide infrastructure; 2) the state actors weaponized infrastructure and disadvantaged the dissident minority communities during the resource distribution; 3) discriminated groups with electoral power negotiate illegal access in exchange for their votes; 4) discriminated groups without electoral power cannot negotiate illegal access with politicians, and instead engage in more conventional political actions, such as taking their case to the court, organizing non-violent demonstrations, and conducting international advocacy to put pressure on the government to alter its policy. This dissertation reveals how infrastructure distribution, often considered a non-political process, can be a highly discriminatory practice from the perspective of bypassed communities, especially if they belong to a political minority, and how illegal access to denied infrastructure by those bypassed communities is likewise a politically sanctioned act. Scholars often assume that stealthy access to denied resources is used as a last resort by marginalized communities pushed outside of conventional demand-making mechanisms. My research instead shows that illegal access is possible only for groups with enough electoral power to negotiate politicians’ compliance. In other words, illegal access is not a last resort for the marginalized. It is a tactic available only to the ones with electoral power.
Middle East Militaries: In and Out of Politics and Economies due to External Threat Perceptions A Dynamic Regional Order Approach to Civil–military Relations: Comparative Cases of Turkey, Egypt, Israel
(2019-08-14) Maziad, Marwa; Migdal, Joel; Kasaba, Reşat
There are many ways for the military to intervene in politics, whether through a direct governing role or monopolizing the national security apparatus. Another much-debated means for military intervention in politics is to play a role in a country’s economy. Turkey, Egypt, and Israel are three Middle East cases, whose militaries have exhibited various economic roles since the 1950s. Subsequent oscillations between economic civilianization and remilitarization have followed. The three cases, however, have shared comparative inception stories of military economic roles, albeit with contrasting configurations of how these military economic activities manifested over time. The militaries’ involvement in the economic realm includes (a) high military budget relative to the civilian state budget and the country’s GDP (Israel); (b) military-run defense industries or the militarization of various economic sectors, such as high-tech, through an advanced military-industrial-complex (Israel and Turkey); and (c) income-generating military-owned enterprises for the purpose of military self-sufficiency. These military-run companies make up for relatively smaller official defense budgets (Egypt). The military-owned holdings can serve as officer pension funds that invest in the civilian economy to directly redistribute the wealth to the retired soldiers (Turkey). Or they include swathes of land controlled by the armed forces that are later sold for income-generation after being vacated (Israel and Egypt). Why did these three seemingly different cases, in terms of their histories, political structures, and societies, converge—one way or another— on a similarly high military involvement in the economic realm of their respective countries? I argue that these military economic roles are co-constituted from within a high threat perception dynamic regional order. In other words, the three militaries play an economic role to maintain themselves as the three strongest militaries in the Middle East. The dynamic regional order approach to understanding economic civil–military relations in the Middle East allows two key observations. First, the countries actually influenced each other’s economic civil–military relations trajectories by virtue of being rival adjacent neighbors, in a high-threat perception environment. This circumstance of regional rivalry and competitive national projects pushed for an arms race in their early years of state formation, which in turn militarized their respective economies over the decades. Second, the countries have consequently been emulating one another from a pool of “best practices,” or at least normalized global civil–military relations practices of military economic roles. I argue that none of these countries’ military economic roles can be understood as an isolated case. The economic role of the military is, thus, a product of the needs of the three countries alike to allocate enough economic resources for their respective militaries in order to enforce sufficient deterrence in a high threat perceptions regional order.
The Legibility of Power and Culture in Ba‘thist Iraq from 1968-1991
(2019-02-22) Degerald, Michael Kenneth; Bet-Shlimon, Arbella
From 1968 until 1991, the state led by the Iraqi Ba‘th Party fought a war against groups in Iraq that did not comply with state dictates. Situated in the Third World of postcolonial lineage, Iraq was in a milieu shaped by regional tensions and the larger Cold War. This work traces a battle of ideas waged by the Iraqi Ba‘th on its political opposition, drawing on Ba’th Regional Command Committee (BRCC) files held at the Hoover Institute and hundreds of publications from various branches of the Iraqi government controlled by the Iraqi Ba‘th. The dissertation’s introduction wrestles with the complex ethical issues of using such controversial archives. Each chapter of this dissertation takes a different lens to explore Iraqi cultural, intellectual, and media history, with the aim of contributing to understandings of the Ba‘th period in Iraq and its complex legacy. I show that transnational influences from Soviet interventions around the Third World had a direct impact on Iraqi Ba‘thist discourse and cultural production. With the United States distant and ideologically demonized, the Soviet Union proved to be more influential on Iraq, a relationship that eventually turned sour. Iraq had been a member of the Non-Aligned Movement since the movement’s beginning but this membership took on new importance when Saddam Hussein issued the I‘lan al-Qawmi in February of 1980, attempting to promote solidarity among Arab and postcolonial nations as well as pre-empt a potential superpower invasion. Consistent with Iraq’s place in the larger postcolonial milieu, programs to increase literacy were key to attempts to develop society and a stronger Iraqi economy to challenge economic imperialism. These literacy programs were remarkable in their size, scope, and overall results, but they neither eradicated illiteracy nor consistently generated support for the Party, illustrating the limits of the Party’s ability to reshape society as it aimed. Drawing on larger debates about tradition and heritage in the postcolonial world as well as in the Arab region, Iraqi Ba‘thist use of turath or heritage in state discourse was central to efforts to win this battle of ideas. Al-Turath al-Sha‘bi (Popular Heritage) was a successful and influential state journal that arguably represented the pluralism of Iraqi society throughout the 1970s until being commandeered by the Iraqi Ba‘th to increasingly serve as its mouthpiece from the 1980s onward. In contrast, Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi Ba‘th moved away from this pluralism in heritage discourse and insisted on the connection between Islam and Arabism (din wa turath) as that which gave their qawmiyya (Pan-Arab nationalism) strength. As such, debates about turath are shown in Chapter Four as a prelude for a later embrace of Islam by the Iraqi Ba‘th. Finally, the Iraqi Ba‘th used a series of discourses and techniques to manage and repress Iraqi political opposition from 1968-1991. Spatial Arabization campaigns targeting Kirkuk accelerated with the use of shu‘ubiyya discourse, shown here to begin in February 1980 in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, continuing throughout the war against Iran. The Iraqi Ba‘th racialized its enemies as Persians discursively while likewise Arabizing groups into the Iraqi nation, attempting to redefine race based on loyalty to the Iraqi Ba‘th. The racialized categories of “Persians” and “shu‘ubis” were not accepted by Iraqi opposition groups and thus these attempts at racialization did not ultimately shape new categories of identity. Such racialized discourses did, however, stimulate sectarianism in Iraqi society. These pernicious, divisive, and violent tactics haunt Iraq to this day.
Assembling ‘Cosmopolitan’ Pera: An Infrastructural History of Late Ottoman Istanbul
(2019-02-22) Kentel, Koca Mehmet; Kasaba, Reşat
In the nineteenth century, the Pera (Beyoğlu) district of Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, became an internationally recognized center of commerce, finance, culture, art, and recreation, in the context of the empire’s rapid integration into world capitalism. The district’s built environment changed radically, manifested in the newly erected apartment buildings, arcades, gardens, and monumental hotels and embassies. This transformation was dependent on largescale destruction of the previous spatial order of the district, as well as on environmental connections to distant and nearby peripheries of Pera, such as Terkos and Kasımpaşa. This dissertation examines this process by locating infrastructure as an integral part of ‘assembling’ Pera in the late nineteenth century. Pera’s rise to prominence has been studied as an experiment in municipal governance, modernization in urban space, and cosmopolitan sociability. This dissertation shows that it was first and foremost a material process, which remade a complex and extended geography within and beyond Pera’s boundaries in fundamentally unequal ways. The critical study of infrastructures reveals the complex encounters forged in this process between different regions, humans and animals, the past and the present, and the living and the dead. More specifically, under two parts respectively titled “Creative Destruction in the Making of Modern Pera” and “Provincializing Pera,” this dissertation focuses on four infrastructural projects and issues that proved to be crucial, especially from the foundation of the Sixth District Municipality (Altıncı Daire-i Belediye) in 1857, into the start of the twentieth century. The destruction of the medieval Genoese Walls; the construction of the Tünel (Tunnel, ‘the world’s second oldest subway’) and the connected transformation of a Muslim cemetery (the Petits-Champs des Morts or Küçük Kabristan) into a garden (the Jardin des Petits-Champs or Tepebaşı Bahçesi); the establishment of a centralized waterworks from Terkos to Pera; and sewage connections between Pera and Kasımpaşa are studied in this dissertation not as manifestations of cosmopolitan urbanism but rather as enablers of Pera’s making as a material as well as a discursive unfolding. This undertaking challenges the frame of cosmopolitanism under which the district’s and other Mediterranean port-cities’ stories have been conventionally told. Rather than taking Pera’s ‘cosmopolitan’ identity as a given, this work uses the history of infrastructures to explore the material conditions of possibility of the district’s claim to such fame. As such, it also explores the role of nonhuman actors, as well as the networks of policymaking, finance, and expertise, in assembling ‘cosmopolitan’ Pera, which entailed rewriting its history, recreating its sensory borders, and transforming urban and environmental topographies.
At the Confluence: Participatory Development, State-Society Relations, and Transboundary Water Management in the Kura River Basin
(2018-11-28) Mitchell, Jeanene Mae; Kasaba, Resat; Migdal, Joel S
The water sector is part of a larger impetus in environmental policy towards public participation, particularly as water management practices have expanded from purely technocratic approaches to include diverse stakeholders and societal groups (Brethaut 2016, Pahl-Wostl et al., 2007). In particular, broad stakeholder participation has been shown to help build regulatory success and legitimacy for multilateral donor-funded projects in international river basins (Gerlak 2007). Incorporating local stakeholders in project development and implementation has been described by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a large multilateral financial mechanism promoting international cooperation on global environmental protection, as critical to the longevity and impact of projects related to the management of international waters. Public participation is also a key tenet of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM), a holistic approach to water management aimed at overcoming fragmented governance in the water sector and endorsed and pursued by multilateral donor institutions (Brethaut 2016). Evidence suggests, however, that local stakeholder participation remains circumscribed in GEF international waters projects, despite the fact that such participation is considered essential for project sustainability, replication, and influencing government policies (GEF OPS3, Chen and Ganapin 2013). If local stakeholder participation is so important, then why is it limited? More broadly, how are transnational development projects implemented locally? To explore these questions, I engage in an ethnography of a multi-year, multi-million dollar GEF-funded transboundary river management project in the Kura River Basin of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. My research aims to explain how local stakeholder engagement strategies in transboundary water management projects are negotiated between development actors and state-level actors across transnational, domestic, and local scales. I answer the puzzle of limited local stakeholder participation in GEF international waters projects by drawing attention to the role of side payments as the site of negotiation between state and development actors at the transnational, national, and local scales. Side payments – forms of compensation to induce an agreement or cooperation among actors (Schelling 1960) – either facilitate or constrain local stakeholder participation in transboundary water management projects depending on the state agenda and the capacity of development brokers to translate or obliquely include participatory strategies. I argue that this process of negotiation has an important effect on water management in a transboundary river basin by affecting whether and how local stakeholders can engage with the river basin in ways that meet their needs for water, economic opportunity, health and safety. My conclusions contribute to an emerging literature on the effects of third-party intermediaries on state-society relations and natural resource management.
Poetics of Empire: Literature and Political Culture at the Early Modern Ottoman Court
(2018-11-28) Aguirre Mandujano, Oscar; Kuru, Selim S.
"Poetics of Empire: Literature and Political Culture at the Early Modern Ottoman Court" argues that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Ottoman scholars and statesmen produced a new literary language in order to express political thought. Poetic and literary composition was an extension of contemporary politics, a medium through which Ottoman learned men expressed, debated, and ultimately transformed political communication in the early modern Islamic world. Building on the work of cultural and intellectual historians over the past twenty years, I posit that literary production at the imperial court crafted distinctive modes of expression in order to articulate the Ottoman sultanate’s place in the world, particularly vis-à-vis its imperial rivals in Europe and the Islamic world. To this end, "Poetics of Empire" focuses on the composition, editing, and circulation of Turkish and Persian literary works, as well as diplomatic correspondence produced during the reigns of Mehmet II (r. 1451-1481) and Bayezid II (r. 1481-1512), whose patronage played a key role in the formation of a new intellectual elite. "Poetics of Empire" engages with emerging scholarship on intellectual and cultural history, especially that which foregrounds the relation between material culture, literary composition, and the transformation of political thought in early modern Europe and Asia. “Poetics of Empire” addresses one of the fundamental problems in the current state of Ottoman intellectual and literary history, namely, the lack of any systematic study of the social context in which political and literary ideas circulated. This dissertation shows that poetic composition played a much more important role in the daily life of Ottoman elites during the early modern period than is generally recognized by the historiography.
The Self and the State: Bureaucracy and the Ethics of Identity in the Twentieth Century Turkish Novel
(2017-10-26) Nolte, Elizabeth; Kuru, Selim
“The Self and the State” examines the twentieth century Turkish novel and its use of bureaucracy as a critique of the modernization and secularization programs initiated by the Republic of Turkey’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938) with reference to other national literary cultures in countries that are defined as post-Ottoman. Through an investigation of the celebrated Turkish intellectual and author Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-1962) and his groundbreaking final novel Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (The Time Regulation Institute; serialized in 1954), this project presents a case study in authorial resistance and alternative ethics during the Cold War. Tanpınar, who held numerous cultural and educational appointments and was elected to Parliament (1943-1946), played a central role in the formulation of the nation’s literary heritage yet remained a reluctant Kemalist. This project investigates Tanpınar’s use of bureaucracy as a means to frame identity as an ethical dilemma—either prescribed by the state and its newfound religion of modernization or recovered through a familial history that is represented as both spiritual and Ottoman. “The Self and the State” considers bureaucracy and the ethics of identity as a defining feature of the twentieth century novels of Turkey and the former Ottoman territories and explores the potential for a “post-Ottoman” literary culture.
Networks of Great Expectations: Palestinian Youth Activism in the Internet Age.
(2017-08-11) Dwonch, Albana S.; Migdal, Joel S
For more than a decade now, a growing variety of protests, mobilizations and movements have been initiated through the Internet. Particularly from 2011 and onwards, a rapid and global expansion of such movements has generated a growing scholarly debate on the role of digital activism for new social movements across various political contexts. My research engages this debate by examining a series of Palestinian protests that took place in the period of 2011-2013. This dissertation explores the relationship between digital networks (especially social media platforms) and new youth movements within a Palestinian context marked by territorial fragmentation, Israel’s ongoing military occupation and internal Palestinian political divisions in the West Bank and Gaza. In this study, I present an in-depth analysis of three case studies in the Occupied Palestinian territories and inside Israel, based on extensive qualitative field research, and complemented by a broad online survey of Palestinian youth’s patterns of online engagement. Through this analysis, I shed light on the formation, dynamics and values of a series of Palestinian protests and the prospects for social change, in a post-Arab Spring context. Taking the Arab Uprisings of 2011 as a point of reference in the changing mobilization processes in the region, I take issue with a prevalent scholarly approach that analyzed these newer movements through the lenses of their links with formally organized activist groups and traditional social movements. By focusing on the intersection between online activities and offline Palestinian contexts, I explain why these young activists preferred loose networks of mobilization, how did their protests take off, and under what conditions they eventually succeeded. The sudden surge of a sustained wave of protests and the tenacious rise of a new group of actors and their new forms of organizing happened at a time when youth studies and polling centers had emphasized just the opposite: the exit of young Palestinians from politics. With this central paradox as a backdrop, the analysis in this dissertation centers around three key areas: 1- the conditions that determined the transformation of certain actions initiated on digital networks into street protests; 2- the degree to which social media, online networks and new forms of activism in this digital age affected more traditional mobilization modes, especially those implemented by official Palestinian parties, and more conventional party affiliated youth organizations in each geographic area; and, 3- the long-term impact of these youth groups and their newer mobilization modes within their society, and relations with existing grassroots movements within the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This study revealed the impact of these protests on the political cosciousness of a network of activists directly involved in these movements. It also exposed the significant weakening of the capacity of official parties and formal movements to draw on these newer forms of mobilizations. I argue that the online campaigns and offline protests signal the laying of the groundwork for a new and networked Palestinian social movement, developing outside the structures of official parties and formal political organizations. Particularly within a Palestinian context marked by segregation walls, military checkpoints, and internal political intimidation, social media tools and increased social media literacy among Palestinian youths enabled this collection of protest movements to move, after the Second Intifada, from the margins of the Palestinian society to its center.
(Re)bordering Territory and Citizenship on the Greek-Turkish Borderland
(2017-05-16) Kasli, Zeynep U.; Migdal, Joel S; Kasaba, Resat
For almost a century, the Greek-Turkish antagonism has been central to the construction of notions of national citizenship and national territory in their official historiographies, state policies and public view. In the 2000s, Greek-Turkish relations have taken a more friendly direction, the old hostile us-them distinctions and the rights of minorities in each other’s lands have been revisited under the EU framework. This is also the period when transit migration through the Greek-Turkish border in the Thracian borderland and in the Aegean Sea has accelerated and gradually been met with stricter EU-led measures of border control. These developments are often studied as two distinct phenomena, in relation to nationalism-minority-citizenship nexus and migration-citizenship-security nexus respectively. My dissertation shows that these are manifestations of changing state-society relations. Following a cross-border historical approach and taking all moving subjects as a starting point allows a holistic analysis of this change. In this study, based on an ethnographically informed fieldwork in the Greek and Turkish border towns in Thrace, I look at the impacts of changing state-level relations since 1974, the heyday of the Cyprus conflict, at the local level on (a) governance of diversity and cross-border interactions, (b) cross-border mobility practices and (c) othering or the hierarchies of otherness between citizens, minorities, co-ethnics, and foreigners, be they the citizens of a neighboring country or migrants from third countries. I argue that this is a relational and dynamic regime of bordering which is best observed in the local state and nonstate actors’ activities, mobilities and interactions in three interrelated fields, namely security, economy, culture. The analysis of this Europeanizing regime of bordering reveals that states’ responsibility to control national territorial spaces against the passage and presence of unauthorized border-crossers has become shareable whereas sovereignty has remained national in economic and cultural fields. However, in each one of the three fields, uninstitutionalized cross-border mobility and cooperation practices of nonstate actors have significantly challenged the effectiveness of mechanisms of control and identifications determined by political centers. These practices then produce a new hierarchy of otherness that distinguishes subjects at two junctures. The first junction is legality which separates unauthorized from authorized border-crossers, or the invited versus the uninvited others. At the second junction, the unauthorized border-crossers are differentiated according to their perceived il/licitness whereas authorized ones, namely day trippers and commuters, are once again distinguished according to their ethno-religious kinship ties. These junctures reveal the specific conditions under which the power of states’ political centers in defining the notions of citizenship and territory are renegotiated or defied.
Domestic Conquest: Land Reform and Bounded Rationality in the Middle East
(2016-03-11) Goldman, Matthew Eugene; Kasaba, Resat
This dissertation examines the rise and fall of projects for land reform - the redistribution of agricultural land from large landowners to those owning little or none - in the Middle East in the mid 20th century, focusing on Egypt, Iraq, Palestine/Israel, Syria, and Turkey. Following the end of World War II, local political elites and foreign advisors alike began to argue that land reform constituted a necessary first rung on the ladder of modernization, a step that would lead to political consolidation, development, industrialization, and even democratization. Unfortunately, many land reform projects resulted in grave disappointments, leading to reduced agricultural output, increased rural poverty, political conflict, and more authoritarian rather than more democratic forms of government. As many policymakers and development experts themselves came to understand, an underlying cause of these problems was their failure to adjust land reform models to account for crucial variations in local political, economic, and ecological conditions. Using a method of similarity approach, this project asks why land reform projects so often sought to apply imported models in vastly different local contexts and then failed to adequately adjust these policy models to suit local realities. Through the examination of texts produced by international land reform advisors and local political elites, including books, parliamentary debates, letters from archival collections, diplomatic correspondence, academic works, and published articles, I trace the decision-making processes that led to the land reform programs and their failures. Drawing on research in cognitive psychology and bounded rationality, I argue that mistakes occurred under the influence of certain cognitive heuristics, i.e., inherent human biases in information processing. Policymakers and policy shapers often chose inappropriate land reform models because their attention was focused on high profile countries’ land reform programs, leading them to downplay differences such as low administrative capacity, relative lack of irrigation water, and threat of soil salinization. Describing an understudied episode in the political, social, and economic development of the postcolonial world, this dissertation offers a new empirical look at the roots of conflict in the Middle East while testing a political psychology argument for recurrent problems in the spread of development projects.
Ottoman Reflections on Gender, Class and Race in Victorian England: Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan’s Finten
(2015-09-29) Kebeli, Sevim; Kuru, Selim S
Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan (1852–1937), who spent more than twenty years of his life in London and India, was the first Ottoman author who made India and the British Empire a frequently visited topic in his literary works. This dissertation explores Hamid’s Finten (1886), his famous drama on London, along with his memoirs and letters that reveal his life in British India (1883–85) and London (1885–94 and 1897–1912). While Hamid’s observations on London and its social structure form the central stage of Finten, the British Empire with its imperial and colonial history provides its backdrop. Based on a close reading of Finten and Hamid’s writings on the British Empire, the dissertation analyzes and discusses class- and race-oriented distinctions that inform metropolitan social relations in Victorian England.

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