Regimes of Mobility

Ultimately, the volume provides a fresh perspective on understanding how the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire impacted on the borderlands of the newly emerged states and transformed regimes of mobility.

Regimes of Mobility offers a much-needed historical perspective on the current crisis in the eastern Arab world, where states have collapsed and societies have shattered, and where the world’s largest concentration of permanent refugees grows ever larger. Contrary to previous state-centered histories, these cutting-edge essays engage the bottom-up story of how Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq emerged as states, created by the League of Nations after World War I.

[...] Regimes of Mobility makes a important contribution to the border literature, both because it focuses on the border construction processes in a specific historical period and because it touches on the state formations of almost all states in the Middle East.

Regimes of Mobility is a welcome addition to our knowledge on the history of the mainly Arab and Kurdish mobile societies and groups in the Arab East who adopted a mobile existence between Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey and Palestine. [...] Both the authors and the editors should be congratulated for crafting such a coherent narrative, usually difficult to achieve for an edited volume.

Conceiving the post-Ottoman space less through hard borders than porous borderlands, and highlighting the interests of both local and colonial actors, Tejel and Öztan develop "regimes of mobility" into a percipient rubric for the mandate period. Framed by an astute introduction and afterword, eleven case studies trace how traders, nomads, priests and refugees negotiated customs controls, quarantine regulations and national churches amid competing notions and uses of territory. This is a timely study of both the disconnections and redirections that define eras of deglobalisation.

Departing from the premise that borders move as well as people and that regimes come and go, Regimes of Mobility is an outstanding contribution to what Europeans designated "Middle Eastern" historical studies. This highly readable volume also provides invaluable insights into processes of bordering, multiscalar networking, state-making, mobility, individual agency, and imperial hard and soft power.

This volume brings together a fantastic group of scholars whose top-notch articles, based on multilingual and transnational research, provide nuanced accounts of the emergence of Middle Eastern states and their boundary regimes. Tejel and Öztan’s volume is a must-read for those interested in the history of subaltern groups, territoriality, mobility, nationalism, and state and identity formation in the post-Ottoman and inter-war Middle East.

The volume brings together a set of articles of generally impressive quality that offer a simultaneously concise and detailed overview of trends in Middle Eastern borderland studies joining a movement away from the nation state towards regionalization and micro levels of analysis in global history.

This volume is an ambitious contribution to the growing field of borderlands and mobility studies by bringing together a set of case studies that collectively challenge conventional narratives about the making of the modern Middle East. Rather than treating borders as static lines imposed by colonial powers or as mere administrative boundaries, the contributors consider them as dynamic, contested, and deeply interconnected spaces where state formation, identity, and everyday life were negotiated in the interwar period.