Description:
Reinterprets the making of the Turkish-Syrian-Iraqi borderlands from a decentred and connected perspective
Brief description: Jordi Tejel is Research Professor in Contemporary History at the University of Neuchâtel. Between 2017-2022, he has led a European Research Council (ERC, Consolidator Grant) research project on the borderlands of the interwar Middle East. He has notably authored La question kurde: Passé et présent (2014), Syria's Kurds: History, Politics and Society(2009), and co-edited with Ramazan Hakkı Öztan Regimes of Mobility: Borders and State Formation in the Middle East, 1918-1946 (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), and with Peter Sluglett, Hamit Bozarslan and Riccardo Bocco Writing the History of Iraq: Historiographical and Political Challenges (2012). He has also published in journals such as British Journal of Middle East Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, European Journal of Turkish Studies, Iranian Studies, Journal of Borderlands Studies, Journal of Migration History, Middle East Studies, and 20&21. Revue d'histoire.
Review Quotes: Rethinking State and Border Formation in the Middle East studies borders and bordering as dialectic processes, in which policy and the reality of border were mutually constitutive. Empirically rich and meticulously researched, the book masterfully weaves together the macro-level of international relations, with the micro-level of borderlanders' lives. Inhabiting the pages of the book are nomads, rebels, smugglers, refugees, trains, cattle, locust and germs, whose mobility were affected by and helped shape the reality of the tri-border zone laying between Turkey, Syria, and Iraq.--Liat Kozma, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem