Drawing a line in the sand? Another (hi)story of borders

Joint seminar IFAS-Research / Wits University
Wednesday 7 March 2018

13:15 – 14:15 – Room 207, 2nd floor, Robert Sobukwe Block, Wits University

Matthieu Rey (IREMAM-CNRS)

It is commonly accepted that the Ottoman Empire was divided up by the European powers, predominantly the French and British, at the end of the First World War. From this perspective, the colonial powers created artificial borders that divided ‘natural’ Arab nations. Contrary to this assumption, a closer look at the nature of settlement and the formation of urban centres at the Syrian and Turkish borders provides insight into the human and social processes that allowed the borders to be institutionalized.

I will argue that borders were the result of a dual process directly initiated by the Tanzimat. First, resettlement and improvements in state control during the 19th century saw tribal areas in the eastern part of the Aleppo province turn into sustainable countryside. Second, central control was directly linked to the ‘urban’ expansion into the countryside. There were a number of ways in which cities influenced their surrounding environment and the attitude of the central authorities seated there towards the provinces. Analyzing the different stages of settlement in the northern part of Syria (within its present day borders) from the 19th century to the late 1920s, sheds light on how these two processes interplayed on the ground to establish a border.

Matthieu Rey is a researcher at IREMAM at the French National Center for Scientific Research. His research focuses on the political system in Iraq and Syria as case studies to understand processes of policy-building and state-building in the Middle East during the 1950s. He examines the political engineering of power. He intends to publish a book on the parliamentary system in Iraq and Syria between 1946 and 1963 and a monograph on Syria. He was a doctoral fellow in the Institut Français du Proche Orient (Ifpo) in Damascus between 2009 and 2013, and then, a research fellow at the Middle East Institute (Singapore). He is also fluent in Arabic. Apart from his main research, he has delivered talks and published articles on elections in the Middle East, development policies, the Cold War, and the ‘Arab spring’.