States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

by Laura Robson

Across the Middle East in the post–World War I era, European strategic moves converged with late Ottoman political practice and a newly emboldened Zionist movement to create an unprecedented push to physically divide ethnic and religious minorities from Arab Muslim majorities. States of Separation tells how the interwar Middle East became a site for internationally sanctioned experiments in ethnic separation enacted through violent strategies of population transfer and ethnic partition.
 
During Britain’s and France’s interwar occupation of Iraq, Palestine, and Syria, the British and French mandate governments and the League of Nations undertook a series of varied but linked campaigns of ethnic removal and separation targeting the Armenian, Assyrian, and Jewish communities within these countries. Such schemes served simultaneously as a practical method of controlling colonial subjects and as a rationale for imposing a neo-imperial international governance, with long-standing consequences for the region.
 
Placing the histories of Iraq, Palestine, and Syria within a global context of emerging state systems intent on creating new forms of international authority, in States of Separation Laura Robson sheds new light on the emergence of ethnic separatism in the modern Middle East.

Genres: Middle East, History, Nonfiction

262 pages, Hardcover

First published April 25, 2017

Reviews

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

Robson's States of Separation analyses minority politics in the Middle East in the aftermath of the First World War. She looks at how new conceptions of state-building in the conflict's aftermath, focussing specifically on Armenian, Assyrian (Syriac), and Jewish populations, and the efforts (or reservations) of the Colonial Powers in shaping the region's new frontiers around them.

Although the book makes a valuable contribution to the field by describing the various ways these minority groups interacted with the Colonial Powers, looking at the emergence of the norm of ethnic separation through population transfers and partition, Robson's analysis underexamines the ideological roots of the very phenomena she is writing about. Although she has demonstrated a competent grasp of partition in her other work, she fails to recognise in this book that the idea of territorial separatism did not arise from nowhere, out of a mist. Robson fails to account for its origins. In each context, the emergence of nationalism was of fundamental importance, not least its centrality to the Balkan separatist programmes and imperial powers who carved up the region at the Congress of Berlin. Herzl, in turn, did not invent the concept of ethnic separation from nowhere. The inherently separatist logic of nationalism, which seeks to legitimise the pursuit of political power through a presupposed "national" identity, pre-dated Zionism and was rooted in post-enlightenment romanticism. The study would have been improved by an acknowledgement of this factor.

Further, in looking at the emergence of Armenian, Assyrian, and Jewish nationalisms, she marginalises the role of Arab (and, in Iraq, Kurdish) nationalism and its adherents' own contemplation of the ethnonationalist ideal against the newly-minoritised populations. Indeed, the relevance of ethno-national and ethno-religious distinctions in Syria still today underscores the complexities of this dynamic. Yet, for the most part, Arab nationalists play a side role in this study, as the mere targets of the Colonial Powers exploiting minority identities. It might have been better subtitled "Transfer, Partition, and Minorities in the Making of the Modern Middle East".

[Lily N · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5

[Mills College Library]

325.21 R6675 2017