Mobilizations, Mass Politics, and Total War. The Radicalization & Politicization 
of Ottoman Veterans during the “War Decade” (1911-23) The so-called “war decade” (1911-23) proved to be a transformative era for the Ottoman Empire. This period marked the end of the Empire and the establishment of new states in its former territories, such as the Turkish Republic. During the “war decade”, the Ottoman Empire engaged in numerous conflicts and mobilized millions of people on both the war and home fronts. The continuous military mobilizations and the foreign interventions radicalized and politicized a generation of war veterans, pushing them towards profoundly different and often opposing political ideologies. In a series of social and political mobilizations, former brothers in arms turn to each other and fought in support of their opposing political allegiances. With war veterans as the historical subject, my paper will examine how politicization of the masses during a decade of continuous conflicts and mobilizations transformed Turkey into a single-party republic and what role veterans of the “war decade” played in this process. The paper’s causal hypothesis is that war mobilization triggered subsequent social and political mobilizations that transformed the Ottoman Empire into the Turkish Republic. Only the war veterans had the means and the knowhow to mobilize against their political opponents who, in this case, were their former brothers in arms. Through their political identities and their willingness to mobilize, the war veterans either constructed a new social reality or defended the old one by participating in nation building projects, such as forming state institutions, or resisted these transitions. The historiography of the Ottoman and Turkish revolutionary war experiences has expand significantly during the last decade. Moreover, the studies on contentious politics have begun to attract more scholars. However, these new developments primarily concern the periods before and after the “war decade”. The paper will use contentious politics and collective action theories to examine how the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish nationalist movement were organized and mobilized. It will examine how both Ottoman and Turkish nationalists constructed their collective identities, and how they used them during their struggle against their national enemies and their political opponents. The “war decade” veterans were byproducts of these collective identities, which they in turn helped produce and reproduce.