This presentation is part of my work on the Ottoman settlement of Muslim Caucasian refugees in the empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My work focuses on ways in which the Ottoman Empire deployed refugee populations to the desert frontiers of the empire in North Africa and Syria to “civilize” both the land and local nomadic populations as part of the ongoing centralizing project of the Ottoman state. Specifically, I will present part of a chapter on the settlement of Quneitra, a town in southern Syria that became a major node for Caucasian settlement after 1878. The refugees that ended up in Quneitra had first settled in the Balkans after being expelled from the Caucasus by Russia in the early 1860s.and had only just begun to become integrated into Balkan politics and society when the 1877-78 Russo-Turkish War forced them to move again. They arrived destitute in ports such as Beirut and Haifa only to be moved almost immediately to the harsh climates near the edge of the Syrian desert. Once there, they had to negotiate the challenging interface between state and citizen, settled and pastoral, and arid and steppe all with almost no knowledge of Arabic and only sporadic material support from the Ottoman government. Slowly but surely, the Caucasian settlers built towns, safeguarded Ottoman telegraph lines, and transformed their area into a new outpost of Ottoman modernity at the edge of the desert. In analyzing how the settlement of Muslims from a distinct diaspora were settled among other Muslims, I hope to interrogate the relationship between the new arrivals and the unfamiliar environmental and human landscape in which they were settled by using materials collected from the Prime Minister’s Archive in Istanbul and the Center for Documents, Manuscripts and Bilad al-Sham Studies in Amman.