During the interwar period, while the Middle Eastern region witnessed an unprecedented intensification of the movement of people, goods and ideas, the new states that emerged out of the Ottoman Empire developed more or less effective techniques for monitoring and controlling the borders in order to limit such movements. As a result of these two parallel dynamics of globalisation on the one hand and nationalist state-building on the other, and the inherent contradiction they appear to harbour, border areas constitute a privileged site to observe how the globalizing processes interacted with more exclusivist agendas. Drawing from primary source data from the Turkish and French Mandate archives as well as Turkish and Syrian press, the paper will analyse this paradox by exploring short distance mobilities across the Syrian-Turkish border between 1929 and 1939. It will be argued that short distance mobilities played significant roles in the consolidation of borders and the subsequent mobility regimes that prevailed in the interwar Middle East. This was also when a standing bilateral Frontier Commission began to work on the actual delineation of the Syrian-Turkish boundary. The work of this commission resulted in the dramatic increase of the number of border posts and guards throughout the 1930s. In this sense, the co-operation between French Mandatory and Turkish authorities to solve “common security problems” considerably paved the way for a much more thorough surveillance and regulation of mobility across the Syrian-Turkish border. Through a careful reading of reports and letters elaborated by border authorities, the paper will also pay attention to the quantitative aspect of the short-distance mobility in the region. As a matter of fact, during the interwar period, thousands of deserters and criminals crossed that border to escape from military service and/or trials. Similarly, smugglers communities with diverse backgrounds came to perceive the border as a resource to secure new economic avenues and also as a way of sustaining trans-border family connections. In response to this challenge, however, Turkish and Syrian elites launched campaigns seeking to “nationalise” border populations and cross-border economy. In sum, far from being alien regions to the emergence of the modern Middle East, the borderlanders who lived on both sides of the Turkish and Syrian border actively took part in the making of both national and trans-regional processes during the interwar period.

The making of borders in the modern era is often seen as a technical process that reflects the political will of national centers, whereby committees meet to demarcate artificial lines that cut across otherwise ordinary landscapes. More than just a simple process of technical demarcation, however, borders effectively parcel out socio-economic and cultural zones, defining national communities as distinct from those left outside. Fixing the border and introducing institutions to uphold it are therefore crucial to the twin processes of state formation and nation-building. In the case of Turkey’s southern border, this ultimate exercise of territorial sovereignty did not take place until the early 1930s, when border commissions were convened with the French mandatory authorities. The existing literature has largely evaluated this process of border demarcation from diplomatic and political angles, but neglected the impact of ‘illicit’ cross-border transactions on the making of Turkey’s southern border. By drawing upon material from the Turkish, French, and British archives, as well as the local press, this paper addresses this gap by examining how the Great Depression (1929) led to the expansion of illicit circuits globally, and explores the ways in which the introduction of anti-smuggling campaigns came to consolidate the border regimes both in Turkey and French Syria. The global economic downturn in the late 1920s unleashed a war of tariffs across the world, in which the states, urged on by the etatist interventions among their neighbors, began to introduce protectionist measures that were designed to protect local industries and maintain a favorable trade balance. The introduction of heightened tariffs on certain import goods was one such characteristic measure adopted by a number of countries, including Turkey. Because high tariffs created significant price differences from one country to the next, however, they led to the emergence of a highly profitable underground economy across borders, including in the borderland between Turkey and Syria. Here, a sturdy coalition of producers, shop owners, smugglers, trackers, and peddlers, equipped with the necessary fluidity of borderland cultures, began to smuggle into Turkey a range of goods from silk textiles to cigarette papers, to salt, and gold, while funneling out opium and weapons in addition to human-trafficking of ‘undesirable elements’. This paper examines the impact of these borderland mobilities on the making of Turkey’s southern border by exploring the local and bureaucratic responses to a rapidly changing world economic order in the aftermath of the Great Depression.

Even though the highest number of forcibly displaced people originates from Syria today, the country has been a refugee hosting area even well before its formation as a nominally independent state under the French mandate (1920-1946). Since then it has become a home for thousands of refugees from Circassians to Kurds, Assyrians to Armenians among others. Crucially, however, the increased mobility of refugees and migrants who settled in the Levant happened at a critical historical juncture marked by the First World War, the subsequent disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, and the frustrated attempt to create an independent Arab state. While most scholars have focused their attention on the struggle between Arab nationalists (urban notables, rural leaders, popular committees) and the French colonial rulers, few have sought to analyse both the direct and indirect role played by refugees and migrants in the shaping of modern Syria. Drawing from primary sources of the French Mandate archival records, Arabic and Armenian language newspapers and secondary sources this paper will examine the impact of the Armenian refugees amidst Syrians’ struggle to define statehood and citizenship after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Importantly, these debates took place at a time of both territorial uncertainty and French tutelage. The mandatory authorities practically decided on all fundamental matters including the hosting and the settlement of refugees, as well as granting them with citizenship. The debate over citizenship prompted hot debates in the Syrian press and among the Syrian political elite who should be considered ‘’Syrian’’ in the society, and the role of religion and ethnicity in the definition of Syrian identity. This paper examines how and to what extent the increased mobility across the Turkish-Syrian border and the settlement of Armenian refugees not only influenced the state-building process and the making of national identity in Syria, but also forced the Armenian community to determine their own strategies of integration at this time of heightened political and territorial uncertainty.

This paper examines the development of the Iraq-Nejd and Iraq-Syria boundaries during the British Mandate period from the perspective of indigenous populations and state officials who lived and worked in the borderlands. Whereas other scholars of the Iraqi state-building period explain Iraq’s borders as functions of French and British imperial deal-making and arbitrary “lines in the sand,” I approach them as institutions that emerge from inimitable processes of reconciling abstract political or strategic objectives with the real-life conditions of government at the very limits of state authority. By focusing on the underlying materialities of rule described in British intelligence files and maps, League of Nations reports, and geographies or first-person accounts by Arab statesmen involved in Iraq’s early history, I demonstrate how the boundary formation process depended on policing the movement of transnational Arab Bedouin tribes in a border landscape of wells, grazing land, and caravan routes in the Syrian and northern Arabian deserts. My first case study involves the 1925 forced resettlement of hundreds of Sunni Ikhwan “refugees” from Nejd into northern Iraq, because their disruptive presence along the frontier exacerbated tensions between Iraq and Ibn Saud, and appeared to lower British prestige among Iraqi tribes. The second case study is a series of informal border conferences between provincial Iraqi, Syrian, and British officials in the late 1920s, the purpose of which was to mitigate security problems and unregulated border crossings arising from the discrepancy between the “de facto” boundary that Britain enforced well to the west of the official 1920 “Leachman Line” between Iraq and Syria. I show Iraq’s boundaries to be a process, not a fact, of the Mandate era, one involving low or mid-ranking British military and intelligence officers, Arab provincial governors and police, and Bedouin tribal shaykhs of the northern Arabian Desert and Syrian Desert. Outstanding political issues such as the rise and expansion of Ibn Saud’s kingdom in Nejd, or British territorial claims to eastern Syria, were addressed obliquely through the policing of tribal movement, raiding, and territoriality. These findings necessitate the reassessment of our field’s understanding of refugees and the politics of resettlement in the inter-war Middle East, the effect of Wahhabi, Saudi, and Hashemite territoriality and ideology on the development of Iraq’s current boundary with Saudi Arabia, and the implications of using local, indigenous proxies to carry out centuries-long rivalries between European empires in the seminal period of Middle East state formation.