My contribution is based on my current research critiquing and re-historicizing the "Sykes-Picot" narrative, shifting the focus away from it and other wartime and postwar European diplomatic agreements partitioning the post-Ottoman Middle East to local, regional, and transnational processes during the interwar period through which the actual new borders were forged. My central thesis is that Sykes-Picot was only one of many "reimaginings" of the postwar map and that a careful study of the violent conflict among these visions is necessary to understand how political space was redefined in the region. Local actors, as much as and often more than colonial powers, catalyzed the reshaping of the postwar map--whether these project succeeded (i.e. Ataturk/Ibn Saud) or failed (Barzani, Abd el-Krim, Omar al-Mokhtar). My study focuses on sites in both the post-Ottoman Middle East and in North Africa where competing political visions (in the Rif, Cyrenaica, Arabia, Syria, and Kurdistan) among rival colonial and local state-builders clashed violently. This effort to historicize the fluidity of this pre-national period and isolate interlinked sub-national and supra-national mechanisms that defined political space during a period very similar to the current crisis in the region is vital at the 100th anniversary of Sykes-Picot.

I would like to share my research, an aspect of which was published in 2015, which argues that Britain’s negotiations with Arabs, France and the Zionists during the First World War never anticipated the contradictions so often blamed for the Middle East’s violent conflicts. Using intelligence records, I hope to demonstrate that the secret negotiations between Sykes and Picot aimed to secure France’s approval for Britain’s war plans in Arabia and Palestine. Their terms were based upon Britain’s limited understanding of the capabilities and influence of Sherif Hussein, whose revolt they could not back without the approval of their main allies in the war. The Sykes-Picot negotiations sought to establish spheres of future influence rather than borders. Intelligence officers expected that Sykes Picot would compliment rather than contradict the McMahon-Hussein negotiations. Circumstances produced by the course of the war, and also the realities of Hussein’s relations with the Arab movements, proved those expectations to be misplaced.

My participation in the proposed roundtable, 'Sykes-Picot at 100,' stems from my interest in and research on the border in the mandate-era Arab Middle East, including the ways in which nationality and citizenship, as well as civic identity were formed by the development of these post-1918 colonial borders. My contribution places emphasis on the importance of the borders as drawn and modified from 1916 through the end of the interwar period as spaces for subversion, documentary identity, colonial classifications of inhabitants, and notions of both flexible and rigid nationality. These themes support the panel’s objectives of offering an understanding—as well as to question that understanding—of how citizenship and nationality developed within both Arab discourse in the post-1918 territories of the Levant and in British and French colonial legislation and regulation. Sykes-Picot has often been understood as the basis of colonial and then nation-state borders in the Levant and Iraq but little historicization has been offered on the ways in which new concepts of citizenship and nationality in the post-Ottoman and post-imperial region were understood and articulated by the region’s inhabitants. The creation of the borders resulted in the creation of new networks of migrants: Arabic-speaking inhabitants of the mandates suddenly became immigrants and emigrants in relation to the spaces through which they traveled or settled. In this connection, I am interested in moving away from nationalist-themed histories of what Sykes-Picot did and did not do for concepts of identity after 1918. Instead, my participation in the panel as a historian will help to foster significant analysis and discussion which offer new theoretical understandings and approaches to the Sykes-Picot agreement. As part of the roundtable, I will approach the history of the ways in which that the agreement created, interacted with, and influenced post-war concepts of documentary identity, internationally-recognized nationality, local citizenship, and movement across new frontiers and borderlands.

The Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 proposed new territorial divisions across the Eastern Mediterranean that would simultaneously create new national entities out of the old Ottoman Arab provinces and bring the region under European colonial domination. Though its vision was not entirely realized, it formed an important basis for the eventual delineation of the British and French “mandates” of Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Transjordan in the aftermath of the First World War. It has been regarded since as a significant moment in the remapping of the Middle East that produced the region’s current political borders, and is a central point of reference in the large scholarly and popular literature examining the genesis of twentieth-century conflict among and within these newly constructed nation-states. But Sykes-Picot did not just mark the beginning of new national regimes forged in the context of brutal colonial occupations. It also opened a new era of demographic engineering that would result in tides of migrants and refugees moving within, across, and out of the newly defined nation-states of the Mashriq. The Sykes-Picot agreement envisioned a set of territorial divisions intended to further British and French commercial and strategic interests, leading the subsequent colonial administrations to attempt to redefine ethnic, communal, and class identities to allow for easier imperial governance over immediately and highly resistant local populations. This demographic engineering took a number of different forms, from ethnically and communally conscious partitions in Syria and Lebanon to the mass relocation of refugee communities in Syria and Iraq to the encouragement of mass Jewish immigration into Palestine. In the popular imagination, Sykes-Picot has too often been represented as the first step in the European imposition of “artificial” political borders that failed to line up with “natural” earlier territorial boundaries assumed to fall along established ethnic or religious lines. In fact, the Sykes-Picot agreement marked an early step towards the creation of a set of internationally supported regimes across the interwar Arab Middle East that explicitly sought to create particular demographics on the ground in order to support an ongoing European imperial presence.

In 2014 the Islamic State released a video showing bulldozers smashing through a sand berm along the Iraqi-Syrian border while dramatically declaring “the end of Sykes-Picot.” Amidst the heated international debate that followed, few people noticed that the border fortifications ISIS so proudly destroyed were not built by European imperialists in the 1920s but rather by Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime in the 1980s. In fact, the Iraqi-Syrian border had been of so little concern to the French and British authorities that they left its delimitation to a League of Nations committee in the 1930s. And even after the border was fixed, local tribes were allowed to cross it freely for decades until a breakdown in Iraqi-Syrian relations finally led to its closure. My presentation challenges the idea that rigid and impermeable borders descended on the Middle East in the aftermath of World War One immediately tearing apart previously integrated communities. Instead, I seek to offer a more nuanced history of post-Ottoman border formation. To do so, I examine the ideological origins, political development, and social consequences of these borders in order to better understand how lines that were expected to be well controlled yet easy to cross became, over the course of the 20th century, both more permeable and more disruptive than initially intended. Building on research conducted in the Turkish border province of Hatay, I argue that borders that were first delimited in the 1920s and 1930s often remained unexpectedly open until political developments in the second half of the century precipitated new efforts to seal them. This approach in turn helps us understand not only the history of the "Sykes-Picot" borders themselves but also the way contemporary claims about these borders can be read as invented traditions reflecting present-day discomfort with the legacy of the nation-state.