This presentation is about the making of French-Jazira in the French colonial ruling ideology and practice which both emphasised the particularity and distinctiveness of the land and people of Jazira. The colonial discourse is played out in different fronts: The region was granted an autonomous administrative status like the other three autonomously administered governorates in French-Syria. Racial taxonomies accompanied the French political project in Jazira. As well as this, essentialist categories about the ethno-religious groups in the region emphasized each group’s uniqueness and dissimilarity from each other and from the rest of Syria. For the French in Syria, the Jazira region was bound up in three fundamental, yet contested Syrian questions, namely the refugee issue, the religion issue (later transformed into the minority issue) and the nomads (Bedouin) issue. The autonomous administration granted to Jazira was the end result of a particular settlement of these three issues borne out of a certain amalgamation of the French political, economic and ideological interests in French-Syria which are intrinsically tied to French imperial concerns in the French empire. The Jazira plain, along with the Orontes valley and the Euphrates valley were viewed as the most viable places for the intended maximization of economic returns. Several reports about the economic prospects of these regions indeed revealed the intersectionality between the economic concerns and the French social and political concerns. The French mandatory authorities undertook the task of strengthening the power of pro-French tribal elites in the region, fostered the empowerment of urban elites and simultaneously promoted small-peasantry through building secluded villages, distributing land or providing agricultural material to the new villagers. If the infrastructural measures—like building roads, extending the railroad from Nusaybin in Turkey and pluralizing economic centres in the region—addressed the general agricultural public, religion emerged as a key feature in the distribution of land or the organization of villages. This presentation will focus on the inherent contradictions intrinsic to these policies and their political implications which, arguably, laid the material ground for the emergence of a culture of sectarianism and elite-dominated sectarian rule in French-Jazira.

The impact of the creation of Hatay on communal and regional relations In 1939, after a brief interlude of joint French and Turkish rule, the French ceded the Sanjak of Alexandrette, renamed Hatay, to the Turkish Republic. The transfer of the sanjak to Turkey has largely been studied in the context of the politics of nationalism, imperial rule and French-Turkish relations (Khoury, 1987; Sanjian, 1956; Shambrook, 1998; Yeasimos, 1988) Only few studies offer a critical appraisal of communal relations and identity politics in the process. Satloff (1986) questions the validity of the common assumption that ethnicity played a paramount role in the process, but his valuable contribution is confined to the pre-Hatay period. The creation of Hatay impacted strongly on communal relations within the confined geographical area of the district, and, subsequently, on family and commercial networks transcending the district, in particular the ties connecting the area to Syria and Lebanon. The staging of Hatay implicated a prolonged negotiating of the – often ambiguous - communal boundaries for political objectives. Its creation was accompanied by the departure of many, in particular Armenians, but also of Arabic speaking inhabitants, including Christians, Alawis and Sunnis. Only a small number of Armenians remained behind, many being resettled in Lebanon (Anjar), but others opted for the village of Kassab, located right on the border with Hatay. This paper reviews social, economic and spatial consequences of the annexation of the district by Turkey for those communities that suffered from emigration. It will presents a number particular cases (taken from detailed documentation kept in Centre des Archives diplomatiques de Nantes) to illustrate the impact of the creation of Hatay on these communities and their networks in de region. The cases include border negotiations of 1939 in the Kassab area, compensation of lost property as well as individual request to resettle in Hatay. References Khoury, Philip, S. Syria and the French Mandate; the politics of Arab nationalism, 1920-1945. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Satloff, Robert, B. “Prelude to conflict: communal interdependence in the Sanjak of Alexandretta 1920–1936.” Middle East Studies 22 (1986): 147-80. Sanjian, Avedis K. “The Sanjak of Alexandretta (Hatay): its impact on Turkish-Syrian relations, 1939-1956”, The Middle East Journal 10 (1956): 379-394. Shambrook, Peter A. French Imperialism in Syria. London: Ithaca Press, 1998. Yerasimos, Stéphane. “Le Sanjak D’Alexandrette: formation et intégration d’un territoire,” La Revue du Monde Musulman et de la Méditerranée 27 (1988): 198-212.

Since the outbreak of popular protests against the Syrian government in March 2011, and more particularly after their transformation into civil war during 2012, the ambivalent stance of the urban business elite has posed several interpretative questions. The bourgeoisie’s reluctance to choose sides is no doubt conditioned by uncertainty about the future, regime resilience, and the generalized violence, especially in Aleppo. Clearly the bourgeoisie’s position is also shaped by the particulars of its development over a half-century of Ba‘thist rule: the eradication of the old industrial bourgeoisie in the mid-1960s, the reconstitution of a dependent and subordinate business class, and the more recent elaboration of crony-capitalist networks binding individuals from the regime and the private sector. But any analysis that takes the Ba‘th coup of 1963 as “year zero” runs the risk of ignoring other relevant factors. While not discounting the value of social-science approaches focused on the contemporary period, this paper argues that a moyen durée historical approach has explanatory value. Specifically, the Syrian urban bourgeoisie has, because it is a bourgeoisie, accommodated itself in particular ways to the state irrespective of the particular regime in power. Although the roots of this accommodation lie in the late Ottoman period, the critical turning points took place during the French Mandate, when the maturing industrial bourgeoisie struck a “corporatist bargain” with the Syrian state that set the basic parameters of state-private sector relations for independent Syria. Understanding the terms and implications of this bargain not only gives historical depth to analyses of post-1963 Syria but also, it is suggested, indications of the potential trajectories of state-private sector relationships in the post-“Arab spring” Middle East as a whole.

During the interwar period, Syria became home to a number of Armenian and Assyrian communities who had been displaced by Ottoman massacres and the exigencies of the First World War. These communities, many of whom were housed in refugee camps, were special targets for humanitarian and political efforts coming out of Europe and the United States; they also became especially closely tied to diaspora communities who were determined to use the refugees’ plight to spearhead campaigns for some version of Armenian and Assyrian national sovereignty. This paper explores the ways in which these refugee camps became new kinds of urban spaces in interwar Syria, representing blocs of unassimilable “minorities” whose primary relationship was not with the Syrian state but with international organizations like the League of Nations and with diaspora groups. These camps soon became spaces within which international organizations operated as state-like actors, determining the layout of the physical space, running local bureaucracies, and distributing goods and services. At the same time, the experiences of these refugee communities provided a foundation for diaspora groups to create nationalist and separatist political narratives for international distribution. The transnational nature of Assyrian and Armenian refugee communities, combined with the semi-permanent nature of their camp dwellings in Syria and their dependence on entities outside Syria for their maintenance, lent these spaces a sense of separation from the emerging urban and rural landscapes of the new Syrian mandate state. Refugee camps thus contributed substantially to the process of defining not only communities but spaces as minoritized, and helped to further strands of Syrian and Arab nationalism that were coming to view minorities as an entry point for Western intervention. The interwar history of Assyrian and Armenian refugee camps in Syria, and particularly the entrance of diasporas into their self-definition, thus helps to illuminate the emergence of Syria as a highly fragmented polity in the mandate period.

Writing in the op-ed section of the Beirut-based French language newspaper, Le Jour, the Aleppine lawyer, constitutional thinker and political activist Edmond Rabbath likened the communal and sectarian politics of Syria to a “régime de cloisons étanche” – an evocative phrase indicating a system of impermeable membranes. Indeed, by the final decade of the French Mandate on Syria, political representation and contestation had become dominated — legally and practically — by forms of ethnic, religious and linguistic identification. This was reinforced by forms of legal practice that fell along sectarian lines. For Rabbath, this system, which he saw as equally an inheritance of an anti-modern Ottoman politics, a feature of French colonial oppression, and a key tool of the Ottoman-Arab Syrian elite had forestalled the formation of a secular Syrian national citizenship to the detriment of Muslims and non-Muslims alike. This paper revisits the 1920s and 30s-era debate about citizenship in the French Mandate through the Arabic and French-language writings of Rabbath to argue that the idea of secular liberal citizenship has been a substantial — though often suppressed — current in Syrian political thought for nearly a century. By returning to this question of secular citizenship and its viability in that body of thought, this paper will move to examine the parallels, perhaps the better concept here is shadows, of this debate in the current revolutionary and minority-based discourse of the conflict in Syria.