This paper explores the relationship between oil development and collective violence in the city of Kirkuk, the capital of the Iraqi oil industry, by focussing on three different episodes of unrest: the strikes staged by oil workers in 1927 and 1946 respectively, and the clashes between Kurds and Turkmens in 1959 on the occasion of the first anniversary of Iraqi Revolution. The baseline of the discussion is provided by a critical analysis of the dynamics, setting and actors involved in these violent events in the context of the rapid growth of Kirkuk as an oil city over four momentous decades of Iraqi history. Within this general framework, and considering episodes of violence as an integral part of the development of urban political sociability, three main lines of discussions are pursued. The first concentrates on the symbolic, ceremonial and physical nature of the violent actions advocated and performed by strikers, political and labour activists (in the case of 1959 particularly Communists and Nationalists), demonstrators, police forces and army contingents. These actions are analysed as evidence of the emergence and consolidation of new class, ethnic and political bonds among the residents of Kirkuk and of its expanding oil conurbation - a suburban belt which brought many underprivileged Kurdish oil workers to the forefront of urban unrest. The second line of investigation focuses on the spatial dimension of violence and highlights continuity and changes in the use of different urban spaces such as streets, squares, public buildings and suburban areas by violent actors from the 1920s to the late 1950s. One of the key questions in this connection is the extent to which urban expansion and suburbanisation affected the setting of violent protest. The role played by the apparatus of urban public security in containing, provoking or staging violence in each of the three episodes considered constitute the third focus of discussion. The objective is to understand how police forces, paramilitaries and army units featured as key players in the ‘politics of coercion’ which characterized the development of Kirkuk as an oil polity under the close scrutiny of the IPC (Iraqi Petroleum Company), the British mandatory administration, and after 1932, the Iraqi government.

On the 13th of April 1909, Istanbul was woken up to slogans and gunshots coming from the Task??la barracks only nine months after the reinstatement of the constitution. While the mutineers who took the streets were soldiers, the protesters included students of religion, liberals and anti-Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) groups. The crowd was shouting for the reinstitution of Shariat and demanding the resignation of some leading Unionists in the cabinet; yet, quite surprisingly, they were also stressing their loyalty to the Constitution. The cabinet resigned the same day. As things seemed to calm down in the capital, the Third Army, stationed at Macedonia, began recruiting volunteers in order to march to the capital and save the constitution. Two week later when the Hareket Ordusu (the Action Army) eventually left, the empire had a new sultan, a new cabinet and a suspended constitution under martial law. Using mainly Ottoman archival documents, newspapers, autobiographies, eyewitness accounts, and sound recordings from the period, I explore the events by shifting the conventional focus on the mutiny itself to how the Action Army utilized the uprising to establish a new political order rather than simply “saving” the old one. I argue that the leaders of the Action Army who were influential figures of the CUP’s Balkan branch took this mutiny as an existential threat, yet turned it into an opportunity to “cleanse Istanbul” from the actors and traces of ancien régime and the liberal opposition. In so doing, they not only attempted to hijack the imperial politics but also transform Istanbul as an urban political space into an epitome of the empire imagined by the CUP elite. “Cleansing of Istanbul” was pursued through a series of administrative, legal and symbolic transformations. First, Sultan Abdulhamid II, and many other influential figures including the opposition were physically removed from Istanbul, and were replaced by “reliable” CUP cadres. Second, austere measures aimed to overawe the individuals under the martial law and restrain political freedoms by introducing a number of laws on right to assembly, press and strikes all between May-August 1909. Finally, the “creation” of a CUP-dominated Istanbul was celebrated and reinforced by re-naming city’s streets with the Action Army “heros,” printing card postal of the memorable moments of the events and constructing the first public commemorative monument of the modern times in Istanbul named “Statue of Freedom” and devoted to Action Army’s 71 befallen soldiers.

In April 1920, on the occasion of the Nebi Musa festival in Jerusalem, riots broke out in the city between local Arabs and Zionists. Several were the outcomes of these riots, amongst the most important changes occured in the perception of identity from religious to national, as in the case of the Arab population that set aside religious divisions in favour of a shared Arab identity; and the urban reorganisation of the city promoted by the British Governor Ronald Storrs. Earlier, in December 1917, the British had occupied Jerusalem and, in few years, established a Mandate to rule Palestine. During the First World War British policy makers made contradicting promises, in particular with the Balfour Declaration promising the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. When the Balfour Declaration became public knowledge in late 1917 the attitude of local Arabs towards the Jews changed, as they felt threatened by Jewish-Zionist immigration. It is in this context that the 1920 riots have to be understood. Through the discussion of the Nebi Musa riots that took place at the zenith of the renegotiation of alliances between Christian and Muslim notables, this paper will show how urban violence was turned into a test of national struggle between Arabs and Zionists and how violence became part of the local political vocabulary marking permanently the local identities of Jerusalem. This paper argues that religious groups, Christian and Muslim, allowed some exchanges and openings in their practices due to the contingency of the situation and to political reasons: they also added violence as an available tool to their rhetoric. This paper aims to show how the consequences of the war and the policies that followed, had a major impact on the local Christian communities through the renegotiation of local alliances and on the de-marginalisation of the Christians, who subsequently became an active part of the emerging Arab nationalist movement. A further aspect dealt with in this paper will address the impact of urban violence in the re-conceptualisation of the urban development of Jerusalem by the British. The new rulers, with their new and particularistic vision over the future of the city, by promoting particular changes in the urban landscape deepened divisions amongst the various religious groups, Christian, Muslim and Jewish, fearing that a ‘mixed city’ would trigger further manifestations of violence.