In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire hosted successive waves of incoming refugees, primarily Muslims who were displaced from the Crimea, the Caucasus, and the Balkans. To accommodate these newcomers, the Ottoman government established the Refugee Commission (Ott. Tur. Muhacirin Komisyonu) in 1860. This paper examines the making of what I call the late Ottoman refugee regime. I argue that this refugee regime was rooted in the empire’s immigration legislation and the “humanitarian” commitment to resettle those in need, particularly Muslims fleeing foreign occupation. The 1857 Ottoman Immigration Law set up the framework of Ottoman immigration and was readily utilized by the Refugee Commission. In the late Ottoman Empire, where most immigrants happened to be refugees displaced from former Ottoman territories, the immigration and refugee resettlement programs had largely coalesced. The Ottoman refugee regime also drew on the culture infused with early Islamic references, which both promoted immigration in the Ottoman Empire and shaped Ottoman society’s responses to continuous refugee crises. Thus, refugees and immigrants were known as “muhacir,” from the term “hijra,” or emigration of Muslims living under non-Muslim rulet o a Muslim state. The Ottoman Empire further utilized its status as a caliphate to justify and publicize its protection of displaced Muslims. Unlike contemporary refugee regimes, deriving refugee identity from one’s citizenship, the Ottoman refugee regime was predicated on one’s membership in a Muslim community and a perceived religious obligation to emigrate when persecuted. The fusion of immigration and refugee resettlement systems and religious premises of refugee resettlement distinguish the Ottoman refugee regime in comparative perspective. Between 1860 and 1910s, the Ottoman refugee regime underwent changes, including new legislation and new patterns of resettlement by the Refugee Commission, which always remained a governmental agency. The Ottoman defeat in the 1877–78 Russo-Ottoman War served as a catalyst in the transformation of the refugee regime, aligning it much closer with resettlement objectives of the Ottoman government. This paper, based on archival research, rethinks the relationship between immigration and refugee resettlement in the late Ottoman era and contributes to the scholarship on global refugee regimes.

In the early 1930s, police and immigration department officials in Palestine’s British-administered government questioned whether a group of Jews from Soviet Armenia were “genuine refugees” or simply “now masquerading as refugees.” The leader of the group, the officials declared after further investigation, was a suspected Soviet agent who presented himself alternately as Persian, Armenian, and Turkish but who in reality was an Egyptian deprived of his nationality on account of ‘Bolshevik’ activities. The outcome of this detective work, and the outcome of similar cases, reinforced the administration’s hard-line stance that refugees did not have permission to enter Palestine as refugees. Such persons, so it seemed, could falsify claims to refugee status, rendering the category meaningless. Indeed, at the end of the Second World War, the British mandate even forced Greek refugees housed in Palestine under the auspices of the Middle East Relief and Refugee Administration (MERRA) to instead settle in Egypt due to security concerns. For its part, British authorities recoiled from the possibility that stateless persons could come under their remit. The paper argues that this attitude should not be historically surprising since recognized refugee status and the necessary provisions that accompanied it potentially complicated and threatened the aim of Palestine’s immigration policy: the creation of a Jewish, capitalist state in Palestine whose inhabitants would not be dependent on Great Britain for economic or welfare assistance. Any immigrant who could not be economically or politically-absorbed into Palestine threatened this policy. This paper explores in more depth the impact of the mandate’s stance on non-Zionist refugee resettlement in light of how that stance differed from the Ottoman position on refugees. In doing so, it sheds light on the refugee settlement programs during the interwar period in the Arab Middle East from the perspective of refugees who settled or wished to settle in Palestine. This allows for an analysis of the ways in which both ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ became self-ascribed statuses used and misused in the face of regulations that discouraged the government in Palestine from offering settlement to non-Zionist individuals who could not prove their nationality. The paper’s case studies consider narratives of Kurds, Armenians, North Africans, Druze, Greeks, and others. Their histories demonstrate the multi-faceted ways individuals and communities challenged the mandate with their own beliefs and justifications as to why they deserved refugee status.

The 1923 Greco-Turkish exchange was the first internationally ratified and executed compulsory population exchange between two countries. It set an international legal precedent whereby forced migration is legitimized as a humane solution to conflicts in order to restore social order. Informed by the principle of segregation, the 1923 exchange is thus organically related to other cases informed by the same logic: the construction of walls, apartheids, partitions, and forced migrations. It constituted a legal reference point for the Potsdam Agreement (1945), as well as the partitions of India and Palestine in 1947 and 1948. Considering the legacies of the 1923 exchange in the post-1945 era, this paper explores the politics of expertise and scholarship on post-Second-World-War refugee integration as a management of difference. Specifically, it traces the fascist fusion of demographics and eugenics in refugee management through an international refugee association presided by a leading Turkish eugenicist. Through archival research and textual analysis, this paper examines how after the Second World War, some former fascists, eugenicists and social scientists collaborate with their counterpart in Turkey and beyond to address the post-1945 refugee crisis with references to the 1923 exchange. Within this framework, it raises questions about the broader implications of qualitative demography in relation to eugenics and humanitarianism--and how these fields contributed to shaping the debates on the "refugee regimes" established after the Second World War.

There is a strong tendency in Turkish historiography to approach the Kemalist policies as purely domestic affairs that emanate from the center in a top-down manner, reflecting the clear ideological position of Ankara. The existing scholarship on the Settlement Law (1934), too, has read the development of demographic policies in ideological terms, framing them in top-down modernist trajectories that were long in the making since the late Ottoman times. As Peter Gatrell recently noted, however, nation-states not only make refugees, but refugees also make nation-states. Such an interactive approach to nation-formation could also help rethink the complex politics around the Settlement Law, which not only regulated the Muslim immigration from the Balkans, but also the manners of their resettlement at home. While the exodus of these immigrants from the Balkans was not rooted in the ideological appeal of Turkish nationalism, the necessity to regulate their arrival in legal terms created opportunities for the ruling elites to formulate anew the ideological imperatives of Turkish nationalism and define the parameters of inclusion and exclusions. The existing literature under-appreciates this interactive aspect by continuing to read the Settlement Law through a singular and nation-centered approach. In this latter perspective, the formulation of demographic policies and their application come across as seamless affairs, where ideologically driven ruling elites act on the population, with a view to engineer a productive, docile, and loyal polity. As such, the processes of demographic engineering are framed as devoid of historical conjuncture and immune from unintended consequences or the constraints presented by state capacity. In this paper, I seek to overcome such limitations by situating the Settlement Law within its due transnational context of heightened interstate rivalries since the 1930s. Unfolding in myriad ways across the borderlands of Eastern Europe, the complex dynamics of interstate competition created the necessary push and pull factors that started dislodging the Balkan Muslims from those areas coveted by various territorially revisionist states in the region. The demographic engineering their arrival triggered in Turkey, I argue, was therefore as much national as international.