In my dissertation I analyze the relationships between historical and everyday state-formation and the making and remaking of the people and landscapes of Dersim, produced as the outsiders of state. I focus on three periods: the massacre and the following displacements in Dersim known as 1938; the growth of capitalism in Turkey and the leftist movements in Dersim between World War II and the coup d’etat of 1980; and, finally, the rise of the PKK (Kurdish Worker’s Party) and the “state of exception” in Dersim in the 1990s. I conclude with a discussion of the last decade where the history, identity, and nature of Dersim have been central to various social and political organizations through the first public recognitions of 1938 after seventy-two years, and a developing anti-dam politics. I mobilize archival methods, field research, in-depth and multiple-session interviews with three consequent generations, and focus groups. Through analyzing state and newspaper archives of the 1930s, and the “extraordinary laws” of the 1980s and 1990s, I discuss multiple narratives and discourses about Dersim, how outsiders came to be defined as “exceptions to the law,” and how they are managed in different periods. Through field research in different settlements and political organizations, interviews, and focus groups, I analyze the mechanisms through which experiences and memories of state violence are transferred and mobilized by different generations to construct identities and oppositional movements. I argue that relations of power and struggle can be analyzed only historically and in relation to each other. More specifically, the state, movements and identity are related and founded upon the making of “outsiderness.” On one hand, the making of the outsiders contributes to the productions of the nation and consolidation of state power. On the other, outsiders identify with and mobilize “outsiderness” as a generalized category of a counter-hegemonic identity. I argue that outsiderness is transferred through subjective constructions of history in the form of memory and consciousness, mediated through personal interactions with the state, and transformed by the movements. As an identity produced simultaneously by the state and the people, outsiderness is both enabling and paralyzing for movements.

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The focus of this paper is Anglo-American relations in Egypt during the early Cold War period. The goal is to show that relations between the Western allies were more contentious than the analysis previously offered by a number of leading scholars. This has been done by examining early Cold War Western strategy for the defense of the Middle East and Anglo-Egyptian negotiations related to the future of the large British military base in the Suez Canal region. What this paper reveals is that rather than working in concert, as others have argued, Great Britain and the United States during this period sparred over tactics and strategy. The major source of contention between the Western powers centered on Britain's irrational commitment to an antiquated foreign policy based on 19th century principles of imperial domination and exploitation. Whereas Britain wanted to combine Western strategy for the defense of the Middle East with its plan to reconstitute its Empire, the United States sought a new strategic outlook that more thoroughly incorporated the nationalist dreams and economic aspirations of the countries in the region. / History

I investigate the social history of Egypt under British imperial occupation through the lens of morality in order to understand the contestation of cultural change and authority under empire. Points of cultural cleavage between European and local inhabitants in British-occupied Cairo included two customs, gambling and the consumption of intoxicants, which elicited sustained and dynamic reactions from observers of Egyptian society on the local and international level. I show that the presence of alcohol and gambling in public spaces in Cairo contributed directly to the politicization and selective criminalization of public morality. However, the meanings attributed to social practices relating to leisure were continually under negotiation and challenge as state authorities, British liberals, Egyptian reformers and religious leaders, foreign missionaries, and representatives of international temperance movements vied to impose their visions of morality upon Egyptian society.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Eurasian Studies and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, 2007. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Nov. 19, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-02, Section: A, page: 0695. Adviser: Christopher I. Beckwith.

abstract: This thesis examines the advent of the Egyptian women's movement from the late nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth century. Continuous negotiations for control between the secular and the religious institutions of Egypt led to the state's domination over the public jurisdiction and the Islamists maintaining a grip over the Egyptian private sphere, which includes family laws and matters of the home. The Egyptian women's movement contested and resisted against the secular nationalists (the state) and conservative Islamists for just and equal society in general, and political rights, and educational, marriage, and divorce reform specifically, which were assurances made to the women's movement by both. Groups formed within the movement joined together and converged to collaborate on key concerns that involved Egyptian women as a collective group such as education and political rights. Using the written works of scholars and leaders of these movements, this study investigates and observes the unique unity achieved through the diversity and disunity of the Egyptian women's movement; as well as explores the individual activism of significant leaders and pioneers of the movement in the midst of cultural encounters resulting from imperialism, political revolutions, and other major societal and political developments of nineteenth and twentieth century Egypt. It explores the ideas and actions of the Egyptian women as they emerged from a veil of silence which shadowed women's existence in Egypt's crucial years of nationalization eventually leading to a unique emergence of an incorporation of Islamism and feminism. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. History 2011

In this dissertation, I use methodological approaches from studies of urbanism, oil modernity, nation building, and identity formation to analyze the relationships between urban change, oil, state integration, and the politicization of group identities in the multiethnic Iraqi city of Kirkuk from 1918 to 1968. I argue that, in early to mid-twentieth-century Kirkuk, the oil industry, Baghdad’s policies, and the British neocolonial presence interacted with local conditions to produce the crystallization of ethnic group identities within a nascent domain of local politics. I find that at the time of the formation of the Iraqi state in the early 1920s, group identities in Kirkuk were fluid and local politics did not align clearly with ethnicities or other self-identities. Instead, they were largely subsumed under relations between more powerful external entities. Kirkukis’ political loyalties were based on which entity best served their interests—or, as was often the case, were positioned against a side based on its perceived hostility to their concerns. These political dynamics began to shift with Kirkuk’s incorporation into Baghdad’s domain, the beginnings of the Iraq Petroleum Company’s exploration just northwest of urban Kirkuk, and the end of British mandate rule. The Iraqi central government’s integration efforts exacerbated fault lines between emergent Kurdish, Turkmen, and Arab ethnic communities at a time when the city’s population and its urban fabric were growing rapidly. The oil industry, which provided the livelihood for a substantial percentage of Kirkuk’s population, became the focus of Communist-led labor organization. Consequently, the Iraqi government, the British government, and the oil company attempted to counter Communist influence through urban development schemes. The combination of urban growth and the expansion of discursive activities stimulated the emergence of a distinct civic identity and an accompanying arena of local politics in which Kirkuk’s ethnic communities were deeply invested. After the destabilizing effects of the Iraqi revolution in 1958, a cycle of intercommunal violence began in Kirkuk along increasingly apparent ethnic lines. Escalating conflict between Baghdad and the Kurdish movement for control of Kirkuk after 1958 fueled these tensions further. The reverberations of the revolution’s aftermath are still evident today.