The Politics of Mass Violence

with Laura Robson

hosted by Sam Dolbee and Deren Ertaş

| Depictions of the Middle East as a space of timeless violence pervade media, popular culture, and scholarship. In The Politics of Mass Violence in the Middle East, Laura Robson offers a rejoinder to such misconceptions while providing a historical explanation of these distinctly modern forms of violence in greater Syria and Iraq, also known as the Mashriq. In this episode, we discuss how a new kind of territoriality in the late nineteenth century combined with imperialist interventions to transform violence into a way of making political claims through the twentieth century and up to the present across the region. We additionally talk about historical research and writing more generally, and how Robson’s past as a trained pianist has shaped her work.

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Depictions of the Middle East as a space of timeless violence pervade media, popular culture, and scholarship. In The Politics of Mass Violence in the Middle East, Laura Robson offers a rejoinder to such misconceptions while providing a historical explanation of these distinctly modern forms of violence in greater Syria and Iraq, also known as the Mashriq. In this episode, we discuss how a new kind of territoriality in the late nineteenth century combined with imperialist interventions to transform violence into a way of making political claims through the twentieth century and up to the present across the region. We additionally talk about historical research and writing more generally, and how Robson’s past as a trained pianist has shaped her work.

Contributor Bios

	Laura Robson is the Oliver-McCourtney Professor of History at Penn State University. She has written or edited five books, most recently The Politics of Mass Violence in the Middle East (Oxford, 2020), a history of the relationship between violence and the state in the twentieth-century Eastern Mediterranean, and Partitions: A Transnational History of 20th Century Territorial Separatism (with Arie Dubnov; Stanford, 2019), a comparative examination of the political “solution” of ethnic partition in the decolonizing world. Her current research considers the twentieth century rise of schemes for mass refugee removal and resettlement, in the Middle East and beyond.
	Sam Dolbee is a lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. His research is on the environmental history of the late Ottoman Empire told through the frame of locusts in the Jazira region.
	Deren Ertas is a PhD Candidate in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the infrastructural politics of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic.

Further Listening

	Owen Miller and Ümit Kurt	381 9/30/18	Violence and the Archives
	Laura Robson	389 9/1/18	Transfer and Partition in the Middle East
	Salim Tamari	367 7/17/18	The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine
	Shira Robinson	273 7/17/18	Both Citizens and Strangers in Post-1948 Israel

Credits

Episode No. 510
Release Date: 13 August 2021
Recording Location: State College, PA / Somerville, MA / Berlin
Sound production by Sam Dolbee and Chris Gratien
Music: Blue Dot Sessions, "Fifteen Street," Zé Trigueiros, "Saez" 
Bibliography courtesy of Laura Robson

Select Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. “Reflections on Violence.” Journal of International Affairs 23, no. 1 (1969): 1–35.

Azoulay, Ariella, and Adi Ophir. The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Barkey, Karen, and Mark Von Hagen, eds. After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997.

Bloxham, Donald and A. Dirk Moses, “Introduction: Changing Themes in the Study of Genocide.” In The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, 1–15. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Dawisha, Adeed. Iraq: A Political History from Independence to Occupation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

Fawaz, Leila. A Land of Aching Hearts: The Middle East in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

Ismail, Salma. The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory, and Government in Syria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Robinson, Shira. Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.

Sacco, Joe. Footnotes in Gaza. London: Jonathan Cape, 2009.

Salibi, Kamal. Crossroads to Civil War: Lebanon, 1958–1976. London: Ithaca Press, 1976.