seda altug | Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey (original) (raw)

Papers by seda altug

Mülkiyet ve Müşterekler Türkiye’de Mülkiyetin İnşası, İcrası ve İhlali, 2024

REMMM, 2024

This article analyses the Syrianization of post–World War One refugees in Syria under the French ... more This article analyses the Syrianization of post–World War One refugees in Syria under the French mandate (1921–1946) through their involvement in two interrelated fields: the labour they spent in the opening up of the Jazira to agriculture, and their engagement in the highly contested politics of the mid-1930s. The scholarly literature on refugees in the Middle East usually operates within the fields of refugee, minority, and empire studies. This article aims to go beyond these fields by analysing the political and economic experiences of Christian and Kurdish refugees in French Syria. It demonstrates how which the French socio-economic project of making the Jazira was appropriated by local residents through labour and politics. It demonstrates how these refugee groups, with diverse histories of past violence and present dispositions, participated in pro-French colonial order and negotiated their terms of belonging to French-Syria in different ways in the decade following their arrival. It explores the centrality of the refugee question in the making of Syriannness both for the locals and the newcomers. Furthermore, the article investigates how ethnicity, religion and labour as the markers of Syrianness were negotiated through both the refugee issue and the involvement of former refugees in national politics.

Page 1. Sectarianism in the Syrian Jazira: Community, land and violence in the memories of World ... more Page 1. Sectarianism in the Syrian Jazira: Community, land and violence in the memories of World War I and the French mandate (1915-1939) Cummunitarisme in de Syrische Jazira: Herinneringen aan Gemeenschap, land en geweld ...

University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2022

Vingtieme Siecle-revue D Histoire, 2009

This paper studies the delimitation of the Turkish-Syrian border in the 1920s and 1930s in order ... more This paper studies the delimitation of the Turkish-Syrian border in the 1920s and 1930s in order to illustrate the dynamic relationship between the development of modern borders —?precise, fixed lines drawn around well-defined territories—? and the development of the nation-state. In Turkey, the definition of the border was part of the extension of the new republican State’s power over the territory it claimed. The border also played an important role in the Republic’s nationalist discourse, since it served to define not only the territory of the State, but also the groups and populations that had to be excluded. In Syria, the definition of the border played a similar role in the extension in the mandated state’s power; but it was in Syrian Arab nationalist discourse rather than the discourse of the mandated power that the border found a discursive role.

İstanbul Üniversitesi Siyasal Bilgiler Fakültesi dergisi, 2008

Seda ALTUĞ * Özet Bu makale, Suriye-Arap milliyetçi ideolojisinin yapı taşlarının ve Suriye-vatan... more Seda ALTUĞ * Özet Bu makale, Suriye-Arap milliyetçi ideolojisinin yapı taşlarının ve Suriye-vatanı tahayyülünün şekillenmesinde, Arap milliyetçi elitleri ve Suriye toplumunun farklı kesimleri ile Fransız manda idaresi (1921-1946) arasındaki ideolojik ve siyasi iktidar mücadelesinin kurucu rolünü anlatmaya çalışmaktadır. Fransız sömürge idaresi altında yapılan kitlesel siyaset vatan, din, cemaat, araplık gibi kavramların milliyetçi bir şekilde içeriklendirilmesindeki en önemli alanlardan birini oluşturmaktadır. Aşağıdaki makale bu iddiayı 1936 yılında Fransa ile Suriye arasında imzalanan ve Suriye'ye beş sene içinde bağımsızlık vaadeden antlaşma ertesinde ortaya çıkan "ayrılıkçı/bölgesel" ayaklanmalar bağlamında tartışmaktadır. Fransız dışişleri ve istihbarat raporları, Dominiken misyonerlerinin raporları, manda dönemi Şam ve Beyrut basını makalede kullanılan birinci el malzemeyi oluşturmaktadır.

Journal of Genocide Research

University of Pennsylvania Press, Nov 30, 2021

The turn to the nonhuman in the humanities and social sciences has arguably been mobilized throug... more The turn to the nonhuman in the humanities and social sciences has arguably been mobilized through a washing away of political violence, its histories, and its traces. Reverberations aims to redress this problem by methodologically and conceptually placing political violence and nonhuman entities side by side. The volume generates a new framework for the study of political violence and its protracted aftermath by attending, through innovative ethnographic and historical studies, to its distribution, extension, and endurance across time, space, materialities, and otherworldly dimensions, as well as its embodiment in subjectivities, discourses, and imaginations. Collectively, in the study of political violence, the contributions focus on human agencies and experiences in engagement with nonhuman entities such as objects, land, fields, houses, buildings, treasures, trees, spirits, saints, and prophets. In a variety of contexts, the scholars herein ask the crucial question: What can be learned about political violence by analyzing it in the terrain of relationality between human beings and nonhuman entities? How are things such as objects, spaces, natural phenomena, or spiritual beings entwined in histories of political violence? And vice versa—how are histories of political violence implicated in nonhuman things?

in Reverberations: Violence Across Time and Space, ed. Yael Navaro, Zerrin Özlem Biner, Alice von Bieberstein, Seda Altuğ (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021)

Armenians of Syria (Beirut: Haigazian University Press, 2018)

Journal of Genocide Research, 2022.

In modern Turkey, as in other parts of the globe, the production and dissemination of patriotic h... more In modern Turkey, as in other parts of the globe, the production and dissemination of patriotic histories has been part of the process of state-and nation-making. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I, Turkish nationalists were able to forge an independent nation-state; and so, unlike the post-colonial world, the official narrative regarding the foundation of the new Turkish state did not suffer from a "sovereignty deficit" vis-à-vis the Western empires, nor did it embrace an anti-colonial discourse of resistance against the Empire. 1 Nevertheless, the Turkish state did suffer from the anxiety of erosion of national sovereignty and this was played out on two fronts: the governance of ethno-religious difference in the country and relations with the West, both of which have been formative tropes in patriotic histories in Turkey. 2 The foundation of Turkey as a politically sovereign nation-state, long before decolonization in the post-World War II period, has thus played a significant role in the construction of Turkish patriotic histories. On the one hand, the foundation myth of 1923 was depicted as an essential pride in the Turkish state/nation and contrasted with the subjugation of the colonized states/subjects of the Western empires. The trope of the Western threat, however, has never vanished from Turkish historical discourses. Indeed, it has revealed itself in the intimate links between the West and the ethnically non-Turkish/ non-Muslim citizens of Turkey as well as the cross-border threats outside its territory. The politics of history has been a tool of ethno-politics, manifesting and instigating the state's aim to consolidate its national-scale power and unitary political project. Disseminated through various state institutions and actors, such as national education, statesponsored media, performances, and reorganization of urban and rural spaces, the early official history of the Turkish Republic transformed a heterogeneous social space ruled by the logic of imperial diversity into a homogenous social space governed by a modern nation-state. The politics of history in Turkey has gone through various phases. While the earlier Kemalist patriotic histories were preoccupied with nationalist consolidation, from the mid-2000s onwards, domination on a regional scale preponderated, acquiring a new magnitude over the former concerns. Here, I chart the development of the latter period under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). As much as exploring

Syria: Borders, Boundaries, and the State, ed. Matthieu Cimino (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2020),, 2020

Reverberations: Violence Across Time and Space, ed. Yael Navaro, Zerrin Özlem Biner, Alice von Bieberstein, Seda Altuğ ( University of Pennsylvania Press,2021), Oct 29, 2021

Dialectical Anthropology, 2013

Starting from mid-2012, the names of some Kurdish towns in Syria and rough maps of the Turkish-Sy... more Starting from mid-2012, the names of some Kurdish towns in Syria and rough maps of the Turkish-Syrian frontier region have started to gain some dose of visibility in the Turkish media, albeit in their misspelled, inaccurate or exoticized forms. Despite progressive changes in the fields of cartography and the standardization of place names over the twentieth century, these maps show little qualitative difference from their counterparts published in the Turkish media in 1930s. The context that paved the way for a brief display in the Turkish media of the names of Syrian Kurdish ''fugitives, illegals and brigands'' and the ''rebellious Kurdish border towns'' in the early 1930s in French-Syria was the Kurdish Ararat Revolt in Turkey (1931), the leadership of which was based in French-Syria. Underlying the recent Turkish media interest in the same issues is the Syrian Kurds' taking initiative for self-rule and establishing de facto autonomy in some towns of Western Kurdistan (Syrian Kurdistan) in August 2012. Through a timely maneuver enabled by the power vacuum amid fights between the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and Assad's forces, the Kurds took over the control of local administration in major Kurdish towns and cities in 'Afrin and binxet (Jazira in Arabic) located along the two ends of the Turkish-Syrian frontier. This has created enormous joy and enthusiasm among the Kurds in both Syria and abroad. Since then, the Yekîneyên Parastina Gel (YPG-People's Defense Forces) has been providing most local and regional security as well as administrative and humanitarian services such as food, energy, medicine and transportation in Syrian Kurdistan. YPG is an armed group that claims to abide by the decisions of the Kurdish High Council, which was formed with the Hewler (Erbil) Agreement signed in August 2012 between Encûmena Nîştimanî ya Kurdî li Sûriyê (ENKS-Kurdish National Council in Syria) and Partiya Yekîtiya Demoqrat (PYD-Democratic Union Party). The ENKS is an umbrella organization composed of fourteen Kurdish political in Syria that have embraced either a pro-Barzani or a

Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'histoire, 2009

Versions papier et électronique : le numéro est expédié par poste. Il est également accessible im... more Versions papier et électronique : le numéro est expédié par poste. Il est également accessible immédiatement en ligne. ... Versions papier et électronique : les numéros sont expédié par poste au fur et à mesure de leur parution. Tous les numéros en ligne sont immédiatement ...