Regimes of Violence

What makes people die and kill in the name of an abstract entity called the nation? How does one travel the distance from being neighbors to sworn enemies? Why do humans suspend empathy for victims of violence when it is committed in the name of protecting the nation-state? These questions have been at the center of my research, and the subject of my first book, Blood Ties: Religion, Violence, and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878-1908 (Cornell, 2014). My second book project, Regimes of Violence: War, Militarism, and the Making of the Turkish Nation, 1878-1939 explores similar questions in a different context; that of interwar Turkey. I define interwar here as starting with the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877-78 that effectively ended the Tanzimat [Reordering] period of reforms in the Ottoman Empire, and ending with the build up the Second World War. I argue that the historical roots of militarism as an integral part of Turkish national consciousness are to be found in the interplay between local and international dynamics during this war-bracketed period. My objective is to trace the historical evolution of the link between militarism and nationhood in Turkey through the lens of social practices and cultural norms. The army, as an institution that effectively shaped Turkish modernity, will be a central part of my analysis, but I am interested in finding out how this process worked at the societal level, and not only among the officer corps and the men conscripted. The projects main contribution would be to advance our understanding of the relationship between the conceptual categories of violence, military culture, and nationhood. While there has been a growing interest in the separate but inter-connected matrices of these three concepts especially since the 1990s, the extant literature displays a bias in favor of case studies modeled in core European states. Furthermore, the ways in which the ideology and the praxis of nationhood become connected through collective action, usually in outbursts of violence, do not receive the scholarly attention they deserve. My fundamental objective is to expose the connections between nation-making and the production and consumption of militarism as a cultural trope that facilitates exclusion and subordination of a nations unruly or undesirable elements through different modes of collective violence. Using previously untapped sources from the Ottoman and Turkish Republican archives, Archives of the Red Crescent and the League of Nations, as well as diplomatic sources from France, Britain, Germany and Austria, this project will explore the foundational period of Turkish nationalism and situate it within a broader framework of the violent processes of nation-making in southeast Europe.