The Politics of Mass Violence | Laura Robson

Ottoman History Podcast

E510 | Depictions of the Middle East as a space of timeless violence pervade modern media, popular culture, and scholarship. In The Politics of Mass Violence in the Middle East, Laura Robson offers a rejoinder to such misconceptions while also 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. More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/08/robson.html 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. 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 at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/08/robson.html