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Sykes-Picot and “Artificial” States

Part of: Many Lives and Legacies of Sykes-Picot

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Aslı Bâli
Aslı Bâli*
Affiliation:
UCLA School of Law
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A century after they met to conclude a secret agreement dividing Ottoman territories into British and French zones of influence, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot have been back in the news. Images of an ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) bulldozer rolling over a small section of the frontier between Syria and Iraq in order to destroy the “Sykes-Picot” border shone a spotlight on the agreement. Western commentators reflecting on the centenary of the agreement have tended to share the view that colonial borders bear a share of responsibility for the ills of the region. The underlying argument is that the “artificial” boundaries drawn by European colonial powers produced faultlines that have driven subsequent conflicts.

Type
Symposium on the Many Lives and Legacies of Sykes-Picot
Information
AJIL Unbound , Volume 110 , 2016 , pp. 115 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 2016

References

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4 James Gelvin, Don’t blame Sykes-Picot, OUPBLOG (Feb. 7, 2015).

5 Among earlier significant agreements, for example, was the “Reglement Organique” that separated Mount Lebanon from Syria. An international commission composed of France, Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire came to a joint agreement that the territory would be given a semi-autonomous status. Farah, Caesar, Politics of Interventionism In Ottoman Lebanon, 1830-1861 (2000)Google Scholar.

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18 Pursley, supra note 10.

19 The contrast with the African experience, where indigenous populations explicitly marked postcolonial borders as artificial, is striking. See Mutua, Makau wa, Why Redraw the Map of Africa: A Moral and Legal Inquiry, 16 Mich. J. Int’l L. 1113 (1995)Google Scholar.

20 The “Règlement Organique,” negotiated from 1860-64 granted Lebanon a semiautonomous status half a century before World War I. Farah, supra note 5.

21 For the full King-Crane report, see The King-Crane Commission Report, August 28, 1919. See also Danforth, Nick, The Middle East That Might Have Been, The Atlantic (Feb. 13, 2015)Google Scholar.

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