Regionalism Reconsidered

Social science scholarship has shown that territorial proximity and the regional neighborhood can be catalysts of armed conflicts, as well as solvents for growing democratization and economic development (McCallister Reference McCallister2016; Gleditsch and Hegre Reference Gleditsch and Hegre1997; Gibler and Braithwaite Reference Gibler and Braithwaite2013; Maves and Braithwaite, Reference Maves and Braithwaite2013; Collier Reference Collier2007). As such, they have established the enormous utility of the regional level of analysis in world politics (Volgy, Bezerra, Cramer, and Rhamey Jr. Reference Volgy, Bezerra, Cramer and Rhamey2017). But while making great strides over the second half of the 20th century, the comparative regionalism scholarship has remained limited by its state-centric bias. Understandings of regions remained reduced to state formations over a geographic territory or an issue area (trade, security, public health, etc.). Regional integration emerged as a dominant policy prescription for security provision, resulting from the assumption that strong state capacity is a necessary first step to that end. Indeed, the gold standard of European integration has privileged conceptualizations of regions as composites of states, ideally strong ones, capable of engaging in regional forms and sustaining regional connections. States-before-regions was the key paradigm that shaped our thinking and practice when it came to regionalism and regional diplomacy in the 20th century.

The Imperial Lens for Contemporary Regionalism

Conceptualizing the imperial peripheries as political regions offers a fresh new pathway through which to examine the regional agency of sub-imperial/sub-state actors in imperial polities. Imperial peripheries were bounded geographic spaces, and expressed in singular scaling. More importantly, thought of their political construction through plural scaling processes, the extra-regional influences from neighboring empires becomes easier to conceptualize and assess. This approach synthesizes the studies of empires and post-colonial studies on the one hand, and comparative regionalism on the other. The gulf between the two has become too glaring in order to investigate the imperial legacies of contemporary regional fracture, particularly for contemporary region-building processes and development of state capacities.

The empire lens in IR has been short on comparative analysis. Still, it has been effective in challenging the linearity of anarchy as a dominant organizing concept to explain world politics in IR. Indeed, the scholarship on empires in political science has recognized the hierarchical nature of relationships between states, both large and small (Cooley Reference Cooley2008; Zarakol Reference Zarakol2017; Barkawi Reference Tarak, Denemark and Marlin-Bennett2017; Nexon and Wright Reference Nexon and Wright2007). In theorizing hierarchy in world politics, chiefly within the framework of imperial “orders,” some have relied on organizational and institutional studies to deconstruct the causal impact of hierarchy on world politics. Drawing on network theory, Nexon and Wright (Reference Nexon and Wright2007) explain that when the study of political relations takes on an imperial cast, the dynamics of divide-and-rule replace traditional balance-of-power politics. While the latter can be helpful in explaining the foreign policies of a rising China or resurgent Russia, it tells us little about “small wars” (Barkawi and Laffey Reference Barkawi and Laffey2006) and regional fractures. Areas of contemporary armed conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa, and many parts of postcommunist Eurasia, are postimperial spaces. Yet frameworks to study the role and influence of formerly imperial powers in these conflict regions, either as factors in conflict or cooperation, remain marginal in IR (Halperin and Palan Reference Halperin and Palan2015; Kumar Reference Krishan2017). The framework of analysis offered in this work, and the concept development on fractured regions, allows to trace, compare and contrast the institutional fabric of regions, historically over time and space. The dearth of such tools within comparative regionalism and the persistent state-centricity in that scholarship have limited historically more informed scholarship of regional politics, particularly in contemporary regions of conflict and insecurity.

Currently fractured regions, such as the South Caucasus, the Western Balkans, or the Middle East, are postimperial formations (Ohanyan Reference Anna and Anna2018). In this context, the TRF adds value to these conversations in delineating the internal characteristics, systemic effects on world politics, and network attributes of formerly imperial peripheries. It shows formerly imperial peripheries, old and new, formal and informal, as independent structures of their own, capable of exerting pressure on their previously imperial cores, which have reconstituted themselves as regional powers in world politics. While concurring with network perspectives in the study of hierarchy in world politics, TRF casts light into the “black box” of regions, enabling a comparative institutional analysis of their connectivity attributes across space and time. Drawing from comparative regional studies, TRF fills an important gap within the “empire turn” debate in IR (Shirk Reference Shirk2017). It identifies the imperial roots of regional politics predating the state system. And this pathway then broadens and historicizes the contemporary regional studies, thereby ameliorating its persistent euro-centricity.

Concept Development Methodology

The concept development on fractured/resilient regions carried out in this article builds on my earlier work on regional fracture theory, in the context of Russian foreign policies in postcommunist Eurasia and the Middle East (Ohanyan Reference Anna and Anna2018). While that study was primarily descriptive, it did sketch out key propositions of ways in which contemporary fractured regions create and facilitate armed conflicts, derail development and democratization in young states. Importantly, it has shown the agency of fractured regions in shaping Russian policies in its “near abroad”. This article offers more granular approach to concept development of fractured regions, one which defines fractured regions as political systems with key and measurable attributes. At this time this work does not engage in hypothesis testing, but is limited to methodology of concept development, which then can be taken up by others for hypothesis testing. Whether, and if so, to what extent do fractured regions lead to armed conflicts, for example, would be one such avenue. Also promising for theory development relates to the way fractured regions impact and shape democratization outcomes in regional states. However, concept development is a first step before causality and correlation can be attempted.

There are two dominant forms of concept development practiced in social sciences: (1) necessary and sufficient condition, and (2) family resemblance (Goertz Reference Goertz2006). The necessary and sufficient condition is the method used in this work when developing the concept of regional fracture, in order to delineate this concept from its alternatives, some of which were discussed earlier.

Concept Dimensions and Indicators

The identification of the constituent units and second-level indicators is the third step in concept development carried out in this work. In terms of its constituent units, regional fracture expresses between states, inside states between government elites and various segments of the society, and extra-regional hegemonic powers with political stakes in the region. Fractured regions are socially constructed political systems: throughout various historical periods, imperial or postimperial, they have enabled imperial longevity (Doyle Reference Doyle1986) and have often served as buffer zones between empires, particularly in the Eurasian continent. Their systemic feature is manifest by the consistent behavior pattern it demonstrates over a long period of time, which is an indication that there is a “feedback loop” resulting in a similar behavior pattern within the region (Meadows Reference Meadows2008), as identified in systems theory.

Indeed, there are specific dimensions of regional fracture that distinguish it from alternative explanations. Table 1 below illustrates these dimensions and second-level indicators for regional fracture, which are grouped in terms of the constituent units in fractured regions (states, communities, etc.) as well as relationships between them. Considering the units and the relationships together allows us to develop the systems theory of regional fracture, moving forward (Meadows Reference Meadows2008).

Table 1. Second-Level Dimensions of the Regional Fracture Concept

Unit-Level Dimensions of Regional Fracture and their Indicators

The “organizational coherence” of the constituent units within a region refers to the ability of such units to organize in self-governance and enjoy legitimacy from their members. These organizations are institutionally bounded arenas, which in cases of higher levels of coherence and communal legitimacy become important scales of political activity and social practice within the region (Paasi Reference Paasi2004; Marston Reference Marston2000; Brenner Reference Brenner1998, Reference Brenner2001; Howitt Reference Howitt, Agnew, Mitchell and Toal2003; Putnam Reference Putnam1994). Thus, higher levels of organizational coherence will reduce regional fracture, contributing to organizational resilience. As such, these indicators reflect the argument that regions and regional spaces of politics are not fixed, and that political scaling is a continuous process: changing levels of organizational coherence within organizations – constituent units of political regions – indicate the production and rescaling of regional politics over time (Brenner Reference Brenner2001).

Levels of self-governance and self-organization within states or social groups can be assessed differently within the Westphalian framework of regions composed of states, and imperial peripheries as political regions, predating the rise of the nation-state. The metrics of regionalism within the Westphalian framework, state strength/failure can be used to assess the level of organizational coherence exhibited by regional states. For imperial peripheries lacking in statehood, the organizational attributes of social groups and community organizations can be used to assess their organizational coherence. In more contemporary fractured regions, there is at least one state which lacks in public legitimacy. For example, states in a region that are authoritarian or competitive authoritarian in their forms of governance (Levitsky and Way Reference Levitsky and Way2006) tend to lack in public legitimacy. Lacking in legitimacy, the governing elites in such regions have the propensity to capture regional politics for their private gain, leaving the broader benefits of regional governance largely inaccessible to their populations.

The region-wide “organizational density and diversity” refers to the existence of players within states and communities, which have the capacity and mobility to cross borders (if the region is constituted from states) or inter-communal boundaries. The scarcity of organizations and their lack in diversity of forms is associated with higher levels of fracture in a given region. The Western IR scholarship, with its state-centric bias, has obscured the rich forms of self-organization and civil society that often pre-existed and predated the rise of the state system in world politics. The ability of state-less nations to self-organize and mobilize to express their political needs, interests, and rights within imperial peripheries or in contemporary world politics is a significant marker towards exploring the regional fabric in world politics. Higher levels of organizational density and diversity within a region strengthen the regional resilience, while their lower levels tend to make the region vulnerable to fracture.

Relationships between the Units

Within this system approach, this refers to regional fracture as a phenomenon and helps to delineate the significance of the units in producing or facilitating fracture in a given region. Assessing the relationship between constituent units in regions allows to capture the power of connections and relationships between units, which has become recognized as critical in the construction of political scales within geographic regions (Urry Reference Urry2003; Castree Reference Castree, Clifford, Holloway, Rice and Valentine2003). The following types of relationships in the context of fractured/resilient regions are developed in this work. First, the “level of hegemonic influence” is an indicator that identifies the mechanisms of influences as exercised by external players in the broader geopolitical environment in which the region is embedded. Such mechanisms can also be assessed by the frequency and durability of their application. In regions with high levels of “overlay,” (Buzan and Wæver Reference Buzan and Wæver2003) described as the ability of extra-regional powers to determine political outcomes inside the region, the external players can have direct or intermediated influence over the region. The influence can be overt and direct, exercised through formal bilateral alliances with the states in the region. Another example of an overt and direct influence are the cases of fractured regions inside or in between imperial powers, where the imperial centers can directly, with varying degrees of success, shape the regional politics in their peripheries. Regardless of this methodological choice, the higher levels of extra-regional influences (benign or perverse) will result in fracture, and the opposite outcome will produce regional resilience and regional empowerment in world politics.

Second, “region-wide unit coordination” is also an indicator focused on the relationships between the units. It refers to the ability of sub-regional actors, state or non-state, to coordinate their activities with one another within the region. Michael Doyle, in his comparative study of empires, argues that the trans-provincial trade within the Roman Empire, between its peripheries in particular, was instrumental for imperial integration and imperial durability (Doyle Reference Doyle1986; Kivelson and Suny Reference Kivelson and Suny2017). Lower levels of region-wide coordination make the region more vulnerable to imperial fracture, a condition that was characteristic of the Soviet Union, where the inter-Republic economic relations were all wired via Moscow – the economic and political center of the Soviet Empire. Higher levels of region-wide coordination are associated with regional resilience and the lower ones with fracture.

Third, “intra-regional unit bargaining” (between state and non-state actors) refers to the propensity or existence of micro-bargains between units within the given fractured regions, in an effort to form alliances and to establish mini-security orders within the region. This indicator manifests in terms of two broad extremes or types of regional orderings: clustered connections between select players (fragmented and uneven security order) on the one hand, and cohesive (integrated and inclusive), on the other. Intra-regional bargaining with greater propensity to clustered ordering reveals a region vulnerable to fracturing: such a pattern creates gaps and divisions between various groups, thereby creating political vacuums for extra-regional players to fill. Cohesive patterns of intra-regional bargaining, in contrast, reflect regionally resilient political fabric.

Fourth, “systemic coherence of regional flows” is an indicator to determine the extent to which economic activities between the regional subunits cohere with existing political frameworks of engagement. Regional fracture tends to be associated with incoherent systemic flows, with economic forces (trade and tourism) often pulling in opposite directions from the political elites (state or non-state). Informal trade between Turkey and Armenia, with the border between the two countries closed, is one example of incoherent regional flows. In this dimension of regional fracture the higher levels of coherence are associated with resilience and the lower ones with regional fracture.

While the empirical section focuses on a single case – the Ottoman Empire and Eastern Anatolia as one of its peripheral regions – this is not a case study-specific analysis (Halperin and Palan Reference Halperin and Palan2015). The empirical section is an exercise in applying the TRF variables in a context of imperial politics. As a variable-based approach, the empirical section does not produce new primary material, nor does it offer any fresh overview or a granular analysis of a particular historical period in the Ottoman Empire: the historical case study approach would have been the route to take for that purpose. Instead, building on the existing historical case studies, the empirical section applies the regional fracture theory in terms of analyzing the Ottoman Anatolian imperial periphery as a political region.

The empirical section below combines qualitative methods of concept development (drawing from years of fieldwork in the Western Balkans, the South Caucasus, Russia, the United States, and the European Union) with historical, variable-based analysis of the Ottoman Empire. While the ultimate, long-term, goal in this research is to demonstrate levels of correlation and causality between regional fracture and armed conflict patterns, this work at the moment is limited to rigorous and systemic concept development to understand the phenomenon of regional fracture. Delineating between contemporary “Westphalian,” and imperial regionalisms, is among the key theoretical implications for regional studies that follows from this work.

The empirical discussion presented below constitutes a heuristic case study (George and Bennett Reference George and Bennett2004; Eckstein Reference Eckstein, Gomm, Hammersley and Foster2002; Van Wynsberghe and Khan Reference VanWynsberghe and Khan2007), which is usually applied to identify variables, hypotheses, and causal paths. Such case studies are also applied to achieve conceptual validity (George and Bennett Reference George and Bennett2004), an essential step towards theory development. The concept developed in this work, applied in the Ottoman/Anatolian case, helps to achieve the following goals. First, it advances the regions-before-states approach to the study of regional fabric of politics, discussed earlier in the article. With this application of the key concept dimensions and indicators to this particular case, this work is an analytical exercise for studying imperial peripheries as political regions, thereby identifying imperial legacies in contemporary regional politics. This is a dramatic departure from the comparative regional studies, where state-centric bias has prevented a deeper historical dive, predating World War II (Katzenstein Reference Katzenstein2005), to examine political regions.

Second, while this case study does not offer causal inferences and hypothesis testing, it does chart new research pathways down the road to examining the regional fracture, with its imperial legacies, as a contributing or a causal factor for armed conflict in contemporary eastern Turkey. As such, this approach creates an opportunity to rethink the contemporary Kurdish conflict, as well as the Turkey-backed Azerbaijani offensive on Armenian forces in the 44-day war in 2020 in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Third, the particular historical period selected for this case study falls between two constitutional periods in the Ottoman empire. The period under study was one of renewed repression and centralization in the empire, which resulted in the suppression of communal organization in its political peripheries. This therefore was a period of deepening regional fracture in the peripheries, which is used as a heuristic case study in this work. Whether this deepening regional fracture contributed or caused the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman empire is beyond the scope of this work, albeit this case study offers the opportunity to examine this link between regional fracture and the genocidal violence in the Ottoman empire in its twilight years.

Dimensions of Regional Fracture in the Late Ottoman Empire

At the turn of the 20th century, the peripheries of the empire stretched into three continents, with the population reaching thirty million (Üngör Reference Üngör2011). The Ottoman Empire, as was most of its contemporary imperial states, was expansionist, territorially vast, and coercive in its imperial governance. And similar to its contemporaries, the Ottoman Empire has been rather “rimless,” often organized via indirect and intermediated center-periphery relations (Nexon and Wright Reference Nexon and Wright2007; Barkey Reference Barkey2008; Kumar Reference Krishan2017). The hub-and-spoke model of power organization has been a signature feature of imperial governance, and has also been observed throughout the Ottoman history (Barkey Reference Barkey2008). Such organizational patterns of imperial organization lent itself to a vertical/hierarchic system, in which peripheral entities primarily communicated with the core. Any communication between the peripheries was intermediated through the center, creating deep regional cleavages in its peripheries as a result.

The regional fracture in the peripheries was woven into the political fabric of this imperial state. Its military-agrarian society is often described as one with low levels of integration in economy, administration, and culture (Üngör Reference Üngör2011). Since the early 18th century, and similar to its contemporaneous empires, the Ottoman Empire struggled to manage its multi-ethnicity, vacillating between periods of gradual reform and authoritarian reversals, most evident in the 19th century. The empire degraded into long cycles of violence in its peripheries since the 18th century (Göcek Reference Göcek2015; Morris and Ze’vi Reference Morris and Ze’vi2019; Üngör Reference Üngör2011; Rogan Reference Rogan2016; Kévorkian Reference Kévorkian2011), culminating in the Armenian genocide and ethnic cleansing of its Christian minorities in Eastern Anatolia in the early 20th century (Göcek Reference Göcek2015; Bloxham Reference Bloxham2007; Akçam Reference Akçam2012; Suny Reference Suny2015; Balakian Reference Balakian2004; Kieser, Polatel, and Schmutz Reference Kieser, Polatel and Schmutz2015). But it also exhibited periods and peripheries of relative confessional coexistence – social peace – under the Muslim hegemony (Barkey Reference Barkey2008; Makdisi Reference Makdisi2019; Campos Reference Campos2011). The millet system is the imperial governance method that enabled such confessional coexistence throughout the empire’s centuries-long rule.

Indeed, despite its vertical power organization and poor connectivity in its peripheries, the Ottoman Empire is often lauded for its cultural pluralism. The millet system is the center of such arguments, which highlight the tacit bargain between the institutional center of the empire, built around Islam, and the rest of the confessions and ethnic groups. This social contract, the argument goes, acknowledged Muslim dominance and its social hegemony in return for relative self-governance and autonomy for the different confessional groups. The non-Muslim communities, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and Jewish, were largely self-governing. They were protected by the state in return for paying a special tax, agreeing not to bear arms, and wearing special clothing to differentiate them from the Muslims (Göcek, Reference Göcek2015). Fatma Gocek notes that since the non-Muslim communities were not allowed to serve in the military, they ended up concentrating in trade and commerce. Muslims specialized in administration (mülkiye), legal and religious affairs (ilmiye), and the military (seyfiye). Karen Barkey (Reference Barkey2008) has reflected on the administrative value of the millet system by pointing out that it fulfilled several goals for the imperial elite. It ensured the loyalty of a growing Christian community with important economic skills. In addition, it offered legibility and order in imperial governance. Barkey also highlights that the millet system also enabled the administration to run smoothly, particularly regarding tax collection, “while also reinforcing the wedge between the Orthodox and Catholic worlds of Europe” (Barkey Reference Barkey2008, 131).

The application of the TRF to the Ottoman Empire under the millet system reveals that the system, while often celebrated for managing diversity, was also deeply divisive on the regional fabric in the peripheries. This regional dimension made the millet system a liability when the imperial center tried to modernize and centralize imperial governance in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The millet system created, maintained, defended, and stratified the ethno-religious differences within the multinational empire (Barkey Reference Barkey2008), with deep inter-confessional polarization in peripheral regions.

The millet system was consequential in shaping the center-periphery relations and the regional fabric in the provinces. Particularly during the Tanzimat reforms in the 19th century, the millet system added greatly to the organizational diversity and density of units – important markers of regional resiliency discussed earlier. During the Tanzimat period in the mid-19th century, encouraged by the currents of reform and attempts at constitutionalism within the empire, many ethno-religious minorities experienced a cultural renaissance within their communities. National Assemblies within these communities were created (Rodrigue Reference Rodrigue and Levy1994), which later developed constitutions and governance structures; schools and institutions of higher education were founded; political parties were formed; and divisions within the communities between traditional and progressive groups and forces were also observed (Der Matossian Reference Der Matossian2014). Similar to the Armenian community, Jewish and Greek communities within the empire were also transformed by the Tanzimat reforms. The Jewish progressive movement emerged within the Jewish millet. Following the edict of 1856, all non-Muslim communities were encouraged to establish assemblies comprised of their religious and nonreligious elements to conduct their affairs internally (Der Matossian Reference Der Matossian2014). Within the Jewish community this culminated in the Jewish constitution in 1865. This communal revival and the promise of constitutionalism it engendered was abruptly halted by Sultan Abdülhamid II, who prorogued the parliament in 1878 for thirty years. This first period of representative democracy ended in another wave of authoritarian reversal, accompanied by state violence against predominantly Christian minorities (Morris and Ze’vi Reference Morris and Ze’vi2019; Bebler Reference Bebler2017; Göçek Reference Göcek2015), against the backdrop of their diminished representation in the center as well as in the provinces.

Göçek suggests that the 19th century reforms had limited impact for improving administration and/or equal rights for the non-Muslim minorities. The reforms diversified the units of organization within the multi-ethnic empire – a key dimension within the TRF, reflecting enhanced regional resilience – but they failed to add to their value as effective political units of self-governance and representation. The organizational coherence of units within regions, another dimension of regional fracture, was insufficiently enhanced by the Tanzimat reforms because they lacked the popular legitimacy within their communities, Göçek states. She explains that these new units of representation provided the elites within the minority communities with enhanced political access to the center, noting that these elites already had good relations with the imperial core. Combined with the persistent unwillingness of the center to share power locally, the reform potential remained marginal. In the end, in addition to reproducing the status quo, the Tanzimat reforms deepened familiar imperial practices of ruling through elites, resulting in the perpetuation of regional fracture in the peripheries.

Importantly, the millet system was based on imperial “differential contracting,” which wired connectivity from various ethno-religious groups directly to the imperial government, eroding intra-regional and inter-confessional connections within the peripheries. The next section on Eastern Anatolia will delve into this issue more directly. At this point, suffice it to say that the assessment of the regional fabric reveals that the Tanzimat reform efforts in the 19th century, geared toward centralization of power and the advancement of equality between all ethno-religious groups, worked at cross-purposes. The lack of institutionalized connections between ethno-religious communities and the weakness of regional governance spaces worked to undermine the modernization efforts in the 19th century. The Eastern Anatolia, in between the two Constitutional periods, 1876–1914, reveals the way regional fracturing ended in genocidal violence directed against the Armenian and other Christian communities of the empire.

The inter-ethnic polarization made it nearly impossible for any intra-regional security bargains, a dimension of regional fracture/resilience, between communities and provinces to emerge. The imperial state, in its zeal to modernize and centralize, increasingly relied on nationalism and religion, expecting diverse communities to fall in line with religious ideology (Göcek Reference Göcek2015). This approach resulted in social networks closing in along religious and ethnic boundaries (Barkey Reference Barkey2008). Building on the existing institutional separation created by the millet system, the centralization elevated the Muslim communities further, geared to match their military-political dominance with enhanced economic status in the empire. The Christian communities, with inferior access to the imperial economy and levers of political power, had oriented themselves toward and integrated with Western trade networks in the 19th century, forming the early economic bourgeois class in the urban areas, albeit with no political power (Levy Reference Levy1992).

The Ottoman peripheries were deeply fractured regions at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, also because of the systemic incoherence of regional flows – economic, political, and social. As discussed earlier, non-Muslim trade networks oriented toward Western markets because of the lack of access to power and economic institutions domestically. These communities were trans-national, connecting the entrepreneurs and traders from the Ottoman Empire to European markets. Under pressure from the increasingly nationalist policies of the imperial state, these groups relied on their ethnic communities both for self-governance as well as routes of global networks and pathways to connect with global markets (Aslanian Reference Aslanian2014). Muslim communities dominated the military-political levers of power, eager to capture the economic gains from globalizing the world economy at the time. Such extra-regional influences undermined the systemic coherence of regional flows – a key marker of fractured regions, then and now.

Also reflecting the systemic incoherence of regional flows is the transnational movement of revolutionaries, such as Armenians or Kurds, who have crisscrossed the Ottoman, Russian, and Persian Empires in the beginning of the 20th century, resulting in the movement of ideas and ideologies throughout the imperial peripheries, as demonstrated by Berbarian (Reference Berberian2019). Such trans-imperial revolutionary activities, cultivated in imperial provinces and culminating in the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, were a vivid demonstration that the margins matter when it comes to imperial governance.

Indeed, the divergent regional flows in the Ottoman Empire in between the two constitutional periods took ethno-religious forms. The strategy of mobilizing Turkish nationalism by the Ottoman states in its twilight years proved ineffective at preventing imperial collapse, with fatal consequences for millions of citizens of the Ottoman state. Regional fracture was practiced for imperial control, resulting in economic loss, humanitarian disasters, and the institutional erosion of the Ottoman state.

Eastern Anatolia: From Shatter Zone to a Fractured Region, 1876–1914

Eastern Anatolia in the Ottoman Empire, in between the two constitutional periods, is a quintessential case study to demonstrate the politically constructed, as opposed to geographically determined, nature of borderlands. Eastern Anatolia is portrayed as a shatter zone between the Ottoman and Russian Empires (Klein Reference Klein2011; Reynolds Reference Reynolds2011; Bartov and Weitz Reference Bartov and Weitz2013), a geographic space where Ottoman and Russian forces have clashed in the 19th and early 20th century. It is discussed as a target of the Ottoman Empire’s civilizing projects, as part of its internal colonialism (Klein Reference Klein2011) directed against the Kurdish tribes in its twilight years. It is also identified as a neglected frontline of World War I (Rogan Reference Rogan2016) and a space of “total war” carried out by the Ottoman Empire, fought in its exterior and in the interior (Kieser Reference Kieser, Kieser, Öktem and Reinkowski2015). Despite its shared features with a number of other imperial borderlands, Eastern Anatolia stands out as a case of multifaceted regional fracture leaving its communities vulnerable to ethnic cleansing and state-sponsored genocidal violence unleashed on the Ottoman Armenians and other Christian communities by the empire in its twilight years.

Mechanisms of regional fracture in Eastern Anatolia were numerous. As a regional system, throughout the 19th century Eastern Anatolia witnessed a surge of associations and political organizing, a process that was rooted in the millet system of confessional tolerance under Muslim hegemony. These developments added to the organizational complexity, diversity, and depth of the regional fabric in Eastern Anatolia. The Tanzimat reforms, despite their limited success in advancing constitutionalism and parliamentary politics in the empire, contributed to the proliferation of ethno-religious civil societies in all millets of the empire. The mobilization of interest groups, political parties, trade associations, and religious institutions, to name a few, added to the organizational diversity and coherence in the empire’s provinces, including Eastern Anatolia.

Despite the growing organizational diversity and density, the unit coordination and bargaining between the ethno-religious groups in Eastern Anatolia remained lacking. The opposite was true: the divided societal fabric in Eastern Anatolia was politicized by the imperial government as divide-and-conquer instruments applied in two distinct policy areas: agrarian and security provision via irregular militia. Both of these issue areas, deeply intertwined, represented the most elemental aspects of social contracts which usually underpin the relationships between the government and the governed in any organized polity: taxation and raising revenue from the societies to provide for their security.

The agrarian question in Eastern Anatolia refers to the land grabbing from Armenian as well as Kurdish peasants by state agents, the Muslim population, Kurdish tribal leaders, and local Muslim notables (Kieser, Polatel, and Schmutz Reference Kieser, Polatel and Schmutz2015). It was hardly a new problem in Eastern Anatolia, but it became securitized and politically contested particularly during the Second Constitutional period. Klein (Reference Klein2011) describes the “agrarian question” as a euphemism to refer to the usurpation in the last two decades of the 19th century, of Armenian lands, mostly by Kurdish tribal chiefs. The linkages between agrarian reform and security deterioration for predominantly Armenian peasants in Eastern Anatolia was driven by various factors. Gocek (Reference Göcek2015) and Klein (Reference Klein2011) highlight the significance of the rise in agricultural capitalism across Europe, which reverberated in these provinces by the growing value of land.

In addition, the recurrent attempts by the empire to gain greater control over the provinces and the largely nomadic Kurdish tribes led to the efforts to sedentarize the Kurdish tribes. Co-optation of the Kurdish tribal leaders with special privileges, appointments, special lease-holding (tapu) rights, and land-for-settlement deals with tribal figures were some of the strategies with regional ramifications attempted by the imperial government. Additional efforts to co-opt the Kurdish communities, interlinked with the land grabbing practices, was the formation of irregular militia forces from the Kurdish communities, named after the Sultan himself – the Hamidiye cavalry units. Klein (Reference Klein2011) argues:

The political support provided to the Kurdish groups in the usurpation of lands from Armenian peasants helped to co-opt and gain the loyalty of the Kurdish community, which, along with Armenians, were regular targets of Russian innuendos of protection in this period. By seeking to empower the Kurdish tribes, the empire applied the familiar tactic of divide-and-conquer: the Sultan translated its political support for Kurdish-led land seizures from Armenian communities into an instrument of demographic engineering, seeking to push out the Armenian population from eastern provinces in an effort to consolidate Muslim presence. The Muslim Kurdish communities were viewed as less of a threat to the Sultan than the Christian Armenians. Indeed, Polatel (Reference Kieser, Polatel and Schmutz2015) explains that while Kurdish peasants also suffered at the hands of the Kurdish tribal leaders emboldened by the Sultan, the Armenian cases of dispossession were interwoven with massive violence, expressed in a violent series of events called the Hamidian Massacres in 1884–1886.

The establishment of the Hamidiye Cavalry by the Sultan reflects the external dimension of regional fracture, as it was a reaction to Russian efforts to co-opt the Kurdish community to create instability inside borderlands of the Ottoman Empire. Internally, by empowering one community, and doing so by way of extra-legal and informal channels, the regional and fragile societal balance between the Armenian and Kurdish communities was frayed, and clustered pockets of social peace and coexistence were undermined. With no institutional spaces of inter-ethnic bargaining in the region, the deployment of the Hamidiye Cavalry units was a case of the destructive use of social capital within the Kurdish communities.

Klein (Reference Klein2011) explains that the primary rationale for the Sultan in establishing the Hamidiye Cavalry units was the fear of external aggression from Russia. But many other contemporaneous observers and historians also point to the Sultan’s motive of suppressing the activities of revolutionary groups from the Armenian communities and their calls for land reform. Largely driven by an attempt to bring in the Kurdish communities under the administrative reach of the empire, the Sultan ultimately made the community less governable, as it ceded the most elemental form of state power to an unaccountable force – monopoly over the use of force. The application of politically unaccountable violence by the Hamidiye Cavalry units, in communities already divided by problems of land grabbing and demographic engineering, became the ultimate manifestation of predatory governance in Eastern Anatolia.

These mechanisms of regional fracture applied tactically and deliberately by the imperial center in this borderland illustrates the politically constructed nature of these borderlands, the fractured regions, in contrast to viewing them simply as geographically determined shatterzones, merely doomed to be beyond imperial reach and vulnerable to external aggression. Klein (Reference Klein2011) points out that how states and local actors respond to political geography is more important than the inherent characteristics of that geographic terrain. The mechanisms of regional fracture discussed here explain the political responses from the imperial center to its borderland with neighboring Russia.

The great power reform agenda applied to the Christian and Kurdish communities in Eastern Anatolia between the two constitutional periods is an important expression of a key regional fracture dimension: hegemonic influence and geopolitical embeddedness of external powers in a given region. The great power initiatives meant to pressure the Ottoman Empire to reform the conditions of these communities were rooted in deeply structural socio-economic and political inequalities sustained by these minorities. Great power reform politics, and its specific focus on the Armenian Question, is a familiar mix of humanitarian concerns and naked realpolitik (Suny Reference Suny2015). Not unlike the contemporary applications of humanitarian intervention by great powers, usually driven by parochial political interests in the target country, the reform politics dominated the regional relations in Ottoman peripheries. The Armenian Question was a recurrent political theme within the reform politics, applied externally and internally within the Ottoman Empire.

In his overview of the politics surrounding the Armenian Question, Der Matossian (Reference Der Matossian2014) points to the 1878 Treaty of Berlin which sought to modify the terms of the Treaty of San Stefano. The Armenian Question was internationalized as the plight of the Armenian community emerged on the international agenda and became entangled with external pressures, geopolitical and humanitarian, on the Ottoman states. But it also became a litmus test for the political changes of modernization, which the empire had been trying to advance. Der Matossian explains that massive demographic changes in Anatolia resulted in the immigration of Muslims from the Balkans and the Caucasus, many of these migrants having escaped inter-ethnic tensions and clashes from the Balkans. Between 1862–1882, the Muslim population of Anatolia increased by 40 percent. The majority of the migrants and refugees moved to mostly rural Eastern Anatolian provinces (or were led by the imperial regime), thereby creating friction with the Armenian peasants and making land a contested resource.

However, it is critical to point out that rapid demographic shifts and inter-ethnic tensions were made possible amid conditions of institutional decay of regional and imperial governance: the lack of representative institutions and parliamentary systems of any sort made it nearly impossible for peaceful conflict resolution mechanisms to emerge in these regions. The institutional weakness of the Ottoman Empire in accommodating the rising friction and mobilization of conflicting interests contributed to the internationalization of the Armenian Question in late 19th century.

The instrumentalization of the Armenian Question by the Ottoman rivals was rather swift. Suny (Reference Suny2015) has argued that the great power interest in the Ottoman Empire, often expressed through reform politics, was driven by their desire to control the straits connecting the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. This made the Ottoman Empire a space where Western European powers could balance and contain Russian interests. The reform politics usually involved Great Britain, Russia, France, and Austria, with Germany professing an official neutrality or indifference toward the Armenians as they were eager to cultivate an alliance with the Ottoman state (Suny Reference Suny2015).

In regards to the Caucasus, Russian political ambitions of the Ottoman reform in favor of Christians can be traced back to the early 19th century (Bloxham Reference Bloxham2007). Seeking to influence the Ottoman Empire without destroying it (not unlike the current Russian policy in Eastern Ukraine), Russia declared itself the protector of the Christian communities after defeating the Ottomans on the battlefield. In the Caucasus, Bloxham dates Russian overtures to protect the Christians in Ottoman provinces to the 1833 treaty of “alliance and mutual defense” of Unkiar Iskelesi (Bloxham Reference Bloxham2007; Jelavich and Jelavich Reference Jelavich and Jelavich1993), from which the Russian position to protect the Ottoman Muslim Kurds and Ottoman Christian Armenians followed.

The reform agenda of outside powers had distinct implications for regional connectivity in Ottoman peripheries. They heightened expectations and created false hopes among the Christian communities, which suffered disproportionately as multi-confessional mechanisms of imperial governance continued to deteriorate (Morris and Ze’vi Reference Morris and Ze’vi2019). Such growing communal insecurity in the provinces made external overtures of reform politically effective for the great powers. In short, the multi-level analysis presented here recognizes the mutually reinforcing nature between the decay of imperial governance and the collective violence directed against Christian communities on the one hand, and the geopolitical calculations of external powers on the other.

This multi-level analysis contrasts with purely geopolitical analyses. Reynolds (Reference Reynolds2011) has argued that great power competition between the Ottoman and Russian Empires, particularly in their borderlands, is key to understanding the course of the history in Eurasia. The geopolitical rivalry, of which the reform initiative was one mechanism, according to Reynolds, was analytically more pronounced relative to nationalism, which many argued to be the key driver of imperial collapse. In regards to the 1908–1918 period, Reynolds notes the following:

This geopolitical narrative, while capturing an important dimension of regional fracture in Eastern Anatolia, however, obscured the significance of local, national, and regional governance failures, including predatory resource extraction, as a factor making external meddling a winning geopolitical strategy for great powers, often to the detriment of the communities they claimed to help. Bulutgil (Reference Bulutgil2017) has challenged geopolitical narratives, pointing out that they tend to assume state leadership as ideologically uniform, often reduced to territorial expansion of the imperial state. In a comparative analysis of contested borderlands in the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian Empires, she has shown that the ideological and institutional structure of state leadership is an important factor in explaining the varied outcomes of minority treatment in contested borderlands during wartime. In short, in her analysis, ethnic cleansing and genocide do not emerge as inevitable historical outcomes explained by imperial strategic imperatives and often driven by geopolitical competition. Rather, the alternatives to the genocidal policies were silenced due to the nationalistic leadership assumed by the government at the time.Footnote ¹

The regional perspective presented here focuses on center-periphery relations, highlighting connectivity, institutional, and representative governance between the periphery and the center as essential for building regionally resilient provinces and necessary for imperial modernization reform. The perspectives as to how geopolitical rivalry politicized and used the Armenian Question and other reform initiatives to advance narrow political ends, is valuable in understanding the regional dynamics on the ground. But the specific nature of regional fracture in the periphery helps to understand the nature of geopolitical rivalry and its application in the peripheries. Specifically, Bloxham (Reference Bloxham2007) explains that the German position in regards to the Armenian Question was driven by German ambitions of its regional economic influence, for which it needed the approval of the Ottoman central government. In contrast, Russia’s aim in 1913–14 was the extension of informal political control in Ottoman territory, an objective for which it needed influence over the Ottoman subjects in the imperial periphery rather than the government. In short, Russia’s application of reform politics targeted the province of Eastern Anatolia, rather than the imperial center. Vertically, geopolitical rivalry deepened the center-periphery tensions in Eastern Anatolia (a process aided by the German factor). Horizontally, geopolitical rivalry heightened the existing inter-communal polarization (facilitated by the Russian factor). Therefore, a multi-level approach and an appreciation of interactivity between societal and geopolitical factors can produce the needed nuance on the question of reform politics and ethnic cleansing and genocide in Eastern Anatolia.