This special issue on World War I appears on the centennial of the war. The issue went to press as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was challenging the borders set nearly a hundred years ago in the Middle East by the imperial powers. Guest editor Mustafa Aksakal introduces the six research articles, part of a wave of scholarship examining the “transformative processes spawned by the war” in response to new historical questions and newly available archival sources. That half of the articles touch on sieges (in Medina) and famine (Syria/Lebanon, and in particular Beirut) produces an eerie echo at a time when civilians once again face hunger and the ravages of an armed conflict, with large numbers of refugees on the move. As we look back, so do the articles, moving backward chronologically from the “minority protection regime” established by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 to “atrocity propaganda” of the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. The issues raised by these two articles resonate loudly, as does the matter of American influence in the region, which is discussed in an article on the wartime politics of Syrians in Cairo. So, too, does the photograph on the cover of this special issue: Ruins of Gaza at the Time of the Great Attack, 1917.

Scholars of the Middle East and North Africa are only too familiar with the momentous changes set in motion by the events of World War I. Given the number of new states and political movements that emerged in the war's aftermath, it seems only fair to describe it as “the single most important political event in the history of the modern Middle East.” Elizabeth F. Thompson recently likened the war's impact on the Middle East to that of the Civil War in the United States. To be sure, the passing of a century hardly proved sufficient for coming to terms with the legacy of either war. In fact, analyses and discussions of World War I in the Middle East have remained highly politicized, in school curricula, in academia, and in popular culture and the arena of public memory. History and historical interpretations are always contested, of course, and there is little reason to believe that accounts of World War I in the Middle East and North Africa will become less so anytime soon.

This article focuses on the years after World War I, especially the first decade following the 1923 establishment of the Republic of Turkey, in order to analyze the position of minorities in the developing “we” of the new nation as projected by its political elite. Situating the discussion in the context of the League of Nations interwar minority protection regime, I demonstrate that the Treaty of Lausanne, which the Ankara government and the Allies signed in July 1923, played an important role in the conflicting treatment that minorities have since received in Turkey. The treaty's minority protection clauses entrenched divisions that had already been formed in the Ottoman Empire during the violence of the preceding decade, including the Armenian genocide. Moreover, reminding Turkish leaders of how 19th-century European imperial powers had used the cause of Ottoman Christians’ suffering as an excuse to infringe on Ottoman sovereignty, these clauses alarmed the Turkish political elite, especially as the “Great Powers” themselves were not bound by such minority protection guarantees. The goal of preventing a repetition of this unbalanced international power dynamic, which, according to the new Turkey's leaders, had led to the demise of the Ottoman Empire, engendered paradoxical policies toward non-Muslim Turkish citizens; they have been largely excluded from a Turkness (Türklük) to which they were sometimes included, even forcibly included.

This article explores the American role in the Syrian political scene in Cairo toward the end of World War I and in its immediate aftermath. It challenges the absence of the United States and of American actors as primary players in much of the historical writing on the Middle East in this period. It illuminates a neglected episode of regional American diplomacy, argues that the United States was not relegated to the periphery in local debates surrounding the dismemberment of Ottoman Syria, and emphasizes the broader uncertainties that characterized the competition for Mandate territories in the Middle East prior to 1920. In doing so, it takes a close look at the long-forgotten reports of William Yale, the U.S. State Department's “Special Agent” in Cairo in late 1917, and situates them within evolving trends in Syrian-Arab politics. Yale, who surfaced in Egypt after serving with Standard Oil in Palestine, was the key Arabic-speaking American “on the spot” and proved to be an astute if imperfect observer of the diversity of Syrian national sentiment. A survey of his reports allows for a new perspective on Cairo's Syrians and their pragmatic and ideological turn toward the United States as World War I unfolded. Alienated from Britain and France, they looked increasingly to the United States, and the appeal of a postwar American trusteeship over Syria gained currency among émigré intellectuals and aspiring powerbrokers.

This article analyzes interviews related to the 1916–19 Sharifian siege of Medina that were published in a collection on the city's history by Saudi Arabian historian Ahmad Murshid. These oral histories narrate how Fakhri Pasha (Turkish: Fahreddin), the Ottoman military commander stationed in Medina during the siege, expelled residents from their homes, strictly controlled the supply of food in the city, and managed military operations out of the Holy Mosque of the Prophet Muhammad. The article seeks to explore the perspective of ordinary civilians who experienced the siege, a perspective largely missing from the literature on the subject. The interviews are positioned here as a valuable historical source for understanding the impact of the siege on these individuals and on their families, communities, and identities. Their memories underscore the interviewees’ deep attachment to their city, as well as to their identity as madanīs and as legitimate narrators of Medina's history.

This article explores the experience of the Great War in Syria and Lebanon with a specific focus on the famine that, combined with other wartime calamities, decimated the civilian population. Using food as its primary register, it looks at a wide range of largely untapped Syrian and Lebanese poems, zajal, plays, novels, memoirs, and histories written over the course of the 20th century, in order to illuminate the experiential dimensions of the civilians’ war and to delineate some of the discourses that structured it. More specifically, it argues that the wartime famine in Syria and Lebanon gave rise to a remembered cuisine of desperation that is deeply informative about the ruptured world of the civilians’ war.

World War I in the Ottoman Empire was a humanitarian disaster of unprecedented scale. By 1916 in the Greater Syrian provinces, men, women, and children were dying en masse of a war-induced famine so devastating that popular memory still names this war ḥarb al-majāʿa (the war of famine). Despite the civilian catastrophe, people's experiences on the Ottoman home front have been only marginally explored in the scholarship. Focusing on the city of Beirut, this article highlights the centrality of food provisioning in the competition for political legitimacy in the provincial capital. Through a detailed analysis of how the Beirut municipality was represented in the city's daily newspaper al-Ittihad al-ʿUthmani, I argue that for local reform-minded notables and intellectuals the war presented an opportunity to prove, both to the local population and to the Ottoman state, that issues related to the internal security and well-being of the Beirut province generally and the city specifically could be dealt with locally through existing governing bodies. The article thus traces the fierce political games played around the issue of food by various actors seeking to win the hearts of Beirutis through their stomachs.

During the Balkan Wars (1912–13), the mobilization of the home front became significant for the belligerent states, which initiated propaganda activities demonizing their enemies and galvanizing the emotions of their publics. This paper explores one type of such mobilization efforts from above, atrocity propaganda, through which states sought to invoke hatred and mobilize public support for war by focusing on the atrocities (mezalim) that their coreligionists had suffered at the hands of enemies. Although the term “atrocity propaganda” has been used exclusively in the context of World War I in the historiography, the practice it describes was effectively utilized during the earlier Balkan Wars. In the Ottoman Empire, both state and civil initiatives played crucial roles in the making of atrocity propaganda, which was disseminated through intense coverage in the Turkish-language press. The imagery it employed shifted with the onset of the wars, becoming increasingly shocking. Atrocity propaganda contributed to the well-known radicalization of nationalism in the late Ottoman Empire.

For much of the modern era the Middle East has been beset by war. From imperial intervention to regional struggle, the reach of war has left few untouched. The region's geography, the rise and fall of its most powerful institutions, and the pressing challenges of daily life remain entangled with war and its legacies. Middle Eastern wars are most often explained in terms of struggles for land and other resources, autocratic machinations, and clashes over identity and religion. All of these are true. But war is never the same everywhere. In important ways these broad frameworks hollow out the complexity and scale of war, and why it matters so much. What else is there to say about “war”? Rather than the political forces that drive it, the essays here are interested in and suggestive of the productive power of war, the ways it has transcended the battlefield and become normalized socially, politically, and environmentally. In particular, the contributors reflect on the role of experts, technical expertise, and the science of war in the making of new social, political-economic, and cultural relations across the region in the century following the start of World War I.

In 1915, soon after Egypt's entry into World War I, the British War Office sent a medical mission to Egypt to investigate the state of bilharzia infection in the country. Bilharzia, also known as schistosomiasis, ran rife among agricultural cultivators in Egypt during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The entry of British-occupied Egypt into the war, and its emergence as a battle theater, heightened fears within the British government that its soldiers would fall prey to the same ailments that plagued Egypt's population.

We have come to understand developmental indices such as growth, standard of living, and the calorie as “universal.” Such indices promise an objective means of erasing developmental differences. They promise sameness. However, what happens when we shift our focus away from inclusion and exclusion in the process of development, and instead look at when and how these categories themselves were constituted?

In Lebanon, diverse sociopolitical projects have sought to mend the wounds, repair the cracks, and overhaul the loss of the devastating civil war (1975–90). Experts and technopolitics have featured centrally in almost all of them. In my anthropological research on expertise on peace and crisis in Lebanon, I explore how, in the decades after the war, an abstract ideal of peace gave way to a distinct space occupied by diverse groups of experts. I analyze how a previously political aim was transformed into a professionalized field around which specialized knowledge domains were developed and technopolitical practices deployed. In this essay I briefly explore this new architecture of expert power based on the technopolitics of peace (and war) in the contemporary Middle East.

I write this piece as Iraq, following Syria, descends into a civil war that is undermining the post–World War I state system and reconfiguring regional and transnational networks of mobilization and instrumentalizations of violence and identity formation. That the Middle East has come to this moment is not an inevitable product of the artificiality of national borders and the precariousness of the state system. It is important to avoid this linear narrative of inevitability, with its attendant formulations of the Middle East as a repository of a large number of absences, and instead to locate the current wars in a specific historical time: the late and post–Cold War eras, marked by the agendas of the Washington Consensus and the globalization of neoliberal discourses; the privatization of the developmental and welfare state; the institutional devolution and multiplication of security services; and the entrenchment of new forms of colonial violence and rule in Israel and Palestine and on a global scale. The conveners of this roundtable have asked us to reflect on the technopolitics of war in the context of this particular moment and in light of the pervasiveness of new governmentalities of war. What I will do in this short piece is reflect on the heuristic and methodological possibilities of the study of war as a form of governance, or what I call the “government of war,” in light of my own research and writing on Iraq.

The U.S. Military's turn to culture in the 21st century occurred largely because of its inability to achieve its stated objectives in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through conventional military force. Building on a long history of military strategies concerned with the cultural differences of others, the U.S. military crafted a warfighting strategy in 2006 based on a counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine of using cultural knowledge to battle the enemy. Charting how and why culture was embraced as a 21st-century “weapons system” shows us how technopolitical systems inside the military-industrial complex are envisioned, built, and then dismantled. Close tracking of these changing 21st-century strategies of war reveals, deep within the counterterrorism discourse, a fundamental belief in American exceptionalism. The principle that emerged from this ideological environment is that the enemies to be fought are not only terrorists or the ideologues of al-Qaʿida but also the countries and cultures that produced them. The implementation of this principle, despite its obvious failures, reveals the ideological underpinning that has justified the incredible destruction and securitized implementation of warfighting.

The long American war on Iraq is not over. In a country ravaged for more than two decades by crippling sanctions and military occupation, the social, cultural, and political-economic legacies of war seem unending. Perhaps even more disturbing, Iraqis now face widespread environmental destruction and a dystopian environmental future. The ecological wages of America's long war in Iraq are partly the consequence of “routine” violence, resulting from the systemic destruction of vital electrical, water, and sewage infrastructure over two decades. It is possible to imagine that Iraq's cities and villages can be rebuilt. But even if it finds its way to the kind of political accommodation that makes reconstruction possible, parts of the country face other pernicious long-term environmental threats, among the most dangerous being the hidden toxic and radiological dangers that have settled in Iraqi bodies and deep in its landscape.

World War I inspired countless artists, poets, novelists, and even soldiers across the world to record their unimaginable experiences and to reject the millennial lie: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (it is sweet and appropriate to die for one's country). Early 20th-century European writers like Wilfred Owen, Virginia Woolf, Erich Maria Remarque, and Henri Barbusse have become household names. Less well known are the Arab civilians and soldier writers who struggled on the edges of the war's fronts.