This chapter engages with the Palestine Railway Arbitration of 1922 and draws out the techniques applied in the arbitration that framed new ways of protecting private property and laid the groundwork for the internationalisation of concession agreements. The chapter describes how introduction of the Mandate System and the inclusion of concession agreements into peace treaties (under the jurisdiction of mixed arbitral tribunals) enabled the advanced protection of private property on the international plane with special attention to the underlying modes of authorisation. It shows how these transformations can be understood as practices of jurisdiction that rely on a mode of self-authorisation. The Palestine Railway Arbitration is particularly illuminating of this point for two reasons. First, from a purely doctrinal perspective, the arbitration is full of formal flaws. It therefore raises the question of the source of the authority of law more pressingly than other arbitrations. Second, it appears that most legal inventions and changes were made out of a sense of necessity without much theorising. These observations point towards an account of law that is attentive to the actual practices of the actors involved.

The Palestine Mandate was argued to have been a document with legal force on the basis that the Council of the League of Nations voted to approve it. The Palestine Mandate lacked such a status, it was argued in response. The Palestine Mandate was not concluded as a treaty. It was not registered with the League as a treaty. It does not appear in League records that give treaties to which League members are party. Britain’s A. J. Balfour told the Council that the Palestine Mandate would have legal force once Turkey ceded sovereignty to the World War I Allies. Turkey never did so. When a peace treaty with Turkey was finalized, Turkey renounced sovereignty in favor of Palestine, not in favor of the Allies. When Britain explained its status in Palestine to the Permanent Court of International Justice, its counsel wrote that, as result of Turkey’s refusal to renounce sovereignty to the Allies, Britain acquired no legal status. He said that Britain’s standing in Palestine was that of belligerent occupant as result of having taken Palestine by force of arms. He did not mention any rights of Britain that might have come from the League of Nations.

This chapter examines the formation and development of modern Kurdish political activism in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire’s existence. It charts the evolution of the movement through an examination of contemporary documentary evidence, including newspapers, publications and archival materials. Over the course of the period between 1880 and 1923, there was a slow but steady uptick in Kurdish political agitation. However, while growing numbers of Kurdish elites came to see themselves as part of a Kurdish ‘nation’ and began to advocate for Kurdish ‘rights’, there was little consensus on how or within what type of framework those rights might be secured. While some looked towards the creation of an autonomous or even independent Kurdish nation-state as a panacea to the Kurdish question, many early Kurdish intellectuals remained committed to the continuation of the Ottoman state. Indeed, it was only in the aftermath of Ottoman defeat during the First World War that support for Kurdish statehood emerged as the dominant trend within Kurdish intellectual circles. However, ultimately the geopolitical circumstances that came into being with the empire’s collapse served to foreclose nationalist aspirations.

This chapter opens the third section of the book on the aftermath of the war. It addresses the end of the war and its many legacies. It starts with the armistice, and then considers the discussion about enemy aliens during the peace conference; it also explores the treaties that ended the war and their consequences for aliens, citizenship and property rights. It continues with the signing of all the final treaties, the emptying of the concentration camps and the lifting of the provisions on foreign movements, the agreement that regulated restitution or liquidation of assets, and the final exchange of populations. The chapter covers the period up to the late 1920s and deals with the transition from the state of emergency to peace, the resumption of naturalization procedures, new rules on borders and migration, new citizenship regimes that emerged from the war in both victorious and defeated countries as well as in the new successor states, and mass denaturalization and statelessness as a consequence of the emergence of new political regimes (such as the Soviet Union) or population exchange. It investigates the impact of special legislation on alien and enemy aliens on policies of migration control and explores the debate among jurists about the many violations of the conventions and human rights and the failed attempts at writing a new convention on enemy aliens.