Most historians of the Mandate Levant have reflexively chosen its new polities - Syria, Palestine, etc -  as frameworks of analysis. However, this approach has empirical and analytical limits. I seek to transcend these by arguing that because the Levant was rather strongly integrated by the 1910s, its subsequent division somewhat counter-intuitively also begot further integration. Thus, because new, now diverging ‘national economies’ had different profiles and needs, the latter were met not the least by regional movements of goods and people. Similarly, cross-border movements encouraged French and British authorities to coordinate legal and bureaucratic mechanisms. In my paper, which is a first draft of my book’s Introduction, I historiographically situate my project and substantiate its argument by outlining its six chapters: Ottoman background, social and mental geographies, Franco-British coordination, socio-commercial networks, labor migration, and geo-economic competition. Professor Rashid Khalidi (Columbia University) will sereve as discussant.

When the Algerian war began, international law, human rights, and the Geneva Conventions remained largely untested in a colonial context. Anti-colonial movements in Kenya and Malaya were underway but they had not successfully challenged the boundaries of these doctrines. The ten International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) missions in Algeria between 1955 and 1962 provide a revealing case study of the ways by which postwar notions of human rights legally excluded international intervention in these internal affairs and absolved the French, the Algerians, and the ICRC of their actions. This paper argues that the Algerian war exposed the inadequacies of international law at the apogee of decolonization. The French and the Algerian nationalists tried to manipulate legal deficiencies and ICRC inconsistencies to their own political ends. The ICRC identified internal struggles as a new category of war; yet, it remained constrained by its own mission and the contradictions of colonialism and was unable to adapt its doctrines during the conflict to better meet the needs of those affected. Professor Clifford Rosenberg (City College) will serve as discussant.

Zeynep Çelik is distinguished professor of architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Professor Çelik has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2004) and American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (1992, 2004, and 2011).

Professor Celik’s paper, “Defining Empire’s Patrimony: Late Ottoman Perceptions of Antiquities” marks the completion of a project and the beginning of another. The first is a co-edited book with Zainab Bahrani and Edhem Eldem, titled Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753-1814; the second concerns her new research, which expands further on some of the themes opened up in the Scramble and deals with commonly ignored aspects of archaeology (such as the labor landscape).

Professor Zainab Bahrani (Columbia University) will serve as discussant.

What lies behind the new American common-sense that we should go to war for global women’s rights? This paper explores how two industries that we rarely think of together are authorizing the current moral crusade to save Muslim women: the international human rights regime and mass-market publishing, which has brought us a sordid genre of pulp non-fiction about Muslim women’s bondage and oppression. Drawing on her experiences in rural Egypt and urging us to think carefully about our own lives, Professor Lila Abu-Lughod offers an alternative way to think about the key terms of this crusade; choice versus force, freedom versus bondage.

Professor Mandana Limbert (Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY) will serve as discussant.

British and US imperial policies included, in the case of the British since the nineteenth century and of the Americans since World War II, the production of certain forms of Islam that could be put in the service of colonial and imperial policies. This involved intermittently the imperial production of “liberal” forms of Islam, “Jihadist” forms of Islam, and then again a new “liberal-democratic” Islam, wherein the very relationship of “Islam” to “democracy” from the view of American and British imperialisms was being determined by these very policies. Concomitant with these policies, British and American liberal political doctrine would deploy explanations of both, the emergence of liberal “democracy” in the so-called “West,” and the persistence of despotism in the non-West, with particular attention to and focus on “Islam.” Much of this, Joseph Massad argues, is a projection of Western imperial commitments to despotism at home and abroad onto “Islam,” not only to showcase Western cultural and political superiority ushered in by the age of secularism through a suspect claim to democratic governance, but also and more importantly to secure imperial aims in what came to be known and religiously defined as the “Muslim world.”

With discussant Talal Asad, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, CUNY

Malek Abisaab’s article sheds light on the development in the relationship between the Lebanese Maronite church and the French colonial authorities during the mid-1930s. It focuses on the confrontational stance of the church toward the French under the leadership of Patriarch Antoine `Arida (1863-1955). Abisaab delineates `Arida’s resistance to the imposition of the tobacco monopoly, the Régie, and his diplomatic and political maneuvers, culminating with the 1935 popular uprising against the French, which cut across Muslim and Christian lines. Through the analysis of French archival documents and reports, he argues that the deterioration in Maronite-French relations was primarily caused by the colonial mapping of Grand Liban and its disruptive consequences for Mount Lebanon’s leadership and economy. With the French imposition of the tobacco monopoly the conflict took the form of a nationalist resistance against the French. It sparked a critique of French colonial logic and encouraged the need to draw alliances with Syrian and Lebanese Muslim leaders. Ultimately, the Maronite community and the Church pursued a delicate balance between their local interests, their commitments to the French, and “partnership” with the Muslims.