The Last Ottoman Rogues: The Kurdish–Armenian Alliance in Syria and the New State System in the Interwar Middle East
The Last Ottoman Rogues: The Kurdish–Armenian Alliance in Syria and the New State System in the Interwar Middle East
This chapter explores how and to what extent the new borders in the Middle East created opportunities and constraints to ex-Ottoman clandestine political groups. By combining transnational history and borderland studies literature, the chapter focuses on the Khoybun League which, in 1927, brought together the formerly Istanbul based Kurdish activists with the Armenians of the Dashnak Party into a revolutionary organization active in French Syria and Lebanon with the aim of ‘liberating’ Armenia and Kurdistan from the Republic of Turkey. It discusses how the propagandists of the revolt benefitted from the increasing means of communication and transportation available in cities such as Aleppo, Cairo, Beirut or Alexandretta to disseminate their political goals and collect funds places as far as Detroit, Rome and Nice. In its second section, however, the chapter proves that the transnational networks mobilised by Kurdish and Armenian rebels to fight the Turkish regime in fact brought regional states closer, as Turkey, British Iraq, French Syria, and ultimately Persia curtailed revolutionaries’ mobility in different ways. While the disruption of territorial sovereignty offered unprecedented political opportunities to former ‘Ottoman’ transnational revolutionary networks, the new emerging international system imposed new realities that slowly turned out to be insurmountable.
Keywords: transnational networks, Kurds, Armenians, Borders, Mobility, borderlands
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