The Annual MUBIT (Mensch-Umwelt-Beziehung in islamischen Traditionen) Workshop in Late- and Post-Ottoman Studies is a two-day workshop in Basel, Switzerland, designed for international doctoral students conducting research on the Near and Middle East. The workshop consists of a two-day, intensive program in which select students work closely with invited experts. Successful completion of the workshop entitles students to 3 ECTS credits. This year, we are thrilled to host Prof. Dr. Laura Robson of Penn State University, USA, to lead our 11^th annual workshop on the topic of “States and Statelessness in the Post-Ottoman Middle East.” The 2023 workshop will be held in person between 20 October (12 :00 pm) and 21 October (13 :00 pm) at the University of Basel. 

Course Description

The fractured, uneven, and often violent processes by which nation-states emerged from the postwar landscape of the former Ottoman empire have received exponentially greater scholarly attention than the concomitant and often similar processes that actively produced various iterations of post-Ottoman statelessness. This workshop begins to redress this omission by examining some manifestations of statelessness across the Middle East and North Africa in the period 1920–1967, emphasizing its emergence as both concept and practice—inseparable from the nation-state, to be sure, but marked by much more than merely the absence of citizenship or nationality.

From the multifarious production of wartime and postwar refugees in Syria and Lebanon to the mandatory remaking of Palestinians as stateless nationals to imaginaries of state-free revolutionary spaces in midcentury Algeria, iterations of post-Ottoman statelessness took on firm political shapes that suggested particular political futures for the Middle Eastern nation-state. In the post-WWI Mashriq, refugees and migratory communities (willingly and unwillingly) produced and enforced new national borders and provided political and territorial venues for the exertion of experimental forms of international and imperial power but also local authority. In Palestine, the mandatory production of a majority indigenous population—both Muslim and Christian—as stateless nationals within their homeland offered a new mode of simultaneously producing both state and statelessness to yield a particular kind of post-1948 political landscape in Palestine and beyond, one in which external actors could continue to maintain a territorial stake in the region. A different iteration of statelessness, rather more utopian in nature, emerged in wartime and postwar Algeria, where the capital of Algiers was reimagined as a kind of passport-free refuge for global revolutionaries of all stripes. In all these cases, the Ottoman Empire loomed as a historical memory of a more flexible (though not always less violent) iteration of state, one that these various imaginaries of statelessness continued to hold in mind as they reimagined the possible nature and consequences of an existence outside the state in this new postimperial era.

This workshop, in other words, posits that alongside a history of state-making in the Middle East we should also note a history of creating statelessness, and not as an absence but a presence. It seeks to investigate what statelessness has meant as a political practice in its own right, and to consider the particular legacies of the Ottoman empire to emerging concepts of living in some way beyond the reach of the modern state—or even doing without it altogether.

Workshop Sessions

1. Ottoman disintegration and the wartime making of Middle Eastern statelessness
2. Colonial statelessness: Refugees, migrants, and borders in mandate Syria and Lebanon
3. Ethnonational statelessness: Palestine and the new international system
4. Utopian statelessness: The case of revolutionary Algeria

Application

Currently enrolled Ph.D. students who wish to attend the workshop should write an email to Falestin Naïli (falestin.naili@unibas.ch) and Alexander Balistreri (alexander.balistreri@unibas.ch), with a short text summarizing their academic background and explaining how this workshop fits in to their research interests (max. 400 words, in third-person singular, in English). Applicants should also provide a CV (PDF, in English). Up to 15 applicants will be selected for participation in the workshop, based on relevance of their research project and a demonstrated ability to contribute constructively to the discussions. 

The deadline for applications is 1 September 2023.

Applicants will receive an answer regarding their participation by 8 September 2022, at the latest. The workshop is free of charge. Unfortunately, funding for travel and lodging is currently unavailable. We will provide successful applicants with information about more affordable accommodation in Basel.

Requirements for Successful Participation

Participants are entitled to 3 ECTS points for successful participation. Participants will receive by mid-September a list of readings to be completed prior to the workshop. Successful participation at the workshop is subject to the mandatory completion of the required readings in advance and active participation in the workshop discussions.

Organized and hosted by

• Dr. Falestin Naïli, University of Basel
• Dr. Alexander E. Balistreri, University of Basel
• Prof. Dr. Maurus Reinkowski, University of Basel
• Prof. Dr. Aline Schlaepfer, University of Basel

Program in Near & Middle Eastern Studies / the Graduate School of Social Sciences (G3S), University of Basel