In the wake of recent upheavals across the Arab world, a simplistic media portrayal of the region as essentially homogenous has given way to a new though equally shallow portrayal, casting it as deeply divided along ethnic, linguistic, and religious lines. The essays gathered in Minorities and the Modern Arab World seek to challenge this representation with a nuanced exploration of the ways in which ethnic, religious, and linguistic commitments have intersected to create ""minority"" communities in the modern era. Bringing together the fields of history, political science, anthropology, sociology, and linguistics, contributors provide fresh analyses of the construction and evolution of minority identities around the region. They examine how the category of ""minority"" became meaningful only with the rise of the modern nation-state and find that Middle Eastern minority nationalisms owe much of their modern self-definition to developments within diaspora populations and other transnational frameworks. The first volume to upend the conceptual frame of reference for studying Middle Eastern minority communities in nearly two decades, Minorities and the Modern Arab World represents a major intervention in modern Middle East studies.

Partition-the physical division of territory along ethno-religious lines into separate nation-states-is often presented as a successful political "solution" to ethnic conflict. In the twentieth century, at least three new political entities-the Irish Free State, the Dominions (later Republics) of India and Pakistan, and the State of Israel-emerged as results of partition. This volume offers the first collective history of the concept of partition, tracing its emergence in the aftermath of the First World War and locating its genealogy in the politics of twentieth-century empire and decolonization. Making use of the transnational framework of the British Empire, which presided over the three major partitions of the twentieth century, contributors draw out concrete connections among the cases of Ireland, Pakistan, and Israel-the mutual influences, shared personnel, economic justifications, and material interests that propelled the idea of partition forward and resulted in the violent creation of new post-colonial political spaces. In so doing, the volume seeks to move beyond the nationalist frameworks that served in the first instance to promote partition as a natural phenomenon.

Historian Laura Robson reveals the dark heart of our purportedly humanitarian international regime.Tracing the century-long history of attempts to remake refugees into cut-rate, disposable migrant labor, Robson elucidates global humanitarianism's deep-seated commitment to refugee exploitation and containment. The advent of internationalist refugee aid has long been told as an inspirational story of humanitarians fighting tirelessly for a system for that would recognize and guarantee the rights of displaced and dispossessed people. But as Robson meticulously demonstrates, modern refugee policy emerges from a different goal: to use refugees as cheap workers in an emerging system of global industrial capitalism. With a global eye, Robson captures the travails of Balkan refugees in the late Ottoman Empire, Roosevelt's secret plans to use German Jewish refugees as laborers in Latin America, and contemporary European efforts to deploy Syrians as low-wage workers in remote regions of Jordan.

Partition—the physical division of territory along ethno-religious lines into separate nation-states—is often presented as a successful political "solution" to ethnic conflict. In the twentieth century, at least three new political entities—the Irish Free State, the Dominions (later Republics) of India and Pakistan, and the State of Israel—emerged as results of partition. This volume offers the first collective history of the concept of partition, tracing its emergence in the aftermath of the First World War and locating its genealogy in the politics of twentieth-century empire and decolonization. Making use of the transnational framework of the British Empire, which presided over the three major partitions of the twentieth century, contributors draw out concrete connections among the cases of Ireland, Pakistan, and Israel—the mutual influences, shared personnel, economic justifications, and material interests that propelled the idea of partition forward and resulted in the violent creation of new post-colonial political spaces. In so doing, the volume seeks to move beyond the nationalist frameworks that served in the first instance to promote partition as a natural phenomenon.

Across the Middle East in the post-World War I era, European strategic moves converged with late Ottoman political practice and a newly emboldened Zionist movement to create an unprecedented push to physically divide ethnic and religious minorities from Arab Muslim majorities. States of Separation tells how the interwar Middle East became a site for internationally sanctioned experiments in ethnic separation enacted through violent strategies of population transfer and ethnic partition. During Britain's and France's interwar occupation of Iraq, Palestine, and Syria, the British and French mandate governments and the League of Nations undertook a series of varied but linked campaigns of ethnic removal and separation targeting the Armenian, Assyrian, and Jewish communities within these countries. Such schemes served simultaneously as a practical method of controlling colonial subjects and as a rationale for imposing a neo-imperial international governance, with long-standing consequences for the region. Placing the histories of Iraq, Palestine, and Syria within a global context of emerging state systems intent on creating new forms of international authority, in States of Separation Laura Robson sheds new light on the emergence of ethnic separatism in the modern Middle East.

The Middle East today is characterized by an astonishingly bloody civil war in Syria, an ever more highly racialized and militarized approach to the concept of a Jewish state in Israel and the Palestinian territories, an Iraqi state paralyzed by the emergence of class- and region-inflected sectarian identifications, a Lebanon teetering on the edge of collapse from the pressures of its huge numbers of refugees and its sect-bound political system, and the rise of a wide variety of Islamist paramilitary organizations seeking to operate outside all these states. The region's emergence as a 'zone of violence', characterized by a viciously dystopian politics of identity, is a relatively recent phenomenon, developing only over the past century; but despite these shallow historical roots, the mass violence and dispossession now characterizing Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Iraq have emerged as some of the twenty-first century's most intractable problems. In this study, Laura Robson uses a framework of mass violence - encompassing the concepts of genocide, ethnic cleansing, forced migration, appropriation of resources, mass deportation, and forcible denationalization - to explain the emergence of a dystopian politics of identity across the Eastern Mediterranean in the modern era and to illuminate the contemporary breakdown of the state from Syria to Iraq to Israel.