The emergence of the modern Middle East is the result of three complementary historical developments: the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the institution of British and French control in its stead and the nationalist challenges to this colonial scramble. The introduction of international borders that accompanied this process is commonly portrayed as the drawing of lines in the sand, an artificial partitioning that brought diplomatic closure to an otherwise contested historical space. For the past two decades, insights gained from the burgeoning field of borderlands studies have enabled a new generation of scholars to challenge such popular depictions. For them, the region's borderlands were not sites of peripheral activity, but rather liminal spaces criss-crossed by global flows and circulations central to state- and nation-formation across the Middle East. Regimes of Mobility offers a select number of case studies that highlight the connectedness of the politics of borderlands throughout the interwar Middle East.

In Age of Rogues, leading scholars engage with themes of historical and cultural legacies, contentious interactions within imperial regimes, and the biographical trajectory of men and women who challenged the political status quo of their time. Rebels, revolutionaries and racketeers played central roles in the violent process of imperial disintegration as it unfolded in the frontiers of the Ottoman, Habsburg, Romanov and Qajar empires. This is a history of these transgressive actors from the late-19th century to the interwar years. This time was marked by similar, if not shared, revolutionary experiences and repertoires of contention across the connected geography of the Balkans, the Middle East and the Caucasus.