Description:

Sea-Border and Air-Space Formation in the Interwar Middle East: A Trans-Imperial Perspective

Based on two epistemological notions –e.g. sea- and air-ports as borderlands, on the one hand, and the co-production of an “imperial cloud” resulting from increasing connectivity between and across British and French empires– this research project proposes a much more holistic yet finely grained of two apparently contradictory and yet entangled processes; namely, border-making and the local appropriation of the principle of territoriality, on the one hand, and the integration of the Middle Eastern region into the global mobility regimes that prevailed during the first half of the twentieth century, on the other. Specifically, the project seeks to provide:

1. A socio-historical analysis of how sea and air border-making processes aligned, and did not, with land borders in the interwar period.
2. A study of British and French imperialism in the Middle East that unravels entangled processes of competition, cooperation and connectivity in order to open up new scales, both in terms of space and time, as a means to rewrite the histories of empires.
3. A careful examination of local agency; namely, how grass-root level actors shaped border-making processes in the region as well as regional and global mobility regimes.

OntoME Project

This OntoME project is dedicated to gathering the various profiles necessary to document the information collected by project members in a specific model tailored to answer the research questions of the project.