Research project Lost in Transition: Obscuring the Arab Caliph and its Consequences after Lausanne
The Lausanne Project: The Project takes its name from the longest-lasting of the post-First World War peace settlements: the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.
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Funded by Gingko and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the publications, website and other programs contributed to the project aim to provide a forum for scholars to share new research on interwar relations between the Middle East and the rest of the world, and to reflect on Lausanne’s legacy – for 2023 and beyond.
Isa Blumi’s contributions to the project include a close inspection into transitional societies in regions impacted by the treaty—the Western Balkan lands separating Albania and Greece (known as Chameria or Epirus), and the lands inhabited by Arabic-speaking Muslims. Of primary concern is the evolution of the policies competing actors maintained in respect to the survival of Ottoman era institutions, a process that ultimately led to the collapse of the Caliphate.
Project description
Far from being uniform, the British imperial apparatus constituted a plurality of administrative projects seeking to use the Caliphate for different, often contradictory and thus clashing, objectives. While the larger British Empire eventually abandoned the issue in face of conflicted demands made of it from a soon-to-be-created Turkish Republic, the events leading to the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 and the subsequent adjustments throughout the larger world inhabited by Muslims reveal calculations rarely considered in the scholarship.
Participating in a larger project that aims to reflect broadly and in new ways on the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, my contribution to “The Lausanne Project” explores the numerous policies adopted by conflicting imperial and local/indigenous projects within the larger context of competing empires facing disparate and contradictory challenges from the Muslims over whom they hoped to rule. In the process, the chapter I will contribute to the larger project asks why local events regularly upset such schemes that sought to mobilize the Caliphate in particular. The questions asked around these local events will be answered by returning focus to a multiplicity of factors, including those taking place among those hoping to return a post-Ottoman Caliphate to the Arab world. These contradictory ambitions would ultimately contribute to the modern world’s (dis)order and should influence how we scholars read the Treaty of Lausanne and its significance moving forward to the creation of modern Turkey, the directions of Middle East and Balkan societies, and how modern diplomacy would take shape in the 20th century.
The Lausanne Project itself takes its name from the longest-lasting of the post-First World War peace settlements: the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. Funded by Gingko and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the publications, website and other programs contributed to the project aim to provide a forum for scholars to share new research on interwar relations between the Middle East and the rest of the world, and to reflect on Lausanne’s legacy – for 2023 and beyond.
The Lausanne Project was conceived in 2017, partly in reaction to the raft of scholarly projects then in preparation for the centenary of the Paris peace conference of 1919. The convenors were struck by the contrast between these initiatives and the dearth of scholarly attention paid to Lausanne outside Turkey. Although diplomatic historians had long recognized Lausanne as exceptional, as “the longest-lasting of the post-war settlements” (Alan Sharp), it continued to figure as an outlier or semi-detached epilogue in accounts focused on the 1919-20 treaties.
Research into the journalist and ideologue Ahmet Ağaoğlu and the diplomat and oil magnate Calouste Gulbenkian (both born in 1869) introduced them to networks of intellectual, social and economic exchange that refused to fit neatly into established metanarratives surrounding the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and emergence of a new Middle East.
Study of bank and oil company archives demonstrated how multinational enterprises like Gulbenkian’s Royal Dutch-Shell manipulated “host” states who claimed them as “national champions”, making a mockery of any notion of “energy security”. (Post-)Ottoman actors embraced strands of nationalist and liberal ideas partially as a response to these perceived encroachments and aggression.
Encouraged to find other scholars exploring the role of NGOs, the press, diaspora groups and other non-state actors in reshaping the relationship between “East” and “West” in the interwar period, Ozavci and Conlin organized a workshop on Lausanne, to prepare a co-edited book of centenary essays that will be published by the Gingko Library in 2023. This group of scholars has since been joined by others – all of whom are introduced on the members page of this site.
Other elements of the project include a travelling exhibition built around Guignol à Lausanne (1923), a collection of caricatures by Hungarian Jewish artists Alois Derso and Emery Kelèn, as well as a collaboration with the Musée Historique Lausanne, on a series of exhibitions and outreach events in Lausanne itself.
Research Subjects:
History, Diplomacy, Art History, Journalism/Media Studies, Political Economy, Middle East Studies, Balkan Studies
Project members
Members
Aimee Genell
Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern History
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Andrew Patrick
Associate Professor of History
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Ayşe Köse Badur
PhD Candidate in History
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David S. Patel
Associate Director for Research
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Cemil Aydin
Professor of History
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Cihan Tekayi
PhD Candidate in Anthropology
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Davide Rodogno
Professor of International History & Politics
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Dimitris Kamouzis
Researcher
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Elizabeth F. Thompson
Professor of History
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Erik Goldstein
Professor of International Relations and Professor of History
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Etienne Peyrat
Assistant Professor of History
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Gökhan Çetinsaya
Historian
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Haakon Ikonomou
Associate Professor
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Hamit Bozarslan
Director of Studies
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Hans-Lukas Kieser
Associate Professor of History
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Ilikm Buke Okyar
Assistant Professor of Political Science
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Isa Blumi
Associate Professor of Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies
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Jonathan Conlin
Senior Lecturer in Modern History
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Julia Secklehner
Research Fellow for the CRAACE Project at the Department of Art History
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Laura Robson
Professor of History
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Lauren Banko
Research Associate of History
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Leila Koochakzadeh
Lecturer
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Leonard Smith
Professor of History
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Lerna Ekmekçioğlu
Associate Professor of History
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Maria Dimitriadou
Curator of the Historical Archives Department
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Michelle Tusan
Professor of History
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Mustafa Aksakal
Chair of Modern Turkish Studies and Associate Professor of History
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Nathalie Clayer
Director of Research
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Ozan Ozavci
Assistant Professor of Transimperial History
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Patrick Schilling
PhD candidate in history
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Samuel Hirst
Assistant Professor of International Relations
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Sarah Shields
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
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Publications
More about this project
Official Website of the Project:
https://thelausanneproject.com/