Urban Violence in the Middle East: between Empire and Nation State

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This project will create an Anglo-German research team investigating popular and state violence in urban centres of the Middle East (Ottoman Empire, Arab lands, Iran) in the transition from Empire to nation state. It thus brings together two distinct research traditions in the hope of broadening the methodological and theoretical perspective on either side. Conceived as the nucleus of a research network, the project will make an original research contribution on specific case studies in addition to sparking a comparative discussion about the articulation of violence in urban spaces as an indicator of the relations between state and society. The comparison will be both synchronic (i.e. between different Middle Eastern settings at the same time) as well as diachronic (i.e. investigating the different contexts of empire and nation state in the same settings). Furthermore, the project will use the findings of this research to compare the findings on the Middle East with scholarship on urban violence in European, (other) Asian and African contexts and thus aims at integrating Middle Eastern history into its global setting, following the call for regional studies to contribute to more general theoretical discussions.