Preliminary Programme

This article unpacks the multiple meanings and chronologies of ‘wars’ through Luhai/Mizo social memories of ‘global’ wars in the British Indo-Burma frontier. I seek to de-center hegemonic, and often Eurocentric, genealogies of colonialism and imperialism by arguing that such legacies concealed historical continuities of violence before and after the World wars. I illustrate how violent social histories here complicate hegemonic narratives of war that were re-purposed for ethnic-minority nationalism, while posturing a distinctly Europeanized view of war that misrecognizes totalized violence within democracies. New forms of ‘total warfare’ originated from Euro-American and Japanese imperial conflicts here, which continued defining postcolonial Indian nation-state’s response to violent secessionism that was cloaked as developmentalism and counterinsurgency. ‘Total wars’ here were longstanding, initially calibrated by colonial rule and subsequently within democracies.
The World wars globalized self-determination movements by merging imperialism with nationalism, and afforded more agency to ethnically-defined minorities in imperial peripheries. I discuss how Lushai/Mizo ‘frontier tribes’ participated in, and ambivalently appropriated contradictory memories of war and nostalgic imperial connections to navigate the transitioning political orders from empire to nation-state, but at the cost of militarization of society in postcolonial decades. This reveals the long history of coercive state-making and the ubiquity of continuing violent conflicts in these borderworlds, which is otherwise selectively whitewashed. The outcomes diversify the global and social history of total wars evidenced in dissonantly memorialized experiences of non-European populations who were uniquely positioned at the borders of warring empires and later, nation-states. (Show less)

The focus of the paper is the emergence and development of the new administrative design of the political geography of the eastern provinces during the Hamidian era. This paper aims at opening a discussion on how the international power conflicts and new understandings of borders, population and sovereignty had a profound impact on the construction of both the international borders of the Ottoman Empire and, from the perspective of administrative geography, its internal borders, as well. To do so, this paper focuses on the Ottoman Government’s General Inspectorate of Anatolian Reforms. I will examine the reports and proposals of General Inspector Ahmet ?akir Pa?a which mainly focused on the task of producing an inventory of the region, with the intent of reconstructing the political geography of the region as a borderland. With using his previous experience in Crete, in Danube and in St. Petersburg, he reframed the government’s security policies in the six provinces, and he aimed to plan the region in a manner that would facilitate the army in reaching the provinces and the Russian border. (Show less)