Transnational Communist Networks in the Post-WWI Middle East: Anticolonialism, Internationalism and Itinerant Militancy (1919-1928)

This dissertation’s core objective is to give the history of Middle Eastern anticolonial and revolutionary activism and its actors in the 1920s their rightful place within post-World War I global radical politics. Networks formed around the Communist International after 1919 serve as the protagonist of this story. The dissertation begins with a discussion of the 1917-1927 Global Revolutionary Wave with particular attention to the Middle East. It argues that the anticolonial revolutions and rebellions in the Middle East between 1919 and 1927 were integral parts of a global wave of revolutions. Using this revolutionary wave as the backdrop, it shows that most Middle Eastern militants reached communist militancy as a consequence of their bid for national liberation and not as an internationalist alternative to nationalism. Through the political trajectories of a number of militants, this dissertation argues that the early years of the Communist International in the region were marked by the convergence of militants and groups with sundry political origins and coming from diverse networks. The First Part of the dissertation connects the history of Middle Eastern anticolonialism to other national and regional contexts by shifting its attention among Turkey and Iran, Algeria and China, or still Syria and France, among others. By so doing, it challenges Middle-East-centric approaches, showing that the story of Middle Eastern anticolonialism was not an exclusively regional one. The Second Part shifts to the porous borderlands – metaphorically and literally – of the Middle East through cases of cross-border agents and instruments.