Towards a Decentred History of the Middle East: Transborder Space, Circulations, Frontier Effects and State Formation, 1920-1946

Within this framework my project focuses on the Bedouin tribes of the desert borderlands between Iraq, Syria and Transjordan from the late 1920s to the post-WWII period. Looking at the influence of droughts, my research seeks to (re-)examine the interactions between modern practices of territorial governance, environmental crises, and the pastoral economy of the Bedouin tribes in the Middle East. In doing so, the project explores the entanglements between the environment, new-state borders and imperial policing of the human and non-human inhabitants of the desert borderlands as well as their spaces of agency.