Following the First World War, the Middle East witnessed a profound political transformation. The entirety of the post-Ottoman Middle East, from Turkey to Palestine, from Syria to Iraq, came under European colonial occupation, which in turn provoked sustained anticolonial resistance. At the same time, under the impact of the October Revolution in the former Russian Empire, communist groups started to emerge in the region, splicing registers of social and national liberation. In this context, British and French empires employed a range of measures against revolutionary politics in the region, from new border regimes and passport rules to novel intelligence-gathering methods. This paper examines the mutually reinforcing rise of revolutionary politics in the post-WWI Middle East and the emergence of new colonial surveillance methods in major urban centers across the region.
Burak Sayım is an SNSF Ambizione Fellow and the Principal Investigator of the “Anticolonial Internationalism in the Interwar Middle East” project at the University of Basel.