The Political Ecology of Violence in the Last Ottoman Century

The CMES Environmental Studies of the Middle East Speaker Series presents “The Political Ecology of Violence in the Last Ottoman Century” with Zozan Pehlivan, Assistant Professor of History, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; Mellon Fellow at Newberry Library, Chicago

The CMES Environmental Studies of the Middle East Speaker Series presents “The Political Ecology of Violence in the Last Ottoman Century” with Zozan Pehlivan, Assistant Professor of History, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; Mellon Fellow at Newberry Library, Chicago

Professor Pehlivan is an environmental historian of the modern Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, and Ottoman Kurdistan. Her research and teaching focus on the history of environments, violence, comparative empires, animals, and pastoralists. Her first book monograph, “The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century” (Cambridge University Press, Spring 2024) examines the outcome of recurrent nineteenth-century global climate fluctuations and related Ottoman policies on pastoralists. By focusing on the impacts of climate change on the deterioration of limited natural resources, her book charts the importance of material conditions on the rise of ethnoreligious tensions between Muslim Kurdish pastoralists and Christian Armenian peasants on the eve of the Great War.

Her interdisciplinary research has been awarded by many institutions, including the Institute of Historical Research (2011), the American Society for Environmental History (2018), and the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (2021), and McKnight Land-Grant Professor at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities (2021-2023). She is also a recipient of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar Award and her article “El Niño and the Nomads” (2020) was awarded the Ömer Lütfi Barkan Article Prize by the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. For the 2023-2024 academic year, she will be a Mellon Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago. At Newberry, she will work on her second book monograph, tentatively titled “Empires of Sedentarization: How Americans and Ottomans Conquered Grasslands”, examining imperial responses to environmental stress during the modern era (1830-1930). This project analyzes the relationship between climate change, state policies, dispossession, violence, and criminalization of Indigenous populations, and proposes a comparative study of forced sedentarization (iskan in Turkish) and migration of herding communities between diverse environmental and political contexts. Taking as case studies the Great Plains and Ottoman Kurdistan, the project examines the ways in which American and Ottoman imperial powers consolidated control in areas inhabited by the herders.

She is also a "collaborator" on a 7-year, $2.5 million SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) Partnership Grant for the project "Appraising risk, past and present: Interrogating historical data to enhance understanding of environmental crises in the Indian Ocean World."

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Contact: Liz Flanagan