ESIL Interest Group History of International Law

ESIL Interest Group History of International Law

Thursday 21 July 2022

BOOK: Jonathan CONLIN & Ozan OZAVCI, They All Made Peace – What is Peace? The 1923 Lausanne Treaty and the New Imperial Order (Gingko, 2023)

Source: the Lausanne Project

Description:

The last of the post-World War One peace settlements, Lausanne was very different from Versailles. Like its German and Austro-Hungarian allies the defeated Ottoman Empire had initially been presented with a dictated peace in 1920. In just two years, however, the Kemalist insurgency turned defeat into victory, enabling Turkey to claim its place as the first sovereign state in the Middle East. Meanwhile the Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, Egyptians, Kurds and other communities who had also populated the Ottoman Empire sought their own forms of sovereignty, jostled between the Soviet Union and the resurgence of empire in the guise of League of Nations mandates. Already disillusioned with the Versailles toolkit, recourse was had to a new peace-making initiative: a forced population exchange, affecting 1.5m people.

They All Made Peace is the first English-language publication to consider the Treaty and its legacy a century on. A stellar group of historians present a contrapuntal, multi-perspective analysis of 1923. Chapters consider British, Turkish and Soviet designs in the post-Ottoman world, situate the population exchanges relative to earlier and subsequent peacemaking efforts, and discuss the economic factors behind the reallocation of Ottoman debt as well as the management of refugee flows. Further chapters examine the“absent presences”, Kurdish, Arab, Iranian, Armenian, and other communities refused formal accreditation at Lausanne, but nonetheless forced to live with the consequences, which are still emerging, one hundred years on.

Table of Contents:

Part 1: From One Imperial Order to Another

Minority Rights and International Law at Lausanne – Aimee Genell
Britain’s Plans for a New Eastern Mediterranean Empire – Erik Goldstein
The Soviet Union and the post-WWI International Order – Samuel Hirst & Etienne Peyrat
From the Clash of Civilizations to Nationalism Theory? – Cemil Aydın

Part 2: Moving the People

International Law and the Greek-Bulgarian and Greek-Turkish Population Exchange – Leonard V. Smith
A Capitalist Peace? Money, Labor, and Refugee Resettlement – Laura Robson
Re-Mix? Armenian Autonomy and the Limits of Post-Genocide “Co-Existence” – Lerna Ekmekçioglu
Thanassis Aghnides, Ayrilios Spatharis and the Population Exchange – Haakon Ikonomou & Dimitris Kamouzis

Part 3: Making Concessions

Oil over Armenians: The “Lausanne Shift” in US Relations with the Middle East – Andrew Patrick
The Mosul Question: Lausanne and After – Sarah Shields
The Division of the Ottoman Debt – Mustafa Aksakal & Patrick Schilling

Part 4: Absent PresencesIranian Attempts to Participate at Lausanne – Leila Koochakzadeh
Arab Exclusion at Lausanne: A Critical Historical Juncture? – Elizabeth F. Thompson
The Kurds and the Defunct States of the Middle East – David S. Patel

Part 5: Framing Lausanne

Framing Pasts and Futures at Lausanne – Hans-Lukas Kieser
Lausanne in Turkish Official and Popular Historiography – Gökhan Çetinsaya
Diplomacy, Entertainment, Souvenir? Guignol à Lausanne and Caricature – Julia Secklehner

More information can be found on the Lausanne Project's website.