Keynote

Post-Ottoman Transitions: Borders, Mobility, and Contested Orders

13 November 2026, 5.30 - 7 pm

Institute's Auditorium, Campus of the University of Vienna

The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of new states fundamentally reshaped the political and social geographies of the Middle East, Anatolia, and the eastern Mediterranean. Yet this transformation can neither be reduced to a clear-cut rupture between empire and nation-state nor adequately explained within the territorial and historiographical boundaries of the nation-states that subsequently emerged. Imperial institutions, social relations, and spatial entanglements persisted across political ruptures, even as new forms of territorial rule, political belonging, and state sovereignty took shape. The post-Ottoman constellation was thus marked by the simultaneity of continuity and profound change, as well as by competing and overlapping orders.
Against this backdrop, the keynote develops a historiographical and conceptual framework for approaching post-Ottoman transitions. At its core is the relationship between the political and territorial reordering that followed the end of empire and the social, economic, and cultural entanglements whose spatial logics did not coincide with the borders of the emerging states. The establishment of new borders therefore did more than rearrange territory: it also transformed the conditions under which mobility, belonging, and social relations were organized and politically defined. At the same time, older spatial connections and patterns of circulation persisted, were transformed, or were recast within new political and legal orders.
From this perspective, borders emerge as dynamic and contested spaces in which the contradictions of post-Ottoman transformation become particularly visible. They illuminate the complex relationship between the territorial logic of emerging states and social spaces and entanglements that did not fully conform to that logic. Post-Ottoman transitions can thus be understood not as a linear passage from imperial to nation-state order, but as open-ended processes of political, spatial, and social reordering in which continuity and change, boundary-making and entanglement, remained inextricably intertwined.