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In this innovative, interdisciplinary work, Zozan Pehlivan presents a new environmental perspective on intercommunal conflict, rooting slow violence in socioeconomic shifts and climatic fluctuations. From the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, recurrent and extreme climate disruptions became an underlying yet unacknowledged component of escalating conflict between Christian Armenian peasants and Muslim Kurdish pastoralists in Ottoman Kurdistan. By the eve of the First World War, the Ottoman state's shifting responses to these mounting tensions transformed the conflict into organized and state-sponsored violence. Pehlivan upends the 'desert-sown' thesis and establishes a new theoretical and conceptual framework drawing on climate science, agronomy, and zoology. From this alternative vantage point, Pehlivan examines the impact of climate on local communities, their responses and resilience strategies, arguing that nineteenth-century ecological change had a transformative and antagonistic impact on economy, state, and society.
About the author
Zozan Pehlivan is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.
Summary
Zozan Pehlivan's innovative examination of slow violence in late Ottoman Kurdistan offers an alternative theoretical framework for understanding inter-communal conflict. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, Pehlivan argues that ecological and climatic fluctuations had a transformative and antagonistic impact on economy, state and society.
