'We', 'they' and the 'human' in the middle: foreign interventions for 'humanitarian reasons' during the nineteenth century in Turkish historiography. Issue 2 (3rd March 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Karakatsanis, Leonidas
• Is Part Of: Middle Eastern studies. Volume 52:Issue 2(2016)
• Page Start: 233
• Page End: 259
• Publication Date: 2016-03-03
• Subjects: Turkey -- Historiography -- Ottoman Empire -- Humanitarian intervention -- Politics -- Education; Middle East -- Periodicals; Moyen-Orient -- Périodiques; 956.005
• DOI: 10.1080/00263206.2015.1122594
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0026-3206

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This paper explores the way in which historiography produced in Turkey (or by Turkish scholars abroad) approaches foreign military/diplomatic interventions in the Ottoman Empire during the long nineteenth century. It focuses on three case studies where 'humanitarian reasons' formed the discursive basis/justification of such interventions. The author argues that when the distinction between victims and perpetrators, civilians and combatants, emerges as an interpretive dilemma in the debates of the historical period examined, similar interpretive and normative challenges are inherited by the historiographical accounts of it. The paper distinguishes two contrasting ways in which Turkish historiographical scholarship responds to such a dilemma. The first remains confined by the way Ottomans themselves viewed the world around them and uncritically reproduces rigid categories of selfhood and otherhood between 'us' and 'them'. The second trajectory offers tools for understanding the conflicts behind the construction of the category of the human worth of international protection, and disentangles itself from the normative bind described above.