Reform or cataclysm? The agreement of 8 February 1914 regarding the Ottoman eastern provinces

Regional Fracture and Its Intractability in World Politics: The Case of the Late Ottoman Empire

“…The Muslim Kurdish communities were viewed as less of a threat to the Sultan than the Christian Armenians. Indeed, Polatel (2015) explains that while Kurdish peasants also suffered at the hands of the Kurdish tribal leaders emboldened by the Sultan, the Armenian cases of dispossession were interwoven with massive violence, expressed in a violent series of events called the Hamidian Massacres in 1884–1886.…”

“…Since the early 18th century, and similar to its contemporaneous empires, the Ottoman Empire struggled to manage its multi-ethnicity, vacillating between periods of gradual reform and authoritarian reversals, most evident in the 19th century. The empire degraded into long cycles of violence in its peripheries since the 18th century (Göcek 2015;Morris and Ze'vi 2019;Üngör 2011;Rogan 2016;Kévorkian 2011), culminating in the Armenian genocide and ethnic cleansing of its Christian minorities in Eastern Anatolia in the early 20th century (Göcek 2015;Bloxham 2007;Akçam 2012;Suny 2015;Balakian 2004;Kieser, Polatel, and Schmutz 2015). But it also exhibited periods and peripheries of relative confessional coexistencesocial peaceunder the Muslim hegemony (Barkey 2008;Makdisi 2019;Campos 2011).…”

“…The agrarian question in Eastern Anatolia refers to the land grabbing from Armenian as well as Kurdish peasants by state agents, the Muslim population, Kurdish tribal leaders, and local Muslim notables (Kieser, Polatel, and Schmutz 2015). It was hardly a new problem in Eastern Anatolia, but it became securitized and politically contested particularly during the Second Constitutional period.…”

The dark side of connectedness: forced migrations and mass violence between the late Tsarist and Ottoman empires (1853–1920)

“…It feared a forceful Muslim reaction against internationally mandated reforms (as in 1895) and, perhaps even more, its evolution into a (possibly foreign-backed) challenge to imperial rule -a danger that seemed to materialize with the Bitlis uprising in April 1914, mostly motivated by Muslim unease over the expected reforms (rather than by Kurdish nationalism). 99 Later on, Unionists harnessed the agrarian question for their own ends, in order to muster support for the de-Christianization of Anatolia. The shift from a failure to contain resource-related conflicts to the willful exploitation of local tensions was thus complete.…”