Kurdish-Christian intercommunal relations : the sectarianization of northern Ottoman-Iranian borderlands, 1830-1914

The catastrophic Armenian genocide of 1915 has long set the trend for the study of intercommunal relations between Kurdish and Christian groups of Ottoman East Anatolia and northwest Iran. In the process, Russian and the Ottoman Empires have been identified as key players in exploiting ethnoreligious distinctions to the advantage of imperial centers and at the expense of the inhabitants of Ottoman East Anatolia. However, the crucial impact that the process of Ottoman-Iranian boundary-making left on intercommunal relations has been understudied. This dissertation traces the impact of the frontier delimitation process on intercommunal relations among ethnoreligious groups straddling the northwest stretch of the Ottoman-Iranian borders. This study proposes that the process of making the Ottoman-Iranian boundaries, which involved redefinitions of sovereignty and subjecthood as preambles to the emergence of the modern states of Iran and Turkey, led to an intense imperial rivalry over the religious identity of imperial subjects of the frontier. Interest and investment in the religious identities of overlapping borderland populations sprang from rival empires’ desire to rejuvenate their compromised sovereignty among their frontiers through strengthening their loyalty and allegiance. The presence of foreign missions and consuls and native subjects with extralegal statuses complicated such imperial efforts, and ultimately worked as contributing factor to the sectarianization of the borderland populations’ communal visions and boundaries. The missions, foreign consuls, and travelers helped to construct a sectarian narrative of intercommunal conflict as they too stressed the religious distinctions of different communities through disproportionate attention to the welfare and education of the Christian minorities. Over time, imperial and missionary rivalry and discriminatory policies of prioritizing the wishes of one group over another’s, led to the emergence of sectarian communities with distinctive communal boundaries and aspirations that could hardly be reconciled. When wartime conditions were imposed on the borderland populations in 1915, sectarianized communities brutalized each other, sending untold number of people to their deaths in the process