On the Border in Kilis

Wednesday, October 20, 2021

I saw an interesting article in the New York Times today. The article relates to the small Turkish city of Kilis, located not far from the border with Syria. The focus of the piece was that, whereas much of Turkey is now demanding that Syrian refugees go home, Kilis is somehow different. 

 

Borders And Our World Today

Thursday, August 5, 2021

The other day I received an email message from the Wilson Center in Washington DC referring to borders, so you know I was interested. The message was advertising an interview with Paul Werth, an historian of the Russian Empire and professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. The question-and-answer session with Werth, who has written extensively on the issue of religious administration in Russia, is rather short but interesting. I recommend that you check it out. 

Sarpi border crossing between
Georgia and Turkey

The title of the interview was "Russia's Enclosure and the Issues of Bordermaking," which immediately caught my attention. In both my previous book, Turks Across Empires, and in the biography that I'm currently working on in relation to the poet Nâzım Hikmet and his generation of Turkish communist border-crossers, I've written a fair bit about frontiers and the people who cross them. Indeed, one of the arguments I make in each of these books is that we need to look more closely at people's locations and surrounding circumstances, and less at ideology, as a means of better understanding what the individuals I look at were trying to achieve.