Anatolia at the end of the Ottoman Empire constituted a veritable melting pot of violently uprooted peoples from Eurasia, the Balkans, Levant, and the larger Middle East. Due to wars since the early decades of the 19th century, Anatolia became the destination point for millions of refugees, at times steered to the relatively safe confines of the Empire’s geographic core. Importantly, this relocation of refugees took place while these same state institutions busily expelled Armenian, Pontic Greek, and Kurdish others. The resulting mélange of humanity crossing different paths invariably informed several state-building programs during the late Ottoman and then post-Ottoman periods. 

The struggle to build a new society out of the rubble of the Ottoman Empire has received attention from the Turkish academy. Heralding the process as a success story equivalent to nation-building campaigns in Europe and North America, Turkish scholars and many Euro-American apologists of the Kemalism to which the process was first linked regularly pointed to Turkey’s resulting modernization. Rarely was this process considered in rural Anatolia, however, details Dr. Sezer offers in her short book. 

Sadly, it is difficult to dissociate Sezer’s work from the laudatory narratives customized by Turkish state-funded universities since the 1930s. As Sezer accesses rarely studied archival material on the heavy investment in settlement and economic development of Anatolia’s vast rural areas, she ends up offering a disappointing listing the delivery of “development” without a corresponding linking to a violence unlikely to formally register in official documents. This is perhaps because Sezer fails to engage a scholarship that foregrounds the violence accompanying modern state building in general and the unique conditions that required Turkey’s vulnerable state to specifically use force to realize a political elite’s goals.

In Sezer’s hands, Ankara’s political masters’ building, through nationalism, an “imagined” community need not go beyond reference to the work of Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, and Anthony Smith. None of these works theorize forcefully how state violence corresponded with these modern identify formation processes. Her de facto obfuscation of the modern state’s often highlighted violent practice means Sezer must avoid details that explain how large tracks of Anatolian countryside became underpopulated by the mid-1920s in the first place. By forgetting to reflect on the precursors of her story, Sezer thus fail to contextualize the subsequent waves of refugees to settle these lands. 

Fortunately, this process of state building has regularly attracted the critical attention of scholars outside of Turkey. Considering she wrote her dissertation in Germany one therefore wonders if supervisors and committee members pressed her to contextualize better the conditions in which the newly established Turkish Republic was designing its rural society. Her few references to Uğur Üngör’s essential study, for example, avoids his conclusions that demonstrated how Anatolia’s diverse cultural heritage faced almost complete erasure, mirroring the normative “European” experiences of violent state-building scholars of modern states like Charles Tilly have long emphasized. Equally problematic are Sezer’s failures to engage earlier works by Ryan Gingeras and Michael Meeker. That Sezer draws on archival material from specific projects to develop Izmir’s hinterland is itself crucial to the task of highlighting the violent history of the “regime” behind administrating the rural zones of Izmir that Gingeras revealed went beyond fighting an occupying Greek army. That said, Sezer does move beyond clumsy binaries accompanying post-World War II narratives of Turkey’s development by inspecting a 1920s and 1930s period of heavy investment in repopulating many of those empty villages impacted by war. Still, her analysis of this process misplaces Ottoman and then Republican state programs to administer ethno-national solutions to such contingencies. 

The uniqueness of Sezer’s study is the focus on the manner policies of forced assimilation (while not labelled as such, Kemalism is very much the program of ethnic cleansing/erasure) extended as much to rural areas as the cities. Sezer’s revealing analysis of projects aiming to facilitate the settlement of villages around Izmir suggests the very configurations that organized village life around common spaces aimed to distract “backward” peasants. What Sezer misses is to accurately explain from what. The planned civilian spaces like squares and town halls were designed to allow vetted representatives of the state to regularly engage the village population. This meant would-be social engineers modernizing rural Anatolia aimed to dislodge the spiritual life of Turkey’s peasants who often did not yet speak Turkish (as they were Kurds or refugees from the Ottoman Empire’s Balkan and Levantine lands). Here lay the sad irony. While in Anatolia because they were Muslims (expelled from their native Balkan and Caucasian homelands for not being Christian), the new subjects of Kemalism were aggressively disentangled from their spiritual, cultural, and linguistic heritage by way of such village designs. That leads to the contested forms of state that are not registered in Sezer’s analysis of plans drawn up by Ankara to create an “imagined” secular, ethnically-racially Turkish community. 

In suggesting that self-identified Muslims simply ignored the fact their newly designed villages deemphasized Islam by sidelining mosques she misses the fact such measures of “modernization” contributed to the major political (opposition) movements that shaped this modern state-building process in the 1920s and 1930s in the first place. Here Meeker’s study of the Black Sea littoral would have come to great use. In other words, Sezer, by neglecting to connect these processes to ongoing struggles for control over Anatolia, she misses the chance to add to our rethinking of secularism and citizenship that implicates the authors behind those reports she studies. 

The problem with writing histories that need a detailed excavation of archives left by interwar regimes is these documents must be put in the context of violence used to govern Turkey’s contested borderlands and interior. While Sezer’s archival sources suggest self-identified secular institutions used nation-building initiatives to create modern Turkey, this meant balancing the different ethno-national associations of refugees. In other words, the establishment of a Turkish state infrastructure had to culturally uproot many Albanian, Kurdish, Jewish, Arab, and practicing Turkish Muslim refugees before modernizing them. This destabilizing function of the modern village meant to replace “primitive” communal living patterns is softly acknowledged in Sezer’s study, but she fails to explore the deeper tensions motivating such investments in creating culturally sterile living spaces.