İlkay Yılmaz (Freie Universität Berlin)talk on “ Security Perceptions and Ottoman Passports (1876-1908)” was held in the framework of the virtual EUME Berliner Seminar on 14 July 2021. The talk was chaired by Önder Çelik (EUME Fellow of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation 2020-22).

This study aims at exploring the relation between the Ottoman government’s threat perceptions, security policies and control over geographical mobility by analyzing the passport regulations with using archival materials. The study tries to explain the disciplinary modern power mechanisms developed by the Ottoman political elite through the analysis of the administrative practices and regulations on geographical mobilization in everyday life as surveillance techniques.
In the Hamidian Era (1876-1908), the geographical mobility is one of the burning issues of the Ottoman political elite as part of the security policies. The new threat perceptions of the political elites, mainly based on political problems, directed their attention to the Armenians, Bulgarians, seasonal workers, foreign workers and members of secret societies. Besides this, the new legislative and administrative security reforms were also influenced by the anarchist fear in Europe and the anti-anarchist regulations against “propaganda by deed”. The threat perceptions thus shaped the security discourse of the political center. 
The new articulations of “vagrant” (serseri) and “agitator/seditous” (fesad) create a discursive link to pejorative understandings of “anarchism” and “anarchist” in official correspondences. It also refers to the security ideology which dwells on the intention of unifying the Empire against “internal and external enemies”. The aim of the study consists in examining the relation between these emergent threat perceptions of the political center, the new regulations on geographical mobilization and criminalization process of certain population groups.

İlkay Yılmaz:  Security Perceptions and Ottoman Passports (1876-1908)

In the first decade of his reign, Vladimir Putin de-emphasized ideology to consolidate control and reinstate legitimacy of state power. The 2011 protests led him to shift gears and assume an ideological approach to consolidating legitimacy. This approach, however, led to the empowerment of “ideological entrepreneurs,” some of whom the Kremlin views as a liability. Who are the ideological entrepreneurs and how does the Kremlin manage them? What are the components of the Kremlin’s ideological operation and how does it impact ordinary Russians? Maria Lipman addressed these questions in her talk.

Speaker:
Maria Lipman - Editor, Point & Counterpoint

02/05/2019 - The Kremlin and Its Ideological Toolbox

"A War for the Better Past: Political Visions in Post-Soviet Counterfactual Histories" by Oleksandr Zabirko in the framework of the Prisma Ukraïna workshop "When the Muses are not silent: Intellectuals’ and Artists’ Responses to the Ukraine-Russia Conflict and post-Maidan Developments in Ukraine" in Berlin on 19 June, 2018

As one of the most popular types of speculative fiction, the “alternative” or “counterfactual histories” constitute a literary genre, in which one or more historical events occur differently than in the historical record. While in the Western fiction the literary models of time travel and counterfactual history function as the elements of the unreal “secondary world” and thus construct a distance between the fantastic and the mundane, contemporary Russophone  authors exploit the generic conventions of fantasy or science fiction in order to suggest a continuity between fiction and reality. Being omnipresent in various media, this aestheticized, counterfactual reality captivates its consumers and is arguably capable of substituting the real world, thus making it possible to read and interpret current geopolitical conflicts (like the war in Donbas) through the prism of speculative fiction. Focusing on geopolitical and social modeling in post-Soviet speculative fiction, the paper claims that the images of the Other, the archaic communal structures and the transformations of historical time provide here an aesthetic ground for a large patriotic consensus of a community united by common resentment.

O. Zabirko: A War for the Better Past: Political Visions in Post-Soviet Counterfactual Histories

The Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien is a platform that promotes the internationalization of research in the humanities and social sciences. It is dedicated to a research agenda that systematically links disciplinary approaches and the expertise of area studies by focusing on entanglements and interactions across national, cultural or regional borders. The Forum invites scholars from all over the world for fellowships and develops transregional communication formats.

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İlkay Yılmaz: Security Perceptions and Ottoman Passports (1876-1908)

Forum Transregionale Studien

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