Danny Zahreddine, Gabriel Leanca, Youssef Alvarenga Cherem Special Issue: A Hundred Years Since the End of the Ooman Empire – Introducon

Special Issue: A Hundred Years Since the

End of the Ottoman Empire – Introduction

Danny Zahreddine

Gabriel Leanca

Youssef Alvarenga Cherem

DOI: 10.5752/P.2317-773X.2020v8.n4.p7

Recebido em 14 de dezembro de 2020.

Aprovado em 14 de dezembro de 2020.

The idea of publishing this special issue of Revista Estudos Inter-

nacionais emerged after the Second International Seminar on the Middle

East, which was organized by the Department of International Relations

at PUC Minas and by the Middle East and North Africa Study Group

(GEOMM, PUC Minas) between 11

and 13

of September 2019. The top-

ic of the seminar was entitled “A Hundred Years Since the End of the

Ottoman Empire”. Needless to say, the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in

the First World War and the Treaty of Sèvres (10

of August, 1920) rep-

resented not only the last phase of its existence, but it inaugurated a new

era for the international relations in the Middle East. The collapse of the

Ottoman Empire had consequences that are still felt in the region to this

day. The Ottoman political legacy reverberated in the relations among

the various ethnic-religious minorities and nation states that emerged on

the ruins of the empire. It played a part in the ways in which the changing

forces vying for power and inuence in the region acted, as well as in the

formation of the political views of Muslims, Christians, Jews, and other

local religious communities. Thus, our aim was to bridge between the

historical dimension of the Ottoman geopolitics and society and the con-

temporary challenges related to Turkey’s complex ambitions with respect

to Europe, Middle East, and Central Asia.

Researchers from seven countries (Germany, Argentina, Brazil,

Israel, Lebanon, Romania, and Turkey) and from eleven dierent high-

er education institutions (PUC Minas, PUC São Paulo, UFMG, UFRGS,

USP, UNIFESP, UNESP, National University of Rosario, University Al-

exandru Ioan Cuza, University of Innsbruck and University of Tel Aviv)

took part in this dossier. This special edition consists of ten papers that

deal with historical as well as recent perspectives. They vary from local

to regional and world aairs.

The rst section of the dossier pertains to a number of histor-

ical and political topics. Naif Bezwan in his article “The Status of the

Non-Muslim Communities in the Ottoman Empire: A Non-Orientalised

Decolonial Approach” sheds light on the relation between the Ottoman

Empire and its non-Muslim communities from a historical perspective.

1. BA in International Relations from the

Pontiﬁcal Catholic University of Minas

Gerais, MA and PhD in Geography from

the Postgraduate Program in Spatial

Information Treatment (PUC Minas).

Professor at the Department of Inter-

national Relations at PUC Minas and a

permanent member of the Postgraduate

Program in International Relations (PUC

Minas). Leader of the Middle East and

Maghreb Study Group - CNPq (GEOMM).

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-

7400-0300.

2. Lecturer in the history of internatio-

nal relations at the Faculty of History,

Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iași,

Romania. He holds a collaborative PhD

from Alexandru Ioan Cuza University

and Bourgogne University, France. He

recently edited L’entrée de la Roumanie

dans la Grande Guerre. Documents

diplomatiques français (28 juillet-29

décembre 1914), Paris, L’Harmattan,

2020 and he is the author of À l’ère des

empires et des nations : la France et les

principautés de Moldavie et de Valachie

(1711-1859), t. I (1711-1789), Les

Éditions Isis, coll. du Centre d’histoire

diplomatique ottomane, Istanbul (2019).

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-

9903-7433

3. BA in International Relations from the

Pontiﬁcal Catholic University of Minas

Gerais (2003), MA and PhD in Social

Anthropology from the State University

of Campinas (2005, 2010), currently

teaching at the Federal University of

São Paulo. His research focuses chieﬂy

on the History of the Middle East, Islam,

and anthropology of religion. ORCID:

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2516-9657.

estudos internacionais • Belo Horizonte, ISSN 2317-773X, v. 8, n. 4, (dez. 2020), p. 7-9

He argues for the necessity of understanding the dynamics and the ratio-

nale behind Ottoman policies and practices toward these communities.

Youssef Cherem and Danny Zahreddine then focused on a central com-

ponent of the reforms and of the international relations of the Ottoman

Empire in the 19

century: the juridical status of non-Moslem, particular-

ly Christian, minorities. Thus, in their contribution “Integration, conict,

and autonomy among religious minorities in the late Ottoman Empire:

the Greek-Catholic (Melkite) Church and sectarian turmoil in Mount

Lebanon and Damascus”, Youssef Cherem and Danny Zahreddine exam-

ined two key aspects: the ocial recognition of the Greek Catholic (Mel-

kite) religious community in 1848 and the multilayered conict in Mount

Lebanon and Damascus in 1860. The impact of the defeat in the Balkan

War (1912-1913) as a critical moment for the Ottoman Empire has been

covered by Edmar Avelar Sena, Guilherme Di Lorenzo Pires and Alaor

Souza Oliveira. Their contribution to this issue is entitled “Between a

Traumatic Past and an Uncertain Future: a study on the representations

of the Ottoman defeat in the Balkan War (1912-1913)”. It looked at the rep-

resentation of the Ottoman defeat in the editorials of the La Jeune Turquie,

an Ottoman newspaper published in Paris at the time of the Balkan Wars.

Rodrigo Augusto Duarte Amaral and Reginaldo Mattar Nasser’s con-

tribution “The creation of the Iraqi state beyond Sykes-Picot: Between

Imperialism and Revolution”, analyzed how the end of the Ottoman Em-

pire shaped the policies of the British and the French succeeding powers

in the region. Thus, the Iraqi case reveals the local struggles for the inde-

pendence of the Arab country and the policies of domination of European

forces in the region after the conclusion of the Sykes-Picot agreement.

Next Gabriel Leanca emphasized on the “Eastern Question”, which is a

central theme of International Relations in the 19

century. In his article

“The Ottoman Empire and Europe from the late Westphalian order to

the Crimean system: the ‘Eastern Question’ Revisited” he looks at how

center-periphery relations had an impact on the world balance of power.

The second section of the dossier introduces more directly the ques-

tion of the Ottoman legacy in contemporary Turkish politics. In their

contribution entitled “The End of the Ottoman Empire and the Evolution

of the Middle East Security Complex”, Jorge Mascarenhas Lasmar and

Leonardo Santa Rita discover connections and intersections that bridge

between several phases of the Middle Eastern geopolitical playground.

Then Nir Boms and Kivanc Ulusoy’s “Rival American Allies: Turkey and

Israel in the Eastern Mediterranean” analyze and dissect how periods of

rapprochement alternated at key moments with rivalry and misunder-

standing between the Ottoman Empire and the Yishuv, between the Re-

public of Turkey and Israel, respectively.

The last section of this issue is dedicated to the relations between

the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, respectively and Latin America. Thus,

Rubén Paredes Rodríguez, in his article entitled “Turkish-Ottoman re-

lations with Latin America: a journey through the time capsule”, sheds

light on three distinct periods: the rst one studies the transition from

the imperial regime to the republican government (1923); the second re-

fers to the evolutions that had an impact on these ties in the second half

Danny Zahreddine, Gabriel Leanca, Youssef Alvarenga Cherem Special Issue: A Hundred Years Since the End of the Ooman Empire – Introducon

of the 20

century; nally, the third one covers the last two decades. Fo-

cusing on the same topic, André Luiz Reis da Silva and Gabriela Dor-

neles Ferreira da Costa in their contribution entitled “Brazil and Turkey

in the 21

century: strategic interests in comparative perspective”, stress

upon the setting of the bilateral agenda between Brazil and Turkey in the

last decades. Finally, Arlene Clemesha and Silvia Ferabolli explored in a

critical fashion the ways in which the Middle Eastern studies evolved in

Brazilian and Latin American intellectual context. In the article “Study-

ing the Middle East from Brazil: reections on a dierent worldview”, the

two authors examine the limits and the possibilities of Latin American

research in this particular eld, as well as its relation with the Anglo-Sax-

on intellectual tradition on this wide topic.

We hope that the readers of this special issue of Revista Estudos In-

ternacionais – “A Hundred Years Since the End of the Ottoman Empire” – will

enrich their knowledge on the Middle Eastern past and present. Last, but

not least, we wish to believe that this thematic number of our journal will

push forward the research in the eld of the Middle Eastern studies in

Brazil and more generally in Latin America.