On 23 September 2024, Professor of Middle East History Dr. Nabil Al-Tikriti provided a lecture entitled “Imperial Legacies, Ethnic Cleansing, and Today’s Balkans and Caucasus,” to the Global Learning Center, affiliated with Wichita State University, and taking place on their campus.
The lecture description:
“What drives sectarian politics from the Balkans to the Caucasus? What has caused such widespread ongoing ethnic and religious disputes, debates, and conflicts? In this talk, Prof. Nabil Al-Tikriti will analyze how yesterday’s imperial dissolutions led to today’s sectarian conflict.”
In the course of this lecture, Prof. Al-Tikriti summarized theses about national homogeneity in the 19th-21st centuries by Eric Weitz and Yuri Slezkine, and the construction of the modern international law regime following European Great Power interventions in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century by Davide Rodogno, before analyzing the role that ethnic mapping has played in international diplomacy geared towards encouraging, implementing, and consolidating ethnic cleansing on multiple fronts — all for the elusive goal of nation-state homogeneity.
Prof. Al-Tikriti thanks UMW Visitors Virginia “Ginny” Gentles, Tim Pohanka, and Terris E. Todd for their particularly staunch support of UMW faculty research, creativity, and educational pursuits. This was an invited lecture.
Leave a Reply