Talk by Ayse Polat (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Cornell Society for the Humanities Cambridge University, PhD)

How do the circulation and distribution of arms shape social relations, conflicts, and hierarchies? Is arms trafficking a means of contesting the established order of things, or cementing it? This paper discusses the Ottoman government’s dis/armament of Circassian settlers - muhajirin - in the Golan Heights. The arrival of Circassian refugees in the Golan marked an expansion of Ottoman settlement policy to Syria in 1878. From thereon, growing refugee settlements constituted an experiment in settler capitalism that reshuffled the ethnic and religious composition of the region. The settlers instituted and expanded a new regime of private property and agrarian production, predicated on the exclusion of their neighbors and exploitation of their slaves. The exclusivity and inviolability of settlers’ property engendered conflict within and outside of this refugee community, as inter- and intra-communal relations were brutalized by the illicit introduction, circulation, and distribution of arms. This paper brings together the history of an arms smuggler and a corrupt governor, to explore the economy of arms in the late Ottoman Golan. It evidences how the Ottoman government introduced and distributed arms into the Golan settlements, only to lose control over their illicit circulation and use. It argues that the economy of arms trafficking helped unsettle these violent intimacies between settlers and natives, and masters and slaves, without challenging and indeed, cementing, a securitarian order based on the primacy of private property.