The Middle East as a Site of Imperial Experimentation

Andrew Arsan: The Middle East as a site of imperial experimentation: As scholars like Paul Rabinow and Gwendolyn Wright have long since pointed out, parts of the Middle East and North Africa served in the course of the twentieth century as laboratories of modernity, in which key norms and forms of the state were first essayed. In my remarks, I will consider both the ways in which this argument might be pushed further conceptually and chronologically, and its limits. When did the Middle East become a site for implementing novel rationales of government, and experimenting with untried practices of statecraft? And what part did it play in the elaboration of particular practices and normative concepts, from intervention to the refugee? While underscoring the importance of the Middle East as a site of experimentation, I will suggest, in my tentative remarks, that we are ill-served by too watertight a distinction between ‘European’ and ‘indigenous’ forms of statecraft, but must apply a more pliable understanding of the workings and purposes of government to regional experience.