State Legitimacy and Refugee Settlement on the Frontier of Southern Syria, 1878–1920

Muslim refugees arriving and settling in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century are often stripped of their historical agency. They are portrayed as having an inherent loyalty to the state based on religious solidarity and gratitude for the state’s provision of refuge. In turn, historians hold this loyalty to be an important factor for late Ottoman legitimization, state-building, and civilizing projects in settlement zones. This paper analyzes a refugee settlement in southern Syria to illustrate how the agency of refugees in rural politics drove historical processes.

Following the 1877-78 Russo-Ottoman War, hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees fled the collapse of Ottoman power in the Balkans. The Ottomans settled tens of thousands on the edge of the desert and semi-arid steppe of the Syrian interior. Most of those settled were ethnic groups originally from the Caucasus Mountains: Circassians, Chechens, and Dagestanis. The most prominent settlement was at Quneitra on the eastern edge of the Golan Heights. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Circassians from Quneitra became notable for their service in the Ottoman and later, French, militaries and gendarmeries that enforced centralizing projects and the state’s claims of legitimacy in the countryside.

I argue that a dearth of Ottoman support and years of disease left the Circassian settlers in a precarious situation. They responded to deprivation by becoming a local political force that vied for resources with their Druze neighbors. Once established, the settlers often chose to ally with Ottoman or French officials in Damascus, voluntarily aiding state-building and legitimization projects in a way that reflected their hard-won influence in rural politics. By foregrounding the agency of refugees turned settlers, I illustrate an important antecedent of refugee politics in the Middle East in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.