This panels highlights people on the margins of legal norms, social customs, gender expectations, and national priorities in the Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman Europe from the 1820s to the 1920s. Dealing with “discarded people”—enslaved women, runaway wives, war orphans, missing children of war, and survivors of genocide—exerted severe pressures on the legal, social, and national order of Serbia, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. In the process of reconciling the complex factors informing these cases, innovative legal and intellectual discourses and social practices emerged, which tried to inscribe marginal people in larger international and national debates.

Emily Greble explores runaway wives and manumitted women in early-nineteenth-century Ottoman Serbia to propose the concept of villagelessness—the act of being unclaimed by village or household—as an early form of statelessness. Tuğçe Kayaal questions World War One Ottoman orphanages as rehabilitative and disciplinary institutions, showing how the orphans’ sexual life, intimate relationships, and friendships became central aspects of their interactions with administrators and peers alike. Theodora Dragostinova examines missing children in the post-1918 Balkan borderlands to show how, in their quest to reunite families, French officials resorted to the practice of “forced repatriation” which sidestepped the wishes of mixed families and especially underage wives. Lerna Ekmekcioglu analyzes the complex relationship between kidnapped women, rescued after the Armenian genocide, on the one hand, and feminist Armenian intellectuals and male political and religious Armenian leaders in Istanbul, on the other, to expose the limits of autonomy of genocide survivors.

The panel demonstrates the overplay between national, international, community, and individual considerations in making place for these “thrown-away people” in societies experiencing radical transitions. Patriarchal, upper-class, national, and international systems demanded uniformity, loyalty, and complicity. Yet, citizens had their own understandings of what to prioritize and how to act