World War I was a watershed moment in the making of the Modern Middle East, and its consequences continue to manifest in the social and political (dis)orders of the region today. The centenary of the war in 2014 prompted new scholarship on the war in the Middle East that questioned the conventional narratives that had framed World War I primarily as a European event. This panel proposes to highlight—for a broad audience of historians interested in critical approaches to war—new historical approaches to World War I in the Middle East that broaden and deepen the study of the war from the perspectives of borderland studies, everyday militarization, queer theory, and international law. These approaches draw our attention to the geographic and social margins of the Middle East region to highlight how high historical dynamics of Ottoman militarization and sovereignty shaped and was shaped by everyday life across the region, highlighting the social history and everyday experiences of militarized societies in the Middle East in their local and global dimensions. The first paper explores how Ottoman military reform during the 19^th century had massive consequences for the Ottoman social order which, in turn, profoundly shaped World War I in the Ottoman Empire. The paper demonstrates how situating World War I in its long 19^th century context provides a new interpretation of why the Ottoman war was so catastrophic even as the Ottomans were able to fight for so long. The second paper explores how the Ottoman war effort during World War I was shaped by the experience of the Balkan Wars (1912-13). Through the receding western borders of the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars, the borderlands surrounding Edirne manifested and exacerbated the importance of the ongoing issues of mobility, identity, nationality and utilization of narratives of violence that the Empire grappled in its last decade. The third paper explores the home front through a queer theoretical lens, examining the experiences and representations of youth engaged in sex work and homoerotic intimacies in Konya – a key site of wartime mobilization. By centering these sexual undergrounds that defied the gendered and sexual norms of the wartime empire, the paper considers how a queer intervention reshapes our understanding of the Ottoman home front during World War I. The fourth paper examines the immediate effect of the cancellation of the Capitulations on the Ottoman War effort through their demise at the Lausanne Peace Conference. While abrogating the Capitulations had been a driving foreign policy goal of the Ottoman state since 1856, their sudden termination transformed the state’s relationship with its imperial subjects—particularly the non-Muslim population—its allies and with the Allied Powers during the long World War I period. Ultimately, the panel offers new avenues to rethink the war’s immediate and long-term significance as a force shaping the history and present-day realities in the Middle East.