History Book Club Presents Dr. Zozan Pehlivan
About the book
The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century
Cambridge University Press, 2024
In this innovative, interdisciplinary work, Zozan Pehlivan presents a new environmental perspective on inter-communal conflict, rooting slow violence in socio-economic shifts and climatic fluctuations. From the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, recurrent and extreme climate disruptions became an underlying yet unacknowledged component of escalating conflict between Christian Armenian peasants and Muslim Kurdish pastoralists in Ottoman Kurdistan. By the eve of the First World War, the Ottoman state's shifting responses to these mounting tensions transformed the conflict into organized and state-sponsored violence.
Pehlivan upends the 'desert-sown' thesis, and establishes a new theoretical and conceptual framework drawing on climate science, agronomy, and zoology. From this alternative vantage point, Pehlivan examines the impact of climate on local communities, their responses and resilience strategies, arguing that nineteenth-century ecological change had a transformative and antagonistic impact on economy, state and society.
About the hosts
Zozan Pehlivan
Zozan Pehlivan, assistant professor of history, is an environmental historian of the modern Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, and Ottoman Kurdistan. Her research and teaching focus on the history of environments, violence, comparative empires, animals, and pastoralists.
Anna Clark
Anna Clark, professor of history, focuses on Irish history, history of sexuality, and gender analysis.