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Jul 12, 2024
Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East
An interview with Sam Dolbee
Summary
Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2023) focuses on the intersections of three entities otherwise deemed marginal in historical scholarship: the Jazira region, the borderlands of today’s Iraq, Syria, and Turkey; the mobile peoples within this region, from nomadic pastoralists to deportees and refugees; and locusts. Sam Dolbee’s research traces the movements of people and insects within this region, and how the social “problem” of mobile peoples and the environmental problem of pests were conflated in the eyes of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman states. Following the path of the locust across this region reveals how the desert of the Jazira and its inhabitants were bordered, transformed by, and participated in both environmental and political projects.
Your Host
Maggie Freeman
Maggie Freeman is a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East.
