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.
Introduction: global climate, local ecologies, and socio-political instability; 1. Kurdistan: a geographic and environmental threshold; 2. Four-legged capitalism: Kurdistan's political economy in mid-nineteenth century; 3. ''What will the end [of] this be'?': peasants and pastoralists face a decade of crisis; 4. The empire of priorities: Ottoman relief policies in the age of scarcity; 5. Environment and the state: from communal to state sponsor violence; An epilogue after the animals died.
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