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This talk has been rescheduled for February 10.

This talk is about how lives of the crossers of the Syria/Turkey borderlands reconfigured a historically contingent politics of territorialization. It has two aims: First advancing a processual and historical account of border and region formation, it redefines the border as a palimpsest of sovereignty—layered and superimposed with competing cartographies of territory and their attendant regimes of mobility.

Second, based on this processual account, Emrah Yildiz shows how state-level mitigating and managing the transgressions of the border and military policing of the designation of their perpetuators as smugglers and irregular traffickers have helped historically and spatially produce the Turkey/Syria border.

Emrah Yildiz joins the Middle East and North African Studies Program and the Department of Anthropology as an assistant professor. His work is a historical anthropology of routes of mobility in the tri-border area among Iran, Turkey and Syria. His research lies at the intersection of historiography and ethnography of borders and their states; ritual practice, visitation and pilgrimage in Islam as well as smuggling and contraband commerce in global political economy.

This is part of the Buffett Institute Faculty & Fellows Colloquium. Find it on Facebook.

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Martha Wilfahrt researches the political economy of development, with a regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. Martha is currently working on a book manuscript, based on her dissertation, which looks at historical legacies of pre-colonial statehood on the contemporary politics of public goods delivery in rural West Africa.

Other ongoing work include a project on the role of traditional authorities and informal institutions in the 2014-15 Ebola response as well as a series of papers on central-local fiscal transfers in decentralized Senegal.

This is part of the Buffett Institute Faculty & Fellows Colloquium.