Books by Serkan Yolaçan
Strongman’s Brokers: Old Diasporas and New Networks in the Age of Populism
Routledge, 2024
Papers by Serkan Yolaçan
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2025
What does empire look like from spaces where multiple imperial projects converge? Through analysi... more What does empire look like from spaces where multiple imperial projects converge? Through analysis of Molla Nasraddin, a pioneering satirical magazine from the early twentieth-century Caucasus, I reveal local engagements with empire that defy traditional binaries of center versus periphery, indigenous versus foreign, and resistance versus accommodation. While critical scholarship has powerfully demonstrated how imperial power shapes local life--from technologies of rule to cultural categories and patterns of inequality--such analysis is typically conducted through the lens of a single empire. In the Caucasus, where Russian, Ottoman, and Iranian empires overlapped, Molla Nasraddin developed a distinctive blend of visual satire, character types, and multilingual wordplay that functioned as a form of satirical pedagogy, cultivating what I term "inter-imperial literacy": the capacity to recognize deep connections between neighboring imperial worlds while maintaining critical distance from each. Through sustained correspondence with readers across three empires during their near-simultaneous revolutionary upheavals (1905-1908), the magazine gave voice to a public defined not by fixed identities but by their capacity for protean transformations across imperial boundaries. While nation-states would eventually redraw the Caucasus, Molla Nasraddin provides a window into a moment when historical borderlands--not imperial centers--offered the most penetrating insights into the workings of empire. In these spaces, elements adopted from competing empires become creative resources for local expression, while apparent cultural alignments conceal critical distance, enabling views of empire at once intimate and askance.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2025
As the concept of postsocialism faces increased scrutiny, there is a call to expand its spatiotem... more As the concept of postsocialism faces increased scrutiny, there is a call to expand its spatiotemporal scope beyond socialist contexts in order to reclaim its analytical capacity. In Azerbaijan, the quiet resurgence of tezkirahs – biographical anthologies rooted in both the Islamic and Soviet traditions –presents an opportunity to explore how former Soviet citizens can bridge different histories, countries, and cultural traditions to nurture an expansive sense of collective presence and moral dignity after seventy years of communist rule and disconnect. These texts help Azerbaijanis chart their diverse roots in the former imperial domains of Persians, Turks, and Russians and absorb them into their vision of who they once were and could be again. Writers and readers of tezkirahs establish connections to
non-socialist pasts and places through what I refer to as temporal pathways, where traversing time becomes a journey to another place, and vice versa. By exploring this spatialized historical sensibility through the capacious ethnographic-textual lens of an Islamic genre, this article sheds fresh light on
postsocialist possibilities.
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 2023
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.
Anthropology Newsletter | Stanford, 2023
History and Anthropology, 2021
Populist strongman rulers of our times have two contradictory
portraits. They appear messianic sa... more Populist strongman rulers of our times have two contradictory
portraits. They appear messianic saviours committed to rooting
out corrupt politicians and kindling a moral rejuvenation. They
also appear pragmatists unafraid to get their hands dirty in the
rough and tumble of politics and commerce. How do strongmen
carry these two faces without having to resolve their glaring
contradictions? I locate the roots of Janus-faced strongmen in
their partnership with overlapping networks of religion and
business. Focusing on the case of Turkish President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, I argue that his two faces are embedded in two
different Muslim networks, the morally stringent Islamists and the
realist Gülenists. The idioms generated by these networks, ‘Homo
Islamicus’ and ‘Golden Generation,’ have profoundly shaped the
content and style of Erdogan’s politics. I use these idioms to
delineate these networks’ social makeup and show how (1) they
hold the strongman accountable beyond the law and the ballot
in the national sphere and (2) externally serve as informal
diplomats calibrating his image abroad. I further argue that the
strongman-network partnership is a fragile and high-stakes
arrangement as their falling-out can leave the strongman
hallowed out and the network fragmented. This research allows
us to reimagine the strongmen of our times as socially
accountable figures whose political prospects hinge less on an
iron fist than nimble fingers knitting a delicate web of clients and
informal diplomats.
History and Anthropology
This article investigates how populists at home and maverick dealmakers abroad, strongman leaders... more This article investigates how populists at home and maverick dealmakers abroad, strongman leaders are increasingly side-lining official career diplomats by using informal diplomats drawn from transnational networks of diasporas, religious communities, and trade. Flagging this partnership as the key to understanding the changing twenty-first century international order, we follow how informal diplomats provide strongmen much-needed flexibility and openness in their foreign dealings. This agility, we suggest, is afforded by their earned status in the moral economy of 'network societies'. Held together by interpersonal bonds rather than abstract national belonging, trust rather than law, and patronage rather than taxation, network societies conjure a state-society covenant markedly different from one between a liberal state and its citizen. By shifting the focus from state institutions to the social life of networks, we place the strongman-informal diplomat partnership within longer histories of diasporic networks and imperial brokerage. Combining this long durée approach with a granular reading of everyday politics, we develop an ethnographically and historically informed inquiry into the two ubiquitous figures of twenty-first-century and lay out a programmatic agenda towards an anthropology of international relations.
Journal of Eurasian Studies, 2019
This article makes a case for the geographical concept of West Asia and develops a specific propo... more This article makes a case for the geographical concept of West Asia and develops a specific proposal for its usage: an intervention to open up the closed box of the Middle East to post-Soviet Eurasia in the north and to the rest of Asia in the east. It advances this transregional perspective from the viewpoint of an old imperial frontier, Transcaucasia, and its erstwhile Azeri diaspora. By drawing on archival material, oral histories, contemporaneous print media, and secondary literature, this article traces the movement of Azeris from the Transcaucasian frontier into the political domains of Iranians, Russians/Soviets, and Turks/Ottomans, and show how their movements became avenues for political subversion, territorial expansion and, informal diplomacy over the course of the 20th century and until today.
Insights, 2019
States in the Middle East today are coming together not on the basis of shared sectarian or ideol... more States in the Middle East today are coming together not on the basis of shared sectarian or ideological lines. Rather, they are coalescing along two rival lines of alliance: (1) a Northern Tier that connects Iran and Turkey to Russia and Central Asia and (2) a Southern Tier that ties the Arabian Peninsula to coastal South Asia, the Horn of Africa, and the southern Mediterranean. Conflicts and rivalries in the Middle East, when seen along these two lines, reveal a clear, operative rationale capable of piercing through the smoke of burning towns and the tangled web of relations that otherwise paint an image of disorder in the region. If these two alliances solidify into blocs, will their rivalries intensify, pulling neighbouring states into proxy wars? Or will they step back to conclude that good fences make good neighbours, divide the region between them, and calm down the countries caught in between? How they handle their rivalries will have consequences for how China’s Belt and Road Intitiative may pass through or bypass them.
Conciliators Guild , 2018
Conferences by Serkan Yolaçan
The dizzying pace of events churning the Middle East since the Arab Spring erupted in 2011 has le... more The dizzying pace of events churning the Middle East since the Arab Spring erupted in 2011 has left experts at a loss for adequate frameworks of analysis. From the multi-front wars in Syria and Yemen to the Iran nuclear deal and the Qatar crisis, there has been an active re-alignment of Cold War alliances and geostrategic partnerships that defies our conventional view of the region as shaped primarily by oil, religious politics and the Arab-Israeli conflict. As Iran moves closer to Turkey and Qatar, and the UAE and Saudi Arabia deepen their strategic ties with Israel beneath the chaos and debris of war, the political fault lines are being redrawn. Signs of a new regional order are becoming visible on the horizon.
We in the Arabia-Asia research cluster at the Middle East Institute and the Alagil Arabia Asia Chair Programme at the Asia Research Institute conceptualise this emerging geopolitical order as part of an East-West, Asia-Europe/Africa geography of trade, energy and strategic partnerships dividing the Middle East along a horizontal line: a transcontinental axis on the Northern Tier, and a maritime axis along the Southern Tier. Having charted the course of diplomatic and political developments in the Northern Tier defined by Iran, Turkey and Russia at a workshop organised by the Middle East Institute in the past year, we move on to the Southern Tier and the turn of events bringing it to life for the Asia Research Institute’s Muhammad Alagil Arabia Asia Annual Conference this year.
At the helm of the Southern Tier and driving the maritime order in the Middle East is the UAE, in partnership with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and Israel. A string of ports, special economic zones and naval bases, stretching out from Jabal Ali and Jeddah to Doraleh (Djibouti), Berbera (Somaliland) and eventually Limassol and Benghazi (Libya) in the Mediterranean, a Middle East with arms spreading across the wider arc of the Indian Ocean to as far as India, perhaps even Southeast Asia, is Abu Dhabi’s game plan for commercial dominance and global supply chain preeminence in an age of big power rebalancing and rivalry.
Abu Dhabi seeks to graft this maritime order onto a map of port operations, shipping lanes and logistics corridors that an ambitious Dubai Ports World had come up with as part of its business strategy in the mid-2000s. As the global recession of 2008-9 hit Dubai’s expansion plans, and more states began to compete for domination of the global supply chain trade, Abu Dhabi stepped in with a bailout and proceeded to rebuild DP World’s network, adding a dimension of military protection. We see the unusual partnerships it has entered into with countries within and beyond the Middle East as pathways to this goal which Abu Dhabi, with its limited naval and strategic capacities, cannot accomplish on its own. Abu Dhabi’s interests notwithstanding, its strategy makes political and strategic sense to its allies, especially with the US drawing down its military presence and Iran and its partners threatening commerce in the Persian Gulf.
We invite participants to flesh out the framework of the two-tiered Middle East and test its analytical limits from the economic, political and security perspectives of different states, and in relation to questions of national, regional and global significance. How resilient can alliances within each of these tiers be, particularly when players have as many differing goals as they have shared ones? Can carving up the Middle East roughly into a transcontinental axis and a maritime one stimulate peace instead of war, and avert the risk of a larger conflict between nuclear armed states in the region? How will a two-tiered Middle East hold out to players like China and Russia that are seeking to expand their footprint in the region as well as the Indian Ocean world at large? Will Abu Dhabi and its partners look to these states to replace the US in its role as the military hegemon in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean, or will it re-define the receding security architecture on a new and unfamiliar set of terms?
An extraordinarily large number of US diplomatic posts are currently empty, and the administratio... more An extraordinarily large number of US diplomatic posts are currently empty, and the administration seems uninterested in filling them in the near future. Trump's disinterest in manning US diplomatic posts though is hardly unique. Other strongman leaders around the world, for example Putin, Erdoğan, and Modi are also challenging the conventional use of formal diplomacy in building and sustaining alliances. Populists at home and maverick deal-makers abroad, strongman leaders are sidelining official career diplomats by using informal diplomats, drawn from transnational networks of diasporas, sectarian communities, paramilitary groups and merchants. While diplomats do tap into such networks in the normal course of business, we think they are being leveraged to a striking degree by the clutch of unorthodox leaders running important countries today. This emergent phenomenon of strongmen partnering with informal diplomats echoes earlier histories of states drawing on individuals from non-state transnational networks as emissaries.
The recent rapprochement among Iran, Turkey, and Russia over Syria has given this trio greater di... more The recent rapprochement among Iran, Turkey, and Russia over Syria has given this trio greater diplomatic weight in the Middle East as compared to their Arab and American counterparts to the south. Astana, the Kazakh capital in Central Asia, is where the trio regularly meet and learn to manage conflicting agendas without stepping on each other’s toes. Lessons learned there may embolden these old neighbors to collaborate on a variety of other issues in the future, consolidating a new geopolitical tier that reshapes the Middle East from the North. Such a rise of what we call “the Northern Tier” urges us to rethink the Middle East within a larger West Asian frame that connects the Arab world to Turko-Persia, Russia, and Central Asia. This conference brings around the table historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and practitioners to examine the historical conditions and future possibilities of the Northern Tier as an interconnected political landscape. It will address questions such as:
• What are the historical relations between states in the northern tier of West Asia?
• Is there a common social basis shared by these states?
• How do states use transnational and diasporic networks to collaborate and communicate beyond the confines of formal diplomacy?
• What are the historical and contemporary links that bridge the northern and southern tiers of West Asia?
What can the past tell us about the present? This question, once the bedrock of historical enquir... more What can the past tell us about the present? This question, once the bedrock of historical enquiry, faded from the academic imagination after the poststructural turn. As utilitarian and deterministic understandings of the past came under attack for ossifying ‘traditions’, a new periodization took shape--now familiar to anthropologists and historians alike--of a post-colonial present separated from its ‘authentic’ past by the unbridgeable gulf of European imperialism and colonial modernity. The workshop aims to probe the limits of this approach by bringing together anthropologists and historians interested in exploring the manifold relationships various pasts have with the present day world.
The workshop focuses on Muslim societies as the primary context to conceptualize the interplay between historical enquiry and analysis of emergent social forms. Included in our understanding of Muslim societies are the European powers that ruled over and through Muslims, and non-Muslim communities whose stories have inextricably been part of the Muslim experience. Our focus on Muslim societies is driven by recent scholarship on Muslim empires and networks. These studies venture beyond both postcolonial and textual approaches to Islam to highlight the complicated relationship of Muslim societies with the cultural geography of Eurasia, Africa, and the Indian Ocean. However, despite employing anthropological categories of analysis, this scholarship has yet to engage with ethnographic work on present day Islam. To initiate a conversation between these ships passing in the night, we hope to press historians of Muslim empires and networks to speak about the past’s resonances with the discourses, practices, and structures explored in ethnographies. Conversely, we encourage anthropologists working on emerging social networks and political struggles in the broader Muslim world to focus, not only on the conditions of postmodernity, neoliberalism, and globalization, but also on regionally specific histories and memories, no matter how layered, distorted, or uneven.
We ask: what are the multi-layered pasts of the Muslim societies that escape the grand-narratives of colonialism and post-colonialism? How does one go about tracing the legacy of such pasts through texts from different genres such as hagiographies, genealogies, epics, letters, diaries, and contract? How does one do that in the absence of such representations? How do Muslims themselves mobilize these pasts to sketch in the present and summon possibilities for alternative futures? How do such mobilizations inform social imagination and geographical reach of itinerant Muslims today, be they scholars, fighters, missionaries, merchants, or diplomats? What are the possible analytical angles that would help us understand such processes beyond “ahistorical traditions” or “inventions of the present?”
A series of emerging developments in Asia such as China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) project, Turk... more A series of emerging developments in Asia such as China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) project, Turkey’s neo-Ottomanism, Iran’s Shi’a Crescent, Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union, Gulf states’ sectarian outreach, and reconnection of Indian diasporas evince increasing regionalism across Asia. Many of these new regionalisms depend on channeling histories and memories of oceanic and territorial routes carved over centuries by movements of people, ideas, and goods across the interconnected terrain of Eurasia and Indian Ocean. Central to bringing this past to the present are transnational networks of trade, trade, religion, kinship, and labor constituted over the longue durée. This interdisciplinary conference brings together anthropologists, historians, sociologists and political scientists to conceptualize emerging regional political aspirations and infrastructure projects through the past of networks. By bringing regions separated in space and pasts disconnected in time, this conference looks to conceptualize how order is constructed beyond borders.
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Books by Serkan Yolaçan
Papers by Serkan Yolaçan
non-socialist pasts and places through what I refer to as temporal pathways, where traversing time becomes a journey to another place, and vice versa. By exploring this spatialized historical sensibility through the capacious ethnographic-textual lens of an Islamic genre, this article sheds fresh light on
postsocialist possibilities.
portraits. They appear messianic saviours committed to rooting
out corrupt politicians and kindling a moral rejuvenation. They
also appear pragmatists unafraid to get their hands dirty in the
rough and tumble of politics and commerce. How do strongmen
carry these two faces without having to resolve their glaring
contradictions? I locate the roots of Janus-faced strongmen in
their partnership with overlapping networks of religion and
business. Focusing on the case of Turkish President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, I argue that his two faces are embedded in two
different Muslim networks, the morally stringent Islamists and the
realist Gülenists. The idioms generated by these networks, ‘Homo
Islamicus’ and ‘Golden Generation,’ have profoundly shaped the
content and style of Erdogan’s politics. I use these idioms to
delineate these networks’ social makeup and show how (1) they
hold the strongman accountable beyond the law and the ballot
in the national sphere and (2) externally serve as informal
diplomats calibrating his image abroad. I further argue that the
strongman-network partnership is a fragile and high-stakes
arrangement as their falling-out can leave the strongman
hallowed out and the network fragmented. This research allows
us to reimagine the strongmen of our times as socially
accountable figures whose political prospects hinge less on an
iron fist than nimble fingers knitting a delicate web of clients and
informal diplomats.
Conferences by Serkan Yolaçan
We in the Arabia-Asia research cluster at the Middle East Institute and the Alagil Arabia Asia Chair Programme at the Asia Research Institute conceptualise this emerging geopolitical order as part of an East-West, Asia-Europe/Africa geography of trade, energy and strategic partnerships dividing the Middle East along a horizontal line: a transcontinental axis on the Northern Tier, and a maritime axis along the Southern Tier. Having charted the course of diplomatic and political developments in the Northern Tier defined by Iran, Turkey and Russia at a workshop organised by the Middle East Institute in the past year, we move on to the Southern Tier and the turn of events bringing it to life for the Asia Research Institute’s Muhammad Alagil Arabia Asia Annual Conference this year.
At the helm of the Southern Tier and driving the maritime order in the Middle East is the UAE, in partnership with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and Israel. A string of ports, special economic zones and naval bases, stretching out from Jabal Ali and Jeddah to Doraleh (Djibouti), Berbera (Somaliland) and eventually Limassol and Benghazi (Libya) in the Mediterranean, a Middle East with arms spreading across the wider arc of the Indian Ocean to as far as India, perhaps even Southeast Asia, is Abu Dhabi’s game plan for commercial dominance and global supply chain preeminence in an age of big power rebalancing and rivalry.
Abu Dhabi seeks to graft this maritime order onto a map of port operations, shipping lanes and logistics corridors that an ambitious Dubai Ports World had come up with as part of its business strategy in the mid-2000s. As the global recession of 2008-9 hit Dubai’s expansion plans, and more states began to compete for domination of the global supply chain trade, Abu Dhabi stepped in with a bailout and proceeded to rebuild DP World’s network, adding a dimension of military protection. We see the unusual partnerships it has entered into with countries within and beyond the Middle East as pathways to this goal which Abu Dhabi, with its limited naval and strategic capacities, cannot accomplish on its own. Abu Dhabi’s interests notwithstanding, its strategy makes political and strategic sense to its allies, especially with the US drawing down its military presence and Iran and its partners threatening commerce in the Persian Gulf.
We invite participants to flesh out the framework of the two-tiered Middle East and test its analytical limits from the economic, political and security perspectives of different states, and in relation to questions of national, regional and global significance. How resilient can alliances within each of these tiers be, particularly when players have as many differing goals as they have shared ones? Can carving up the Middle East roughly into a transcontinental axis and a maritime one stimulate peace instead of war, and avert the risk of a larger conflict between nuclear armed states in the region? How will a two-tiered Middle East hold out to players like China and Russia that are seeking to expand their footprint in the region as well as the Indian Ocean world at large? Will Abu Dhabi and its partners look to these states to replace the US in its role as the military hegemon in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean, or will it re-define the receding security architecture on a new and unfamiliar set of terms?
• What are the historical relations between states in the northern tier of West Asia?
• Is there a common social basis shared by these states?
• How do states use transnational and diasporic networks to collaborate and communicate beyond the confines of formal diplomacy?
• What are the historical and contemporary links that bridge the northern and southern tiers of West Asia?
The workshop focuses on Muslim societies as the primary context to conceptualize the interplay between historical enquiry and analysis of emergent social forms. Included in our understanding of Muslim societies are the European powers that ruled over and through Muslims, and non-Muslim communities whose stories have inextricably been part of the Muslim experience. Our focus on Muslim societies is driven by recent scholarship on Muslim empires and networks. These studies venture beyond both postcolonial and textual approaches to Islam to highlight the complicated relationship of Muslim societies with the cultural geography of Eurasia, Africa, and the Indian Ocean. However, despite employing anthropological categories of analysis, this scholarship has yet to engage with ethnographic work on present day Islam. To initiate a conversation between these ships passing in the night, we hope to press historians of Muslim empires and networks to speak about the past’s resonances with the discourses, practices, and structures explored in ethnographies. Conversely, we encourage anthropologists working on emerging social networks and political struggles in the broader Muslim world to focus, not only on the conditions of postmodernity, neoliberalism, and globalization, but also on regionally specific histories and memories, no matter how layered, distorted, or uneven.
We ask: what are the multi-layered pasts of the Muslim societies that escape the grand-narratives of colonialism and post-colonialism? How does one go about tracing the legacy of such pasts through texts from different genres such as hagiographies, genealogies, epics, letters, diaries, and contract? How does one do that in the absence of such representations? How do Muslims themselves mobilize these pasts to sketch in the present and summon possibilities for alternative futures? How do such mobilizations inform social imagination and geographical reach of itinerant Muslims today, be they scholars, fighters, missionaries, merchants, or diplomats? What are the possible analytical angles that would help us understand such processes beyond “ahistorical traditions” or “inventions of the present?”