UC San Diego

This dissertation offers a critical and in-depth analysis of forced displacement as a means of nation-state building and its consequences by concentrating on the exchange of the Greek Orthodox population of Anatolia and Thrace for the Muslims from Greece in the early 1920s. The focus is on the refugee experience in the aftermath of the exchange, which fundamentally challenges the current perception of this seminal event and its adoption as a means to resolve conflicts. Since the idea of exchanging populations came to the negotiating table in Lausanne, this method was presented as a legitimate and indispensable, albeit challenging and unpleasant, way of avoiding existing and future ethnic conflicts due to the presence of different ethnicities within the borders of a nation-state. Being the first compulsory population exchange carried out under the auspices of the League of Nations, the 1923 Greco-Turkish population exchange quickly became the locus classicus for such practices. It was praised for its successful consequences and presented as proof of the League of Nations’ functionality and the relevant nation-states’ state capacity.After the introductory chapter on the history of exchanging populations, Chapter 2 concentrates on the historiography of the population exchange and how historiography played a notable role in presenting exchanging populations as a legitimate method of peace-making with the scholarship’s intrinsic bias toward conflict resolution. The chapter reviews a bulk of intellectual production and problematizes the discipline of history itself. Chapter 3 is about the Turkish/Muslim refugees, who, in the existing literature, were considered to be displaced not only from their ancestral homelands but also from agency, and shows that they established their organizations to pursue their claims and collectively raised their voices. Chapter 4, “The Greek/Orthodox Christian Case,” analyzes the political strategies that the Greek refugees developed in order 1) to defend their rights, 2) to solve their pressing problems, and 3) to respond to the anti-refugee prejudices of the native population. This chapter shows how their activities reorganized the political sphere in Greece with a careful analysis of the hitherto neglected refugee publications and press. Chapter 5 deals with the refugee sub-communities/groups even more marginalized: the Grecophone Cretans, including Afro-Cretans and refugees suffering from leprosy; the Turcophone Greeks in Greece; and the Greek community of Constantinople, who were exempted from the population exchange and became a minority. In the concluding chapter, the findings of this dissertation are revisited, and based on these findings, how the current meanings of refugeehood in Greece and Turkey are negotiated, reformulated, and reproduced is discussed.