State Building and the (Trans)Regionalization of Families in the ‘Middle East’

The formation of (post)colonial states and border demarcation in the ‘Middle East’ has had long-term effects on family relations and migrant trajectories, reaching into the present. This article analyzes three case studies of individuals and families from today’s Turkey, Syria, and Jordan who, in this process, became citizens of different states or whose lives were fractured across newly drawn borders. Thus, it reconstructs state and border formation as supporting specific types of transregionalization: (1) the long-term impact of creating borders which changes power relations in families, including in migrant arrival contexts; (2) transregionalization through a self-fashioned Westernization of the elite that deeply influenced certain milieus and urban areas of the new states, and (3) the lack of institutions of higher learning in young states as a driver of transregionalization and transnational lifestyles. In this way, the article shows how multifaceted the ‘interconnectedness of the MENA with the broader world’ (as outlined in the Call for Papers for this Special Issue) is by introducing a focus on the colonial processes the region has gone through in the past 100 years.