SNSF Ambizione Grant Dr. Burak Sayım – Anticolonial Internationalism in the Interwar Middle East

Anticolonial Internationalism in the Interwar Middle East project will track a generation of anticolonial militants in the post-World War One Middle East through a collective biography. Drawing from primary sources in seven languages, the project will problematize the shift in their alliances from world communism in the 1920s, to Benito Mussolini's Italy by the early 1930s, and Nazi Germany towards the Second World War. The four-year project is funded by a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Grant from September 2025 on and will be led by Burak Sayım as the Principal Investigator.

The project will explore the transformation of anticolonial activism in the post-Ottoman Middle East (particularly Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Turkey) across the interwar years. It will problematize the agency of Middle Eastern actors, the role of transregional ideological connections in the making of this political current, and the legacy of these ideological interactions in the making of the Cold War order in the Middle East. On this basis, Anticolonial Internationalism poses and sets out to answer the following research questions: Q1) Why did anticolonial activists initially engage with, and later become disillusioned by, communist and fascist world-making projects? Q2) How did the global transformation of left-wing anticolonialism lead to the emergence of right-wing anticolonialism, changing the platforms for fostering internationalism in the Middle East? Q3) How did the political formations of anticolonial movements in the Middle East contribute to the interwar crisis of the global order, and vice versa? Q4) How did the alignments of anticolonial internationalists with communism and fascism during the interwar period influence the political movements of the Cold War era in the Middle East? 

Starting from these questions, Anticolonial Internationalism seeks to reframe interwar anticolonialism, locating and studying the seemingly contradictory transformation from communism to fascism at the intersection of global, Middle Eastern, and European history. By tracing the collective story of a generation of anticolonial nationalists, the project argues that a comprehensive understanding of Middle Eastern political movements necessitates combining three distinct approaches: 1) The integration of the trajectory of local revolutionary and radical actors as makers and breakers of global politics. 2) A transregional and entangled account that interweaves Middle Eastern anticolonialism into the story of the so-called European Civil War, which I propose reframing as the Global Civil War to provincialize Europe further. 3) A multi-biographical approach that highlights human agency in the transformation of anticolonial movements, their internationalist agendas, and their various world-making projects.