Elizabeth’s current research concerns the exclusion of Arabs from the Lausanne negotiations, arising from the legal anomaly of the mandates, which were created on the basis of Article 22 of the League of Nations covenant that took effect after ratification in January of 1920. Arabs’ demands for inclusion have been only marginally treated in historical narratives written from both the Turkish and the European view. Elizabeth will present a portion of this research during the June 2021 workshop, demonstrating the Arabs’ demands for inclusion and their understanding of their legal position during the Lausanne process. The paper addresses a growing literature on the complex issue of sovereignty raised after World War I by scholars of the Woodrow Wilson, the peace conference, and the League of Nations.

In a second project, Elizabeth is studying how the peace process through 1923 ignored the issue of war crimes— not just in the better documented case of Armenia, but also in Greater Syria. Her research investigates the ways in which racialized humanitarian discourses may have served to silence discourses of Syrian rights and Allied crimes.

Elizabeth’s book How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The Syrian Congress of 1920 and the Destruction of its Historic Liberal-Islamic Alliance (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020) will be issued in paperback in September 2021.

Find out more about Elizabeth’s research here.