Interaction between the international and the domestic : the case of the 1908 Constitutional Revolution in the Ottoman Empire

• Main Author: Gocer, Derya
• Published: London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London) 2009
• Subjects: 956.1
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.645827

This thesis focuses on the international-domestic interaction within the context of the 1908 Ottoman Constitutional Revolution and examines it in relation to the intemational dimensions of the social transformation of the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So the focus of the research is on the extent and the mechanisms of the international constitution of political change within the Ottoman Empire in regard to the historical moment of 1908. The framework for the research question is the ongoing theoretical investigations of the scholars of International Relations into the possibility of using a historical sociological approach to conceptualize the reciprocal constitutive roles of the international and the domestic realms in engendering political transformations, whether in this longue duree or in sudden ruptures. As such, the thesis engages with the historical sociology tradition. The main objective is to enable a productive encounter between the case study itself and the general theory: the starting assumption is the impossibility of a purely national account of political changes of this scale. Given this framework, the thesis limits the examination of the case and the discussion of theory to the debate on the interaction between international and domestic dynamics. A creative understanding of how these two dynamics interact and co-constitute each other would contribute to the general analysis of political change within the field of International Relations. At the same time an analytical re-reading of the case study from this angle would locate this turning point in the history of the Ottoman Empire and of the Middle Eastern in a wider analytical context and thereby give it its due theoretical and historical weight.