I thank Yumi Moon for the generous reading of my book and for posing three deeply engaging questions.

First, regarding the Ottoman origins of the modern refugee regime, the Ottoman refugee regime was a precursor to refugee resettlement in the Middle East after World War I, as Turkey and British and French mandatory authorities built upon Ottoman foundations and favored the agricultural and rural model of resettlement. Its impact on the international refugee regimes of the League of Nations and the United Nations was indirect, primarily through resettlement practices in the interwar Middle East. The Ottoman emphasis on Muslim refugees is exceptional for utilizing early Islamic narratives of migration for legitimacy, but not exceptional for favoring a specific religious group. Most contemporaries of the late Ottoman Empire favored immigrants, many of whom were refugees, based on their faith (and race, which were intertwined) and therefore their perceived assimilability and desirability. In the interwar era, the League of Nations member states, while claiming to uphold refugee rights for all, preferred resettling Christian refugees over Muslim and Jewish ones. In this sense, I agree that the “narrowing of the refugee category,” based on religion, was a stage, and a not-so-distant one, in the evolution of the modern refugee system.

Second, on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, I concur that the question worth asking is how an empire, beset with financial and geopolitical challenges, survived for as long as it did. Empire of Refugees shows that refugee resettlement propped up imperial rule in parts of the Levant and Anatolia. New refugee villages meant the arrival of tax collectors, land surveyors, gendarmes, and other state officials. The Circassian village of Amman, for example, generated vigorous economic activity, tying that semi-nomadic region closer to the empire. This book contributes to the debate on the Ottoman collapse—which rightfully focuses on World War I diplomacy, Ottoman bankruptcy, and the Armenian Genocide—by showing that, first, troubles had been brewing in the Ottoman countryside for decades, as many refugee village economies collapsed, and, second, refugee resettlement could unravel social dynamics when political demands of Ottoman communities were couched in ethno-national terms. Muslim refugees were seen as settlers by many of their neighbors, and in Ottoman Christian areas their presence was interpreted as a hostile sectarian act by the Ottoman state.

Finally, regarding North Caucasian diasporic politics, the dominant organization, the Circassian Union and Support Association (1908–23), claimed to represent up to a million refugees, most of whom were illiterate and lived in the countryside, but was led by urban-based elites, including the old Ottoman-Circassian nobility, military officers, and new middle-class professionals. The Association’s main objective, in tune with grassroots needs, was to preserve cultural identities in exile, which led to the Association’s efforts to promote literacy, codify languages, publish dictionaries, and craft a unifying historical narrative. The refugee elites used the openness of the post-1908 (Young Turk Revolution) era to ramp up the Association’s activities, hoping to leverage their numerous but scattered communities into a political force, in line with other, better-organized ethno-religious communities in the empire.

This exchange has been deeply stimulating, and I thank Yumi Moon for this engaging conversation. I hope that readers find it useful to think through Cold War Refugees and Empire of Refugees side by side.