Dawn Chatty's Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East offers a window into the experiences of various ethno-religious groups that have faced or continue to face involuntary relocation within and into the Middle East. The author focuses her study on the area comprising Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Turkey, which were once an integral part of the Ottoman Empire. Arguing that “commonly, when we think of dispossession, forced migration, or exile, our minds turn to the plight of the Palestinian people” or perhaps to the “Kurdish problem” (p. 2), the author seeks to situate the involuntary migration of these two groups within a wider frame. For example, she examines the experiences of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim minorities who were forcibly displaced as a result of nationalist uprisings within Ottoman territories or wars between European powers and the Ottoman Empire. Chapter 3 is especially interesting in this regard because it examines understudied groups such as Circassians and Chechnyans, who were displaced from the Caucasus to the Middle East as a result of border wars between the Ottoman Empire and imperial Russia.

A major strength of the book is that it provides a detailed historical background focusing on the Ottoman Empire's internal power struggles, border wars between the Ottoman Empire and neighboring powers, Western colonization, and 20th-century Arab nationalism, which helps situate the forced movement of populations. Extensive historical background is supplemented by personal accounts of first-generation forced migrants or their descendents. Through these accounts, the author illustrates the human and individual dimensions of the larger power struggles taking place in the Middle East in the 19th and 20th centuries. The individual accounts not only give the reader a sense of the kinds of hardship faced by displaced groups but also provide insightful information about how some of the individuals belonging to these groups overcame displacement and dispossession and adapted to new environments.

Finally, the book contributes to current debates on multiculturalism, integration, and assimilation into host countries. Within academia, such debates tend to focus on the assimilation and integration of non-Westerners into Western societies. Much has been written recently, for instance, about the integration (or lack thereof) of Muslims in Europe. The author of this work offers a different frame for thinking about the questions surrounding the integration and assimilation of minorities. One of her main contentions, in fact, is that forced migration into the Middle East has most often resulted in integration without assimilation, leading to the formation of “cosmopolitan identities” and people “transcending the limitations placed on them by political boundaries and geographical isolation” (p. 6). The author explains this state of affairs by pointing to the Ottoman Empire's millet system, which offered protected status to non-Muslims and accommodated cultural differences. She then points to the policies of Arab states, which have generally given religious and ethnic minorities a certain amount of autonomy. Syria figures prominently as an example. The book alludes to Syria's pan-Arab and secular brand of nationalism, which has allowed space for ethnic and religious minorities to maintain separate communities with their own languages, cultural traditions, and schools. The author is careful, however, to note exceptions to this trend in the region, such as Palestinians in Lebanon and undocumented Kurds (bidūn) in Syria. It would have been interesting to read her views on the extent to which these exceptions complicate the “integration without assimilation model” and on what they indicate about the current geopolitics of the Middle East.

For readers framing their interest in forced migration around specific countries within the Middle East, the historical and ethnographic data will, at times, seem unevenly distributed. The area today comprising Turkey, Israel/Palestine, and especially Syria are given significant historical coverage, but there is less detailed information on Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and particularly Iraq. In terms of the personal narratives, the author largely includes those of individuals who ended up in Syria and to a lesser extent Egypt and Jordan. At the same time, one of the book's accomplishments is that it avoids taking for granted current national boundaries. The narrative stretches back to the Ottoman era, framing forced displacement through watershed historical moments that have had an impact on mobility and boundary making in the Middle East in the last 150 years.

Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East represents a valuable contribution to the study of forced displacement in the Middle East. The book will appeal to scholars in the social sciences and especially those in disciplines such as history, anthropology, geography, and political science whose research focuses on minorities or forcibly displaced groups in the Middle East. It also constitutes a useful textbook for introductory courses on these topics.