Ayse Polat

I work on the international politics of law, race, and migration in the modern Middle East.

My first book, The Pale of Humanity: Law, Carcerality, and Humanitarianism in the Late Ottoman Empire, interweaves critical debates on Ottoman modernity, international law and political economy, migration studies, and historical IR to show how the dictates of global humanitarianism shaped the Ottoman Empire – its territorial borders, juridical boundaries, and diplomatic relations – in the late half of the 19th century. I contend that humanitarian campaigns, including refugee settlement and anti-slavery and anti-trafficking legislation, served to regulate and restrict human mobility at scale on the basis of race, religion, gender, and class. This book thus aspires to reconfigure the historical relationship between the central categories of IR, such as international law and order, non/sovereignty, and mobility.

 I am currently doing research on my second book project, tentatively titled The Deluge on our Plains: Politics of Dis/Armament in the Modern Middle East. This book is an international legal history of war, violence, and arms trafficking in the Middle East between 1890-1948. By retracing the trajectory of the region’s unmitigated militarisation to early attempts at disarmament, I hope to provide a critical explanation as to how and why the political economy of arms came to dominate, deny, and destroy the lives and aspirations of its peoples.

I have presented and published my work on the international politics of pan-Islamism and Islamic humanitarianism, the racial politics of migration law, and the modern perversions of humanitarianism. My ongoing projects include statelessness and the making of early international law, international politics of settler colonisation in the early 20th century, political theories of race and migration in the Ottoman-Arab intellectual tradition, and the political economy of light in 20th century Beirut. 

I completed my PhD (2023) in Cambridge and served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Universities of Columbia(2024) and Cornell (2025) before I joined Oxford as a Departmental Lecturer in Historical International Relations. I have previously taught on humanitarianism, international law, order, and conflict, and international migration at the faculties of History and of Politics.