ABSTRACT
The European colonial rulers of the Middle Eastern mandate states embraced the deliberate and often brutal production of sectarianism as a strategy to ensure continued colonial dominance over the region in an era generally unfriendly to empire. The colonial combination of strategies of legal manufacturing and physical population engineering resulted in a newly sectarianized landscape in which individuals and communities alike had to mediate their access to jobs, rights to land, freedom of movement, admission to courts, and political representation through communal identifications and institutions – an order enforced by a violent colonial military occupation. This chapter explores this process of colonial sectarianization as a centrally important backdrop to the eventual emergence of highly fragmented and differentiated regimes of postcolonial citizenship.
