Capricious Borders: Minority, Population, and Counter-conduct between Greece and Turkey.

• Author: Mesaric, Andreja
• Position: Book review

Capricious Borders: Minority, Population, and Counter-conduct between Greece and Turkey

By Olga Demetriou

New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013, 226 pages, $120.00, ISBN 9780857458988.

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Olga Demetriou's work explores the relationship between state power and the Muslims of Western Thrace, Greece's border region with Turkey. It traces the process of minoritization of the region's Muslim population by observing changing government policies and exploring how they interact with people's lives. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in and around the town of Komotini, the book's primary focus lies in how these developments shape(d) people's everyday lived experience. The book opens with a historical discussion on the drawing and re-drawing of borders in Thrace and the often arbitrary, or as Demetrious puts it, capricious, nature of this process. Borders in what is now northern Greece shifted several times in the early 20th century and the area surrounding Komotini alternated between being part of the Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria, and Greece. The Balkan wars and WWI prompted several waves of migration in the wider region, however, as Demetriou highlights these were "less about being Bulgarian, Greek or Turkish than about moving temporarily until normality was restored" (p. 37). Once the current borders between Greece and Turkey were established after WWI, Thracian Muslims were exempt from the population exchange that followed in 1923, leaving a significant Muslim minority in the region.

As a border territory and one of the last areas to be joined with modern Greece, the Greek ness of Western Thrace was simultaneously taken for granted and in constant need of being proven. That left the Muslim population that remained in the region in a precarious position. The central chapters of the book are dedicated to understanding how the realities of those Muslims that stayed behind have been shaped by the Greek state's policies and actions throughout the 20th century as well as exploring how members of this minority population engaged with those developments. They offer a critique of the systemic discrimination and structural inequalities affecting what is variously termed the Muslim, Turkish, or Turkish-speaking minority. Conscious of the power of naming in shaping reality and bestowing rights Demetriou simply speaks of "the minority," without designating it as Muslim, Turkish or otherwise. She refers to the interlocutors she...