Kabir Tambar

Kabir Tambar is currently completing a book manuscript on languages of solidarity in the Middle East. The work centers on an early twentieth century moment when revolutionary dreams of inter-religious brotherhood and equality in the framework of the late Ottoman empire collapsed. This collapse was occasioned by a history of genocide, dispossession, and rising ethnonationalism. The book examines non-nationalist responses to the violence of those years, and in particular it studies how certain practices that had been central to the now failed horizons of revolutionary solidarity – practices of collective mourning, translation, and historical criticism – persisted for certain Ottoman Greek and Ottoman Armenian figures of the era. Tabar suggests that by attending more closely to the politics of friendship in this moment we can become more attentive to non-national political possibilities that persist even today.

Tambar is associate professor of anthropology at Stanford University. His research and teaching examine debates about secularism, minority recognition, and state violence primarily in Turkey and more broadly in Europe and the Middle East. He is a faculty fellow at CASBS and was a fellow in 2023-24.