Gözde Yazici Cörüt unfolds the details of everyday life and represents the local people as
active agents - active moreover in relation both to the changing nature and effectiveness of
the Ottoman state's assertion of territorial authority and also to the differences between
policies and practices of the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Overall she focuses on the
end-of-empire border politics and the issue of Ottoman citizenship not only from the
perspective of macro-level political developments and central state power but also in terms of
the peripheral specificities of administration and the movements and subjecthood choices of
people inhabiting the Russo-Ottoman borderland. The author presents a new type of multi-faceted
account of borderland development in which ethnoreligious considerations came to inform a
somewhat messy production of sovereignty in the context of the modernizing transition between
empire and nation-state.
