Lausanne Moment

The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne remains one of the few interwar peace settlements that has endured into the twenty-first century. Celebrated by some as a triumph of state sovereignty and peacemaking, it has also come to symbolize forced displacement, the erasure of minority rights, and the codification of population transfers as instruments of international order. Just over one hundred years after the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, The Lausanne Moment revisits a diplomatic, legal, economic, and financial juncture that helped reshape the world and defined new norms of so vereignty, displacement, and identity.Rather than focusing solely on high diplomacy or legal text, the book brings into view the human dimension. Through case studies ranging from the refugee experience in Nikaia and of orphans from Asia Minor in Greece, to the enduring memory of loss in Pontic singing and the Kurdish experience in Turkey, the book documents the deeply personal and community-level consequences of forced migration and political rupture. This volume also interrogates the geopolitics of Lausanne through new thematic lenses. Essays explore how the treaty facilitated the continuation of imperial practices under new nationalist forms, shaped debates over public debt and cultural heritage, and affected actors and regions often overlooked in Lausanne historiography, such as Albania, Cyprus, and the Kurdish nationalist movements.Through its interdisciplinary and transregional approach, The Lausanne Moment breaks new ground in Lausanne studies, bringing together historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, political scientists, and cultural theorists; and introduces voices and perspectives that have been marginal to mainstream narratives.The Lausanne Moment situates the treaty within broader histories of state-led population engineering and suggests that the “peace” of Lausanne, one of the twentieth century’s most consequential, yet paradoxical, peace settlements, was neither absolute nor apolitical, it was instead crafted, contested and constantly renegotiated.