A PhD Candidate in Political Theory at the University of Michigan, Merisa Bahar Şahin is currently writing her dissertation, “Anticolonial Cosmopolitanisms: Young Ottoman Anticolonial Thinkers and Projects of Global Integration,” which examines early projects of decolonization by exiled Ottoman intellectuals from 1878 to 1909, spearheaded by Ahmed Rıza Bey and Prens Sabahaddin.

Turning to understudied archives of Ottoman Turkish and French texts, this project combines historical and critical approaches to political theory and international relations, interrogating how Ottoman thinkers in the age of high imperialism understood the relationship between sovereignty, cosmopolitanism and inclusion; as well as thinking about the space the Ottomans occupy in the world. This project reframes the problem of inclusion as the intersection and inextricability of the domestic and the international: inclusion refers both to countries' inclusion in the world system and to the inclusion of the many peoples in the domestic sphere as equal citizens in the polity itself, presenting a critical understanding of inclusion and its limits at dual scales.