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Addresses the shifting interpretations of the Treaty of Lausanne across national contexts, tracing how its provisions have been legally, socially, and politically reimagined.

The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne remains one of the few interwar peace settlements that has endured into the twenty-first century. Yet, the memory of Lausanne has proved deeply contested. 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 this diplomatic, legal, economic, and financial juncture that helped reshape the world and defined new norms of sovereignty, displacement, and identity. Building on a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship and serving as a sequel to They All Made Peace—What is Peace?, also published by Gingko, this edited volume foregrounds the lived realities and long-term legacies of the treaty, critically re-examining the political, cultural, and social consequences of its provisions and aftershocks.

Rather than focusing solely on high diplomacy or legal text, The Lausanne Moment brings into view the human dimension of the Lausanne moment. Through case studies ranging from the refugee experience in Nikaia and Asia Minor orphans in Greece, to the enduring memory of loss in Pontic singing, the symbolic ethnicity of Cretan descendants, and the Kurdish experience in Turkey, the book documents the deeply personal and community-level consequences of forced migration and political rupture. These experiences are not confined to the immediate postwar period; they linger across time, informing the present-day politics of memory, migration, and identity.

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. Lausanne’s cultural afterlives, from its role in shaping archaeology, music, and education policy, are also covered in the book. 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—Kurdish, Cypriot, Pontic, Albanian, and Cretan—that have been marginal to mainstream narratives. By weaving together policy analysis, oral history, cultural production, and historical research, the volume offers an expansive and textured account of one of the twentieth century’s most consequential, yet paradoxical, peace settlements.

The Lausanne Moment situates the treaty within broader histories of state-led population engineering, colonial eugenic practices, and the moral politics of international humanitarianism. The “peace” of Lausanne, the volume suggests, was neither absolute nor apolitical—it was crafted, contested, and constantly renegotiated. The book’s contributors collectively ask not only what peace meant in 1923, but also what it means today for those still living with its consequences.

An analysis of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne from multiple historical, economic, and social perspectives.
 
The last of the post-World War One peace settlements, the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne departed from methods used in the Treaty of Versailles and took on a new peace-making initiative: a forced population exchange that affected one and a half million people. Like its German and Austro-Hungarian allies, the defeated Ottoman Empire had initially been presented with a dictated peace in 1920. In just two years, however, the Kemalist insurgency enabled Turkey to become the first sovereign state in the Middle East, while the Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, Egyptians, Kurds, and other communities previously under the Ottoman Empire sought their own forms of sovereignty.

Featuring historical analysis from multiple perspectives, They All Made Peace, What Is Peace? considers the Lausanne Treaty and its legacy. Chapters investigate British, Turkish, and Soviet designs in the post-Ottoman world, situate the population exchanges relative to other peacemaking efforts, and discuss the economic factors behind the reallocation of Ottoman debt and the management of refugee flows. Further chapters examine Kurdish, Arab, Iranian, Armenian, and other communities that were refused formal accreditation at Lausanne, but which were still forced to live with the consequences, consequences that are still emerging, one hundred years on.