Khayrallah Center Announces 2024 Winner of Alixa Naff Prize

The 2024 Alixa Naff Book Prize is awarded to Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky for his book Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State.

In Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State, Dr. Hamed-Troyansky examines the transformative role of Muslim refugees from the North Caucasus in shaping the late Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century. He shows how the mass migration of Circassians, Chechens, and Dagestanis—driven by Russian imperial expansion—reshaped Ottoman demographics, governance, and land policies. In reaching its decision, the selection committee noted that “Hamed-Troyansky innovatively integrates refugee studies with Ottoman history, emphasizing the agency of displaced communities in negotiating resettlement, influencing Ottoman rural development, and navigating imperial citizenship. By connecting local experiences to broader imperial and global histories, the book challenges narratives of passive victimhood and demonstrates how refugees became central to state-building and social transformation in the late Ottoman era.”

Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of global migration and forced displacement and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. He is the author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024). Vladimir is currently writing a new book, which is a transnational history of Muslim displacement in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia since 1850. His articles appeared in Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Slavic Review. He received a PhD in History from Stanford University and served as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University.

“The message of Empire of Refugees… has been that of hope and survival”

Upon receiving the news, Dr. Hamed-Troyansky responded, “I am thrilled to be awarded the 2024 Alixa Naff Prize in Migration Studies for Empire of Refugees. The Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies has been at the forefront of developing Middle Eastern migration studies, a brilliantly vibrant field today, and this recognition from the Center is an absolute honor. This book took over ten years to research and write, and it was only possible thanks to many brilliant people in the field, to whom I have been turning for advice; librarians and archivists, without whom no historian’s work is possible; and refugees’ descendants in the Middle East who generously shared with me their family histories. For me, the message of Empire of Refugees, which narrates how the two empires handled Muslim mobility, has been that of hope and survival—against all odds, including ethnic cleansing, migration bans, and war—a message, tragically, as relevant today as ever.”