Featured Research
Political Naturalisation: Conscripting Transit Citizens in the United Arab Emirates (Mira Al Hussein)
Since its formation, the United Arab Emirates has sought to construct a cohesive sense of national identity among its citizens, centred on a system of material and legal privileges granted exclusively to Emirati nationals. A pillar of its nation-building project was the strict exclusion of foreigners from citizenship and the upholding of a patrilineal citizenship regime. Thus, Emirati nationals are part of a social hierarchy that reproduced colonial inequalities, which have become increasingly difficult to overcome in the post-nation-state era.
More Catholic than the Pope: Turkish competition with ‘little Russia’ in Libya, 1953–1957 (Ömer Aslan)
Drawing extensively on declassified American, Turkish, and British archives, this study explores the Turco-Egyptian rivalry in Libya and its place in the intra-Western alliance relations in the 1950s. It shows how the Turkish government, acting ‘even more Catholic than the Pope’ in Libya, was so committed to fending off the Egyptians that it became frustrated by what it perceived as British and American apathy and appeasement toward Egyptian sway in Libya.
Book Review: Stitching the Intifada: Embroidery and Resistance in Palestine (Enji Matar)
Providing a review of one of the most recent books about Palestinian embroidery (tatreez), Enji Matar analyzes Rachel Dedman’s book titled Stitching the Intifada: Embroidery and Resistance in Palestine. Matar investigates how Dedman’s work speaks to previous works on embroidery and what additional insights we can gain from Dedman’s work. The review aims to propose deeper questions that Dedman’s short book touch upon.
Rolling the dice: Capitalism, trafficking and speculation across the Western Mediterranean (José Ciro Martínez)
This paper ruminates alongside two hashish traffickers whose lives span the Strait of Gibraltar in light of their simultaneous critique and embrace of the speculative underpinnings of contemporary capitalism. Drawing inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s allegorical image of chance, illustrated in his delightful portraits of the gambler, I foreground these traffickers’ distinctive engagements with and recounting of uncertainty in their profession.
Unmaking Mother, Wife, and Chaste Woman: Subverted Femininities in Theodosia Sophroniades’ Narratives (Seda İzmirli Karamanlı)
This article foregrounds Theodosia Sophroniades, a half-Circassian Greek-Orthodox author, journalist, and interpreter during the Hamidian era (1876–1908). Although long overlooked in women’s historiography, Sophroniades occupied a prominent place in the multicultural and multilingual Ottoman intellectual milieu of the late nineteenth century.
Under the palm trees: Social and environmental considerations around the expansion of Medjool dates in the Southern Jordan Valley (Livia Perosino)
The article analyses the agricultural transformation of the Jordan Valley (JV). The specific socio-technical imaginary that has driven this transformation has led to the systematic overexploitation of water resources. The integration of treated wastewater was a technical fix that avoided questioning the wider economic and agricultural model. However, treated wastewater further contributed to the degradation of the environment and livelihoods of local populations.
Transregional Agency and Politics in Defining the ‘Middle East’: Unpacking Critique and Cartography Through Syrian–Turkish Borderlands (Jonas Nabbe & Ward Vloeberghs)
The term ‘Middle East’ has been contested ever since its emergence in 1902. Although it has acquired a fairly mainstream delimitation, this conception of the region has largely been shaped by outside (Western) powers. This is problematic because the area thus defined comes with three theoretical flaws that influence our understanding of the region until today.
Laughing right: Jordanian political humour and right-wing ideologies in social media spaces (Yousef Barahmeh)
This article examines how Jordanian political humour has been strategically employed in social media spaces since the 2011 Arab uprisings. It explores how right-wing ideologies have given rise to Jordanian political humour, particularly of a populist nature in social media spaces, both to reflect and contest dominant political dynamics, social tensions, and public discourse in post-Arab Spring Jordan.
Archiving Gaza in the Present: Memory, Culture and Erasure (Dina Matar & Venetia Porter, Eds.)
Conflict does more than destroy physical spaces. It extinguishes lives, erases histories and disrupts the collective memory of entire communities. In Gaza, where genocide has wrought catastrophic loss, the destruction of heritage adds another dimension of devastation. Yet amid the rubble, acts of archiving, art-making and storytelling persist. Archiving Gaza in the Present brings together voices from Palestine and beyond to document the cultural erasure and to explore how creative and archival practices resist it.
Academic freedom challenged: Comparing France, Germany and the UK (Donatella della Porta & Sevgi Doğan)
Focusing on France, Germany and the United Kingdom (UK), our research has addressed the different mechanisms of repression of academic freedom with particular attention paid to the movements in solidarity with Palestine that spread globally after 7 October 2023. The empirical research triangulates quantitative and qualitative analysis. Using various sources, we have constructed a database that we use to map episodes of repression in the three countries, specifying their targets and mechanisms.
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