This Year's Conference Theme

War, Empire and Sabotage in an Age of Genocide

The genocide in Gaza—livestreamed to the world and enabled by global powers—has shattered the post–World War II order’s claims to protect people from mass atrocity. It has rendered hollow the tenets of international law while exposing the impotence of global institutions when faced with empire’s determination to sustain itself through war, militarism and capitalist circulations. Israel and its supporters have normalized territorial conquest, military aggression and the routine terrorizing of populations. This moment signals a new chapter in an old story: empire’s reliance on war, mass violence and dispossession.

At the same time, it is essential to resist frames that exceptionalise or isolate the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) from global histories and structures of power. Persistent narratives that render the region inherently violent or unstable obscure its entanglement in global systems of power, while naturalising its peoples as disposable and its resources as endlessly exploitable. BRISMES 2026 Conference invites scholars to interrogate and unsettle these durable imaginaries, and to examine the ways in which war and empire shape, constrain and erase the past, present and future of the region.

We especially encourage submissions that engage with the following areas of inquiry:

• Empire and Violence: How do global, regional, and state powers sustain systems of domination through infrastructures, borders, legal regimes, racial ecologies and political economies of war?
• Life under Empire: How do individuals and communities live, persist and resist under conditions of violence and dispossession? What forms of agency, solidarity and everyday survival emerge? How do “abject”, “deviant”, “surplus” bodies and lives generate other spaces and worlds against deadly conditions and how do different collectives experiences, speak about and share these other worlds?
• Frames and Representations: How are exceptionalism, moral panics and racialised narratives mobilised to justify neglect, exploitation or death? How are such discourses reproduced, policed and contested?
• Alternative Futures: How might decolonial, feminist, queer, disability, Black and Indigenous frameworks open new ways of knowing, imagining, and organising beyond genocidal logics and imperial mediations?      

We also invite contributions that address broader questions raised by the current conjuncture: What does the region’s exceptionalisation reveal about the making of settler colonial power, the temporalities of genocide, or the infrastructures of reconstruction and bordering? How do these perspectives illuminate both the durability and the vulnerabilities of organised power? Where might we locate spaces of sabotage, solidarity and re-enchantment?

We welcome proposals for Panels, Roundtables, Individual Papers, and Creative Interventions that engage with these themes, as well as submissions situated within the wider field of Middle East Studies or focused on the lived realities of people in the Middle East and North Africa and their diasporas. Submissions from all academic disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged.