This Year's Conference Theme

Uncertain Futures: Ruptures, Resistance, and the Global Middle East

We live in times of global instability - marked by accelerating climate crises, endless war, genocide, rapid AI deployment, and shifting geopolitical power. From the vantage point of the Middle East, the "liberal world order" has long been revealed as a selective construct, exposing the exclusionary boundaries of who is granted full human dignity. Today, as these global frameworks fracture under their own contradictions, the Middle East stands not merely as a site of violence and extraction, but as a crucial locus for understanding the dynamics of (global) collapse and the possibilities that emerge from it.

The BRISMES 2027 Annual Conference invites scholars, practitioners, and activists to examine the Middle East at this critical juncture of uncertainty. We seek to explore how crises and systemic ruptures generate not only destruction, but also insurgent possibilities and alternative futures. Moving beyond frameworks of passive victimhood, we interrogate the dialectic between hope and despair, mapping agency, resistance, creativity, and grassroots reconfigurations across various scales - from the intimate and local to the regional and global.

By analysing wider histories and geopolitical and economic shifts, this conference aims to connect the Middle East both internally across its diverse political landscapes and to broader global processes. How do lessons from other regions inform Middle Eastern struggles, and what lessons might the region hold for the Majority World about surviving - and dismantling - (failing) imperial orders?

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

• The Collapse of the Liberal Order: Deconstructing Western-centric paradigms, human rights discourses, and the selective category of the "human". 
  
• Geopolitics and Geoeconomics: Reconfigurations of imperial geopolitics with new and evolving alliances. 
• Climate Breakdown and Energy Regimes: Intensified regimes of resource extraction, green colonialism and the wider politics, history and socio-ecology of climate breakdown in the global Middle East;
• War, Genocide, and Resistance: Everyday survival, decolonial politics, and abolitionism in contexts of state violence and occupation.
• Technological Frontiers & Power: Artificial intelligence, digital surveillance, automated warfare, and counter-surveillance.
• Dis/Connectivities and Scale: Mapping regional connections and configurations, infrastructural networks, and global solidarities
• Hope, Despair, and Radical Futures: Political and social possibilities born out of ruptures, destruction, systemic collapse.
• Creative (Re-)Imaginings of the Future: Poetic, literary and aesthetic imaginings and visions of alternative futures. 
• Comparative & Interconnected Methodologies: Drawing lessons and solidarity networks between the Middle East and other regions.

We welcome proposals for panels, roundtables, individual/co-authored papers and creative interventions that engage with these themes. We also welcome submissions that sit outside the conference theme and are 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. In addition, we invite submissions that speak from other geographies, with the capacity to speak to and with Middle East Studies. Submissions from all academic disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged.