Salwa Ismail is Professor of Politics with reference to the Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research examines everyday forms of government, urban governance, and governmental violence. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in both Egypt and Syria, enquiring into how mechanisms of government and practices of violence come to be formative of ordinary citizens’ political subjectivities. She is the author of Rethinking Islamist Politics: Culture, the State and Islamism (I.B Tauris 2003); Political Life in Cairo’s New Quarters: Encountering the Everyday State (University of Minnesota Press 2006) and The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria (Cambridge University Press 2018). Her most recent publication appeared in Political Geography.