Featured Research

This jointly-authored article critically examines a troubling silence within feminist academia regarding the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people. This silence isn’t merely passive but actively normalizes oppression, causing tangible harm and perpetuating colonial violence. The article argues for a reinvigorated feminist decolonial praxis that actively confronts these silences by amplifying Palestinian voices, advocating for divestment from institutions complicit in settler colonialism, and supporting civil society movements, such as student encampments and the BDS campaign.

This chapter investigates the dynamics of sectarianisation in Damascus and Aleppo, Syria’s most important urban centres. Particularly, it seeks to do so by exploring the politics of space, destruction and (re)construction that have taken place since the start of the conflict in 2011. In urban Syria, securitised imaginaries and representations of sectarian difference have underpinned patterns of destruction and (re) construction as well as specific violent spatial arrangements. In turn, these spatial interventions have worked to transform Syrian cities’ complex architecture of identities –sectarian, but not exclusively– into a fixed political geography dominated by relationships of exclusion. Read more: https://www.routledge.com/Sectarianism-and-Civil-War-in-Syria/Hinnebusch-Valbjorn/p/book/9781032903828?srsltid=AfmBOooAgRYhE2RqXF4Gakmpwto34xYyhbhHR7owP4TLP4MhqCo0M8D9

This article seeks to establish a theoretical framework for considering how the collective and individual expressions of humour in social media spaces have been used and presented in the socio-political context of Jordan after the 2011 Arab Spring. This framework moves from the collective to the individual and makes Mikhail Bakhtin and Sigmund Freud complementary to the study of Jordanian social media humour after the Arab Spring.

This brief piece picks apart selected standard narratives about the war on Gaza which Western media and governments use to describe the unprecedented devastation since October 7th. The analysis sketches how key characteristics of the Palestine/Israel question’s colonial roots and post-independence regimes’ strategies of power explains these contradictions and how they lead to ‘palliative’ peace processes which defer structural solutions rather than advance them.

My name is Brendan Van Crout, a final-year International Relations undergraduate at the University of Exeter. From 11 to 20 April, I had unprecedented access to NGOs, academics and citizens’ movements that deal with migration, particularly in the state of Tunisia and the wider Middle East and North Africa region. I will discuss my experiences and thoughts from a short but intensive trip to Tunisia.