Featured Research
Needs that Bind: Materializing Nationality in Post-Ottoman Regimes (Orçun Can Okan)
Needs That Bind reconsiders the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire and the construction of new regimes in the decade after World War I, to understand the consequential connections that remained among the new republican regime in Turkey and neighbouring French and British Mandates in Syria-Lebanon and Iraq.
Foreign Policy and the Institutional Evolution of Rojavayê Kurdistan (2011–Present) (Marianna Charountaki)
This policy paper examines the evolution of Rojavayê Kurdistan [Western Kurdistan – commonly referred to as (Democratic Self-Governance of) Rojava] from 2011 to the present, analysing how successive phases of the Syrian conflict shaped its institutional development. It argues that Rojava’s survival and consolidation have been driven primarily by external engagement, rather than by religion or ideological doctrine.
Gaza and the Colonial Right to Self-defence: Legal Absurdities and the Circular Reasoning of Violence (Passent Moussa & Colin Samson)
This article challenges the framing of 7 October as a standalone event, critically examines Israel's invocation of the "right to self-defence," and argues that the genocidal exercise of this purported right has served to facilitate the ethnic cleansing and annexation of Gaza and, increasingly, the West Bank.
Colloquial Arabic as a decolonial language: the case of linguistic hybridity in Jordanian satirical writing (Yousef Barahmeh)
In Arabic language, a distinction is often made between Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic, fuṣḥā (formal language) and ʿāmmiyya (colloquial Arabic), and literary language and vernacular expressions. In this article, we reassess these frames to critically analyse the use of linguistic hybridity in Colloquial Jordanian Arabic (CJA) as a decolonial linguistic strategy, particularly in Jordanian satirical writing and culture-specific expressions.
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.
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