Issue Editors: Elif Babül, Muriam Haleh Davis and Jessica Barnes with Guest Editor Alex Lubin

This issue of Middle East Report, “Race—Legacies and Challenges,” highlights the historical and cultural specificity of racial formation, racialization and racism in the Middle East and North Africa. Histories of Western imperialism across the region, indigenous legacies of enslaved labor and ongoing postcolonial nation-building projects have configured race and racism differently than across the West. Racial categories continue to be shaped and reshaped by contemporary regimes of migration, labor and value creation. They intersect with other categories of social difference including gender, linguistic and cultural difference, nationality and socioeconomic status. Thus, while there are shared global features of race and racism across geographies, this issue demonstrates the need to analyze race and racism locally. At the same time, it is critical to acknowledge the political currency that anti-racist mobilization and rhetoric anchored in the West holds in the current moment. In tracing the social movements that have arisen in response to racism in the Middle East and North Africa, this issue also shows how activists and citizens are making strategic connections across geopolitical borders in their struggle to articulate anti-racist futures.

Note: All articles are open access.