Issue Editors: Mona Atia, Graham Cornwell and Muriam Haleh Davis with Guest Editor Shira Robinson

The spring 2022 issue of Middle East Report, “Settler Colonialism’s Enduring Entanglements,” brings together a wide range of geographic and disciplinary perspectives on settler colonialism from the Middle East, North Africa and the metropole. While there is a rich literature about the two most well-known instances of settler colonialism in the region, French Algeria and Israel and Palestine, these cases have been surprisingly peripheral to the field of settler colonial studies as well as to broader definitions of settler colonialism and understandings of how its legacies shape politics and social life today. With the goal of expanding the geographic scope of analysis, we explore these and other, lesser-known sites of settler colonialism in the region. We recognize from the outset that settler colonialism is an inherently messy thing to pin down. It is both a process and a concept. In practice, settler colonialism often operates in conjunction with other processes that can effectively mask it, such as nationalism, Indigeneity and sovereignty, to name a few. Authors in this issue also examine the contested meanings and understandings of decolonization in different contexts. We seek to pull apart some of these entanglements and to illuminate the long past of settler colonialism in the Middle East, the ways it shapes the present and continues into the future.

Note: All articles are open access.