Issue Editors: Lisa Hajjar, Basil Farraj, Kanwal Hameed and Jacob Mundy.

MER's fall issue, ‘Carceral Realities and Freedom Dreams,’ centers carceralism—that is forms of unfreedom—and organized resistance against it. Authors trace the logics and effects of carcerality across time and space, from the massive scales of migration policy, penal systems and state policing to more intimate realms of loss and brutalization. Their accounts reject exceptionalism when it comes to carceral states in North Africa and the Middle East, instead drawing attention to the globe-spanning architectures and coordination that enforce deprivation, restrict mobility, produce new technologies and constrain futures. Yet carceral realities do not need to be destiny. At the heart of each piece is an attention to the people whose lives are at stake in the question of freedom, whether in Morocco, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt or Tunisia. Taken together, they demand we grapple with detention, torture, suspension and death—and insist we learn with people as they resist, refuse, dream and organize in the face of systematic violence.

This issue of Middle East Report has been produced in partnership with the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Security in Context.