Paper Trails Pedagogy
In order to uncover the paper trails of the powerful, one has to first learn how to track down, read and decipher obscure planning documents that are often available in the public sphere.
The Secret Lives of UAE Shell Companies
The UAE’s growing number of free zones are providing secretive havens for offshore companies to avoid taxes, regulation and accountability at home. Shell companies and money laundering abound. But it is still possible for determined researchers to discover who controls and ultimately benefits from this expanding system.
An Archive of Literary Reconstruction after the Palestinian Nakba
A close reading of a literary journal’s table of contents in colonized Palestine reveals a vibrant culture of resistance and renewal in the midst of destruction and dispossession.
Israel’s Vanishing Files, Archival Deception and Paper Trails
The Israeli government is keeping many of the state’s archival documents classified, censored and out of the reach of potentially critical historians. But determined scholars continue to uncover tantalizing paper trails that challenge Israel’s air-brushed official narratives.
Weaponizing Iraq’s Archives
The Bush Administration’s exploitation of Iraqi state archives for atrocity material to justify its failing 2003 invasion of Iraq was based on precedent. The genealogy of exploiting Iraqi archives for political ends serves as a warning for how the self-evidently virtuous notion of human rights can be used to justify war.
The Politics of Paper Trails
States often hide their accountability in plain sight: in redacted documents, incomplete flight manifests, encrypted data, shredded memos and reclassified archives. They also go to great lengths to keep their internal affairs private: banning oppositional media,...Border Regimes and the New Global Apartheid
Catherine Besteman analyzes the new form of global intervention that is taking shape in the rise of militarized borders, interdictions at sea, detention centers, indefinite custody and the generalized criminalization of mobility around the world. The Global North—the United States, Canada, the European Union (EU), Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, the Gulf states and East Asia—is investing in militarized border regimes that reach far beyond particular territories to manage the movement of people from the Global South.
Israel’s Permanent Siege of Gaza
The devastating human and health consequences of intervention by deprivation are noted in Ron Smith’s account of Israel’s decade-long siege of Gaza, whose dynamics are similar to the catastrophic sanctions regime imposed by the United States on Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War and the siege warfare utilized by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen.
The UAE and the Infrastructure of Intervention
Rafeef Ziadah investigates the rise of humanitarian logistics hubs such as Dubai International Humanitarian City, which, although ostensibly humanitarian, have become a key mechanism of intervention and increasingly a central element in the projection of power for the Gulf regimes such as the United Arab Emirates.
Humanitarian Crisis Research as Intervention
Sarah Parkinson describes the growing popularity of extreme research—scholarly research conducted in crises zones amongst conflict-affected populations in the Middle East and North Africa—and shows how this research is a mode of intervention that can impose serious harm on individuals, communities, local partner universities and even humanitarian program staff.
The Palestinian McCity in the Neoliberal Era
Sami Tayeb examines how a multitude of privately financed urban development projects in the Israeli-Occupied West Bank are creating a form of colonization that parallels that of Israel. Unlike Israel’s settler-colonial urbanism, however, this form of urban colonization is driven by global, and particularly neoliberal, capitalism, as it consumes Palestine’s remaining agrarian land at an unprecedented rate.
Urban Interventions for the Wars Yet to Come
In a wide-ranging interview, Hiba Bou Akar shows how urban planning is being used to turn some neighborhoods and urban peripheries in the Middle East into militarized frontier zones between competing political, military and sectarian organizations guided by the dystopian logic of a war yet to come.
The Shifting Contours of US Power and Intervention in Palestine
Lisa Bhungalia Jeannette Greven and Tahani Mustafa argue that the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign against the Palestinians—which gives Israel free reign to violently dispossess Palestinians while simultaneously withdrawing US aid for food, schools and hospitals—has both worsened Palestinian lives and has had the unintended consequence of weakening some levers of influence the United States holds over Palestinians.
Iraqibacter and the Pathologies of Intervention
Omar Dewachi traces the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria in war-related wounds—which US military doctors labelled Iraqibacter—to the biological legacy of decades of sanctions, war and intervention in Iraq, and how antibiotic resistance is increasingly being found in other militarized intervention zones in the region.
The Globalized Unmaking of the Libyan State
The current disorder in Libya is not merely the result of a failed humanitarian intervention, which allegedly collapsed the state. Global currents and processes have also combined with local forces to unmake the Libyan state. Like the other cases of globalized state unmaking in the region, a new phase in Libya’s history opened in 2011 and has yet to be closed. It is one in which the order of Libyan disorder has been constituted by global networks of interpenetrating relations within and beyond Libya’s borders.
The New Landscape of Intervention
Even as the 2000’s saw the return of traditional forms of imperial intervention—with the US deployment of military forces in Afghanistan and Iraq in pursuit of a quixotic and unwinnable War on Terror—there are increasingly new forms of intervention that must be understood, assessed and mapped.
Roger Owen
Roger Owen, a former contributing editor of Middle East Report who taught at Oxford University and Harvard University for over half a century, died on December 22, 2018 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 83. A specialist in the economic, political and...Helen Lackner, Yemen in Crisis: The Road to War
Few people from the West know Yemen better than Helen Lackner. Her experience and insights make this book essential for understanding the multiple dimensions of Yemen’s crisis.
Progressive Surge Propels Turning Point in US Policy on Yemen
The US House of Representatives passed a potentially historic resolution on February 13, 2019, calling for an end to US military support for the Saudi-led coalition’s intervention in Yemen that began in 2015. This long overdue Congressional action to constrain executive war-making, however, would not have been possible without a tremendous grassroots mobilization against US involvement in this disastrous war and the surging progressive tide that is raising deeper questions about US foreign policy in the Middle East.
Roundtable: Three Women Activists Advancing Peace in Yemen
The growing public awareness of the war in Yemen—and the historic Congressional invocation of the War Powers Act this winter—could not have occurred without the dedicated activism of Yemeni Americans and their allies. A contributing editor to this issue, Stacey Philbrick Yadav, spoke to three activists working from different corners of the United States—Seattle, Atlanta and East Lansing—to advance peace in Yemen.
