Anti-hero*ines and Oman’s revolutionary afterlives
“What happened to the women who fought for the revolution?” This question has frequently come up when I have been […] The post Anti-hero*ines and Oman’s revolutionary afterlives…
“What happened to the women who fought for the revolution?” This question has frequently come up when I have been […] The post Anti-hero*ines and Oman’s revolutionary afterlives…
Anyone who knows Venezuela knows that things happen fast there. It is a function of the hectic pace of urban life in a society that is highly subject…
Ching Kwan Lee’s Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Decolonization Struggle combines history, ethnography and sociological analysis. According to Lucas Tse, the author’s account of political tra…
Disaster Nationalism by Richard Seymour examines the rise of contemporary far-right movements, which he describes as neoliberalism that has been radicalised along ethno-nationalist and protectionist l…
Taking a photograph of her grandparents as its jumping off point, Indignity by Lea Ypi blends memoir and historical enquiry to explore her grandmother’s life and the period…
In The Great Betrayal, Fawaz Gerges examines the reasons for consistent political instability in the Middle East since the early 20th century. Examining Western intervention, domestic authoritarian ru…
While thinking optimistically about politics is never wise, it is impossible not to share in the euphoria of Syrians for […] The post Syria in the Moment appeared…
After more than eight years of no contact, I conducted a video call with a former non-influential officer from an […] The post The Emotional Toll of Death…
The fall of Asad’s state of eternity on December 8th, the liberation of his regime’s prisons and security centres, the […] The post Forever no more? Between new…
How can communications studies contribute to anthropological inquiry of Syria? This essay reflects on the architecture that governs silence and […] The post Do walls still have ears?…
Sednaya Prison, long cloaked in secrecy and fear, has stood as a stark symbol of the Asad regime’s repression. For […] The post Seeing Sednaya: Echoes of a…
Khaldoun al-Mallah, a Palestinian-Syrian medical doctor and writer, journeyed south from exile in Idlib Province two days after the fall […] The post Avowing Revolution appeared first on…
To be honest, I can’t describe my feelings now; it is a historical moment. Syrians finally feel they can breathe, […] The post Recalibrating Hope and Revolutionary Temporality…
Joyful crowds toppling statues, unsealing torture prisons, defacing regime iconography, ordinary people roaming freely through Al-Asad’s Presidential Palace . . […] The post Recalibrating Syria:…
On the 7th of December 2024, Damascus was up all night having a special kind of party. At 3 a.m., my siblings […] The post On Silence appeared first on…
Just as “Der Optimismus ist Pflicht” (optimism is a duty) – as Popper is frequently (though perhaps apocryphally) credited with […] The post Soliciting Slaps – Notes from…
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury. 2024. Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba. Redwood City: Stanford University Press. […] The post Colonizing Palestine: The Zionis…
Last year, I submitted an abstract for a conference about the future of authoritarianism with the title ‘knowledge production and […] The post In times like these appeared…
Reflections on Rusha Latif’s Tahrir’s Youth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution (American University in Cairo Press, 2022). After more than […] The post Lessons from Tahrir for activists…
In Revolution and Democracy in Tunisia, Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh present an interdisciplinary analysis of Tunisia’s rich history of protest, arguing that popular resistance has long shaped t…
In The Incarcerations, Alpa Shah unpacks the plight of the Bhima Koregaon-16, a group of human rights defenders who were imprisoned without trial for an alleged plot against…
In 1931, an American newspaper competition asked its readers to submit the best use of the word denial in a sentence. The winner was “Denial ain’t (just) a…
I first visited the Dhufar region of southern Oman in 2013. I was soon to learn that some residents were discussing the future of the exiled former opposition…
In the wake of October 7th, I was asked by a fellow anthropologist if my Syrian friends and interlocutors – who participated in the 2011 revolution and are…