“To the Arab Hebrew [la-ʿivriyah ha-ʿarviyah]! If you are a Hebrew, you are not an Arab. If an Arab, not a Hebrew. So, you are neither a Hebrew nor an Arab . . . C.Q.F.D.” This paid announcement, published by an anonymous reader of the Jerusalem-based Hebrew newspaper ha-Tsevi on 27 November 1908, reminds us that the idea of an Arab Jew (or, in the parlance of Palestinian Hebrew in the early 20th century, an Arab Hebrew) has been at once present and contested from the early years of Zionist settlement in Palestine. Moreover, the contestation was (as it remains) often more emotional than logical (ce qu'il fallait démontrer notwithstanding). But the category of Arab Hebrew was not constructed simply to be attacked; for some, including another personal advertiser on the very same page of ha-Tsevi, Arab Hebrew was a self-proclaimed identity. “To M. M.,” he or she wrote, “I saw you, I knew you, I respected you. I will leave you, I will remember you, and I will not forget you.” This mysterious, otherwise anonymous, apparent break-up letter—a succinct, public tweet a century before Twitter—was signed by “Arab Hebrew [ʿivri ʿarvi].”

We have come to understand developmental indices such as growth, standard of living, and the calorie as “universal.” Such indices promise an objective means of erasing developmental differences. They promise sameness. However, what happens when we shift our focus away from inclusion and exclusion in the process of development, and instead look at when and how these categories themselves were constituted?

Aspects of space and place shape daily life, social structures, politics, and intimate relations among people. In the late 1980s and 1990s, anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists—influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre on the meaning of social space—started to highlight the spatial in their analysis of social phenomena. These scholars focused on the production of urban space and asserted that space is dynamic and often shaped by the needs of its users as well as by those who design it. With the exception of Setha Low's work on Latin America, these writings were mostly centered on the United States.

Starting with Said's critique of Orientalism but going well beyond it, poststructuralist and postcolonial critiques of modernity have challenged not only one-dimensional visions of Western modernity—by “multiplying” or “alternating” it with different modernities—but also the binaries between the modern and the traditional/premodern/early modern, thus resulting in novel, more inclusive ways of thinking about past experiences. Yet, while scholars working on the Middle East have successfully struggled against the Orientalist perception of the Middle East as the tradition constructed in opposition to the Western modern, they often have difficulties in deconstructing the tradition within, that is, the premodern past. They have traced the alternative and multiple forms of modernities in Middle Eastern geography within the temporal borders of “modernity.” However, going beyond this temporality and constructing new concepts—beyond the notion of tradition—to understand the specificities of past experiences (which are still in relationship with the present) remains underdeveloped in the social history of the Middle East.

In Lebanon, diverse sociopolitical projects have sought to mend the wounds, repair the cracks, and overhaul the loss of the devastating civil war (1975–90). Experts and technopolitics have featured centrally in almost all of them. In my anthropological research on expertise on peace and crisis in Lebanon, I explore how, in the decades after the war, an abstract ideal of peace gave way to a distinct space occupied by diverse groups of experts. I analyze how a previously political aim was transformed into a professionalized field around which specialized knowledge domains were developed and technopolitical practices deployed. In this essay I briefly explore this new architecture of expert power based on the technopolitics of peace (and war) in the contemporary Middle East.

My engagement with the social history of the Middle East, as I embarked on graduate studies, coincided with Judith Tucker's lamentation in 1990 that it was a field understudied to the point of being largely ignored. I came to the study of this new region with training in the native history of Canada, which had introduced me to the challenges and rewards of reconstructing the stories of people who had been denied agency in a narrative dominated by European conquest and nation-building.

Much work has been done in recent decades on the histories of the Jews of Arab lands across a variety of time periods, reflecting an increasing interest in the historical past of the Jews of the “Orient.” While diverse, this literature may be divided into several general groups. The first comprises studies written by Western and Israeli scholars and encompasses a broad spectrum of Arabic-speaking countries. This literature has explored, among other things, issues relating to the way of life and administration of ethnically and culturally diverse Jewish communities, their approaches to Zionism and the question of their national identities, their positions regarding the Zionist–Israeli–Arab conflict in its various phases, and the phenomena of anti-Semitism, particularly in light of the increasing escalation of the conflict. It includes works by Israeli intellectuals of Mizrahi heritage, some of whom came together in the late 1990s in a sociopolitical dissident movement known as the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition. The target audience of this movement was Mizrahi Jews: refugees and emigrants from Arab countries as well as their second- and third-generation offspring. The movement, which was not ideologically homogeneous (particularly regarding approaches to the resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict), took a postcolonialist approach to the Zionist narrative and enterprise, and was critical of the entrenchment of the Ashkenazi (European-extraction) Jews among the elites of the emerging Israeli society. The movement had scant success in reaching its target population: the majority of Mizrahi/Sephardi Jews living in Israel. Nevertheless, it brought to the fore the historical socioeconomic injustices that many Jews from Arab countries had experienced since arriving in Israel, whether reluctantly or acquiescently.

The Arab Gulf remains a marginalized, even unfashionable, area of research in the Middle East academy. In spite of—or maybe because of—this marginality, the region offers an interesting vantage point for reflecting on the production of knowledge about geographic and cultural regions. The frame of knowledge production casts into relief discourses of “the city” in Middle East, and particularly Gulf, studies over the past decade.

I write this piece as Iraq, following Syria, descends into a civil war that is undermining the post–World War I state system and reconfiguring regional and transnational networks of mobilization and instrumentalizations of violence and identity formation. That the Middle East has come to this moment is not an inevitable product of the artificiality of national borders and the precariousness of the state system. It is important to avoid this linear narrative of inevitability, with its attendant formulations of the Middle East as a repository of a large number of absences, and instead to locate the current wars in a specific historical time: the late and post–Cold War eras, marked by the agendas of the Washington Consensus and the globalization of neoliberal discourses; the privatization of the developmental and welfare state; the institutional devolution and multiplication of security services; and the entrenchment of new forms of colonial violence and rule in Israel and Palestine and on a global scale. The conveners of this roundtable have asked us to reflect on the technopolitics of war in the context of this particular moment and in light of the pervasiveness of new governmentalities of war. What I will do in this short piece is reflect on the heuristic and methodological possibilities of the study of war as a form of governance, or what I call the “government of war,” in light of my own research and writing on Iraq.

After the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist narrative dominated the histories and historiographies of Middle Eastern and North African Jewries. Accordingly, Jews and Arabs were largely kept as distinct binaries divided by the intellectual walls that separated Middle East studies and Jewish studies programs. Local North African and Middle Eastern scholars also silenced or overlooked the Jewish dimension of Middle Eastern societies in the same manner that Israeli scholars ignored the historical connections between Arabs and Jews that existed both before and after 1948. The exclusive, sacred yet ebbing, nationalist paradigm has been plagued with historiographical fissures in recent decades, allowing a new wave of intellectual engagement by a young generation of Jewish and Muslim scholars who began to put the Jew and the Arab back into local and global histories formed through complex social, cultural, economic, and political networks.

When I was in graduate school, in the 1980s, one frequently heard complaints about the comparatively unsophisticated nature of the historiography of the medieval Middle East. There was considerable envy of historians in fields like early modern European history, who pushed broader disciplinary limits and whose works were read not just for content but also for historiographical and theoretical inspiration. There were some in our own corner of the profession blazing new methodological trails—Clifford Geertz, for example, who, though not a historian, had much to say to historians, and whose books were read eagerly by historians, and not just in Middle Eastern history; or Fedwa Malti-Douglas, as much at home in feminist literary theory as in medieval Arabic literature. But many graduate students in Middle Eastern history felt a bit underrepresented on the cutting edge of historical thought and practice.

Studies of public space focus disproportionately on cities. Complex and densely populated urban built environments—with their streets, plazas, institutional buildings, housing projects, markets—make concrete and visible attempts to manage difference. They also structure the ways that less powerful residents challenge and sometimes remake elites’ spatial visions of the social order. The robust literature in Middle East studies on Islamic cities, colonial cities, dual cities, quarters and ethnicities, port cities, and so forth is no exception to this urban focus.

Postwar Lebanon, Sufism, imperial translations, Hamlet, trials and atlases, city streets, literary cafés, and Tahrir Square: disorienting as these various themes might appear to be, they nonetheless entitle eight recent inquiries into contemporary—and precedent—directions of literary critical studies of the modern Arabic novel and their calculated revisions of, perhaps, another Arabic literary historical narrative that necessarily engages multigenre, comparative literary–historical investigations. Each of the works under review here was published between 2010 and 2013, with just one specifically, and that ex post facto, addressing the momentous events in Cairo's Tahrir Square in the early months of 2011. In other words, these works might well have already anticipated a more than seasonal, some would even argue historic, “Arab spring,” and at least several of the works’ authors found it necessary to append an epilogue to their in-production text, or otherwise slightly, subtly, revise at the last minute their presumptive chronologies and the contested trajectories of modern Arabic literature that attend them. From the classically proverbial “tradition versus modernity” discussions through their historicist implications for the cultural production of new media and alternative public spheres, each of these studies seeks, in its own way/s, to instantiate Arabic literature—and Arabic literary criticism—within and against its respected precursors. But where will that self-same literature, and its current critical mediations, eventually wind up, whether globally, nationally, or historically?

A few years ago, while conducting archival research on Pahlavi-era Iranian newspapers, I came across a photo from the anti-shah demonstrations that took place in late 1978 and early 1979. It showed a large group of Armenians protesting against the shah. In these years many Iranians and Westerners considered the shah's policies beneficial for religious minorities in Iran. Around the same time, I found a sentence that made this discovery more intriguing. In his seminal work Iran between Two Revolutions, Ervand Abrahamian mentions that throughout the Muhammad Riza Pahlavi era, the opposition to the communist Tudeh party accused it of being controlled by “Armenians, Jews, and Caucasian émigrés.” I tried to find references in the current scholarship to Jews participating in the party, which could have earned them their part in this propaganda campaign, but found very little. Having read the important works of Joel Beinin, Orit Bashkin, and Rami Ginat on Jewish revolutionaries, including communists, in the Middle East, I wondered where the Jewish radicals in Iran were. Several factors may contribute to this silence in the historiography: the writing of Iranian history from a Zionist vantage point, a lack of interest in the history of the Iranian left in the postrevolutionary historiography, and an inability to conceptualize the transregional and global nature of the Iranian Jewish community.

The U.S. Military's turn to culture in the 21st century occurred largely because of its inability to achieve its stated objectives in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through conventional military force. Building on a long history of military strategies concerned with the cultural differences of others, the U.S. military crafted a warfighting strategy in 2006 based on a counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine of using cultural knowledge to battle the enemy. Charting how and why culture was embraced as a 21st-century “weapons system” shows us how technopolitical systems inside the military-industrial complex are envisioned, built, and then dismantled. Close tracking of these changing 21st-century strategies of war reveals, deep within the counterterrorism discourse, a fundamental belief in American exceptionalism. The principle that emerged from this ideological environment is that the enemies to be fought are not only terrorists or the ideologues of al-Qaʿida but also the countries and cultures that produced them. The implementation of this principle, despite its obvious failures, reveals the ideological underpinning that has justified the incredible destruction and securitized implementation of warfighting.

The long American war on Iraq is not over. In a country ravaged for more than two decades by crippling sanctions and military occupation, the social, cultural, and political-economic legacies of war seem unending. Perhaps even more disturbing, Iraqis now face widespread environmental destruction and a dystopian environmental future. The ecological wages of America's long war in Iraq are partly the consequence of “routine” violence, resulting from the systemic destruction of vital electrical, water, and sewage infrastructure over two decades. It is possible to imagine that Iraq's cities and villages can be rebuilt. But even if it finds its way to the kind of political accommodation that makes reconstruction possible, parts of the country face other pernicious long-term environmental threats, among the most dangerous being the hidden toxic and radiological dangers that have settled in Iraqi bodies and deep in its landscape.