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This uprising is demanding justice beyond sectarian, class, religious or cultural divides. In the clarity brought about by the uprising, the regime's politics of division has been challenged by the uprising's politics of solidarity.

Public commemoration and performance are closely bound up with time, place and social arenas, the memorialization of the past serving a variety of goals. This article considers the memorialization of the experience of the famine that blighted Ireland and northern Scotland during the Victorian period, and focuses on Glasgow, one of Scotland's major cities and the destination of many famine migrants. It explores the instrumental use of the famine past in the public sphere in a city long haunted by the specter of sectarianism and considers the impact of the choices made by different collectives in the process of heritage making and remembrance of uncomfortable/difficult aspects of the past.

When rebel forces seized Damascus on 8 December 2024 and toppled the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, it was impossible not to share in the euphoria over the end of 54 years of brutal dictatorship. After more than a decade of civil war, rebel forces began the offensive that finally brought down the regime, showing Syrians that nothing is permanent, not even dynasties. Political transformation finally came because the regime's backers withdrew their protection and Assad's deeply demoralized army collapsed. The essay explores the challenges facing Syria's new leadership under Ahmad al-Sharaa, including sectarian tensions and the destabilizing influence of Western sanctions and Israeli military interventions. Whatever comes next, this chapter of Syrian suffering is over, though the complexities of transitional justice and the devastating sectarian violence that erupted in March 2025 cast uncertainty over Syria's future.

This article is primarily a piece of conceptual scoping and considers the concept of 'the local' in relation to peacebuilding. It notes how the local is simultaneously held to blame for conflicts (as unenlightened, dangerous, uncivilised) and is also regarded as a saviour for international peace support operations. Local legitimacy, partnership and ownership of international peace interventions are seen as a fast track to success, sustainability and exit. The article navigates its way around this confused understanding of the local and argues that the local is a (not always helpful) construction. It further argues that, by applying a critical lens towards the concept of the local, we can seek to separate the concept of the local from territory and see it in terms of activity, networks and relationships. This has implications for practice and 'field' work.

This article seeks to address a significant lacuna in Arab American Studies in respect of the role played by primary, secondary, and adult education in the integration of hundreds of thousands of mainly Christian immigrants from the Ottoman Levant between the 1890s and the late 1920s. The article begins by discussing the context in which US federal authorities sought to assimilate and “Americanize” these new immigrants through the education of adults and minors in a rapidly evolving public education system, also addressing the developing role of charitable, parochial, and other private schools within the nascent Arab American community. At the heart of national policy was a concern, voiced particularly loudly during the second half of World War I, that the loyalty of immigrants to their new country had to be embedded through a deliberate inculcation of common American values. The education system, in its various forms, bore the brunt of this work. This ideological policy, however, often came into conflict with a countermovement of cultural pluralism, through which it was attempted to retain or reclaim intellectual, cultural, and social legacies from the migrants’ countries of origin. After tackling this wider context, the article focuses on the disparate communities of Arabic-speaking immigrants, from New York to states such as Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, and California. Within this heterogenous but, initially at least, mainly Christian diaspora, an intense debate took place throughout the first quarter of the twentieth century over these questions of Americanization, race, identity, the desirability, speed, and comprehensiveness of assimilation, and the extent to which the language and cultural legacy of the mother country would have to be sacrificed in becoming American. These debates, focused on education, shaped the self-view of the nascent diaspora community in ways that lasted until the more nationally diverse “second wave” of post-World War II Arab immigration.

We use an experiment across the Arab Twittersphere and a nationally representative survey experiment in Lebanon to evaluate what types of counter-speech interventions are most effective in reducing sectarian hate speech online. We explore whether and to what extent messages priming common national identity or common religious identity, with and without elite endorsements, decrease the use of hostile anti-outgroup language. We find that elite-endorsed messages that prime common religious identity are the most consistently effective in reducing the spread of sectarian hate speech. Our results provide suggestive evidence that religious elites may play an important role as social referents—alerting individuals to social norms of acceptable behavior. By randomly assigning counter-speech treatments to actual producers of online hate speech and experimentally evaluating the effectiveness of these messages on a representative sample of citizens that might be incidentally exposed to such language, this work offers insights for researchers and policymakers on avenues for combating harmful rhetoric on and offline.

We develop and test an economic theory of insurgency motivated by the informal literature and by recent military doctrine. We model a three-way contest between violent rebels, a government seeking to minimize violence by mixing service provision and coercion, and civilians deciding whether to share information about insurgents. We test the model using panel data from Iraq on violence against Coalition and Iraqi forces, reconstruction spending, and community characteristics (sectarian status, socioeconomic grievances, and natural resource endowments). Our results support the theory’s predictions: improved service provision reduces insurgent violence, particularly for smaller projects and since the “surge” began in 2007.

How do civilians respond to civil war narratives? Do they react to ethnic frames more strongly than to alternatives? Governments and rebels battle for hearts and minds as well as strategic terrain, and winning the narrative war can shift legitimacy, popular support, and material resources to the sympathetically framed side. We examine the effect of one-sided and competing war discourses on ordinary people's understandings of the Syrian civil war—a conflict with multiple narratives, but which has become more communal over time. We conduct a framing experiment with a representative sample of Syrian refugees in Lebanon in which we vary the narrative that describes the reasons for the conflict. We find that sectarian explanations, framed in isolation, strongly increase the importance government supporters place on fighting. When counterframed against competing narratives, however, the rallying effect of sectarianism drops and vanishes.

Five years after people took to the streets in protest at political organisation across the Middle East, the consequences of these actions remain. As the protests gained traction, states began to fragment and regimes sought to retain power, whatever the cost. While a great deal of focus has been upon what happened, very little attention has been paid to the role of agency within the context of the fragmenting sovereignty and political change. This article contributes to these debates by applying the work of Giorgio Agamben to the post-Arab Uprisings Middle East, to understand the relationship between rulers and ruled along with the fragmentation of the sovereign state. The article argues for the need to bring agency back into conceptual debates about sovereignty within the Middle East. It concludes by presenting a framework that offers an approach building upon Agamben's bare life.