In the context of profound global transformations, the field of area studies faces unprecedented epistemological and methodological challenges. This article argues that beyond shifts in geopolitical power, the ongoing restructuring of the global knowledge order necessitates a paradigmatic rethinking of how we understand world regions and civilizational differences. Drawing from the perspective of mutual learning among civilizations, the article identifies deep structural limitations in the traditional area studies paradigm-rooted in Cold War epistemologies, Orientalist assumptions, and singular modernity. It proposes a paradigm reconstruction along four dimensions: epistemology (reconceptualizing difference), methodology (shifting from external explanation to internal understanding), research stance (moving from objectification to intersubjectivity), and research goal setting (from adversarial to cooperative knowledge). Furthermore, the article outlines the unique mission and responsibility of area studies in China in the process of this reconstruction, advocating a shift from knowledge reception to knowledge production, and from regional observation to active co-construction of global knowledge. This paradigm shift aims to transform area studies from a tool of competition into a platform for understanding, coexistence, and civilizational dialogue in the twenty-first century.
This article critically examines the short-to-medium-term out-comes and strategic implications of the 2023-2024 Hezbollah- Israel conflict, triggered by Hamas's October 7, 2023, Al-Aqsa Flood operation, and situated within the escalating confrontation between the Axis of Resistance (AoR) and the US-led camp. After the November 27, 2024, ceasefire, Israel proclaimed a 'historic turning point', while Hezbollah framed its resilience as 'legendary steadfastness' that foiled Israel's primary objectives. Combining Levy's theory-guided idiographic case study approach and inte-grating Martel's tactical-strategic victory framework, Arregu & imath;n- Toft's asymmetric warfare theory, and Sobelman's balance-of-vul-nerability model, the analysis shows that Israel's major tactical successes-pager/walkie-talkie sabotage operations, leadership assassinations, and massive bombardment-did not translate into strategic victory. Hezbollah preserved organizational cohesion, core deterrence, and political legitimacy, thereby blocking reoccu-pation and forced disarmament. Drawing on Arabic and English- language governmental statements and media (October 2023- August 2025), the article illustrates classic 'asymmetric victory con-ditions' in which the weaker actor prevails through endurance. It also challenges seemingly techno-determinist claims about Israeli technological superiority, highlights Hezbollah's post-ceasefire recovery challenges, and reveals long-term limits and potential counterproductive effects of 'barbarism' strategy, particularly in shifting global and Western public opinion about Israel.
The continuity of censorship within university spaces resembles the proliferation of academic repression across student organizations and faculty dissent in what has been described as the Palestine exception. Drawing on the framework of epistemic injustice, the analysis theorizes how higher education institutions use discursive translation and administrative rationality to police and enforce so-called acceptable discourse. Thus, the university governing structures at Texas Tech University become the primary site to demonstrate far-right-wing tactics/mechanisms to delegitimize dissent and constrain academic freedom, specifically in the case of Dr. Jairo F & uacute;nez Flores. Ultimately, the article argues that the active participation by universities not only maintains hegemonic order but colonial logics in continuing to suppress epistemic and material forms of violence on university campuses.
From inception, the Zionist project to establish a Jewish state in Palestine has been explicitly colonial. However, recent attempts have been made to frame global Jewry as indigenous to Palestine, including by groups who foreground their own indigeneity. This article focuses on the Indigenous Coalition for Israel, the New Zealand-based group whose founders opened the Indigenous Embassy Jerusalem in February 2024. Background details of the group's members and networks are described, exposing a Christian nationalist agenda that is antithetical to indigenous liberation. Thematic analysis of claims made by the group via their website reveal narrative subthemes and rhetorical techniques used to serve two specific discursive functions: to invert the colonizer-colonized relationship, and to reject settler-colonial theory. Both enable Zionism to evade characterization as settler-colonial. Settler-colonial theory is shown to illuminate historical and contemporary power dynamics in Palestine. However, the abstraction of the theory leaves open conceptual gaps enabling the recuperation of its terms. This article concludes that indigenous liberation requires theory grounded in the historical trajectories and material realities of resistance and situated within the global systems sustaining colonial domination.
This essay examines the entanglement of market-oriented reform, social fragilization, and external coercion in Iran. It argues that exchange-rate liberalization, subsidy restructuring, privatization, and price-based reforms do not mechanically produce protest. Rather they can generate social fragilization when they transfer economic risk onto households, erode compensatory credibility, and weaken predictable expectations of governance. Under conditions of sanctions, inflation, currency depreciation, and geopolitical hostility, such fragilization may lower protest thresholds and reshape the perceived opportunity structure available to external actors. The essay shows how domestic economic grievances can be misread by hostile powers as signs of regime fragility and political availability to foreign coercion. Iran's experience demonstrates both the plausibility and limits of this logic: social fragility may create volatility, but it does not necessarily produce institutional collapse or societal alignment with external intervention. The essay therefore bridges political economy and security studies by showing that domestic reform and external coercion must be analyzed within a single strategic field.
Shuchen Xiang's thesis in Chinese Cosmopolitanism is that racism is primarily a Western phenomenon and that racism never developed in China. According to Xiang, Chinese metaphysics, centered on what she calls processual holism, places an obstacle in the path of racism. Xiang also claims that the rise of racism in the West is to be explained by appealing to the dominance of essentialist substance metaphysics. Xiang holds that substance metaphysics explains why, in the West, "barbarians" came to be seen not only as inferior but also as unassimilable and unimprovable. Xiang claims that anti-assimilationist racism has been dominant in the West since classical antiquity. I argue that Xiang's account is based on a misreading of ancient Greek and Roman sources. Xiang ignores the existence of assimilationist policies during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. I contend that Xiang's attempt to explain the divergences between Western and Chinese social histories through appealing to different metaphysical orientations is unsuccessful. When it comes to explaining racism the materialist explanatory framework is still far more powerful than its idealist competitors.
This paper addresses the comments made by Maga & ntilde;a-Huerta, Sousa and Li, and Bhatt in relation to Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea. The article emphasizes that the dominant sentiment of their three commentaries is a desire for a situated engagement with others that leads to mutual understanding. Indeed, this is the dominant message of Chinese Cosmopolitanism. The message of Chinese Cosmopolitanism is thus, in its own way, a universal one that has broad resonance. The commentators recognize the monumental effort that is still needed in the service of this vision. It is hoped that the conversation will inspire the path forward.
This article offers a critical interpretation of the 2024 film adaptation of Reading Lolita in Tehran, directed by Eran Riklis, arguing that the film operates as an instrument of neo-Orientalism in the service of a contemporary imperialist narrative. Drawing on Bourdieusian field theory, it examines how the film's transnational production-characterized by an Italo-Israeli financial alliance and the spatial reconfiguration of Tehran in Rome-facilitates a neo-Orientalist gaze. Textual analysis shows that the film employs de-historicized and fragmented visual strategies that flatten the complex lived experiences of Iranian women into reductive symbols of suffering, foregrounding motifs of oppression for Western consumption and validating a binary logic of Self and 'Other'. The discussion then traces the film's alignment with contemporary US and Israeli geopolitical rhetoric, showing how it instrumentalizes gender and human rights to sanctify military and diplomatic agendas. Ultimately, the film functions as an apparatus of neo-imperial hegemony, naturalizing global power asymmetries and moralizing geopolitical conflict.
This essay examines the role of specific Iranian diaspora factions, particularly pro-Pahlavi monarchist networks, in whitewashing the US-Israeli military invasion of Iran. While the Iranian diaspora lacks the structural power to incite war independently, a small, organized minority of diaspora activists has played a significant role in legitimizing foreign intervention by manufacturing moral and narrative consent. Drawing on Bauman's concept of retrotopia, the essay demonstrates how Persian-language media outlets and coordinated social media campaigns have constructed an idealized image of prerevolutionary Iran that defies historical reality, while actively suppressing the voices of the vast, silent majority of Iranians, who reject foreign military intervention. The argument further contends that the tragic episode of January 8-9, 2026, during which peaceful economic protests turned into armed insurrection following Reza Pahlavi's public calls to take to the streets, was used by the Iranian diaspora as a pretext to justify military intervention against Iran. The inflated figure of the victims propagated by diaspora media platforms, was later cited by US officials to justify aggression against Iran. The pro-war diaspora's monopoly on representation, enforced through media gatekeeping, digital harassment, and AI-generated disinformation, has thus helped to sanitize the invasion, making it palatable to Western publics and policymakers.
This essay situates the wars of 2025 and 2026 within a longer genealogy of state resistance in modern Iran. It argues that the Islamic Republic's strategic victory against Israeli and US aggression must be read against a century-long discourse that has made autonomy, nonalignment, and resistance to imperial and colonial domination central to Iranian statecraft. Its claim of victory is therefore historical and asymmetrical, measured against a modern experience in which imposed wars repeatedly produced territorial loss, occupation, foreign domination, humiliation, or prolonged attrition. The essay traces state resistance from Sayyed Hassan Modarres' neutralism, through the nonalignment discourses of the National Front and their successors, alongside religious currents that linked anti-dependence to authenticity and Islam, to its revolutionary synthesis under 'Neither East nor West'. After 1979, this discourse became a governing doctrine extending across military, political, economic, and cultural fields. The first imposed war consolidated its logic, while indigenous defense capabilities, the Axis of Resistance, and the resistance economy expanded afterwards. The essay argues that the second and third imposed wars vindicated the pursuit of true independence as state resistance's central claim: a comprehensive conception of independence capable of sustaining autonomy and defining the terms of survival against imperial power.
China's research on the Middle East has undergone three phases. From the Bandung Conference to the current rise of the Global South, the focus of China's Middle East studies has shifted continuously: from early research centered on national liberation and decolonization in Middle Eastern countries, to development-oriented modernization studies after the 1980s, and to the present practice of situating Middle East Studies within the framework of the Global South. Despite changes in research themes, what remains consistent in China's Middle East studies is the strong empathy Chinese scholars hold toward the Middle East. This empathy stems from their shared identity as Global South countries and the common goal of modernization shared by Asian nations. Chinese scholars have no intention of constructing the Middle East as an 'Other' opposed to the 'Self'. Instead, the intention is to view the Middle East from the perspective of the region itself or the Global South at large, so as to reveal its authentic features. Contemporary Middle Eastern issues are also examined from the perspective of long-term civilizational communication, transcending both conflict theories and various forms of centrism. China's research approach offers a new alternative for global Middle East Studies.
'Jamila, a beautiful call, as a beautiful name-Jamila, a call carrying the meaning of heroism.' These stanzas were recited by a schoolgirl, as she welcomed the Algerian anti-colonial militant Jamila Bouhired to Bahrain in 1958. In the 1993 film Jamila's Mirror, filmmaker Arab Loutfi presents Palestinian revolutionary women active in the late 1960s and early 1970s as reflections of Jamila. This article adopts Loutfi's lens to show other reflections in Jamila's mirror-this time, of women in Bahrain: within class struggle and nationalist projects, and as part of Bahrain's mid-century anti-colonial movement and leftist revolutionary movements which followed. Toward the retrieval of an intergenerational lineage of women in rebellious and popular politics in twentieth-century Bahrain, the article adopts a methodological form that works at the 'social scale'. To do this, it draws on an archival commons-multi-format, multi-site material that is not contained by the repositories of colonial or national archives proper. In addition to historicizing the role of women in Bahrain's modern history, this article argues that writing anti-colonial histories at the social scale deepens our understanding of political movements and allows us to conceptualize a spatialization and temporality of revolt.
