The exhibition False Witnesses ( Shuhud al-Zur ) by Dia al-Azzawi at Saleh Barakat Gallery in Beirut, from September 11 to October 31, 2025, is the kind of show one usually would only see at a museum (Figures 1, 2). It consists of several large-scale works that invite an almost immersive viewing experience, in which seeing requires physical movement and the artwork dominates the perceptual space of the viewer. The works offer a critical reflection on power and violence in Iraq over the past two decades.
The conflict that erupted in Sudan in mid-April 2023 has had a profound impact on scholars, university staff, academic institutions, and academic freedom in the country. It also has had a deep impact on scholars displaced because of war or political repression since the 1990s, who now constitute a significant part of the Sudanese diaspora. The war has devastated the country's population, landscape, services, and infrastructure, including both general and higher education sectors. In the half-decade that preceded the current conflict, Sudan witnessed an uprising in 2018, in which students, academics, and academic associations played an important role, followed by a short transitional period (2019-21) and a subsequent coup (2021). The latter consolidated the power of the army and its allies and narrowed the space for academic freedom that had expanded during and after the uprising. Although an incident that occurred at the University of Khartoum toward the end of 2025 shows that there may be a degree of freedom of intramural expression (the right to challenge the workings of the university), other events in Sudan suggest little respect for freedom of extramural expression (the right to engage in public expression without negative repercussions), because of the nature of governance arrangements, among other factors. This particularly affects academics and professionals currently in Sudan who call for peace.
With the collapse of the regime in Syria in late 2024 and the end of a brutal civil war, Syrian higher education faces a series of challenges as it adjusts to a post-authoritarian, but Islamist, government. Institutions of higher education were significantly degraded during the war and universities became sites of resistance, surveillance, torture, and violence. This article assesses the Middle East Studies Association's failure to adequately engage with Syrian higher education during this period and argues for a renewed effort to build connections and engage in professional dialog with counterparts in the country. At the same time, it highlights renewed threats to academic freedom and new problems including heightened sectarianization, creeping gender apartheid, and unclear legal guidance for higher education. It concludes with specific proposals including the development of Arabic-language resources on academic freedom and the expression of solidarity with the Syrian people as they rebuild their country.
Atrocity denial suffuses the bedrock of the academic field of modern Middle East studies. One of the most frequently cited works about modern Assyrians is a 1974 revisionist account of the 1933 massacres of Assyrians in Iraq. Its author, Khaldun S. Husry, dismisses Assyrian recollections of the violence as "propaganda of the victims." Examining how Husry's article came to be published reveals that the editor who published it, Stanford Shaw, promoted its logic as part of his denial of the Armenian genocide. As a result of the influence of this denialism, Assyrians-who continue to face displacement and dispossession over a century after hundreds of thousands of them, alongside Armenians, were killed by the Ottoman Empire-are systematically demeaned in academic literature. Scholars routinely treat Assyrians as problematic, questioning their legitimacy through racist lines of inquiry. They then claim, as moral licensing for their contempt, that their aim is to critique ethnic nationalism and colonialism. Analyzing the disparagement of Assyrians in the Middle East studies field offers lessons about what good and bad critiques of ethnic nationalism look like, how to avoid historiographical and citational pitfalls when writing about marginalized people, and why revisionist histories of atrocities are profoundly harmful.
In the US, engaging in scholarship and advocacy on Middle East issues, certainly on Palestine, has long attracted attacks from campus and off-campus organizations and individuals. However, a near consensus has emerged that the threats to academic freedom that we are witnessing today are unprecedented, as it is now the US government that is leading the assault. The weaponization of charges of antisemitism against those engaged in teaching about Palestine and/or in pro-Palestine advocacy has become a battering ram utilized by the political right to achieve a central goal: taming or destroying American higher education as a locus of critical inquiry and potential opposition to the Trump administration's authoritarian project. What does the current moment mean for us as members of a Middle East studies community? How have the challenges we face evolved and how are today's attacks different from those of the past? This essay addresses the evolution of these growing threats in the US as well as longer-standing threats in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region in the context of the role and work of MESA's Committee on Academic Freedom (CAF) in responding to them.
Debates on gender, war, and revolution in the Middle East are not new. The question of gender in the region has moved the imaginaries of academics, administrators, policymakers, journalists and activists throughout the decades, if not centuries. There is a similarly vast amount of literature on war and revolution in a region that has often been seen, and continues to be seen, through a lens shaped by a disproportional focus on conflict and violence. Many have brought the two perspectives together, discussing the nexus of gender, war, and revolution in the Middle East. This article is the introduction to a roundtable, which consists of three articles on gender, revolution, and war in Afghanistan, Iran, and Syria and contributes to this long-standing tradition of debates on the topic, offering unique perspectives on an oft-discussed area. Together, the three articles that make up this roundtable stand out for the broad range of their methodological approaches, their challenging of dominant approaches and simplifying binaries, and their efforts to highlight and counter the sidelining of marginalized perspectives.
This short article explores trans mothering as an embodied practice of popular sovereignty in the context of the Syrian state army. Moving beyond traditional state-centered and militarized masculinities that shape scholarly notions of sovereignty, I demonstrate how trans mothering—embodied through listening, care, and affirmation of fellow soldiers—became a mode of antiwar world-making amid Assad’s counterrevolutionary war. The article centers on the story of Duaa, a trans woman whose gender identity was denied by the Syrian state. Forcibly conscripted and sent to the frontlines in the Damascus suburbs, Duaa developed everyday practices of trans care and support toward fellow soldiers, reorienting military service around mutual support rather than state control. Building on ethnographic research and life history interviews in Lebanon, I engage with Syrian–Palestinian writer Naya Rajab’s approach to trans mothering and Amahl Bishara’s theorization of popular sovereignty as a disruptive force against authoritarian rule. Through this framework, the article illustrates how Duaa’s trans mothering temporarily shifts the army’s hierarchy into acts that nurture mutual care rather than sovereign obedience. Her trans care reimagines sovereignty not necessarily through resistance, but through the everyday reconstitution of state power on state military bases. Finally, the article argues for a reconsideration of popular sovereignty in post-Assad Syria, where massacres and displacement continue to serve as technologies of sovereign rule under Ahmad al-Sharaa.
This article examines the historical evolution of gender concepts in modern Afghanistan, tracing its development from nation-state building in the late nineteenth century through the revolutionary influences of Socialist and Islamist movements, and into the transformations prompted by the U.S. invasion in 2001. While situating the topic within its broader historical framework, the analysis centers on two archetypal figures of iconoclastic women in twentieth-century Afghanistan: those affiliated with communist parties under the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) and those associated with Islamist mujahidin groups. Drawing upon the traditional Afghan archetype of the heroic-poet woman, the discussion explores how warfare—both in theory and practice—reconfigured gender identities via a recurring cycle of uneven advancement and regressions. These shifts were driven largely by elite, top-down strategies that positioned urban women as symbolic agents enlisted to fight entrenched gender norms, rather than to transform them through meaningful reform. The article further addresses the roles of migration and regional ideologies in this process, underscoring how such dynamics often disregarded the lived experiences and needs of ordinary Afghan women. This oversight contributed to the rise of novel iterations of the poet-heroine archetype, which paradoxically sought to dismantle conventional notions of femininity. Ultimately, the article advocates for a viable feminist approach in Afghanistan grounded in local histories, geographies, and social realities—moving beyond rigid binary frameworks to achieve genuine relevance and effectiveness.
