Academic interest in the study of forced migration as a specific field developed only in the late 20th century. But its conceptual tools had a much earlier incarnation in the United States. In the early 20th century historical linguistic and ethnographic research was being conducted with Native American peoples who had been subjected to massive ethnic cleansings in the preceding two centuries. Much of that early work was with tribes who had been displaced, dispossessed, and involuntarily marched into resource-poor reservations. The scientists working with them thought they were engaging in a kind of salvage operation to record ways of life before they disappeared. These researchers largely ignored or failed to recognize the impacts of displacement—destroyed settlements, land occupation, nonviable reservations, inadequate welfare, and hostile administrations and lack of legal rights—and focused instead on trying to reconstruct memory culture of “what life was like in the old days.” Nevertheless, these studies gave us many of our basic concepts to describe and analyze the experience of uprootedness and dispossession. These fundamental concepts have become important in the discipline of forced migration studies. They include understandings of: role and identity, hierarchy, social networks, conflict mechanisms, reciprocity and trust, boundary creation, rites of passage, liminality, and the role of myths.

During the late Ottoman period, a large influx of migrants and the expansion of cultivation created opportunities for new settlements in the countryside of Anatolia, Greater Syria, and Iraq. However, settlement often brought misery to newcomers in the form of malaria, especially when it occurred in the lowlands of the Mediterranean. This article traces the contours of the encounter with malaria that arose out of settlement, offering an overview of how Ottoman state and society confronted the conundrum of the swamp and examining the impact of this confrontation on local political economies. It demonstrates that swamps and malaria were a significant concern for late Ottoman state and society, and that policies adopted to address malaria sometimes facilitated the creation of large estates in the countryside of the Mediterranean littoral.

In the final decades of Ottoman rule, several waves of refugees from the Russian Empire's North Caucasus region immigrated to Transjordan, where they founded Amman and other agricultural villages. This article examines the economy of Amman in its formative years as a Circassian refugee settlement. By exploring connections between North Caucasian refugees, Syrian and Palestinian merchants, and Transjordanian urban and nomadic communities, this study posits refugees as drivers of economic expansion in the late Ottoman period. I argue that the settlement of North Caucasian refugees and their active participation in the real estate market in and around Amman contributed to the entrenchment of the post-1858 property regime in Ottoman Transjordan. Through a study of an upper-class Circassian household and its legal battles, this article also illustrates the rise of refugee elites who benefited from the commodification of land and the construction of state-sponsored infrastructure in the late Ottoman Levant.

In the immediate aftermath of World War I, the newly formed League of Nations saw Middle Eastern refugees—particularly displaced Armenians and Assyrians scattered in camps across the Eastern Mediterranean—as venues for working out new forms of internationalism. In the late 1940s, following the British abandonment of the Palestine Mandate and the subsequent Zionist expulsion of most of the Palestinian Arab population, the new United Nations revived this concept of a refugee crisis requiring international intervention. This paper examines the parallel ways in which advocates for both the nascent League of Nations and the United Nations made use of mass refugee flows to formulate arguments for new, highly visible, and essentially permanent iterations of international authority across the Middle East.

In late 2015, approximately 2,000 Syrian asylum seekers made their way into Norway via the Arctic passage from Russia. What ensued are “global moments,” breakthrough events that have reshaped lives and futures for both the refugees and those who aided them, and it is the latter group on which this article focuses. As refugees began arriving in Arctic Norway, Refugees Welcome to the Arctic, an ad hoc grassroots organization, was formed to assist them. This group of ordinary people, most of them with no previous humanitarian experience, took action in defiance of Norwegian government policies, and providing food became the focus of their efforts. Refugees Welcome to the Arctic members often described being motived to act by their own traumatic memories of the region's experience of World War II, a time of deprivation and brutality suffered at the hands of the retreating German army. Food, as an enactment of compassion, is shown to be a powerful means through which people connect in very personal, concrete ways to the humanitarian enterprise.

This article examines the figure of the misafir (guest) as it personifies the combined domains of everyday and institutional hospitality in Hatay, a contested border province annexed to Turkey from French Mandate Syria in 1939, and home today to over 400,000 displaced Syrians. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2012 in Hatay's administrative capital, Antakya, I focus on the perspectives of the region's bilingual (Turkish-Arabic) Jewish and Christian populations about the official misafir status of the first Syrian arrivals. I argue that the sudden transformation of Syrians from familial misafirs to governmental misafirs in the early days of the Syrian conflict ruptured the hierarchical domains of reciprocity that have historically shaped the cross-border relations between these communities. In this process, Antakya's religious minorities recognized and negotiated the limits of their own residence, difference, and citizenship in Turkey, and invoked the lived practices of hospitality that exist beside but also transcend ethnoreligious and national identities. By examining how historical articulations of religious and national difference along the Turkish–Syrian border are entwined with the figure of the misafir at the interpersonal level, this article contributes to debates on hospitality in scholarship on the Middle East and in migration literature.

This article discusses how the Lebanese state has responded to displacement from Syria (2011–17), and how the resulting policy formulation processes and discourses have constructed the relationship between the hosting state and the refugee. It focuses especially on how this small state has negotiated its politics of reception and choice of policy tools amid dysfunctional institutions and political disputes. To this end, it uses the lens of Lebanon's model of sectarian power sharing to understand the polity's response to mass displacement. This process has been structured by the defining dynamics of the country's politics of sectarianism: slack governance, an elite fractured model, and a politics of dependence on external and domestic nonstate actors. The Lebanese model offers broader insights into types of coping mechanisms that emerge in the context of forced migration, notably when a formal refugee regime is absent. The article contends that states lacking a legal asylum framework and grappling with various governance hurdles are likely to draw on the repertoire of their political regime to deal with displacement.

This article explores the ways in which refugee and host experiences of displacement in Jordan between 2010 and 2013 were articulated in a socioeconomic register that coincided with, but was also independent of, both state biopower and historical cross-border regionalisms. I argue that this register became salient due to a shared understanding of everyday life as characterized by what I term hunger, a state of depredation where “people eat people” to attain their own well-being. In pursuing this argument, the article has two goals: to show how Iraqis and Jordanians negotiated the complexities of living together in hunger by censuring individuals—locals and foreigners, rich and poor—who contributed to producing hunger rather than to alleviating it, and by consciously resisting the corrosive effects of hunger on social relations; and, more generally, to challenge universalizing understandings of refugee experiences according to which local tensions between refugees and hosts are derivative of a globalized antiforeigner discourse.

First-time European and American visitors to the United Arab Emirates, where I live, are often surprised by the prevalence of heritage villages, festivals, and sports in hypermodern Abu Dhabi and Dubai. “Heritage” in the Arab Gulf, as elsewhere in the Middle East, is a central and growing industry, attracting the attention of scholars as well as investors and tourists. At the same time, much of the region's—and the world's—invaluable cultural heritage has been and continues to be obliterated by insurgents and governments alike. Spectacular assaults on historical sites, cultural institutions, and symbols of cultural-religious diversity in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Yemen demonstrate that the “new wars” of the 21st century are being fought on the terrain of cultural heritage as much as they are over other precious resources. And yet, the interconnections between this heritage construction and destruction remain underexplored. In much of the scholarship produced in the burgeoning field of critical heritage studies, the duplexity of these processes is ignored. Instead, most edited volumes and “global” analyses of the field look to the Middle East and other Muslim-majority nations only in so far as they present case studies of heritage destruction—the bombing of the Bamyan Buddhas in Afghanistan and the looting of the National Museum of Iraq being iconic examples.

The construction of heritage can be a violent process. Authorizing state-sanctioned narratives and the spaces that materialize them are belligerent acts. Crafting and territorializing a singular history out of many entangled ones necessarily relies on the destruction, containment, and/or silencing of the evidentiary terrain—of people, places, and things. In this sense, the construction of the past—to play on Carl von Clausewitz's well-known maxim—is the continuation of war by other means. As networks of knowledge production and transmission, “lieux de mémoire” are everyday sites of violence that embody ongoing social relations and the attendant struggles over power. In times of peace as in war, they are terrains of symbolic and material contestation whose creative destruction can be deployed as political spectacles and projections of power. Examples of such dynamics abound, whether in the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North America or Palmyra, Baghdad, and Mecca in the Middle East. In its varied forms, then, heritage is as much a cause for celebration for some as it is a cause of injury for others. Heritage reflects the power to subjugate the past to the politics of the present and to dictate the future, both of which are intrinsic to state and subject formation.

After losing control of the capital Sanaa to Yemen's northern Houthi movement, which is aligned with forces loyal to the former president ʿAli ʿAbd Allah Salih, current Yemeni President ʿAbd Rabbu Mansur Hadi turned to Saudi Arabia for help. In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and its coalition of nine states began a bombing campaign in Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world. Prior to the conflict, Yemen was already 90-percent dependent on imported food and had been battling a severe water deficit. A twenty-eight-month-long siege of its civilian population has left the country in a situation that some humanitarian groups deem to be worse than the crisis in Syria. The media has barely covered Yemen's catastrophic crisis, partially because of overt censorship by the Saudi kingdom and a shielding of its systemic violations of international law by powerful allies including the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. These countries are clearly more concerned with billion-dollar arms deals with the kingdom than with putting an end to what has been described as the worst food crisis since the establishment of the United Nations.

Cultural heritage in the Middle East is under attack. Brutal civil wars and foreign interventions have inflicted tremendous direct and collateral damage on historic sites, monuments, and museums. The chaos has also facilitated the emergence of new identitarian politics wielded by groups operating outside the framework of the nation-state. Consequently, history and geography are being contested and reconfigured, while cultural heritage itself is being divided and reappropriated, and its ill-fated fragments captured by groups that do not recognize them as their own heritage, or as heritage at all, destroyed.

By the time I completed fieldwork in Qatar in 2016, the Msheireb project that aimed to redevelop the heart of Doha was nearing completion of its first phase. The way this development project unfolded during this time was indicative of broader negotiations of Qatari cultural brokers with ideas of indigeneity and expertise: the project was rebranded from Dohaland, “The Heart of Doha,” to Msheireb (after the local wadi) in the first half of 2011, while the iconic Al Kahraba Street—the “spine” of the old city and the first street to be electrified in Qatar—was referred to in architectural notations as the “Champs-Élysées” of Doha. The politics of indigeneity of place-making in these negotiations reflected an unresolved unease with the cosmopolitan nature of expertise. This tension was related not necessarily to the ingenious remixing of traditional and modern concepts of cultural and environmental sustainability, but rather to the active erasure of foreign expertise. We see this, for example, in the active rebranding of the I. M. Pei's Museum (in reference to the Chinese American “starchitect” who designed it) in order to take its rightful “local” name, the Museum of Islamic Art. While these efforts would suggest an intention to localize expertise and build local capacity as part of national objectives, I argue in this essay that this mastering in fact obscures local expertise by dissociating it from the cosmopolitan context in which knowledge production is negotiated in Qatar.

Heritage is a key site of politics in the Middle East. Recent episodes of the relentless destruction and construction of heritage in the region convey just how deeply intertwined it is with the making (and unmaking) of the postcolonial state. In Palestine/Israel, heritage has developed over a long history into an important site where both state power and resistance against it are produced, reshaped, and disseminated. A current proliferation of urban regeneration projects there is linked to the struggle against the ongoing occupation and colonization of Palestinian lands, as well as the incomplete, truncated emergence of a Palestinian state. Most of these heritage projects are carried out by semi- or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In this essay, I argue for the value of thinking about heritage in terms of government and state-making, or more precisely in terms of a Foucauldian understanding of governmentality, to reveal the kind of work it performs in Palestine and beyond. States govern also by heritage, and both states and the local communities they attempt to control mobilize the language of heritage for a variety of different purposes in a variety of different settings. What is distinctive about Palestine is the central role NGOs play in the institutionalization of a heritage field. In their work, they collapse the divide between mobilizing heritage to defend vulnerable communities and resist the encroachment of the (Israeli) state, and using heritage to develop institutions and help build the (Palestinian) state.

Artifacts that have experienced atrocities, even genocide, and survived, acquire the power to recall the horrors of the past, and to recollect the absent persons, things, and places that were lost. They symbolize violence, but also survival and resilience. Material objects that have endured looting, mutilation, displacement, and separation from the communities where they functioned as sacred relics, liturgical aids, or prized artworks form a special category. They are survivor objects.

Emblazoned across the front page of The New York Times on Sunday, 15 November 1981 was a large photograph of hundreds of US soldiers from the army's 82nd Airborne Division parachuting into the vast western desert of the Sinai Peninsula. The photo was eerily reminiscent of the images from October 1956 when Israeli soldiers dropped into the same desert as part of their effort, along with British and French forces, to topple the government of Egyptian President Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir. But the American soldiers were on a much different mission. Rather than attempting to bring down Egypt's government, they were there to participate, alongside Egyptian forces, in “Operation Bright Star,” the largest American military exercise in the Middle East since World War II. During the next ten days, more than 6,000 US soldiers participated in the “war games,” which stretched from Egypt to Sudan, Somalia, and Oman, at an estimated cost of more than 50 million dollars (157 million dollars in current figures). On 25 November, the penultimate day of the operation, a half dozen American B-52s flying from North Dakota dropped a cluster of bombs over the Egyptian desert and then returned home on a thirty-two-hour journey without stopping, demonstrating the vast reach of the American military.