Revolutions seldom involve more than one percent of the population. However, in Bahrain, a small island nation with a population of around 570,000, twenty percent of the population took to the streets in February 2011 to demand greater democratic reform, making it “proportionally one of the greatest shows of ‘people power’ in modern history.” The regime's response was disproportionally brutal. Saudi-dominated troops from the Gulf Cooperation Council Peninsula Shield Force were “invited to” or “invaded” Bahrain, depending on who is telling the story. Under cover of the Saudi military, Bahrain's security forces killed dozens of civilians, torturing, maiming, and raping many others. The arsenal of repressive techniques was exhaustive. Belonging also was used as a tool of repression, with many being stripped of their Bahraini citizenship on spurious, terror-related charges.

This article examines the historical roots of juridical moral regulation in modern Egypt, assessing the relationship between modern law and shariʿa through the lens of the influence of the Islamic practice of ḥisba on courts and legislators. The article engages critically with scholarship on Islamic law and postcolonial theory regarding the impact of Western colonialism on law in Muslim societies and problematizes the understanding that shariʿa was secularized in the Egyptian legal culture through the translation of Western legal concepts. Instead, a different narrative is offered, one that recognizes the agency of local actors in the process of secularization and considers the influence of shariʿa in the legal development of contemporary Egypt.

This article traces intersections between Turkey's relations with the League of Nations and violent homogenization in Anatolia in the two decades following World War I. It advances the argument that the strife for creating a homogenous population—a core element of Turkish nation building—was embedded in the international order. This is explained on two levels. First, the article stresses the role of international asymmetries on the mental horizon of the Turkish nation builders. The League's involvement in the allied plans to partition Turkey had the organization wrapped up in a mélange of humanitarian concerns, civilizing doctrine, and imperialist interests. Turkish nationalists wanted to avoid those imperialist pitfalls and overcome international minority protection by means of Turkification. They saw international humanitarianism as an obstacle to their nationalist line. Second, the article highlights the ways in which the League itself supported the Kemalists’ drive for Turkification, either directly, especially in the case of the “population transfer” between Greece and Turkey, or indirectly through prioritizing Turkey's sovereignty over minority concerns.

This article explores how the Great Depression in 1929 led to the expansion of illicit circuits globally, and examines the ways in which the introduction of anti-smuggling campaigns came to consolidate the border regimes in Turkey and French Syria. The global economic downturn in the late 1920s led states to embrace protectionist measures such as heightened tariffs and import quotas, all designed to protect local industries and maintain a favorable trade balance. The introduction of such measures, however, often resulted in the emergence of highly profitable illicit circuits, including in the borderland between Turkey and Syria. Here, a sturdy coalition of producers, shop owners, smugglers, trackers, and peddlers began to smuggle into Turkey a range of goods from silk textiles to cigarette papers, while funneling out narcotics into Syria. By seeking the global trajectories of such commodity flows, this article examines the impact of these borderland mobilities on the making of Turkey's southern border by exploring the local and bureaucratic responses to a rapidly changing world economic order in the aftermath of the Great Depression.

The Islamic reformist movement in Algeria is often seen as a precursor to the independence movement, in which religion was supposedly integrated into nationalist identity politics. Focusing on the Muslim scout movements between the 1930s and 1950s, this article challenges this view by arguing that Islam continued to play a role beyond that of an identitarian marker. Influenced by Christian youth movements, the Muslim scouts developed ideas of a “muscular Islam” that remained central even after the movement split in two—one association close to the major nationalist party and another linked to the reformists.

This article analyzes the microprocesses that imbue bread with meaning and the macropolitics that shape its subsidized provision. It begins by outlining bread's multiple forms of value and significance, some easily quantifiable, others not. It problematizes the predominant approach to studying moral economies before putting forth an alternative framework. Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork in Jordan, the following empirical sections examine the different ways in which bureaucrats, bakers, and ordinary citizens portray the government's universal subsidy of Arabic bread. I unpack the diverse opinions encountered in the field and discuss their links to the Hashemite regime's polyvalent legitimating discourse. The article then dissects the politics of provisions that contribute to the bread subsidy's paradoxical persistence. It concludes by considering the relationship between moral economies, opposition politics, and authoritarian power in the context of Jordan's ongoing food subsidy debate.