The roots of the Arab world’s current Russian entanglements reach deep into the tsarist and Soviet periods. However, this shared history has fallen through the cracks of academic structures that approach the two regions separately. This roundtable, part of a growing scholarly effort to heal the area studies divide, expands and reflects on the recently published book Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History, which we co-edited with historian Eileen Kane.1

In 1901, Cemaleddin Dağıstani, a newly enrolled student at a madrasa in Bursa, sent a letter to his family in the district of Quba (now in Azerbaijan) in the Russian Empire. He excitedly shared what he had witnessed during his journey to the Ottoman Empire. Upon crossing the Russo–Ottoman border from Batum (now Batumi, Georgia) to Rize, he was met by Ottoman officials who registered him as a muhajir (refugee or immigrant). Alongside other muhajirs from Russia, including Circassians, Dagestanis, Tatars, and Muslim Georgians, he boarded a state ferry to Istanbul. In seven days, he arrived at the Ottoman capital. He recalled meeting Muslim refugees from Bulgaria, Greece, and Habsburg-occupied Bosnia, and Muslim subjects of the British, French, and German colonial empires. The lion’s share of muhajirs, however, like Cemaleddin, were former Russian subjects. In his letter, Cemaleddin marveled that at times of need Muslims from all over the world sought and found refuge in the Ottoman domains.1

When researchers think of access disruptions, they tend to think of factors exogenous to a field site, those emerging from nationwide events or global crises. Especially in semiauthoritarian contexts, such as Turkey, where ongoing historical contestations (over human rights, minority rights, and freedom of expression) as well as current political polarizations have created a volatile institutional and social environment, ethnographers are more likely to find their fieldwork disrupted. In this essay, I draw attention to a different kind of disruption, one that arises from the endogenous character of the local field site. In particular, I discuss the impact of low interpersonal trust on fieldwork. While gaining access and establishing trust are universal challenges in ethnographic research, the issue is particularly a formidable one in Turkey.

Iran handed the world a surprise in 1951. That spring, its parliament voted to nationalize the country's lucrative petroleum industry. Euphoria spread as young Iranians tore down Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) signs and watched mighty Britain cower (temporarily) before the hero of Iran's oil nationalization, Mohammad Mosaddeq. Stunned by this brazenness, an American summary posed the question on the minds of many diplomats: “How did nine Persian politicians win sufficient power to destroy the concession of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company?” For the next two years the West tried to figure out how to confine this enormous shock to the petroleum market by focusing on the man it held responsible for the crisis. An aristocrat and seasoned politician, Mohammad Mosaddeq garnered the support he needed to break through the monopoly of the AIOC. With the world's attention on Mosaddeq and oil at the time, it was unclear to many (although not to Mosaddeq himself) that another monumental battle for the future of Iran was taking shape: the fight for women's suffrage.

In 1926, an official delegation of prominent Muslim scholars from the Soviet Union visited Mecca. The delegation came to the holy city just a few months after the Soviet Union had become the first country to recognize the rule of ʿAbd al-ʿAziz ʿAbd al-Rahman al Saʿud (1875–1936; Ibn Saʿud) over the Hijaz. The delegation’s members attended an international Muslim congress, met with Saudi officials, and performed the hajj. Before departing they issued a statement supporting Saudi sovereignty, noting that Ibn Saʿud had “purified the [Islamic] holy lands” from the rule of the Hashemite dynasty (r. 1916–24), the Saudis’ predecessors. The Saudi state warmly welcomed this Soviet support, publishing the delegation’s statement in Umm al-Qura (est. 1924), their official weekly.1

What is ethnography in times of war? How does war shape the conditions and possibilities of ethnographic research? How do the exigencies of daily life in a war zone ultimately prescribe and restrict what kinds of research can be done? In the following essay, I reflect on my experiences conducting ethnographic fieldwork in southeastern Turkey in unexpected wartime conditions. During the two years that I spent in the field, a series of local and national crises disrupted a fragile peace that had lasted for the previous few years. Confronted with disaster after disaster, I was continually compelled to reevaluate my project—interrogating my research questions, changing my research methods, and assessing whether I would be able to continue my research at all. The war defined my time in the field and dictated the possibilities and limitations of the work that I was able to do. While I had planned to examine earlier histories of violence, ultimately the contemporaneous war and its effects on daily life, the politics of memory, and the landscape became a central focus of my fieldwork.

What is perceived today as “living in an unknown moment” with global pandemics and ecological disasters has long become the “new normal” that structures everyday life at the margins of Europe and the Middle East, particularly in places with rising authoritarian regimes. As scholars working in and on Turkey, for instance, we have witnessed or experienced firsthand several moments of crisis over the recent years. We have seen the collapse of peace negotiations between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Worker's Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistane; PKK) in 2015 and the resulting surge in state violence in Turkey's Kurdistan, the 2016 coup attempt against the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) government by the Gülen movement, and the long-standing suppression, criminalization, and incarceration of dissent affecting, among others, students, politicians, journalists, and academics. These divergent yet interlinked moments of crisis have reshaped and often complicated, if not completely stopped, our research as ethnographers of Turkey. These moments of crisis have also pushed us to develop creative strategies and analytics to continue our fieldwork and provided opportunities to hone our research questions and methodologies in more nuanced ways.

On August 19, 1953, Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq was removed from office by a coalition of Iranians, including Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1941–79) and members of the armed forces, supported by the United States and Great Britain. The US provided considerable financial, logistical, and organizational support to the coup, which was code-named Operation TPAJAX by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Although the British had been committed, in one form or another, to removing Mosaddeq since he first became prime minister and nationalized Iran's British-owned oil industry in May 1951, the US did not determine to overthrow Mosaddeq by coup d'etat until spring 1953, shortly after the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower came to office.

The Aswan High Dam was a cornerstone of two overlapping political projects. For Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the dam symbolized a bright future in which the decolonized Egyptian people could finally claim their destinies and triumph over the twin forces of imperialism and nature. The Soviet-assisted megaproject acquired such symbolic importance that Nasser’s security apparatus carefully policed its representations in Egyptian society, culture, and intellectual life. For the USSR, by contrast, the dam symbolized Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s break with the Stalinist past, initiated in his famous February 1956 “secret speech” that criticized Stalin’s draconian repressions, isolationism in international affairs, and neglect of “the East.” Even as it led to economic, scientific technical, and cultural agreements with Afro-Asian states including Egypt, Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization agenda loosened controls over political speech at home, unleashing powerful new political ideas, forces, and artistic trends. This brief essay will explore the overlap between the two projects, asking where they met and diverged and what this means for studies of political, cultural, and environmental history.

On May 15, 1972, the Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Algeria’s President Houari Boumedienne arrived in the workers’ town of El Hadjar, near Annaba, to celebrate what appeared to be postcolonial Algeria’s most important economic achievement. In a festive atmosphere, Castro cut the ribbon inaugurating a powerful blast furnace constructed by the Soviet Union and a rolling mill made by the Italian firm Innocenti in the steel plant of El Hadjar.1 Promised by the French colonial state, but built step by step after Algeria’s independence by the government of the Algerian Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale; FLN), the El Hadjar steel plant was the heavy industry the country hoped would spur its industrialization, much like the heavy industry that once constituted the cornerstone of industrialization in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a major source of inspiration for Algeria; it also was a key provider of technology, training, and further technical assistance. Reporting on El Hadjar’s opening ceremony, the French newspaper, Le Monde, did not fail to observe that, “The Algerian government entrusted the USSR to expand the plant, increasing its production capacity [from 400,000] to nearly 1.5 million tons [per year] in 1977.”2

Any fieldwork is inherently filled with tension arising from two fundamental yet conflicting obligations: first, the need to treat the field as an already constituted research object, and second, the requirement to continuously reframe, remake, or essentially reconstitute this object during the fieldwork. This double bind places the fieldworker in a blurred position, navigating between the certainty of the former and the uncertainty of the latter. My fieldwork on Istanbul's private security market in Turkey was no exception. While approaching the market as an already constituted research object, I also had to cartographically unfold it as I explored it. My research specifically examined how security, as a peculiar good and service, was translated into a market object in Turkey's private security industry. Despite its relatively recent emergence in 2004, the industry has experienced tremendous growth. By 2019, 1.6 million people had completed private security training, 1.1 million had obtained licenses, and around 320,000 were actively employed in the industry. This translates to nearly 3 in every 100 working-age individuals being trained, almost 2 in 100 licensed, and 1 in 200 working as private security guards.

Even as it passed its seventieth anniversary, the 1953 coup in Iran has remained a hotly debated political topic. This is true in the public spheres of Iran, which saw its last democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, overthrown in the coup, and in those of the United States and the United Kingdom, which helped stage the ouster. There also has been an attempt at historical revisionism about the coup, usually by overemphasizing the domestic factors that led to the coup and placing less importance on the role of the CIA or questioning Mossadeq's democratic credentials. This revisionism has been robustly rebutted by the scholarly community, which has held to a general consensus on the basic narrative of the coup: that it overthrew a popular leader and that it took place with significant interventions from London and Washington. The release of the final batch of US documents related to the coup in 2017 (following many years of undue delay) also bolstered evidence for this consensus. But, although most public debates about the coup center on questions such as the constitutional process of Mosaddeq's dismissal or the relative weight given to domestic and international actors behind the coup, there is another historiographical question that has been subject to widely divergent perspectives in the field: the relationship of the coup to the Cold War. In other words, can the 1953 coup be considered a Cold War confrontation, or is this a misleading frame of reference? Both sides of this argument have often focused on the motivations of coup plotters (mostly those in Washington, DC, and London) and whether they are more readily explained by a genuine fear of the communist movement in Iran or whether this was a rhetorical smokescreen, masking the neocolonial drive for the control of Iran's resources. This tension is not limited to scholarship on Iran. Even as new global histories of the Cold War have grown in recent years, some have cautioned against the use of this framework for understanding politics in the Global South. Jeremi Suri, for instance, speaks of a “group of scholars” who have “questioned the very utility of the Cold War as an analytical concept” by pointing to “the ways in which this geopolitical term privileges state actors in the United States and Europe and neglects local forces of change, many of which had little apparent connection to the basic issues and personalities of the Cold War.” In his analysis of the global place of Algeria's drive for independence, Matthew Connelly suggests “taking off the Cold War lens,” arguing that such a lens did less to shape the views of historical actors (such as the Eisenhower administration) than “those of the historians who have studied them.”

A long history of political power struggles has shaped Iranian national identity. Each successive regime has sought to take control of Iranian political currents to reach its own objectives, and in the process has influenced Iranian identity in important ways. Few political figures in Iranian history have been as significant as Mohammad Mosaddeq in the shaping of Iranian identity, which he represents in ways that other political figures have failed to capture. His power to shape Iran's relationship with Western powers and his ability to project the image of Iran onto the world stage have enabled the endurance of his significance in the Iranian national psyche, which continues to show itself with his symbolic appearance in a range of political activities, including student rallies and public demonstrations.

After an absence of more than fifteen years, Russian and Soviet themes began to reappear in contemporary Arabic fiction around 2005, as Russia started to regain prominence in Arab politics and Arabic writers began rediscovering some of the transnational entanglements that the Cold War’s unipolar ending had largely occluded. Contemporary Arabic fiction writers have put Russian and Soviet material to many uses; this essay focuses on four: satirizing Soviet internationalism through depictions of dormitory racism; mocking the gender assumptions behind Arab nationalism and internationalism; humanizing jihadi fighters; and speaking beauty to power. The sheer diversity of these uses (and of others not covered here) shows that “How has Russian literature influenced Arabic literature?” is the wrong question. Future research should ask, rather, what local hungers the Russian/Soviet legacy has fed, what artistic and rhetorical resources it has offered, and how Arab writers have reimagined it.

In a seminal essay, Lila Abu-Lughod addresses “The Romance of Resistance,” suggesting that widespread scholarly interest in unlikely and quotidian forms of resistance is romanticizing. Rather than identifying resistance as proof of the ineffectiveness of systems of power, she contends that scholars might more productively consider how resistance is embedded in, and can serve as a diagnostic of, power. Writing in a Foucauldian vein, she reminds “where there is resistance, there is power.” If Abu-Lughod cautions against romanticizing resistance, in this response I take up a similarly critical stance toward disruption. Following Abu-Lughod's formula and drawing on my own experience as an ethnographer of music and sound in Turkish modernity, I suggest that where there is disruption, there is order, and that disruption might therefore become a site for diagnosis of order.

The September 2015 military intervention launched in Syria by Vladimir Putin at the invitation of Bashar al-Asad marked Russia’s tangible return to the Middle East and initiated a 180-degree turn in the course of the ongoing war. Four years after the beginning of the Syrian revolution, its repression, and its escalation into war, Moscow’s military involvement became a testing ground for Russian martial strategies, including “nonmilitary” measures and communication strategies. By exploring both textual and visual content posted on social media by Russian war reporters deployed in Syria between September 2015 and January 2020, in this essay I seek to highlight the ties between the embedded narratives around the on-site military intervention for Russian-speaking audiences, and the longstanding Russian Orientalist fascination with the Middle East.

When I entered graduate school in September 2016, Turkey was mired in a series of successive crises. I had spent the first half of the year living in Istanbul, writing about the country's reception of Syrian refugees as a journalist and researcher. During that stretch, a series of suicide bombings and, in my last week in the country, an attempted coup, were formative for the way I made sense of future fieldwork in Turkey. I surmised that it would be wrought with unpredictability. My research interest in Syrian refugees’ access to Turkey's state services was itself marked by uncertainty. This uncertainty was tied to the nature of Syrians’ explicitly temporary legal status within Turkey and the broader domestic and geopolitical context that shaped the contours of Turkey's refugee policy. Given these layers of unpredictability both endogenous and exogenous to my research interest, I planned to design my research with uncertainty as an analytical focus.

A century ago, the Ottoman Empire finally ceased to be after a long reign that stretched back to the late medieval period, and, ostensibly, nobody really missed it. It was once possible to write about the fall of the Ottoman Empire as the overdue culmination of a process that gave rise to independent nation–states. But, increasingly, the empire casts a long shadow on the historiography of the Middle East, and its last days emerge among its most consequential for the future of the region. The same political actors who reshaped late Ottoman politics were integral to the struggle for the post-Ottoman landscape. These individuals included provincial elites from nondominant ethnic groups who, rather than embracing ethnic nationalism, remained Ottomanist in their vision of the region's future until the final moment. Newer scholarship rejects the teleology of the nations that emerged from postwar fracturing, demonstrating that the map was not redrawn by the victors in an instant. It was forged, instead, through armed struggles against European imperial powers and among rival movements that lasted for years. One hundred years after the Ottoman Empire's collapse, historians are still excavating its long-ignored relevance for understanding the modern Middle East, which was buried under the weight of nationalist and Orientalist metanarratives that never questioned the inevitability of its demise.