When asked to gather information for any type of research project, books are the last place many of our students want to look, unless forced to do so because print sources are required as part of the assignment. The research tool of this “post-literate” generation is the computer, and their most frequently used source of information is the internet. In fact, using the internet seems to be the best way to keep my students engaged in any extensive, or ongoing, research project.

Most research on the Gulf states focuses on oil and its impact on state power. The literature on rentier theory almost unanimously agrees that oil rents buy off citizens and lead to socio-political stagnation. Massive protests and government attempts to address citizen demands in Kuwait between 2011 and 2013 call into question that narrative. Since those protests, the Kuwaiti government has taken steps to increase its representation of public officials and accessibility in the public sphere, including by expanding the government's presence on Instagram. How have Kuwaiti citizens voiced their opinions to government accounts? And how has the government responded to online criticism?

This essay looks at the pattern of interactions between the state and Kuwaiti citizens on Twitter and Instagram using a content analysis of government accounts. The findings raise questions about the validity of the payoff thesis and understandings of consent and acquiescence. My analysis illustrates that there is a public dialogue that moves beyond the rigid structure of state and society by which the literature has traditionally understood Gulf rentier societies.

Syria, its contemporary life as well as its long history, presents immensely rewarding possibilities for the student of the Middle East. Moreover, there is a great deal of published material on Syria’s geography, ethnography, and social and political institutions, but — as one would expect in view of the modern history of the Levant — the overwhelming majority of these studies have flowed from the pens of French scholars. Indeed, most Americans, even those highly conversant with Middle Eastern affairs, regard Syria with befuddlement if not consternation. As a result, Syria is truly a neglected area in American scholarship. There have been few attempts to investigate the country seriously even from the outside, let alone to conduct research within its borders. On the other hand, those Americans who have worked in Syria, including the present writer, have found it a good place to carry out scientific research, so long as one observes certain commonsense rules. In the following paragraphs, I shall try to sketch the areas where research is permitted, research facilities available in Syria, the varying procedures necessary to gain research permission, and living conditions. Because of the nature of my own work there, most of my comments refer specifically to Damascus unless otherwise stated. Likewise, all the data presented in this paper was gathered before the outbreak of fighting on October 6, 1973, and may thus be only partly valid as of this writing.

In a 2002 lecture at Home Works, Beirut’s contemporary art festival, writer and cultural critic Abbas Beydoun claimed that Lebanon’s internationalism had led to derivative cultural production. The well known critic’s comments evoked an angry outburst from members of his predominantly Lebanese audience of young artists and cultural workers. To varying degrees, however, this characterization of Beiruti culture repeats and prefigures descriptions of the city as a meeting point between East and West. Indeed, Beirut’s reputation as a multi-linguistic and cross-cultural Mediterranean port is traced to the latter half of the nineteenth century when the city became the capital of an Ottoman province and followed as a regional center for missionary, political, and cultural activities. Moreover, Beydoun’s characterization did not always carry such a negative connotation. This paper begins to trace the ways in which the visual arts is a field for producing, rather than reflecting, Beirut’s cosmopolitanism. To do so, I look at two historical moments pivotal in the institutionalization of the visual arts. The first is that of Daoud Corm (1852-1930), the city’s first professional easel painter whose career ran from the Ottoman period through the French Mandate (1920-1943). The second is the decades of the 1960s and 70s, the city’s heyday as a regional cultural capital when a number of artists and activists established a gallery system, further expanding the private sector’s consumption of painting and sculpture.

A New Academic fashion in the disciplines of history, anthropology, and cultural criticism is to “foreground” authors in works of scholarship. But it is not in imitation of what is currently fashionable that I have chosen to make my address autobiographical. I am a historian who enjoys writing narrative history and who elsewhere has argued that the narrative remains as valuable and as legitimate in modern scholarship as theory. So here I wish to tell a story that may hold some lessons for those scholars who seek freedom from the constraints imposed both by the norms of Middle Eastern societies and by the rules of the western academy. In our post-modern, post-structural, post-colonial world, all the certitudes have been shaken, and the narrative might well be the only kind of story that we can relate to with any kind of authority.

Since the end of World War I, the people of the Middle East have lived – from Turkey to Iraq – in a world created by Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau. From the outset, the victorious powers of the War, especially Wilson, paid lip service to the principle of self-determination in addressing various nationalities, but they soon realized this great principle can be a double-edged sword whose use could cost them dearly – in casualties as well as capital. Western and regional powers resolved this dilemma by installing a system of states in the Middle East, in the name of self-determination, which was in fact appallingly unfair and feeble. Implementation of this policy in the face of multi-ethnic milieus and complexities, where the dominant group constituted no more than 50 percent of the population, had disastrous consequences and fractured the social landscape of the region into distinct camps of winners and losers.

This article investigates the collective memory that occurred as a result of the chemical attack on Halabja, on March 16, 1988. In light of discussions that deal with memory and reconciliation in post-genocide societies, we look at how collective memory and “postmemory” are formed among the survivors and their descendants. The merit of the article is that it brings together the victim's accounts and creates a bottom-up perspective that challenges the official accounts created by Kurdish and non-Kurdish elites as part of top-down narratives on what happened that day in Halabja and how it should be commemorated. The interviewee narratives illustrate that people of Halabja consider the memory of the chemical attack as an enduring trauma that creates a shared rendering of the past and continues to shape their collective identity. While each generation transfers this collective memory to the next, they also seek justice via shared commemoration practices outside official discourses. In their narratives, reprobation is not directed solely toward the Saddam Hussein regime, but also toward the current rulers of the Kurdistan Region as well.