Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle East Conflicts (SISMEC)

01/12/2024

Culture war spin, unfortunate media tendencies and social research biases produce a badly distorted understanding of the world

01/04/2024

Compact Magazine, a radical American journal

03/16/2022

"How did a psychiatrist find himself in the midst of such madness? How did a son of the Antilles become an Algerian revolutionary? For that matter, how did a once-obscure figure emerge as the revolutionary intellectual “most relevant for the twenty-first century,” as Cornel West writes in an energetic introduction to the sixtieth-anniversary edition of The Wretched of the Earth? To understand where Fanon ended up, it’s helpful to understand how he started out."

They were out to get him. It was at once a source of terror and a form of tribute. Frantz Fanon was targeted as an Algerian revolutionary, but he was also

12/19/2021

The trove of documents—the military’s confidential assessments of 1,311 reports of civilian casualties—lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children.

The promise was a war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs. The documents show flawed intelligence, faulty targeting, years of civilian deaths — and scant accountability.

11/20/2020

"On Macron gave the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) a 15-day ultimatum to accept the charter...

The charter will state that Islam is a religion and not a political movement, while also prohibiting 'foreign interference' in Muslim groups...

Macron has also announced new measures to tackle what he called 'Islamist separatism' in France.

The measures include a wide-ranging bill that seeks to prevent radicalisation. It was unveiled on Wednesday, and includes measures such as:

-- Restrictions on home-schooling and harsher punishments for those who intimidate public officials on religious grounds

-- Giving children an identification number under the law that would be used to ensure they are attending school. Parents who break the law could face up to six months in jail as well as large fines."

President Macron gives Muslim leaders an ultimatum to accept a "charter of republican values".

11/16/2020

"A Muslim prayer app with over 98 million downloads is one of the apps connected to a wide-ranging supply chain that sends ordinary people's personal data to brokers, contractors, and the military."

"The apps sending data to X-Mode include Muslim Pro, an app that reminds users when to pray and what direction Mecca is in relation to the user's current location."

"Another app that sent data to X-Mode was Muslim Mingle, a dating app that has been downloaded more than 100,000 times."

A Muslim prayer app with over 98 million downloads is one of the apps connected to a wide-ranging supply chain that sends ordinary people's personal data to brokers, contractors, and the military.

05/01/2020

"Many appeal to fiscal pressures brought about by the 2008 financial crisis, or to the broader neoliberalization of higher ed, to explain the growing proportion of contingent versus tenure-eligible faculty members at colleges nationwide. The problem with these accounts is that they fail to explain why departments continue to produce Ph.D.s at a rate that far eclipses the number of faculty opportunities available. Why do departments consistently admit far more students than they could plausibly place?

This tendency is perhaps most pronounced at 'non-elite' schools, although even Ivy League departments increasingly struggle to place their students. But rather than decreasing Ph.D. admissions to accommodate this reality, many have increased the size of their Ph.D. cohorts. Why?"

Even before Covid-19, contingent faculty could be cut for almost any reason. That's about to get worse.

03/23/2020

This collection, which can serve as an introduction to the field of populism, provides an array of interdisciplinary approaches to populist mobilizations,

03/02/2020

The US and its Nato allies have vowed to withdraw all troops if the Taliban uphold their commitment.

03/02/2020

Some 15,000 Afghans and Iraqis who assisted the US military are trapped in their home countries as they await promised visas. A recent court decision could force the US to process their visa applications faster.

12/14/2019

"Earlier this week, we learned that our leaders also knew the war was a fiasco, doomed to fail. But, unlike many of us, they chose not to speak out. Instead, as The Washington Post revealed in a series of stunning articles based on what it has labeled the Afghanistan Papers—a trove of previously classified documents that it is calling a “secret history of the war”—dozens of consecutive generals and senior US officials had repeatedly lied about, omitted, and obfuscated the facts to give an illusion of progress in that war.

"Examples abound. As early as 2003, Bush’s hawkish secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, apparently admitted, “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are” in Afghanistan. More than a decade later, during the late Obama years, retired Army Lt. Gen. Doug Lute (once the Afghan War “czar”), conceded to one of the interviewers, “We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.” Perhaps even more troubling, in a throwback to Vietnam War–era stat-fudging, one unnamed army colonel confessed, “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible.”

The Afghanistan Papers are a devastating indictment of our military and political leaders. The question is: Will anyone notice?

12/03/2019

"Many lines of ‘critical inquiry’ were developed during the 60s and early 70s, when people around the world were trying to rise up against colonial powers and formal apartheid regimes. It was a time when capitalism and liberalism seemed vulnerable; alternative models — from Communism to Islamism to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and beyond — seemed to pose major threats to the hegemony of the Western political and economic regime.

In the intervening decades, the apartheid systems in the United States, South Africa and other places have been significantly (if incompletely) dismantled; former colonial powers have largely given up their project and independent states have emerged in their wake. In these respects, the revolutionaries had their way. Yet simultaneously, most alternative arrangements to the prevailing political and economic order have collapsed – be it as a result of their own contradictions and deficiencies or because they have been coopted or outright destroyed – or else they persist in some marginal form, with their broader aspirations largely abandoned or curtailed.

That is, in many respects, it is a whole new world relative to when many of these paradigms of critique were put forward. Many of the problems they sought to address have been mitigated or evolved, if not resolved. Most of the alternative social arrangements these critiques were organized to drive people towards are no longer plausibly ‘on the table.’ Nor are new credible possibilities being put forward... This does not entail or imply that all is well.

Instead, the current system is struggling under a number of contradictions, people are growing increasingly impatient with respect to its failures and shortcomings, skeptical of its continued value or relevance. This acute sense of problems paired with a dearth of solutions or alternatives gives rise to dangerous currents of ironic detachment on the one hand, and nihilistic outrage on the other. Up to now, critique has often served to reinforce these trends – but it could be used to mitigate them instead. It could serve to open up horizons, to restore a sense of possibility and agency, to help sort out what is valuable from what is not, in order to understand and respond to the challenges and opportunities with which we are currently faced."

Refashioning Futures serves as a masterclass in the practice of viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement – and as a testament to their value.