States Without People: Revolt and Defeat in the Middle East 0228024153, 9780228024156

Citation preview

S t a t e s w it h o ut People

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McGill-Queen’s Studies in Protest, Power, and Resistance Series editor: Sarah Marsden Protest, civil resistance, and political violence have rarely been more visible. Nor have they ever involved such a complex web of identities, geographies, and ideologies. This series expands the theoretical and empirical boundaries of research on political conflict to examine the origins, cultures, and practices of resistance. From grassroots activists and those engaged in everyday forms of resistance to social movements to violent militant networks, it considers the full range of actors and the strategies they use to provoke change. The series provides a forum for interdisciplinary work that engages with politics, sociology, anthropology, history, psychology, religious studies, and philosophy. Its ambition is to deepen understanding of the systems of power people encounter and the creative, violent, peaceful, extraordinary, and everyday ways they try to resist, subvert, and overthrow them.   1 New Media and Revolution Resistance and Dissent in Pre-uprising Syria Billie Jeanne Brownlee   2 Games of Discontent Protests, Boycotts, and Politics at the 1968 Mexico Olympics Harry Blutstein   3 Organizing Equality Dispatches from a Global Struggle Edited by Alison Hearn, James Compton, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Amanda F. Grzyb   4 The Failure of Remain Anti-Brexit Activism in the United Kingdom Adam Fagan and Stijn van Kessel   5 The Participation Paradox Between Bottom-Up and Top-Down Development in South Africa Luke Sinwell   6 Citizens, Civil Society, and Activism under the EPRDF Regime in Ethiopia An Analysis from Below Edited by Camille Pellerin and Logan Cochrane   7 Intercommunal Warfare and Ethnic Peacemaking The Dynamics of Urban Violence in Central Asia Joldon Kutmanaliev   8 Our Subversive Voice The History and Politics of English Protest Songs, 1600–2020 John Street, Oskar Cox Jensen, Alan Finlayson, Angela McShane, and Matthew Worley   9 States without People Revolt and Defeat in the Middle East Billie Jeanne Brownlee and Maziyar Ghiabi

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States without People Revolt and Defeat in the Middle East

B i l l i e J e a n n e B r own lee a n d M a z i y a r G hia bi

McGill-­Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2025 ISB N ISB N ISB N ISB N

978-0-2280-2415-6 (paper) 978-0-2280-2416-3 (eP D F ) 978-0-2280-2417-0 (eP U B) 978-0-2280-2418-7 (OA)

Legal deposit first quarter 2025 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free McGill-Queen’s University Press in Montreal is on land which long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst Indigenous Peoples, including the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabeg nations. In Kingston it is situated on the territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabek. We acknowledge and thank the diverse Indigenous Peoples whose footsteps have marked these territories on which peoples of the world now gather.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: States without people: revolt and defeat in the Middle East / Billie Jeanne Brownlee and Maziyar Ghiabi. Names: Brownlee, Billie Jeanne, 1984- author | Ghiabi, Maziyar, 1986- author Series: McGill-Queen’s studies in protest, power, and resistance; 9. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s studies in protest, power, and resistance; 9 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20240478789 | Canadiana (ebook) 20240478835 | ISB N 9780228024156 (paper) | I S BN 9780228024187 (OA) | ISB N 9780228024170 (eP U B) | I S BN 9780228024163 (eP D F ) Subjects: LC S H : Protest movements—Middle East—History—21st century—Case ­studies. | LC S H : Civil war—Middle East—History—21st century—Case studies. | LC SH: Right and left (Political science)—Middle East—History—21st century—Case studies. | LC S H : Middle East—Politics and government—21st century—Case studies. | LC SH: Middle East—Social conditions—21st century—Case studies. | LCG F T : Case studies. Classification: LCC D S 63.123 .B76 2025 | DDC 956.05/4—dc23

This book was designed and typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon. Copyediting by Shelagh Plunkett.

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To the memory and smile of Habib Enayati, grandfather. For the love and fortitude of our parents, Bob and Carmen,   Faegheh and Gabriele. To the wild rhythms and curious minds of Kian and Manush. ‫شهیدی که بر خاک میخفت‬ ‫سرانگشت در خون خود میزد و مینوشت‬  ‫دو سه حرف بر سنگ‬ «‫به امید پیروزی واقعی‬ ،‫نه در جنگ‬ ‫که بر جنگ‬ A martyr nestling in the dust dips a fingertip in his blood and writes Two, three words on a stone: ‘In the hope of a real victory Not in war But over war.’ Qaysar Aminpour (1959–2007) ‘Plans for peace (3)’, The Grammar of Love

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Note on the Transliterations  xiii



Postscript: Silence, Intelligence, and Genocide  xv



Prologue: Unthinking Defeat  xix



a c t o ne : O n R e v o l t Vignette 1. Place de la République, Paris, 42 [sic] March 2016  3

  1 Revolt, Not Revolution!  7

a c t t wo: O n C i v i l W a r

  2 The Great Civil War   29 Vignette 2. Damascus Suburbs, May 2010  47   3 The Culture of the Right: Statolatry   50   4 Partisans of the State: Statopraxis 75

a c t t h r e e : O n D i sp l a c e m e n t Vignette 3. Erbil, Iraq, November 2014  107

  5 Displacement as State (De)formation  110

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viii Contents

  6 Demographic Engineering and National Anxieties  127   7 States of Disruption: Dépaysement and Virtual Displacement 145

Epilogue: States without People  157

Notes 175 Index 201

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Acknowledgments

A book is in the encounter of many. But it is more so in the encounter of the one with whom you share the best part of your life, your partner and, in this circumstance, co-author. The making of this book took the two authors, sometimes together and sometimes individually, to places far and near. Our intellectual house was the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari, where we first met in the library of Ca’ Capello on the Grand Canal. Mario Nordio was a shared teacher and intellectual guide in those early years of learning about the Middle East and global politics. His cigar, then pipe, and wise humour are unforgettable, and we both owe him the courtesy of the first push to pursue research as a career. A push that was later informed by the captain of the (Venetian) Gulf Matteo Legrenzi, who over many years advised us on academic pathways, for which, today, we find ourselves in Exeter. And to Simone Cristoforetti, Maziyar’s mo’allem-e awwal. We lived in the slopes of the Shamsiyyeh neighbourhood in Damascus below the Qasiyun Mountain in 2009–10. Our many friends and colleagues there put us face to face with the tragedy of war and displacement, and the frailty of hope, for which we are in debt and yet inspired. The same goes for all those who helped us through the happy and tense periods of research and life in Lebanon, Iran, and elsewhere and with whom we have maintained an intellectual dialogue over many years. Our intellectual houses in the UK have been in Oxford and Exeter since 2011, a year that marked the start of the Arab revolts and the progressive fallout of their most radical aspirations. Stephanie Cronin was our interlocutor over many years about history and its lessons from below but also on the necessity and tragedy of hope in politics,

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x Acknowledgments

something that deeply informed the way we came to conceive of this book. Many others, in varying degrees, shaped the time and ideas that made this book what it is: Walter Armbrust, Edmund Herzig, Philip Robins, Eugene Rogan, and Michael Willis were part of discussions and exchanges that over the years informed some of the lines of inquiry of this book. And Anne, our most dear friend (and landlady) who read bits and parts of this book more than any other, with stoic patience and humour. We are truly thankful for her friendship over more than a decade. In Exeter at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies we found an inspiring place to test and advance our ideas, with the support of ­colleagues working across the Islamicate world. William Gallois, inter alios, believed in this book in its early days, encouraging us. To put it in his own words, ‘[w]hat a wild and crazy piece, which I mean as a compliment!’ We are both grateful for his camaraderie. Lise Storm helped both of us to make Exeter our academic and life home, for which we are indebted. Sabiha Allouche, Mustafa Baig, Claire Beaugrand, Ahmad Deilami, Adam Hanieh, Marya Hannoun, Laleh Khalili, Katie Natanel, Ilan Pappe, Ross Porter, Safaa Radoan, Kumail Rajani, Sajjad Rizvi, Emily Selove, Marc Valeri shared with us thoughts and suggestions on issues that informed the book’s argument and analysis and the preparation of the manuscript. We are both also lucky to learn every day from our fantastic past and present doctoral students Areej Jafari, Kinan Noah, Hannah Cowdell, Peyman Zinati, Arghavan Moharrami, Kamyar Salavati, and Leila Dara. Our friends made Exeter a new home for us, and there is not enough thanking for that: Nora, Francesco, Giorgia(s), Riaz, Kanwal, Rami, Hashem, Ruba, Alicia, Isabel, James and Lara, Semih, and Seyma. A special thanks goes to Eric Hooglund, who has been an interlocutor since we first submitted a paper for Middle East Critique in 2015 and whose vision and guidance is superlative, a rare gem in the current landscape of scholarly journals; to Matteo Capasso, who as one of the editors of that journal provided much useful feedback on some of the emerging arguments of this book. Chapters 1 and 2 are substantially modified versions of articles that have appeared through open access in 2015 and 2020 in the journal Middle East Critique.1 The core of the idea of this book emerged in conversations over several years with Marco Giacalone. We are grateful for his boundless philosophical thinking and the chats on Furio Jesi while sitting in Tehran’s Emamzadehs or in Bergamo’s gardens. And many others who

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Acknowledgments

xi

for the sake of space and readers’ patience we leave out here. While thinking about revolt and revolution, and its many philosophical facets and contentions, we were inspired by the philosophical praxis of Salvatore Prinzi (aka Saso), a Napolitan philosopher and pedagogue who has been part of the creation of Italy’s radical political experiment known as Potere al Popolo (Power to the People).2 In March 2015, with a group of students, activists, and local citizens, Potere al Popolo occupied an abandoned mental asylum in the Quartiere Mater Dei in Naples. Ever since, the political project that came into being there has been a practical laboratory of organisation, defeat, and social experimentation with which we thought and exchanged experiences. Saso’s analysis of local and global politics never ceased to be inspirational, even when life and geographical distance faded our connections. In Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Türkiye, Iran, and elsewhere, our gratitude goes to friends and fellow travellers from whom and with whom we learnt about the events and experiences that surrounded us. We thank in no particular order: Hazem, Ridha, Wafaa, Elena, Ghia, Rima, Jenny, Tatyana, May, Hande, Suja, Rawan, Viola, Ayman, Zoe, Carlo, Giuli and Mirko, les 3 freres et l’Omadis, Negar, Mohsen, Sasan, Sepehr, Mitra, Babak, Minoo, Reza, Amir, Ali, Emile, Sebastian, Daniel, Shireen, Lamia, Vira, Nikolas, Kiana and Pietro, and many many many others. This type of research, spanning more than a decade and several countries, could not happen without the good luck of having financial support and intellectual freedom to pursue research. Billie Jeanne’s research was supported by an esrc-gcrf postdoctoral grant between 2018 and 2019 and several funding pots at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies. Maziyar’s research was supported by two Wellcome Trust awards at the University of Oxford and the University of Exeter respectively, as well as a postdoctoral fellowship at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (e h e ss) in Paris between 2017 and 2018. Both authors benefited from departmental and faculty support at the University of Exeter. We are grateful for the trust put in us by the funders and we hope the result will enable further inter-­disciplinary and unconventional research with the Middle East at the core. We presented parts of the book at several academic conferences and in workshops. These include: the Arab Studies Research Centre’s Five Years after the ‘Arab Spring’ at the American University of Beirut in 2016 (when the English–Arabic interpreter passed out while translating Maziyar’s digression on Giorgio Agamben); at the annual

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xii Acknowledgments

conference of the Italian Association for Middle Eastern Studies in Venice in 2016; at the seminar of the Islamic Studies Centre at Oxford in 2017; the 100 Years of Displacement Conference at the aub in 2018; the Beyond Sectarianism workshop at Cambridge University in 2018; and at ‘Exploring the New Regional Dynamics of the Middle East’, organised by Seteney Shami and Adam Hanieh and the Arab Council of Social Sciences in 2021. We are grateful to all the participants and discussants of these events for their critique and comments which put our work in perspective with wider questions in the Middle East and globally. Equally, we owe much to the transversal discussions around conflict, peace, and political economies at the heart of the Drugs & (dis)Order project at the School of Oriental and African Studies, led by the vision of Jonathan Goodhand, Francisco Gutierrez, Tim Rhodes, Pat Meehan, Frances Thomson, Jenny Pearce, and many others. Our family has been a rock upon which we had the luck to build our intellectual careers: Carmen and Bob, Faegheh and Gabriele, Tim and Valeria, Mahin-dokht Khalili (Maman-bozorg), Day-i Ali, ­Neli-joon, Day-i Mammad, and those who are no longer with us in this world but whose gracious memories fill our lives, Massimo and Habib Enayati (Baba-bozorg). We are grateful to have had a life full of beautiful friends all over the world, Shireen and Michele, Sara, Alessio Lupi, Federica (Fruk), Massimiliano, Olivera, Eugenio, Nicolo, Dasha, Angelka; and Rafa Gude, our broder, with whom we exchanged information, concepts, and strategies to think back-andforth from the Americas to the Middle East, from gang politics to settler-colonialism. But most of all, it is the joy, curiosity, and sleeplessness in the company of Kian and Manush, to whom we dedicate these pages, in the hope that the bells of war they hear around them may be silenced by their and their friends’ love of living. Billie Jeanne Brownlee’s work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/P009727/1]. Maziyar Ghiabi’s work was supported by the Wellcome Trust [grant number 219771/Z/19/Z at the University of Exeter, and grant number 01988/Z/13/Z at the University of Oxford] and by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/p011543/1] at the School of Oriental and African Studies (s o a s ).

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Note on the Transliterations

Throughout the text, we used a simplified version of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (Arabic language) transliteration guidelines. For the hamza, we have used ’, whereas for the ayn ‘. We avoided diacritics and used the spelling of popular places as they are used internationally (in English). Names of people and places known in Western languages have been translated with the most common form in English, e.g., Ghaddafi and not Qadhdhafi or Qaddafi; Khomeini and not Khumayni. As a rule, we aimed at simplifying transliteration for the sake of readability.

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Postsc rip t Silence, Intelligence, and Genocide

This book started in 2013 when the revolts in the Arab capitals were progressively turning into a transnational counterrevolution. The horizon of civil war and displacement was everywhere we looked. More than ten years later, that horizon has only become gloomier, violence exacerbated to new highs, and dehumanisation being the norm in engaging with enemies and adversaries. For more than ten years, we collected a substantial amount of material made up of interviews, fieldnotes, commentaries, reports, and other such data from around the region, and while we were awaiting feedback from reviewers, the 7 October attacks on Israel and Israel’s ensuing war on Gaza took place. As we write, the mass killing of Palestinians and the obliteration of Gaza as a lived environment is still ongoing, while Israeli hostages have remained captive for more than six months. What were extraordinary extremes in speech and tactics in war have become the norm. The human tragedy that has been unleashed since 7 October leaves us breathless and shocked, but that is nothing compared to the emotions and suffocations of Palestinians all over the world. The annihilation of Gaza, its people, its health, educational, civic infrastructure, and the complicity of European and American governments with Israel’s overt strategy of ethnic cleansing and depopulation have gone beyond this book’s already pessimistic vision. Israel’s use of artificial intelligence programmes such as ‘Lavender’ and ‘Where’s Daddy’ establish a novel logic of maximum efficiency in war and security, while also casting light on an almost totalitarian control over digital information available to those living in Gaza – and indeed elsewhere. Justifying this as a better option in terms of time management and emotional detachment, Israel is using the war on Gaza, in the word of the Israeli army, as ‘a great laboratory’.1

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xvi Postscript

Some commentators, in Israel and across the world, referred to 7 October as the new 9/11. That may hold ground only if we look at 9/11 as the date inaugurating a tragic era that has unleashed unprecedented violence against people in Afghanistan and Iraq and all others who have been brutally affected by the US-led ‘War on Terror’ across the world. A conservative estimate puts the number of people displaced by the United States and its allies’ post-9/11 wars at 38 million.2 Almost a million people have died due to direct war violence with another 3.8 million finding death indirectly.3 Only if we grasp the meaning of such data for what they actually bring about, and cause, can we understand the historical reach that they have. Confronted by this insurmountable tragedy, we felt disarmed and vitalised at the same time. Disheartened by the silence of many progressive academics and institutions across the world in speaking against Israel’s brutal war machine or in recognising the bare minimum of Palestinian existence and right to life. And we also felt energised by the solidarity of millions of people across the world, standing loud and strong against injustice and fear amidst the silencing of anti-war voices in European and American public discourse. To mind, again and again, came the words of Carlo Levi in his lesser known La Paura delle Libertà (Fear of Freedoms), ‘[T]he fear of freedoms is what generates fascism’,4 and this new culture of the right (chapters 3 and 4) seems to us the preparation for an ever larger conflict. Equally, we realised that the core arguments of our book stood tragically solid in the wake of post–7 October developments in the region and across the world. The culture of the right, the abuse of mythologies, the use of displacement as state formation, the emergence of grassroots authoritarians as a device of social control had become front and centre in the way regional and Western states policed critique and social activism against the warmongering attitude of most public officials. So, the chapters of this book have remained unchanged and its core arguments unaltered by the tragedy of the present state in Palestine. Here and there in the book, we have added reminders and annotations to show how our discussions of certain paradigms and topics (militarism, grassroots authoritarianism, displacement politics, right-wing connections, etc.) have come to be very relevant in the current war on Palestinian lives in Gaza and the West Bank. We write the final words of this postscript in late March 2024 as the United States has abstained, without using its veto power, from the United Nations Security Council vote on a ceasefire in Gaza.

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Postscript xvii

The prospect of an end to the war is yet distant and, somehow, unthinkable. Hope is treacherous, as Alaa adb el-Fattah reminds us in the epilogue of this book. We are left with solidarity and organisation against endless wars, till they are overcome.

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Prolog ue Unthinking Defeat

Fascism has been the counter-revolution against the revolution that didn’t take place.1 Ignazio Silone (1900–1978)

Andarivieni , a B a ck-and-Forth Working on a book manuscript is like reordering a room when you have deliveries arriving all day long. The moment you find a place for the item you’ve unpacked, someone knocks at the door with another delivery. You did not order that item, and yet you need to find a place for it. Items continue to arrive and must be stored. One day, they will come to good use, or so one always thinks. In a situation like this, not eased by the perpetual exploitation of intellectual and physical work, it is imperative to set up a good infrastructure, a scaffolding that makes movement between ideas/places less cumbersome, the motion from the ground of lived events and the ceiling of concepts less of a jump into the void. Not a pathway but a back-and-forth. This is the work we consider in periods of abundant ideas and commodities but have too little time to arrange in actual living forms: an intellectual work, that is an andarivieni – va e vieni, a going and coming back: ‘a series of digression and detours … an oscillation from forms-of-life and [their] use’.2 The back-and-forth as a method of composition has given us some strength, too. This has come, alas, from tragic developments in the lifeworld of politics, going back and forth from the Middle East to Europe and North America, back to history and forth to the present. As we were writing

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xx Prologue

our sections on the culture of the right from 2015 to 2023, explaining how ideas rooted in European and Western neo-fascism have long had root in the Middle East, we were witnessing the Tunisian president Kais Saeidi deploying established conspiracy tropes such as the Great Replacement Theory (g r t ) (see chapter 3 and the epilogue); Israeli fascists such as Itamar Ben-Gvir taking up public office in Bibi Netanyahu’s latest cabinet (chapter 4), at the heart of policing and security apparatuses right before the attacks of Palestinian militants in southern Israel; the Saudi crown prince Mohammad Bin Salman and uae ruler Mohammad Bin Zayd embracing militaristic styles of government. In 2020, the covid-19 pandemic brought a global halt to public life in a manner that had been inconceivable even by the most totalitarian of states. It did so with relative homogeneity across the south and north, east and west of the globe, with governments with vastly different ideological outlooks adopting similar policies and public rhetoric, though there were also varying degrees of denial of the virus’s existence, conspiracies around its origins, and restrictive punishment measures against those breaching lockdowns and isolationist orders. The conditions triggered by the pandemic and the policies adopted by states may seem far from the world of protests and repressions – of revolt and defeat – which is central to this book; yet, the pandemic materialised better than any other event or political process the very heart of this book’s thesis, that of states without people, the one suggested in Giorgio Agamben’s repurposing of the Greek term ademia (‘without a demos’).3 In this overlapping of health, public order, and state-making, we researched and wrote the book, with the pandemic and many other events serving to reinforce the core arguments in it. Now, as of March 2024, the region is about to enter a new and more dramatic era, with Israel’s war on Gaza and Palestinians as the watershed for other wars yet to come. Beyond the newsroom alerting us about how defeat is an enabler of the culture of the right, a good deal of innovative scholarship on questions of revolt, civil war, and displacement is being produced and published as we complete this prologue. There is no way to do full justice to it, but we hope our references provide some mapping of these groundbreaking works and the way they have guided us throughout our back-and-forth.4 We went through many back-and-forth moments in this book. Some physical, to Beirut, Istanbul, Tehran, Gaziantep, and Paris in times

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Prologue xxi

of revolt, reaction, and displacement. Some more ideational, such as the revisiting of myths, the many forms of right-wing culture, and the ­ethereal political parallels of events across different regions of the world and what seems their congruent longue durée trajectories. This back-and-forth took place under the spell of defeat: in Iran after the debacle of the reform-oriented movement in 2009 and its sporadic successors in 2019, 2021, 2022, and counting; in Iraq with its descent into violent civil war and ‘perpetual revolt’ since 2003 and increasingly in the 2010s;5 across Mediterranean capitals, south and north, with the underwhelming results of popular alternatives in Greece, Türkiye, Spain, Tunisia, and Egypt and the ascension of hyper-capitalist and authoritarian-prone governments in their wake. Things didn’t – and don’t – look good, wherever we gazed. But nor do they look stagnant. Something has been on the move, perhaps in a direction we neither expected nor wished for. So, in the back-and-forth of writing this book we have ended up in a place very different from where we started. And we know that one is never the same after leaving a place and returning to it. This new place, we call it the culture of the right, is a place that is not entirely new to our ears and minds, while it is not completely old either, a revamping of what we read in history books. It is what is left after the defeat.

‘ A M a r x is t C h a si ng Myths’ One thinker, an unexpected passenger among many, has been in our company throughout the physical and ideational journeys that formed this book. He is the Italian theorist and mythologist Furio Jesi, dubbed in a 2021 piece in the Jacobin ‘a Marxist chasing myths’. Born in Turin on 18 May 1941, Jesi was the son of a military official who took an active part in Italy’s colonial wars in North and East Africa. Though coming from a Jewish family, Jesi’s father was ‘aryanised’ by Benito Mussolini via the merit of military virtue. Jesi’s maternal grandfather, Percy Chiarone (1880–1953), lived in Cairo for many decades, presiding over educational institutions in the Egyptian capital. He is also the person through whom Jesi acquired a precocious passion for mythol­ogies. By the end of his teenage years, Jesi was considered an enfant prodige of the study of myth, entertaining epistolary correspondence with the doyen of the field, the Hungarian classical philologist Karol Kerenyi. But Jesi’s intellectual appetite was omni­ vorous and despite his short life – he died in 1980 due to a gas leak

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xxii Prologue

in his flat – he has come to be known as a perspicacious observer of contemporary politics. Up until recently, Jesi’s existence has lingered in the shadows. He was remembered only by a handful of specialised scholars, among whom was Giorgio Agamben, the philosopher of the Homo Sacer series, who wrote the preface of Jesi’s essay on Arthur Rimbaud’s Bateau Ivre. It was at the turn of the new millennium that Jesi was brought to light in the intellectual panorama, first in Italy, then across Europe, and finally in the 2020s, across the Atlantic in the Americas. This was no coincidence – the resurfacing has been a sign of the ­tangibility and salience of his philosophical vision. But why? In his lifetime, Jesi took an active part in the political movements of the 1960s as a card-carrying communist and a union activist. But as a self-taught scholar, who never went to university and only sporadically took up teaching posts, Jesi was an outsider to the life of the intelligentsia. This is crucial because it enabled him to develop his thought outside the strictures of orthodox debates of the time. He took part in the Parisian revolt of 1968 and was later a witness to the defeat of these uprisings. That experience inspired him to write the essay Spartakus: The Symbology of Revolt, published in 2014 in an excellent translation by Alberto Toscano.6 In this book, Jesi explores a ‘symbology’ and a ‘phenomenology of revolt’ where he discusses the Spartakist revolt led by Rosa Luxemburg in 1918–19, as a way to situate the political fallout of the decades that followed the Spartakist defeat. There he asks the ever-important question that also guided us in the first section of this book: what distinguishes a revolution from a revolt? And how to make sense of a counterrevolution without there having been a revolution? The thought of ‘defeat’ was never too far from Jesi’s mind. The main corpus of his work dissects the cultural expressions and forms that emerged in the aftermath of defeated popular uprisings in early ­twentieth-century Europe. He searches for the use of myths in justifying calls for renewal, a pursuit that led him to dig out the cultural roots of the rise of Nazism and fascism; and later to the rhizomes of modern capitalist culture, a bundle never too far from its recent fascist past. Jesi understood and wrote about the dangerous force of myths in politics, and he recognized the political culture of his time, that of a post–World War II Europe, as imbued in the culture of the right, a culture that pertained equally to those professing themselves as left- or right-wing.

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Prologue xxiii

Jesi’s rediscovery over the past two decades is part and parcel of the trend in what could be named the momentum of Italian theory. Antonio Gramsci, Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Donatella Di Cesare, Alberto Toscano, Franco Berardi, and Paolo Virno have become household names in contemporary political writing, including in/on the Middle East. While the latter names are known and wellcited, Jesi has yet to be discovered by those studying the region: we claim to be the first authors to have brought his work to light for Middle East scholars in a double article published in Middle East Critique in 2015 and 2021.7 Reviving some of the intuitions of Jesi can contribute to a paradigm shift in understanding political culture and state–citizen relations in the Middle East. More crucially, it helps to situate the events and phenomena which have taken place in the region within the processes of political transformation in the wider world, with a special focus on the contiguous and overlapping realities of the Mediterranean region. Jesi’s grappling with revolt and the ­culture of the right prepared the ground for our work on the phenomenology of revolt and defeat in the Middle East. In this, we are aware that the task of phenomenology, while bringing lived details of history and enabling a granular – or, to use Gramsci’s term, ‘molecular’ – analysis of the things of the world, also falls short of delivering an escape route for how to change the way things are.8 That is an aspect to which we have given thought in the epilogue of this book, where we grapple with what we mean by states without people and how we can move beyond those.

T h e M id d l e East a s a P o l it ic a l Laboratory In his introduction to the book Radical Thought in Italy, Michael Hardt argued that Italy was a political laboratory for the era seeing the transition from the Cold War to the 1990s. ‘This is not to say that Italian revolutionary movements’, he writes, ‘have met only with great successes in recent decades; in fact, their defeats have been almost as spectacular as those suffered by the French proletariat in the nineteenth century’.9 Italy was a laboratory of experimentation in new forms of political thinking that helped us conceive a revolutionary practice. There is an immediate shortcoming in such an argument but also some potential. Where is most of the world? Do Chinese economics, Indian politics, and Iranian theory not matter in the making of the

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politics of the present? Yet, Italy may be a geo-cultural space that, in terms of the development of ways of thinking about the world, may have something to say. When it comes to intellectual exploration and political practice within the framework of the nation-state and state theory, the Italian experience has clout beyond it relatively minor weight. A peninsula home of half a dozen kingdoms and statelets in the nineteenth century, including the unique case of the theocratic state of the Vatican, Italy has embodied the dilemmas of state-making and the pursuit of regional autonomies in the midst of competing cultural, political, and religious forces. State theorists such as Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) had enormous influence on the vision and ideas of nationalists across the world and especially in the Global South. George Sorel, the French intellectual, thought of Mazzini as a man pursuing a ‘mad chimera’ but also someone who understood all too well the importance of myths in the practice of revolution. In a way anticipating the elaboration of Furio Jesi, Sorel said that myths enable men to foment a combat capable of destroying ‘the existing state of things’.10 This did not go unnoticed to those keen to transform politics and the state. A young Benito Mussolini, till then a socialist, thought that Mazzini had given Italians the myth (of Italianity and Rome as Empire) that ‘impelled them to take part in conspiracies and battles’.11 The Hindu nationalist Veer Savarkar (1883–1966) thought that Indians, much along the line of the Italians described in Giuseppe Mazzini’s works, were building humanity. Others followed closely. Zionist idealogues such as Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky, who himself had studied and resided in Rome during the early decades of the twentieth century, had popularised Mazzini’s ideas to the readership of the Young Turks journal, for which he was briefly one of the editors. Arab and Iranian nationalists were deeply moved by the syncretism of religious appeal, national imagination, and pragmatic politics that Mazzini as a revolutionary man had embodied. These same forces later shaped the rise of another, very Italian and very international phenomenon, that of fascism. So, Italy was the laboratory of modern politics in the twentieth century, a laboratory located at the crossroads of East and West, South and North – Italians having been outliers and underdogs in the game of Western modernity, the southerners of the North. Italy’s historical experience ranged from the making of fascism as an organising principle for militant movements taking over state-making, to the great postwar bargains of cattocomunism, the political compromise of

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Catholics endeared with communist idea(l)s, and of Communists who had an (unconscious) Catholic mindset and conservative culture; to the rise of media ghouls in political life in the person of Silvio Berlusconi (for some, wrongly, the antecedent to Donald J. Trump) who innovate the language of politics by introducing the systematic defamation of the declining left (‘i communisti’) and of the public s­ ector in favour of private capital; and the technocratic turn with globethrottling international bankers Mario Monti and Mario Draghi as saviours of the nation and the state, both of whom served as prime ministers in the 2010s. By 2022, the historical circle seemed to be complete with the election of the first post-fascist prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, in the days coinciding with the one hundredth anniversary of the fascist takeover of the state in September 1922 with the ‘March on Rome’. In one of Meloni’s first interviews, she rejected accusations of her party’s antisemitic social base by saying that the Party Fratelli d’Italia was very much inspired by the right-wing Israeli Likud.12 The statement established the new cosmologies of political culture displacing previous orders and blocs between left and right. Dylan Ridley argues that fascism is a form of authoritarian democracy rather than an anti-democratic dictatorship. Not a ‘breakdown of democracy’, Ridley says, but rather the outcome of the development of civil society groups in what Antonio Gramsci calls situations of crisi organica, ‘organic crises’.13 These are turning points in which the democratic demands ‘produced by civil society cannot adequately be expressed through existing political institutions’.14 In a similar vein, the political theorist Davide Tarizzo argues that fascism is only possible in a condition of democracy, not within other forms of rule, such as authoritarian dictatorship or monarchic tyranny. ‘The reason for this’, he adds, ‘is that fascism marks the moment when people are fooled into believing that modern democracies can get rid of all failures and compromises’.15 In this setting, fascism is not ‘a betrayal or a refutation of democracy’; it is its full completion. Mussolini, in his  ­co-authored pamphlet with philosopher Giovanni Gentile ­(1875–1944), verbalised this logic: ‘il fascismo é la forma piú candida di democrazia’ (‘fascism is the most candid form of democracy’).16 The tightening space of political participation and more orthodox lines of inclusion over who can have a say in the direction of political change are two immediate outcomes of this form of thinking. Such a vision, with requisite variations in style, would find eager ears in the likes of General Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi, Bashar al-Assad, Benjamin

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Netanyahu, as well as democratic leaders such as Narendra Modi, Emanuel Macron, Giorgia Meloni, and others. We elaborate on these ideas in chapters 2, 3, and 4. We believe that the so-called ‘Middle East’ is the laboratory of politics in the twenty-first century. Going through epochal changes represented by colonial, imperial, and inter-state conflicts, mass-scale human ­displacement, rapid modernisation in terms of access to digital technologies, international links with diasporas, and escalating t­ ensions over the place of religion, cultural diversity, and socio-­economic inequality, the Middle East as a region is faced with epoch-making challenges. This book is built upon a phenomenological approach, attentive to the symbolism and experience of politics. We must admit that during the period in which this book took shape, we also experienced the participation, infatuation, rethinking, and situating of the revolts about which we write here. In this context, States without People argues that the Middle East embodies a laboratory for the understanding of state-making and political culture.

Be A w a r e o f t h e M e d ievali sts i n Chi ef! Consider: What if the United States, when invading Italy in Septem­ ber 1943, had recruited several scholars of canon law – the body of juri­dical norms agreed upon by the Catholic Church to regulate the life of believers and the ecclesiastical institutions, in other words, life and politics – to study a potential constitutional order suitable for Italian society? Then, once victorious, the US commander-in-chief, instructed by the president, appointed one of these scholars to the role of drafting the post-fascist Italian constitution to harmonize Italy’s religious Catholic society with the new democratic government. The leading consultant was a practising Muslim Shi’a scholar trained in Christian theology and the science of hadith in the city of Najaf in Iraq. He was competent and got the job ‘because of his skills’. This odd hypothetical example does not fall far from truth in the case of postwar Iraq. In 2003, at the time of the drafting of the Iraqi constitution, Paul Bremer, then American head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, sought the consultancy of Noah Feldman, a Harvard University law professor, whose doctoral dissertation at Oxford University was ‘reading the Nicomachean Ethics with Ibn Rushd [Averroe]’. One might wonder, what is this topic’s relationship to the complex configuration of Iraq’s modern constitution? Feldman,

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a Democrat among the Republican administration officials and born into an Orthodox Jewish family, had never been to Iraq and was not in any serious way knowledgeable about contemporary politics and society of the Arab world. He had written a text, After Jihad, pondering about Islam and democracy in much the same way that was fashionable during the early 2000s.17 This background may explain how the new Iraqi constitution resulted in a sectarian artefact immersed in a timeless reading of identity politics, dividing citizenship and institutional authorities along sectarian religious lines. Writing in Al-Ahram Weekly, Edward Said reminded readers that Feldman ‘has never practiced law in the Arab world, never been to Iraq … what an open-faced snub not only to Iraq itself, but also to the legions of Arab and Muslim legal minds’.18 Examples of medievalists in chief abound in the imperial history of the Middle East. In fact, Feldman’s case is not isolated; it represents a paradigmatic case of orientalist scholarship influencing contemporary configurations of the Middle East along sectarian lines. There is a long tradition of this kind: Experts of medieval Islam refashioning themselves as experts on international affairs, conflicts, and state– society tensions. One of Feldman’s intellectual mentors was Bernard Lewis, another expert of medievalist Islamic thought. Lewis became a prominent international commentator on contemporary Islamic societies, and he advised US Republican administrations, including former US secretary of state Michael Pompeo, who stood out for his Evangelical take on world affairs.19 For example, in an excerpt ‘­analyzing’ Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Lewis wrote: There is a radical difference between the Islamic Republic of Iran and other governments with nuclear weapons [forgetful that Iran does not possess nuclear weapons]. This difference is expressed in what can only be described as the apocalyptic worldview of Iran’s present rulers … The phrase ‘Allah will know his own’ is usually used to explain such apparently callous unconcern [killing Muslims while killing unbelievers] … [T]he threat of direct retaliation on Iran is … already weakened by the suicide or martyrdom complex that plagues parts of the Islamic world today … This year, August 22 corresponds, in the Islamic calendar, to the 27th day of the month of Rajab [1427]. This, by tradition is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on

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the winged horse Buraq to the farthest Mosque in Jerusalem … This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world.20 Similarly, Daniel Pipes, founder of the right-wing think tank Middle East Forum, employed his specialization in medieval Islamic history (PhD at Harvard, 1978) to become a commentator on contemporary Middle East politics. He taught at the Naval War College and then acted as policy consultant for US Republican administrations. Pipes’s trajectory and political influence is far-reaching despite his being rebuked by the academic community. He views Islam as inherently incompatible with the modern world and has influence in conservative political circles.21 For instance, following 9/11, Boris Johnson, then editor of The Daily Telegraph, contacted Pipes to get an immediate commentary on the attacks. Beyond the academe, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist (also with an Oxford MPhil), has described the conflict in Yemen as a ‘7th century struggle over who is the rightful heir to the Prophet – Shiites or Sunnis’.22 Throughout the following chapters, we will debunk this mindset and its dangerous connivence with imperial armies, showing that the rhetoric about ‘sectarianism’ as innate in the Middle East and as the cause of its ‘backwardness’ is misleading, obfuscating rather than clarifying the complexity of the political turmoil in the region.23

P he n o m e n o l o g y o f R e volt and Defeat States without People is a study of the political transformation taking place in the Middle East in the twenty-first century. It explores the unwrapping of region-wide (and transnational) revolts through a framework which casts light on parallel experiences across the globe. It provides an analysis of why these revolts did not materialise into revolutions and how their defeat enabled the affirmation of the culture of the right. As opposed to an overview of political thought and sociological analysis, a phenomenological approach enables us to come to terms with the matter and experience of defeat, a condition that is felt deeply across the region. To explore the aftermath of defeat and the political culture that pertains to it, we are going back and forth between here and there: the present and the past, the revolts and counter-revolts, the Arab capitals and European ones, the thoughts and the praxis of Southern and Northern visionaries in one place or

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the other. We move from the unlocatable distance of the myth to the very street corners of present history. We argue that since 2001 three paradigmatic moments have transformed the region: revolt, civil war, and displacement. These are not just historical events. They are transformational processes that have affected the idea of the state, the notion of citizenship, and the place and forms of political culture. They have turned the region into an open-air experimentation lab for politics. The phenomenological approach builds upon a grounded reading of the lived experience and lifeworld of those affected by political transformations. This has taken us to places and stories that may not strictly be political but the incidence of which has far-reaching effects on political culture and praxis. It has also enabled us to move between and beyond the national and regional spaces of analyses, integrating forms of political expression and practice from the Middle East to the West and then across the spheres of the Global South and North. Rather than expanding on the conceptual implications of a phenomenology of revolt and defeat, we have been keen to show what are its effects in the formation of state–citizen relations. We believe these are profound, and they hold the seed for future trajectories in shaping the region and its place in the world. We reflect upon this question in the epilogue. The book advances three lines of argument dissected in each section (or act): a. The political protests that have taken place in the region since 2011 were revolts, not revolutions. b. The region has lived in a condition of civil war since 2001 – we call this the Great Civil War. This condition has emerged from defeat and is manifested in a political culture that we refer to as the culture of the right. c. The defeat of the revolts and their lapse into civil war has produced a multi-latitude displacement, which we theorise as dépaysement, a condition that affects physical dislocation, imaginal politics, and virtual (re)connections. The sources and analysis that we use are based on the combination of the authors’ distinct field research across the Middle East and North Africa. This includes a decade of research on social movements and digital activists active before, during, and after the Syrian revolt, as well as working on the politics of displacement between West Asia

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xxx Prologue

and Europe and data collection and ethnographic notes in/on Iran, Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine touching upon questions of state–­ citizen relations. Our work, therefore, draws on substantial field observation, both online and on the ground, accompanied by in-depth interviews with civil society actors, key media stakeholders, activists, media practitioners, academics, and extensive desk research. Act 1 of this book, following this prologue, is ‘On Revolt’. It studies the symbolism of the ‘Arab Spring’ and its phenomenological connections with ­similar movements across the Global South and North. To do so, it questions the semantics of revolt that emerged, revisiting the language and symbols mobilised at the outset of the events, and it follows this symbolism into the lifeworld of protests from the 2011 confrontations up to the most recent occurrences of regional revolt. The discussion focuses on the symbolism and mechanism of revolt as opposed to those of revolutions, bringing in some of Furio Jesi’s discussion of the centrality of historical time and the perception of time in the dualism of revolt and revolution. Revolts, by their very nature as abrupt and situationist processes, suspend the flow of ­historical time. They fail to establish a new political calendar, thus ingraining the events as part of history. In the aftermath of their defeat, the people who took part in these revolts become trapped in mythological thinking leading to revisionist and reactionary visions, which eventually enable an affirmation, in public, of the culture of the right. The latter points are explored in act 2, which deals withthe c­ulture of the right, i.e., the political residue in the wake of the collapse of social and political movements. The section is divided into three chapters, each dealing with core pillars of the culture of the right: the role of myths and mythology in justifying and fuelling the civil war conditions and reifying belonging; the return of the ‘state’ as a sacred ground of political identity; and the shifting in the logic of citizenship towards the logic of the partisan with the rise of forms of ‘grassroots authoritarianism’. Specifically, chapter 2 illustrates the descent into widespread conflict across the Middle East which ­followed the defeat of the revolts. We identify this new political era as the one following 9/11, and we name it the ‘Great Civil War’. Thinking about the revolts and conflicts across the region spanning from North Africa to West and Central Asia as being a ‘civil war’ projects us to the work of historians of Europe who defined the period from World War I to the end of World War II as a ‘European Civil War’. Most notably this definition gained ground with the work of

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Enzo Traverso, author of the book Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945,24 in which he explores how interstate war ­co-existed with granular social conflict within and across nation-state borders. An analogous process has taken place in the Middle East, where geopolitical (though not yet overtly interstate) conflict has polarised and transformed local tensions and conflicts along social, religious, and political lines from Libya to Afghanistan, from Türkiye and Iran to Yemen. Through an investigation of the myths that enabled the depoliti­ cisation of political claims and the sectarianisation of the revolt, we investigate what motivates and expands the idea of the enemy and the descent into conditions of sectarian civil war. Central to our analysis is the concept of ‘mythological machine’, a knowledge-­producing device that enables the elaboration of myths and their alleged origins autonomous from their actual existence. This form of epistemic work is at the root of the culture of the right. This is the subject of discussion in chapters 3 and 4, in which we look at statolatria (statolatry), the adulation of the state, a term used positively during Mussolini’s period in power to call for love towards the state as idea(l) and machine. Through reinterpreting statolatry in its Arabic variant haybat al-dawla (prestige of the state) and Farsi potential equivalent maslahat-e nezam (expediency of the state) in the Islamic Republic of Iran, we discuss the way the state has made a forceful return to the ideological aspects of life. This return of the state in spaces where it already had a marked presence – think about the seminal work of Nazih Ayubi, Overstating the Arab State25 – is however distinctive. The return of the state, this time, occurs without any ideological content, in a void of political thought. It is an empty shell of violent symbolism characterised by ideas without words and by a void of meaning overall, to use the definition coined by Jesi. Chapter 4 introduces the praxis that underscores the return of the state. We introduce the concept of statopraxis through which we bring attention to the dynamics that have seen grassroots agents, off- and online, taking up the role of the state. Or rather, putting into practice what they believe the state should be enacting in the social field. We refer to this form of political practice as statopraxis. In its granular manifestation statopraxis operates through grassroots authoritarian forms, with the rise of citizen-led vigilantism and self-defence, jointventure surveillance of people’s behaviour, especially online, and a call for militaristic ethics in the realm of public life. Through this process,

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the citizen follows the logic of the partisan, void of civil input but permeated with factional force. In the third and final act of the book we use our phenomenological approach to look at how displacement transformed the demography of the region, with depopulation, reterritorialisation, and virtual ­disorientation among people. Thinking about the concept coined by Tzvetan Todorov around dépaysement, we reinterpret displacement as a multi-latitudinal phenomenon. In this sense, displacement is not just the physical dislocation of people from the place of their belonging; it also indicates the imaginal distance and reimagination of their politics, as well as the virtual displacement that is experienced by those who remain in their place of belonging while having their emotional and affective bonds to it severed. This is what we refer to as latitudinal displacement, which is best captured in the French word dépaysement. To clarify its meaning and practical bearing upon reality, we go through numerous cases across the region as well as within the diasporas. The book closes with an epilogue that reflects upon the vital questions of ‘hope’ and ‘what needs to be done?’ Rather than giving space to prophetic aspirations, we redirect our attention to the need to rebuild (or build anew) a security from below, a human(e) security framework that responds to the foundational needs to create space of engagement and autonomy. In this, our epilogue is an invitation to take the back-and-forth of the book to a new place, to give it life in the next momentum. We tasked ourselves with revisiting the contemporary history of the Middle East, open to the flow of political culture and praxis across the globe. So, States without People attends to a paradigm shift that is long-awaited in the study of global politics; first by placing the Middle East at the centre rather than at the margins; second, by living up to the epoch-making significance of twenty-firstcentury events in the emergence of state–citizen and state-making. We found ourselves in a political lab made up of ideas, practices, and desires. Finally, now, we need to find a way out of it and towards new humane horizons.

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ac t o ne On Revolt

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Vignett e 1 Place de la République, Paris 42 [sic] March 2016

Three weeks have passed since protesters occupied Place de la République. The month of March has yet to come to an end. It carries on, for now, till they feel the times change. We are now at the 42nd of March, the equivalent of 11 April for those outside the square of occupation. The Spring Equinox keeps people hopeful. The General Assembly is bustling, especially after 4 p.m. People from various walks of life and employment categories come and join the assembly after the workday. It carries on till late, decreasing in size after 10 p.m., but not fading away until midnight or after. We didn’t get a chance to be in Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2012. This is the French Tahrir, though the stakes are not as high, and police repression has evolved in such a way to repress and inflict violence with care (in other words not to kill intra muros Paris; killing in the banlieues proves not so problematic). Together with a call for grève générale (general strike), the sign Rêve Générale (general dream) appears as the distinctive feature of the Nuit Debut movement (translated as ‘All Night Long’, literally: Night-Up), which started on 31 March and lengthened the month of March for weeks into the summer. It is a social movement that taps into decades of protests across France and frames itself as an extension of the field of struggle against the encroachment of capitalist policies on the rights of workers and citizens, in defence of the French social state. This confluence of struggles (confluence des luttes) aims at creating a large front, in the revolutionary sense: it engages with trade unions, artists’ unions, the unemployed, and the anti-capitalist, feminist, and anarchist collectives across France. Its performative dimension has given momentum to its

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4

On Revolt

shortcomings in terms of organisation, beyond the manif (street demonstration) along the boulevards and the urban fights that, one week or the other, take place in Place de la Nation. On 11 April (that is 42 March) 2016, one of the authors was in the square on their own, chatting with some of those following the general assembly’s proceedings. A rumour was spreading fast: someone had just found out the home address of then French prime minister Manuel Valls, one of the archenemies of the movement, known for his tough policing approach and confrontational style when he was minister of the interior. In a matter of minutes, through what could not be other than word of mouth and a quick turnaround of agreements and discussions, a group of ‘volunteers’ within the square decided to march on the pm’s residence. It was around 11 p.m. on Saturday. It didn’t take much for the right slogan to pop up: apéro chez Valls, an aperitif at Mr Valls’s home in rue Keller, in the heart of bobo (bourgeois-bohemme) Paris. One of the authors of this book took good notice and made way in the company of protesters. Along the Boulevard Voltaire and then into Boulevard Richard Lenoir, we spoke about what ideas of revolution we should pursue. Some of the fellow marchers made sure to smash the rear-view mirrors of the car-sharing vehicles along the way. A small quarrel ensued. ‘Stop, you help them to portray us as vandals’, ‘these are undercover police putting the blame on us’. One protester tried to get through to the young man with a covered face who was systematically smashing cars, but to no avail. The reaction was forceful and many of the other participants were determined to defend their operation. ‘Let them pay!’ ‘Different methods for the same objective.’ Eventually, there was a tacit agreement on moving the target to the many banks along the pavement. Street consensus ensued. Groups of five or six made sure to put out of order the cash withdrawal machines along Boulevard Voltaire and leave an incontrovertible message on the banks’ windows: assassins! We reached the alleys near rue Oberkampf. In what ended in quite a theatrical outcome, a student of philosophy revealed that her political model was Antoine Saint-Just (1767–1794), the French revolutionary who was once head of the Committee of Public Safety established by Robespierre and who was known as the Archangel of Terror for his defence of violence against the enemy of the

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Place de la République, Paris, 42 [sic] March 2016

5

revolution. Another, a young man working as a physiotherapist, preferred the man himself, Robespierre, who ‘took up the burden of bringing about the transformation people wanted’. When this author was asked ‘who is the one you are inspired by from the French Revolution?’ the answer did not come out straight. ­Jean-Paul Marat was known to be l’ami du peuple (the friend of the people) and his apotheosis reminded the authors of the way a ­revolutionary figure such as Ayatollah Khomeini achieved the ­highest divination upon his funeral, not so much during or after his lifetime. Instead, the author said ‘Scaramouche’. ‘But who is Scaramouche? Never heard of him’ was the skeptical response of one of the fellow marchers. It was a tactical detour referring to the character of the disgraced actor Leone Moddenesi, who was said to have taken up the role of the people’s vindicator against the ­enemies of the revolution. This figure was popularised in a ­historical fiction by the collective of writers Wu Ming in their novel The Army of the Somnambules, centred around the events of the French Revolution of 1789. The response fitted the setting: we were marching on the French pm ’s home for the people’s ­aperitif. A plebeian comedian turned people’s avenger was the ­closest the author could connect to … Manuel Valls was not at home. He was in Algiers discussing energy deals with his Algerian counterpart. Once in rue Keller, the usual barricade setup was put in place as the sound of anti-riot police brigades echoed off the walls of the tall neighbourhood buildings. Soon, dozens of police vans arrived at high speed in the narrow alleys picking up whoever was along their way. Luckily, the fellowship we had entertained sneaked through one of the ­internal garden gates into the courtyard of a private compound. The gate was opened by a female sympathiser watching from the windows – perhaps a bourgeois sympathiser of plebian vengeance – and just before the police van blocked the road, we all managed to enter a local café, whose portcullis was swiftly lowered and shut. Tear gas filled the air in the room, but there was no shortage of lemon and vinegar. Earlier in 2013, one of the authors had learned the art of resisting tear gas in Taksim Square in Istanbul, taught by Turkish protesters fighting the plan to destroy an urban garden in what became the Gezi protest. We eventually walked back to the Place de la République once things quieted down, and the police had made sure we didn’t enjoy our aperitif chez Valls. There was

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On Revolt

fear and excitement, and the aperitif wasn’t a failure, even though it was defeated. That night, and the nights following, gave the authors of this book an entry into the logic of revolt and the way it travels between places that are semiotically distant but phenomenologically connected. We also realised that calls for revolution and the politics of revolt are imbued, consciously and unconsciously, with myths and mythologies. Whether these myths are tied to figures in the French Revolution of 1789 or the Nahda of the nineteenth century or in the distant epopees of specific Roman, Greek, Achaemenid, Egyptian, Islamic, or even Biblical times matters less. They, myths, acquire a life of their own, and in the aftermath of the defeat of popular protest they leave a void which, in one way or another, is filled by their cultural repurposing.

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1 Revolt, Not Revolution!

Fakkir bukrah illˉı magˉash [Think about the tomorrow that never came]. Graffiti artist Keizer, Cairo, Egypt, May 20141 So they say the colonized want to move too fast. Let us never forget that it wasn’t such a long time ago that the colonized were accused of being too slow, lazy and fatalistic. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth2

P r o g r e ss a n d Potenti als The outbreak of the Arab uprisings in 2011 triggered tectonic changes in the region. On the one hand, there has been a remarkable transformation in the region’s political life, with people gaining new leverage in contesting state power; on the other hand, autocratic regimes proved to have great resilience either by launching a process of restyling through reforms or by embarking on fierce battles to maintain power, including through testing foreign-backed assistance and intervention. Algiers, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Khartoum, and Manama are still hotspots of political confrontation and foundational struggle for state–society configurations as much as for transnational politics. This rehearsal of the ‘Arab Spring’ confirms that the events unfolding since 2011 remain a bitterly contested and misunderstood phenomenon.3 They are still in fieri, in progress, rather than in posse, just potential. The spark of what was initially defined by many as the ‘Arab Spring’ had among its numerous effects that of changing people’s perception about the Arab world – for a little while at least. In the view of most

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On Revolt

observers, including the indigenous, the great majority of the region was imagined or perceived as being in the grip of an authoritarian spell that had slowed down the flow of time and transformed people into docile citizens, unwilling to challenge and/or incapable of challenging the status quo and its rulers.4 The myth of authoritarian survival, later reinforced by the idea of authoritarian upgrading, permeated the academic world and policymaking circles, which seemed to have eyes only for those elements that guaranteed stability and longevity to the ruling elite. The totem of this scholarship was a strong leadership and security co-option above everything else. It was not long before the outset of the civil war that Syria was referred to as a ‘successful’ story of authoritarianism, capable of inculcating obedience and fear of the ruler into the citizenry, which metamorphosed into a ‘disciplined society’ of non-thinking subjects.5 The idea of a docile citizenry, in political terms, would often concretise in the symbolic portrayal of Arab societies as inherently chaotic and unruly.6 An oxymoron of unchanging chaos, of docile unruliness. The uprising in 2011 revealed a more complicated and fluid reality. There is a state of eager hopefulness subduing a background of helplessness that permeates the way we operate the dissecting tools of analysis, our disciplines and our fields of enquiry. The detachedness of scholarship of politics is rooted in the prevalence of the methodological approaches used in the discipline. With the shift in the social sciences towards quantitative and macro-data methodologies, one need not be surprised that the inner workings and ground-level changes that inevitably feature in a pre-revolutionary – as well as counterrevolutionary – moment are lost in translation.7 Yet, it was with the outset of the Arab revolt in 2011 that the social science fields engaged in understanding state–society relations and citizen–power tensions and started to produce outstanding works of scholarship. This scholarship was nuanced and mindful of the fluid tensions within the making of citizen politics as well as in the way state-making and state-unmaking worked amidst domestic and international power plays. Yet, political change and state–society tensions oscillate between moments of revolt and civil war. Underlying this pendulum is the transformation of political culture across the region, which will in part determine the trajectories of current events. Think for instance of the series of anti-government protests which erupted in several Arab countries, including Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan, Algeria, Iraq, and Lebanon, between 2018 and 2023 that were effective in ousting

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two long-standing authoritarian rulers in the region, Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Sudan’s long-standing dictator Omar al-Bashir. Often dubbed the ‘Arab Spring 2.0’ or ‘Second Arab Spring’, these uprisings somehow rekindled hopes and visions which were buried with the defeat of the protests during the counterrevolutionary moment following 2022.8 In this chapter, we want to indulge in how our in vivo considerations of those protests in terms of ‘words’ and ‘lifeworlds’ fare more than a decade later, after the waves of counterrevolutionary reaction led by state authorities as well as grassroots organisations. We include considerations about protests that have taken place following the initial waves of the ‘Arab Spring’, such as the ‘Lebanese Revolution’ of 2019 and the Iranian ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ protests of autumn 2022. Both exposed the deep-seated force that civic resistance holds against a malfunctioning or intrusive state, while also illuminating the shortcomings of hyperactive urban and/or online movements when it comes to the practice of political, institutional change. These made claims to be ‘revolutions’ not ‘revolts’ and ‘revolutionary’ not ‘reformist’, even though they were suppressed and quelled in a matter of months, without reaching a transformative stage. At least, prima facie. In the following pages, we look at the tension over competing claims of ‘revolution’ and ‘revolt’ as an avenue to explore and connect with their phenomenology in the Middle East. To do so, we put things in a historical and theoretical perspective, in dialogue with the work of Furio Jesi and other theorists who have wrestled with these contentions elsewhere. Firstly, the chapter reassesses the terminology – and related historical contextualisation – in approaching the Arab Spring. Strongly embedded in Orientalist discourse, termi­ nological preferences are part of a process of defining political phenomena; they bear significance per se, apart from revealing aspects of the mindset of the interpreter. Our objective is to draw comparative and phenomenological lines between the waves of protests in the Middle East, in their local ecologies of contention, with global reverberations as materialised in the slogans, acts, and ideals of, for instance, Spanish Indignados, Greek protesters, and US and UK occupation movements during the 2010s. The chapter tackles two ambivalent forms of silence. The first is the one characterising the scholarship that downplayed or disregarded the set of voices, hidden actions, and defiant tactics of the ordinary through extraordinary people prior to the outbreak of the revolt

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because of its focus on strongmen, leadership, and authority. The other is the silence on the coming of age of the culture of the right in the region (and globally) which has become a permeating force in state practice and grassroots groups. By concluding that the events in the region were ‘revolts, not revolutions’ we are also setting the scene for our phenomenology of defeat in the following chapters.

W o r d s T h a t Matter As soon as the events unfolded in Tunis, Cairo, and other Arab ­capitals, for the sake of immediacy, observers brought back from the cold the toolkit of analysis that had been applied to other regions of the world in prior political upheavals. If the democratic wave had swept from Latin America to Europe and East Asia since World War II, skipping the Arab shores,9 the time had come to reconsider clinically the pathology of authoritarianism in its last, and perhaps more entrenched, manifestation. Deep incredulity was felt by political, academic, and media circles in the wake of the region-wide emergence of the Arab Spring. Where did the uprisings arise from? How to interpret the events and how to explain them? And did this mean that Arab societies and states were no longer inherently authoritarian? The academic world recited a mea culpa for having missed the preparatory phases and for that they put Arab protesters at the helm of the fight against authoritarianism. Influential scholars such as Gregory Gause III modestly admitted that political scientists like him had been inebriated by the myth of authoritarian stability, failing to capture the ‘forces for change that were bubbling from below, and at times above, the surface of Arab politics’.10 Competition over the labelling of the 2011 protests started with a number of definitions such as the ‘Arab revolutions’, the ‘Arab Spring’, the ‘Arab Awakening’, and, rather dramatically, the ‘Arab tsunami’. As terminology is a locus of lasting influence in imagining historical events and their symbolic power, it is surprising how uncontested and undebated has been the adoption of the terminology for the events in the Arab world.11 Fred Halliday suggests that ‘[d]efinitions of revolution are, like all definitions in social sciences, conventional: revolutions are not – any more than are nations, classes, even events or date – objectively given “things” waiting to be unearthed or identified like objects of natural science. They are phenomena which human

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subjects choose to group, on the basis of criteria of significance and recurrence, into one category rather than another.’12 But terminology is not randomly chosen or methodologically insignificant. Terminology, pari passu with theory, allows the expression of ideas and phenomena beyond the limited field of study.13 Words matter in understanding reality, as put by Walter Benjamin, who wrote that language is not simply and only the communication of what can be communicated but also the symbol of what cannot be communicated.14 The Arab uprisings have been defined as ‘spring’ or ‘revolutions’ since the very beginning. The term ‘spring’ is a metaphor that recalls the brief Czechoslovakian Spring of 1968, quickly halted by the Red Army of the Soviet Union. The term tends to minimise the intensity and courage expressed by the participants and is intrinsically both teleological (the inevitable sequence of winter–spring–summer– autumn) and a form of passivity (spring will come even if you refuse to take any action). In this regard, the word ‘spring’ shares something with the term ‘revolution’, which is used in astronomy to refer to the movement of a celestial body around an axis in line with its orbit. The sequence of the seasons, as inevitable as it is, is coterminous with the cycles of celestial revolution; both are beyond the control of the human agency. The conception of a revolution in European thinking as a sudden, radical change in the status quo derives from the effect of achieving a world upside down, a bouleversement in the French version, which nonetheless is specular to the status quo ante and, as such, predictable. The idea of revolution as a radical change in history is in fact a modern concept dating to the French and American revolutions of the nineteenth century. Before these events, revolutions did not indicate a radical transformation but rather a rebellion or a coup d’état, which would not necessarily interrupt the course of history with a new beginning.15 ‘Revolution’ referred to the idea of ‘restoration’, to the reoccurrence of stages in life, forms of governments, good or bad fate. This means that originally the term referred to the Latin idiom mutatio rerum, i.e., the shifting order of things, which signified the changes of governments that cyclically happen in human history. Not new starts, but cycles of change. Hannah Arendt says that all revolutions are essentially expressions of taking action and starting something new, representing ‘the determination to act, [the] joy in action, the assurance of being able to change things by one’s own efforts’.16 In 2011 and up to 2013, the

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Middle East had witnessed ‘uprisings’, conceived as a mobilisation and oppositional moment at a popular level: were these events ‘revolutions’?17 If we limit our analysis to Arendt’s definition, the paradigm of ‘revolution’ depicts the events fairly well, as determination, joy, and effort were key elements of the events in the Arab streets and to later events of that scale in the region, such as those in Lebanon in 2019 and Iran in 2022. Nonetheless, it is necessary to identify other layers of this revolutionary moment. The literature on revolutions preserves an overly historicised approach, which makes use of the past as a yardstick for the present. This methodology compares today’s events in the Arab world with those of the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the Iranian revolution of 1979, and the wave of European uprisings in 1848. While these revolutions had two main elements, the radical change to pre-existing political systems and the rise of charismatic leading figures, the Arab uprisings have not brought radical transformations, with the partial, indeed temporary, and fragile exception of Tunisia, and in none of the countries has there been the emergence of revolutionary leaders or new political orders. If leadership and radical structural change are essential to revolutions, it is inexact to use this analytical category for the events in the Middle East. Moreover, the American Revolution and the later stages of the French Revolution taught that revolutions are preceded by changes in the social fabric resulting in the conception of homines novi, ‘new men’ (and women), as exemplified in the claims to rebirth of citizenship (and shifting gender norms), in their own terms and models, as in the post-revolutionary settings of the u ssr, the pr c , Cuba, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Another expression that gained resonance in the Western semantic taxonomy is that of ‘Arab Awakening’. ‘Awakening’ was first used by the Palestinian British intellectual George Antonius in his famous book The Arab Awakening, published in 1938. The book describes the literary and cultural renaissance characterising Arab societies and intellectuals at the turn of the nineteenth century. ‘Awakening’ traces its history back to the nahda movement of the nineteenth-century Arab-speaking regions of the Ottoman Empire. It is coterminous with the Italian Risorgimento, with which it also shares the actual meaning of the word nahda and the proto-idea of a unitary nation, which was relatively successful in the Italian case (though the South–North divide in the peninsula is testimony to its uneven development), while it remained a dream for the Arab world. The reutilisation of this term

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carries two disputable assumptions: the first is that the events in the Arab world represented an unprecedented and non-predictable event, like waking up all of a sudden in the middle of the night. The second is that they arose from a political, civic, and emotional dimension that was not there previously or that was dormant. Did Arabs awake from a long sleep and decide to pour into the streets in a moment of madness? Or, instead, did the West suddenly became aware of the transformations taking place in the region only when protests erupted in 2011? Who was actually sleeping? Us or them?18 The term ‘revolution’ carries a plurality of meanings. It is itself a site of struggle between diverging ways to interpret (and, echoing Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, ways to change) the world. So, we shall pay heed to how revolution and its associates (i.e., revolt, awakening, and uprising) are translated in the Arabic language.19 In modern standard Arabic the term thawra derives from the verb thāra: to rise up, e.g., to be stirred or excited and hence to rebel, revolt. It is today used to translate the term ‘revolution’ as an act of radical change in political, cultural, or social terms. With a broad range of meanings, including insurrection, it originally indicated the idea of revolt rather than that of revolution. This use of the term (i.e., signifying ‘revolt’) was put to good use during the best part of the twentieth century to translate the events characterising anti-colonial struggles across West Asia. As pointed out by Gilbert Achcar in his book The People Want, ‘revolt’ was the English term of choice in the Great Arab Revolt of 1916–18, the 1920 revolt in Iraq, the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925, and the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936.20 It is another Arabic term, inqilab, which best interprets the Latin word ‘revolution’, with the meaning of ‘overturning’ or the French ‘bouleversement’. Inqilab is currently used in Farsi (enqelāb) to translate the Western term/concept of revolution in both its political and astronomic meanings, whereas in Arabic, it unambiguously refers to the modern paradigm of coup d’etat. This fact is now well-established among scholars working on political theory between European languages and Arabic. What is less known is that this differentiation is a modern construct. In pre-modern times, the two terms were used interchangeably. At the start of the twentieth century, authors living in Ottoman lands would use the term inqilab to describe the Young Turks’ Constitutional Revolution of 1908. For instance, Jurji Zaydan (1861–1914), a Lebanese intellectual active in the formulation of Arab nationalism, authored a novel titled Al-Inqilab al-‘Uthmani (1911),

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‘The Ottoman Revolution’. Similarly, Ruhi al-Khalidi (1864–1913), a Jerusalemite politician, writer, and supporter of the Young Turks, published the pamphlet Asbab al-Inqilab al-‘Uthmani wa Turkiya al-‘at (Reasons for the Ottoman Revolution and the Young Turks, 1908). These first-hand observers of dramatic political change opted to use the word inqilab to address the scope of dramatic transfor­ mation that was occurring at the heart of the Ottoman Empire. The reason why these authors preferred one term over the other is not explicated in their texts; however, we can infer that the lack of mass protest and public mobilisation characterising the end of the Ottoman polity suggested that the term thawra may have had less salience compared to the technical category of inqilab. The distinction between thawra and inqilab only started to appear in the intellectual works that accompanied the anti-colonial uprisings of the twentieth century. These were defined as inqilab to capture the revolutionary transformation of the qalb, ‘the heart’ or ‘essence’ of the polity, in liberatory or emancipatory conditions. Thawra indicated the emerging spirit of the national struggle, whereas inqilab translated this will into reality. Only by the 1960s did the meaning and scope of the world thawra widen to include events like popular uprising and socio-political transformation, while inqilab assumed its narrower sense of coup d’etat. One could argue that not only do contexts shape terms’ usages and meanings in ways distinct from the contexts that produced comparable terms in other languages, but also, terms acquire new meanings in history, shaping what they will mean tomorrow. In the rhetoric and symbology of political elites in the Arab world, there have been several revolts and revolutions since the outset of the post-colonial era.21 The uprising against British colonial authorities in the summer of 1920 is recalled in Iraqi history books and throughout the Arab world as the ‘Iraqi Revolt of 1920’ (thawra-t al-‘ashrīn), though in its translation into European languages, the word used is revolution. This event unwrapped along the lines of a traditional anticolonial uprising, yet the use of the term ‘revolution’ gives it further historical legitimacy. The 1958 coup d’état that ousted the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq is also officially named a thawra: the ‘1958 Revolution’ or the ‘July 14 Revolution’. Similar considerations can be made for Egypt’s 1952 and Syria’s 1963 free officers’ coup d’état or, even more paradoxically, for the 1980 ‘corrective’ purges led by  Hafez al-Assad, which went down in the name of al-thawra ­al-tahsisiyya, ‘the corrective revolution’.

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There is also a subjective side, which derives from the voice of people who take part in popular movements of a transformative kind. The Egyptians who toppled Hosni Mubarak called themselves revolutionaries (thawwarin), as did those who elected Morsi and, paradoxically, those who supported al-Sisi’s coup.22 Hence, who are the revolutionaries and to what revolution is one referring? In discussion with colleagues working on revolutions, especially from an anthropological angle, we were confronted with the question of respecting the categories adopted by those actively taking part in the political moment and movements. That is to say, we should call a specific process of events, such as the Yemeni protests that toppled Ali Abdullah Saleh, a ‘revolution’ because those taking part in it, in vivo, used that category themselves (i.e., thawra) rather than using exogenous or alternative categories (intifada, inqilab, nahda, etc.).23 This line of argument is not new: in the epilogue to The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote, ‘Events, past and present, not social forces and historical trends … are the true, the only reliable teachers of political scientists, as they are the most trustworthy source of information of those engaged in politics.’ So, she went on, if the Hungarian protesters in 1956 were fighting against imperialism, then ‘political science must accept the term’.24 We are intrigued and sympathetic to the spirit of this invitation, but we also remain sceptical about uncritically embracing the interpretative language of those partaking in the making of history. Why? The reason for this hesitancy is provided by reversing the historical cases we are thinking of. What if, in writing historical and political analysis, we decided to adopt the terminology used by those taking part in events such as the 1922 March on Rome led by Benito Mussolini, the leader of the Fascist National Movement in Italy, later known as Il Duce? Mussolini and his camerati called themselves the spearhead of la rivoluzione fascista, ‘the fascist revolution’, an expression which was widespread among the populace at the time, including those thousands joining the march. In one of his many impactful speeches, Mussolini reminded his audience, ‘It is not them, the anti-fascists who are striking, that are the true revolutionaries; the true revolutionaries are us [the fascists].’25 The same would apply to al-Sisi supporters who were calling for the ‘revolution of the people and the army’ after 3 July 2013, co-opting (or actually kidnapping) the language of revolution of Tahrir Square. In the post–Arab Spring discourse we should be more conscious of where these words

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originate, where they are used, and why they matter. Perhaps social scientists can still maintain the prerogative of searching for words for world-making, autonomously from, but overt to, those taking part in them. It seems to us that there is no added value in removing the filter between historical events and political analysis in terms of interpretative categories. There is more to learn in thinking with the words being used by those taking part in the events while situating these same events in the longer-term explorations of meaning situated in history (as for revolts and revolutions) and in a transnational space. So, we must acknowledge that the term thawra – as much as the term ‘revolution’ in European languages – is a much (ab)used one in the Arab world and is itself a site of struggle in the epistemological and ontological journeys that it has gone through.

T im e a n d M o vement Beyond words, the question of revolt is one made of performance and actions. We identify the characteristics of post-2011 events in the Arab world, as well as those in 2022 Iran, along several performant elements. First, these events were popular manifestations of social and political disaffection, with no clear leadership, no structured organisations (although political organisations took part in them), no unifying objective other than the immediate ‘the people want the overthrow of the regime’ or, in the Iranian context, ‘down with [marg bar, literally “death to”] the Islamic Republic’, which are equivalent. One can define these as the combination of existing social movements, made of grassroots organisations, connective tissues left over from previous protest waves, and the nonmovement of ordinary people otherwise disengaged from active politics but mobilising in conditions of economic and social injustice. Asef Bayat defines the nonmovement as ‘the collective actions of noncollective actors [which] embody shared practices of large numbers of ordinary people whose fragmented but similar activities trigger much social change, even though these practices are rarely guided by an ideology or recognizable leaderships and organizations’.26 Bayat’s definition, despite the author’s explication, is still reminiscent of Negri and Hardt’s prefiguration of the multitude as a manifold entity made of individual subjectivities which bear immanent revolutionary power, to which we return in the epilogue. Yet, Bayat’s sociological sensitivity, as opposed to Negri and Hardt’s eschatological vision, allows his definition to capture more accurately

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the potential of everyday ordinary practice against, or despite, the state authority. While the multitude of Negri and Hardt transmutes into an end-of-time representation of humanity as a wholeness standing beyond power, Bayat, who has a touch of street politics, dips his definition of nonmovement into grounded social studies.27 But it is not that far, either, from a projection of politics as a lived matter to be reclaimed through a universalising claim. In connecting the Iranian protest of 2022 to the Arab Spring more than ten years earlier, Bayat cites the famous Tunisian poet Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi (1909–1934), who wrote, ‘If one day, the people demand life, then destiny will have to respond.’28 In doing so, he tacitly or unconsciously identifies the spirit and engine of the protests in the Arab and Iranian contexts as animated by claims over life and projection beyond the historical time of which they were a part until the outbreak of protests. It is also a projection of these movements towards the category of revolt, not revolution, as we discuss below. The collective action of the people (as a nonmovement or, if you wish, the multitude) was concerned with the immediacy of the political event, not with what they believed was needed in its aftermath. The revolutionary movement in Egypt, Syria, and even Tunisia, as well as Iran, was mostly negative in its demands. It voiced popular resentment against what was not acceptable, injustice, and the establishment. It was also the materialisation of popular exasperation with the worsening of socio-economic conditions and the widening gap between the elites (both political and economic) and the rest. It aimed at ­destabilising and dethroning previously established authorities in furtherance of achieving ‘dignity’ (karamah) and socio-economic justice (‘adalah ijtimayyiah). Let us dwell a little further on these points. What would we identify as the horizon of political change among people who took to the street during the Arab uprising or across Iran in autumn 2022? Here we find useful thinking in Furio Jesi’s conceptualisation of revolt and revolution formulated in his unpublished essay on the January 1919 Spartakist uprising (Spartakusaufstand) in Germany led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. This essay was Jesi’s analytical move to better theorise the events of 1968 across European cities in light of their practice of revolt and their potential defeat. Jesi writes, ‘We use the word revolt [rivolta] to designate an insurrectional movement different from the revolution.’29 The difference in the two words does not stand in the goals of revolt or revolution. They both may aim

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for the same outcome, the toppling of the political order or/and the seizing of power. This consideration was also evident in the protests taking place in the Arab world after 2011 as well as Iran in 2022. Regardless of whether the protests were a revolt or a revolution, the general demand of those taking to the street was the fall of the political order and the coming of a new form of power (indefinite). But what distinguishes ‘revolt’ from ‘revolution’ is a different experience of time and a different projection of the events in history. ‘If … revolt is a sudden insurrectional outburst, which can be inserted into a strategic design, but which does not imply a strategy in the long term’, Jesi writes, ‘and revolution is instead a strategic complex of insurrectional movements’, one can say that revolt ‘suspends the historical time and establishes a time when everything which happens has a value per se’. Revolution instead, Jesi claims, ‘is entirely and deliberately entrenched in the historical time’.30 What does this distinction imply for our understanding of the transnational events that went under the name ‘Arab Spring’ and those that took place later in Iran? A symbiotic relationship is at play between revolt and revolution: there can be no revolution without revolt, although the contrary is not generally true. Their intrinsic difference lies in the conceptual timeframe of the movements that support them. As revolutions are struggles for the ‘after tomorrow’ and the ‘other yesterday’, revolts long for immediate results, for the ‘now’ and ‘tomorrow’. They are the materialisation of an overwhelming sentiment of impatience, which unfolds in the collective action of otherwise (perceived) passive communities and individuals. The revolts in the Arab world and Iran were characterised by the struggles against marketisation and the profit-seeking authoritarian state (as embodied by the ruling elites – Gramsci’s classe dirigente) and of a form of public authority that had cut off organic connection with the citizenry.31 Yet, if one considers the political developments in Egypt after the coup d’état by General Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi, the dynamics of the revolt have metamorphosed into a phenomenon, in the theory of Antonio Gramsci, of passive revolution. Gramsci defines the passive revolution as ‘a process whereby a social group comes to power without rupturing the social fabric (as in [1789] France) but rather by adapting to it and gradually modifying it’.32 This oxymoron conceals great analytical depth; the events were marked by an active social upheaval, albeit of the disorganised type (the nonmovement), which brought immediate results in the power contest. Indeed, the fall of Egyptian president

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Hosni Mubarak exemplified the success of the popular revolt, as much as it did in Tunisia with the ousting of President Ben Ali. Yet, the small ruling elite which emerged from the unrest of post-Mubarak Egypt led to the creation of power and an institutional framework much in line, both in the means of coercion and in the politico-economic structure, with the previous order. New groups of people are now in power across the region, but the fundamental structures have remained largely unchanged. It is what Gramsci defines as a revolution without a revolution. Apart from buttressing our argument of the Arab Spring as a moment of revolt, the concept of passive revolution also elucidates some of the trajectories of the current regime of power, for instance, in Egypt and Iran, with military men progressively taking over the limited spaces of participation in the political contest. Therefore, we speak of revolts not revolutions when thinking about the uprisings in the Arab world and Iran. The people, conceived as the collective of informal groups not directly engaged in institutional politics, led the revolutionary moment but failed to seize the symbols of power, in other words, to make space for their entry into a historical time. Jesi’s terminology, built around the 1919 Spartakus revolt but with 1968 Paris in mind, connects with our own terminological journey on the Arab Spring and the Iranian 2022 protests. Both fall within the remit of revolt, regardless of outcomes. They broke the historical time in which Arab countries and the Islamic Republic of Iran had been imagined, both by local and global observers, but without placing their aftermath into history.

C o n n e c t in g Revolts By 2013, observers had begun referring to the Arab revolts as the ‘Arab Winter’ or the ‘Islamist Winter’, detailing them with connotations that were much the opposite of their initial claims. There had been a revolting of the phenomenon. Again, the paradigm of the impossibility of change and exceptionality – in particular, of the Arab world – had a comeback, while geopolitical interest in Iran maintained a strong push, media-wise, in the hope of the fall of the Islamic Republic. The failure to understand the events on the ground and those that pre-dated them reverberates in the narrative adopted by most of the media (international and local), politicians, and often academics, which seem to keep readopting the idea of ‘Arab exceptionalism’ and conversely ‘Iranian revolution’.

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To counter this argument, this chapter argues that in order to understand the Arab Spring and the Iranian protests since 2009 we have to make up for the disconnectedness of those analysing these phenomena without being connected to political ferment, made of similar protest movements, in Europe and the United States. This detachedness is exemplified in the use of skilful linguistic and thematic choice. The most common and effective way has been that of emphasising the diversity between ‘them’ (Arabs and Muslims) and ‘us’ (Westerners) and the adoption of tones, at times pathetic, more appropriate to the description of exotic topics than everyday civil resistance. Yet what is most extraordinary is the adoption of such a narrative not just by the West but also by local news outposts and elites. After all, Edward Said did say that Orientalism is not just an attitude of the West towards the Islamic world, but it is also appropriated and interpreted by local elites and experts. Fouad Ajami is a case in point of this self-orientalisation. A local observer with scholarly credentials, who still exhibited the aftermath of Orientalism, he recognised Arab exceptionalism as an actual phenomenon and attributed the cause to the intrinsic, regressive culture of Arab societies. To put it more crudely, when Western protesters demonstrate, occupy squares, confront the police, and challenge the political establishment as a whole (e.g., Indignados of Puerta del Sol, the Indignant Movement of Syntagma Square, to name two in a multitude of examples), they are framed as the discontents of the economic crisis and austerity – or in the post- c o v i d era, as disillusioned freaks out of touch with the world – while when Arab protesters take to the streets they are, simply, mobilising against dictatorship and for democratic government. They are revolutionary. Contrary to this way of thinking, we want to illuminate the similarities between the local (e.g., Arab, Muslim, non-Western) manifestation of dissent and the global (e.g., Western) movement against capitalism (and economic crisis and austerity), during both the first wave in 2011 and the second one in 2019 up until 2023. Arab, Iranian, and Western protesters share an underlying coherence of language of dissent, mobilisational tactics, and ideals, and they also object to similar means of repression (with differing intensity). Understanding these shared elements has the benefit of framing the analysis of the Arab Spring as not an exceptional and legendary event. Instead, it sheds analytical light on the events and the scope of Western political manifestations and, potentially, on their genealogy. Let us take into consideration

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how the revolts in Arab countries in the 2010s prefigured (and proliferated) the events in Western capitals. The Arab revolts have gone down in history as the ‘Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube revolutions’ given the prominent role these tools had in the surge of the revolts, promoting dissent, breaking the barrier of fear, and coordinating the logistics of the upheavals. The binomial digital media and young generation tend to convey the impression that the Arab uprising was caused by Western technology rather than by the people in the region. In this regard, Tarak Barkawi asserts, ‘To listen to the hype about social networking websites and the Egyptian revolution, one would think it was Silicon Valley and not the Egyptian people who overthrew Mubarak.’33 Different from the codes of action and revolutionary practice exemplified by popular mobilisation in the Global South (e.g., 1958 Cuba, 1980 Nicaragua, 1994 Chiapas), the tools of information technology and the internet transformed the fight into a peaceful one, at least in the transition of most events. The use of social media was also significant because it shows how the Arab protesters preceded and offered a model for European and Western social movements. Firstly, Arab protesters made use of digital media to bypass the limited coverage of events in mainstream media. By sharing online images and videos from their organisational practice and of their courage, they also provided material models of organisation for other protesters around the globe. This connection is reflected in the official website of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which declared, ‘We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of non-violence to maximise the safety of all participants.’34 One example above all is represented by the crucial spatial occupation of squares and parks, which was first performed in Tahrir Square and imitated, for example, in Madrid’s Puerta du Sol, Athens’s Syntagma, Barcelona’s Plaça Catalunya, and Istanbul’s Gezi Park. This connected the visibility of the digital/virtual sphere of the new media with the material struggle for space in the squares. A leading Greek activist said, ‘In May 2011, the spirit of Egypt came via Spain to Greece’;35 he forgot to mention that, more than from Spain, it came from the digital connections that the activist community – as a communication avant-garde of the revolt36 – had with other movements across the Mediterranean. Not only did Arabs reinterpret the new media according to their needs, but they also struggled (by using them) to raise their voice above the Western tendency to readapt the news to their own views … so in a way the new media

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have become a way to bypass their national censorship and the censorship imposed by the West through claims of expertise. Although the connection between the Tahrir Square model and mobilisation in the European capitals is evident to the activist community who took part in those coterminous events, it has been forgotten or misrepresented in the mainstream media. New media tools, created and distributed mostly by Western companies (especially in the early 2010s), are (thought of as) an invention of the West. They shortened distances and made the younger generations of the Arab revolts more similar to ‘us’, the European/American. They also enhanced the class dimension as the poorer strata of the population had, especially then, limited or no access to digital platforms and they were therefore less visible in the virtual space. The working class of Arab societies, thus, lay beneath the surface of the images, leaving the spotlight to young, often female college and university students. As such, information technology had the potential to redeem the image of the Arab world as a site of underdevelopment, dangerous chaos, passivity, and violence and as inhabited by people in need of help (from the West). Some observers even interpreted the ideology of the Arab youth as inspired by the ideas of non-violence theorist Gene Sharp, of whom they had probably never heard.37 Equally, we should not forget the other side of the coin of digital technologies, the part of which we are now all too aware and of which we are reminded in public policy on disinformation. It is by now evident that social media platforms have been used for the advancement of systematic distortion with the purpose of advancing specific political ends or for maximising instability across the world. The role of Israeli spyware, such as Pegasus, as well as of p r and intelligence companies in election meddling, hints at the likelihood of similar operations in the context of popular protests already during the 2010s (and earlier). The same reasoning applies to the use of deep-fake images and audio spread through social media before our public awareness that such means of fake production actually existed. Although claims of foreign tech interference are often used by repressive states across mena (the Middle East and North Africa) to attack opposition groups and dissidents, it remains a question that cannot be left out of the discussion on media use among protesters. This has also been confirmed during the Iranian protest of autumn 2022 when armies of trolls and bots took part in the digital promotion of the events occurring inside Iran.

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T r a n s l a t in g and T r a v e l l in g R epress i ons If struggles and the ideas about them travel, as we learnt in the first part of this chapter, can we also claim that repressive practices and ideas about state authority travel from unexpected places? Indeed, there is resemblance between the post-revolutionary measures in Egypt, Libya, and other Arab countries and the security measures taken by the Greek, Spanish, Italian, and UK states in the wake of popular protest and widespread public discontent. The emergency laws used by Egypt’s government-cum-army, both nationwide and in the Sinai, embody this governmentality. In November 2013, the Egyptian interim president imposed hefty fines on any public gathering of more than ten persons which did not have previous governmental approval. Since becoming a republic in 1952, Egypt has had only nine years of government without a state of emergency (1952–56, ending with the Suez Canal crisis; 1964–67, ending with the war with Israel; 1980–81, ending with President Anwar Sadat’s assassination; ­2012–13, ending with the scaf’s imposition of a new emergency law following ­pro-Morsi demonstrations).38 Sixty-one years of state of emergency since 1952. Similarly, in the wake of the mass movement of the Indignados, the then right-wing government in Spain pushed forward legislation to ‘elevate passive resistance to a criminal offense, including blocking the entrance to public buildings and sit-ins’.39 The law applies a fine of up to 600,000 euros for unauthorised demonstrations in front of the parliament buildings and up to 30,000 euros for insulting the police.40 In 2014, the UK parliament passed a law undermining the capacity of civil society, and especially trade unions, to put pressure on the government. The government of the UK is thus able to impose fines on unions for not having a completely accurate membership list and imposes restrictions on civil society campaigning ahead of elections through a combination of a bureaucratic maze and heavy fines.41 From India to Iraq, Venezuela to Algeria, Colombia to Iran, Spain to Hong Kong, millions of people have taken to the streets to raise their voices against inequality, corruption, bad governance, and authoritarian measures. Each protest erupted because of unique dynamics and ­triggers (a tax on WhatsApp, the cost of gas, bread, fuel, or a subway ticket), but the slogans and tactics appeared remarkably similar across the globe. The year 2019 was also a year that saw millions of young people from across different cultures and time zones taking to the

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streets to tackle climate change, worried about politicians’ inaction and denial of climate warming. Often, these protests were organised under the banner of Extinction Rebellion. They were met with increasingly repressive measures by the states as well as bans on reporting on them in the media (a soft censorship measure to prevent them gaining traction among new followers). This trend was further exacerbated by the pandemic in 2020. The imposition of preventive measures in the wake of the covid epidemic produced reactionary responses in the Middle East and the West alike.42 Lockdowns, curfews, arrests, and greater restrictions placed upon freedom of expression were measures authorities employed citing public health considerations. These protest movements might appear vastly different from one another. Yet, they are all marked by youth-led political action and relative horizontalism. Arab protesters entered a dialogic and mutual relation with Western activist communities, in spite of feeble or non-existent prior connections. Individual citizens, activists, bloggers, and community organisers have all taken part in the protests, striving to create new forms of political engagement based on broad, decentralised, and consensusbased approaches. Horizontalism was amongst the main features of the Arab protesters’ modus operandi. The same applies to the Iranian protesters who took to the street in 2022, as well in previous outbursts of protest in 2017 and 2019. In the 2010s, informal, participatory, and direct democracy groups operated and communicated with each other across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Even in the case of Syria, since the beginning of the uprising, local committees and councils began to operate out of the blue, with a broad network of participants and with no aid or support from external entities. Conceptualised by the thoughts of the Syrian anarchist Omar Aziz, who died before becoming internationally known, the local councils were forms of autonomous, non-hierarchical, self-governed organisations based on the principle of cooperation, mutual aid, and psychological support.43 The local committees embrace all segments of society, horizontally structured around nuclei of members, and dealing with the provision of basic services, coordinating with other local councils and with armed resistance groups and allowing a micro-management of security across the territories where they are set up. Similar forms of organisations emerged in Iran, especially in Tehran and other major urban nodes, where neighbourhood groups started mutual aid organisations to support the logistics of protests and coordination of needs during the height of the 2022

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protests. It is a sign of the evolution of protest movements into localised networks which, for better or worse, have to rely on mutual aid support to compensate for the lack of mass organisation. Connecting with diasporic supporters across North America and Europe has proved vital maintaining the momentum of the protest on digital platforms, without much impact on the material effect of protest organisation and power projection on the ground. Indeed, the selforganisation of protesters and civic activists, whether in Tahrir Square, Aleppo’s war-torn neighbourhoods, Tehran’s middle-class building blocks of Ekbatan, or Zuccotti Park in New York, had similar tactics of opposition. This is the second point of connectedness among globalised protesters. The late David Graeber, anthropologist and long-life activist, shows in his book The Democracy Project that protesters in Egypt, Barcelona, Athens, and New York had channels of communication about everyday matters of struggle such as how to defy police surveillance and how to self-organise a horizontal and deliberative meeting among numerous protesters. They also shared their views about the strategy adopted by the police and the security apparatuses to deter them.44 To provide a rather facetious yet symbolic image of the inter-connectedness of local Arab protests and global anti-­ capitalism protest, Graeber brings in the role of Pizza Express. ‘Inspired by the example of the Egyptian labor unions who had sent pizzas to fellow union activists occupying Wisconsin’s statehouse some months before’, Graeber writes, ‘hundreds of people across North America and beyond reached for their credit cards and began phoning in orders for pizzas’.45 The pizza connection is a more profound token of global solidarity among subaltern groups, of the variegated and unclassifiable type. It also unveils a common thread among the local protesters of the Arab streets, which, as we argued above, did not have politicoideological schemata but manifested their will to dignity (karamah) and justice (‘adalah), and the global protesters of the Occupy movements. After all, Indignados, which means ‘outraged’, derives from the Spanish word for dignidad, ‘dignity’, the same Arabic karamah so dear to protestors across the Middle East. What does this ‘dignity’ signify? It refers to the common aspiration for respect and meaningful participation in everyday life, a reckoning of the agency that people hold. There can only be a revolt for dignity, expressed in the mannerism of the everyday and through the non­ movement of people. The projection of alternative communal realities hints at the suspended times that participants experience, left outside

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the historical time of political and social transformation. Whether these can become a revolution for dignity and transform historical time is yet to be seen. For now, they are experiences of revolt that have worked as a pedagogic pathway of struggle without entering a revolutionary stage capable of deviating away from the existing polity. As such, though protests were defeated, they were not failures. But in entering the stage of after defeat, they become part and parcel of processes leading to civil war and the unfolding of the culture of the right.

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ac t tw o On Civil War

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2 The Great Civil War

[C]ivil wars do not happen because a person makes a decision, ‘Today, I’m going to start a civil war.’1 United Nations and Arab League special envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi to the Iraqi Governing Coalition Dehumanization is part of the colonial process and is the prelude to massacre.2 Ghassan Abu Sitta and Rupa Marya, from the operating ­theatre of Shifa Hospital, Gaza, November 2023

T h e ‘ M id d l e E a s t ern’ Ci vi l War? Defeat is rarely a day signposted in the calendar of political events. Nonetheless, it is a reality that one becomes aware of when the expectation of a new chapter in politics is unattended and unattainable in the short-run. In this window between the impossibility of victory of the revolt and the impossibility of returning to what existed before it emerges the condition of civil war. In dedicating our attention to civil war, we do not intend to overlook the militarisation of the conflict and its geopolitical undercurrents, all of which have been amply discussed in other works. In a fashion similar to that which we adopted over the question of revolt, we are interested in the phenomenological dimensions which transform a politics of revolt into a politics of civil strife. Between 2000 and 2023, more than one-third of all armed conflicts around the world took place in the Middle East. This number has grown to one-half since 2011. The Syrian civil war, in its fourteenth

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year as this book goes to publication, has reached two unfortunate milestones: it is the deadliest armed conflict in the new century and the second most lethal conflict since the Cold War, surpassed only by the massacres in Rwanda in 1994.3 The ‘Great Civil War’ is the term we employ to refer to the set of military and paramilitary confrontations, geopolitical conflicts, terrorist attacks, foreign interferences, attempted secessions, and heightened ethno-religious violence that emerged after the US declaration of the ‘War on Terror’ following the events of 11 September 2001. For more than two decades, dozens of countries and millions of people saw interstate violence as well as popular mobilisations shape a region that stretched from North Africa to Central Asia. So far, the set of events that have affected this region, which is generally referred to with the geographically ambiguous colonial epithet of ‘Middle East’, has not been looked at in a continuum. We argue that the events following 9/11 must be considered as one single historical period, which we call the Great Civil War, or, with Enzo Traverso’s Blood and Fire: The European Civil War, 1914–19454 in mind, the Middle Eastern Civil War, ­2001–24 (considering the Israeli wars on Palestinians and Lebanese peoples as the start of a new global era). Armies, imperial and regional powers, coups and revolts, ethnic cleansing and genocidal plans, and mass-scale forced population transfer have transformed the region in epochal ways. Since 2011, a series of popular protests has shaken the region’s political cadre. After the defeat of the revolts, it did not take long for popular political demands to shift against specific ethnic or religious groups, accelerating the process of territorial disintegration and societal transformation after 2001. Civil wars characterised the political struggle in Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Yemen but spread beyond these cases reaching Egypt, where fear of the Muslim Brotherhood led to levels of repression along sectarian lines (anti-Islamists) which became more blatant than in the pre-uprising era. Reverberations of this kind, though opposite, were also visible in Türkiye, either with the long-term conflict with the Kurds or with the polarising confrontation between Turkish president Recep T. Erdoğan and most of the Turkish non-akp opposition, i.e., the secular versus religious conflict that has persisted in Türkiye for ninety years. These have been struggles over how to govern the nation rather than over who belongs to the nation. We call the new condition that is animating the region the Great Civil War. The Great Civil War, identified in this section as the period between 2001 and 2024, has produced the collapse of state institutions, the transformation

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of ideologies, the spread of civil unrest and violence, and the displacement of communities across borders. The outbreak of new conflicts, often degenerating into new civil wars and the resumption of old ones (yet to be resolved), is leading scholars and commentators to resuscitate the category of ‘sectarianism’ to explain violence in the Middle East.5 The term ‘sectarianism’ is often used to describe sentiments that justify violent and illiberal manifestations of age-old antagonistic identities (currently in the Middle East, it is Sunni vs Shi’a), intercommunal warfare, and genocidal violence perpetuated by one group against another. Sectarianism is blamed for the chaos, conflict, authoritarianism, displacement, and extremism characterising the region as a whole. The sectarian card triggers the enunciation of grand theories capable of reducing tangled mechanisms of political life and contention into a dualistic rift, counterpoising antagonistic religious identities animated by primordial impetus and mythological cadres in their struggle with each other. In doing so, sectarianism as a theory understands identity as static and one-­dimensional and ignores – or puts in a secondary place – other features such as kinship, class, and national, local, and ideological identification that feed sectarian conflicts. There is, however, a new scholarship on ‘sectarianism’, one that adopts diverging persuasions, none of which is simplistic or essentializing. Simon Mabon is one such influential voice. Mabon categorises those working on sectarianism along a classical scheme which in the past was used for scholarship on nationalism, a coincidence that is in itself telling as we will see below: the primordialist who maintains that religious and ethnic divisions affect political struggles (Geneive Abdo, Naser Ghobadzadeh, and Mark Tomass) and the instrumentalist who believes these divisions are subject to change and shifts, driven by material interests (Sami Zubaida, Gregory Gause III, Max Weiss).6 Most scholars agree with the sectarianisation thesis advanced by Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel, who, rather than saying that the region is sectarian, argue that there is a regional process of sectarianisation.7 The virtue of this argument is to highlight that political Islam often takes the shape of religious nationalism because adherents of this ideology work within the boundaries of the nation-state and are concerned with state-building at home, rather than the projection of transnational politics. Within the new scholarship on sectarianism, one contribution that stands out, according to both Mahon and Dodge, is that of Fanar Haddad, who argues that sectarianism is neither all-encompassing nor non-existent; it is ‘not just a tool of political elites seeking to secure

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their power and privilege; not just a matter of dogma and belief; not just a political issue or a frame for intergroup competition at the subnational level’. Sectarianism is ‘shorthand for a variety of symbols, behaviours, actions, attitudes and other phenomena related to sectarian identity’. Haddad recognises that sectarianism is a function of nationalism and a contest about ‘who gets to define the terms of coexistence’.8 Haddad suggests that we not dismiss sectarianism but qualify it with analytical meaning rather than grand schemes rooted in old and stereotypical narratives. In dialogue with, rather than against, the emerging scholarship on sectarianism, this chapter takes sectarianism not as the departure point but as an epistemic venue, which has come to define the broader ­narrative of political life, in fact, beyond the so-called Middle East. It revisits sectarianism within the political transformations of the region with the aim of formulating an alternative paradigm of interpretation. What governs the mechanics of the Great Civil War is the mythological machine, which fabricates ‘sectarianism’ and constructs new forms of ‘belonging’ that displace the old notions of nation-state and community. However, before progressing to analysis of the Great Civil War, we need to define the mythological machine more comprehensively and show how it is a defining paradigm to understand potential outcomes after defeat, in political revolts, such as the Arab Spring and other forms of protest mobilisation. In introducing the notion of the ‘mythological machine’, we argue that sectarianism is a myth, something that does not exist but that has real world effects. The mythological machine is a device that produces epiphanies and myths; it is a gnoseological process whose cultural, social, and political effects are generated via mythological facts and, as a machine, it does so through both guiding and automatised mechanisms. Through this interpretive shift, the chapter proceeds by taking several theoretical steps using a variety of cases from across West Asia and North Africa, contextualising them with global political events. Firstly, it provides a very brief overview of how sectarian scholarship has shaped imperial politics by relying on the ‘expertise’ of medievalist scholars and how a new scholarship is emerging with a counter-­ discourse. Rather than adopting the framework of sectarianism, the chapter re-interprets ‘civil war’ in continuity with the category of ‘revolts/revolution’, using the case of the popular revolts which went under the name ‘Arab Spring’. It argues that it is civil war, shaped by the work of the mythological machine, which governs state–society

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relations and transnational politics in the Middle East. Third, the chapter discusses how the mythological machine incorporates a semantic othering via mythological thinking and practice that shapes the perception and experience of civil war.

W h a t Is t h e M y t h o l ogi cal Machi ne? The term ‘mythological machine’ emerged in Furio Jesi’s writings during the 1970s. It followed his work on the symbology of revolt in light of the events of May 1968. Some authors have referred to this machine as an early version of Foucault’s dispositif, an ‘apparatus’ that governs words, ideas, discourses, and actions. But perhaps what is most interesting and innovative in Jesi’s theorising upon myths is how they are enablers for a political culture that is fundamentally of the right. It is this link between the place and the operation of myths (what could be called the use of mythological operandi) that we are keen to experiment with in our task of understanding the phenomenology of defeat in the Middle East. Now, let’s take a step back and think with Jesi about the political lifeworld of myths. ‘Whoever believes in the existence of myths as an existing autonomous substance’, wrote Jesi, ‘is eventually brought to consider himself as the depository of the exegesis which … distinguishes the righteous from the unjust, those who can live from those who must die.’9 This process enables what Karol Kerenyi, the Hungarian classicist mythologist, identified as the birth of ‘technicised myths’, the use of images, superstitions, suggestions, passions, texts for an instrumental purpose dictated by political objectives, which he argued emerged more blatantly during the rise of Nazi fascism in Europe in the early twentieth century. Mythological systems are reactionary by nature because they are built upon a sentiment of an imagined but lost ancient world to which they seek to return and for which return is a superior knowledge or ethics tasked upon political subjects. Metaphorically, this is not a world of yesterday or, even less so, of tomorrow – the imminent timeframe of revolt or reforms to which ordinary humans refer. It is a world of the day before yesterday, the bygone, and the world of after tomorrow, the yet-to-come. The mythological machine’s ontological objective is to defend pre-existing social structures and power relations, of which they are the ideological expression. It is not the essence of myths that matter but their actual existence, their real function. That is also the fundamental distinction, reasoned in Jesi’s work, between myth and

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mythology. The first is an unknown unknowable; the second is whatever human interpretation arises from the former. So, the mythological machine is a gnoseological device – because it produces knowledge – that enables the persuasive power of myths. As an interpretative paradigm it indicates a complex apparatus that incorporates and transfers collective experiences together with socialised knowledge of ‘truth’ and history, while it reproduces mythologies via tales, narrations, and artistic figurations autonomously from the source from which they derive. Different from mere propaganda, the mythological machine has a life of its own. It is an engine that does not simply produce or re-interpret myths in a new fashion; it produces discourses, ideologies, and historical and material effects, which legitimise power and stabilise identity, two key elements of a sectarian civil war. In it, thinking, speaking, and practice concur and co-produce the work of the machine, rather than following a sequential line of idea, expressions, and actions. Thus, the mythological machine guides the conflict, as in civil wars, in the discernment of friends from enemies, which nurtures the sectarian nature of reality – a foundational feature, as we will see in the latter chapters of this section – of the culture of the right. The continuum between revolt/revolution and civil war is where the agency of the mythological machine is most effective in transforming the political struggle into a praxis of ‘othering’ by intervening in the modus operandi of knowledge production. There is no epistemic difference between forms of civil war in the Middle East and those in other regions. Observers and local fighters interpret civil wars through localised semantics, in the absence of global frames of interpreting political revolts. This semantics is imbued in multiple layers of meaning: in mythological thinking, situating the contemporary world in a time before the origins; philological – using language as the interpreter of realities – and political – outlining strategies for framing conflicts and collective futures. By introducing the analytical model of the mythological machine, this section discusses the significance of ‘myths’ and ‘mythologies’ in the understanding of the Great Civil War, highlighting also the epistemological, philo­ logical, and practical dimensions deriving from it. For those accepting it, a ‘myth’ is a true (hi)story which occurred in a time of origin – of the universe, of the land, or of a community. It provides a model, a paradigm of behaviour that – in virtue of its foundational nature – is always valid, creating forms of mythical ancestries and ethics to be imitated and a flow of time where

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everything has already happened once. The myth in the mythology demands the eternal return to the myth. As a device narrating human life and the life of communities, myths produce forms of knowledge that become ‘mythologies’ (mythos + logos).10 Inspired by religious or nationalist hagiographies or epics, mythologies operate also as an attempt to qualify the community of origin and, in nationalist/religious sect-coded logics, the present communities. Both self-declared secular nationalists and religious clerics embrace them. This is the case among ethno-nationalist groups claiming to restore the lands of their fathers (e.g., Aryanism, Zionism, white supremacism, Hindutva, etc.), but it works similarly with scholars in Islamic jurisprudence and exegesis highlighting the need to return to the times of origin (e.g., Salafism, isis jurists) or to reclaim the defeat of the righteous heir to divine power (Shi’ites). In this sense, the mythological machine is a key agent in rooting and expanding the ­culture of the right within public culture, often affecting the Weltanschauung of conservative (right-wing) as well as progressive (left-wing) movements. This aspect will be amply examined in the next two chapters. Now, following this conceptual overview of what is a mythological machine, we shall move to put this machine into action and to understand its praxis, which occurs through ideational, philological, and practical processes.

S y mbo l o g y o f the Enemy We can identify the working of the mythological machine in three interlocking spheres: thinking, speaking, and practice. In Islamic jurisprudence the science (‘ilm) of hadith builds upon the narrations of mythological histories for the enunciation of norms and morals pertaining to the present. These are legitimised based on the chain of transmission which provides authenticity to the content of the hadith, in varying degrees of strength. Scholars of hadith work on chains of transmission and commentaries to prove specific arguments or to dismantle existing opinions or stories. In this, hadith and the stories pertaining to the first century of Islam are defining elements in the politics and administration of social life in the present. This also works within the politics of civil wars. The Islamic State systematically has employed early Islamic (­ hi)stories to justify its tactics against local and regional enemies, especially Shi’ites. Abu Asaad Al-Samaan, an isis-affiliated jurist, used the hadith

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of Safiyya bint Abdul-Mutalib (570–640 ad ) to legitimise the practice of beheading in a combat setting11 or the story of Khaled Ibn al-Walid, one of the commanders during the Islamic conquests, who killed captive prisoners with no justification other than his pledge to God ‘to make a river with his enemies’ blood’.12 Hadiths, because they are realistic tales belonging to the era of the righteous community – the community of origin – become powerful mobilisation tools for undertaking violent actions. isis is not the only political group that makes use of mythologies to define who is and who is not part of the nation. The grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdal Aziz ibn Baz, formulated an extensive body of literature and sermons condemning the Shi’is. His language focuses on disloyalty, esoterism, and ‘weird’ practices portraying the Shi’is as malignant others who do not qualify as ‘our brothers’.13 His fatwas remain an influential source in the juridical practice of Saudi courts. These rulings bear discursive and symbolic value but also an effective application of power. In 2014, a Saudi court sentenced a Sunni man to prison because of the crime of ‘sitting with Shi’i’.14 Inspired by this reading, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Zarqawi, wrote of the Shi’is as ‘the most evil of mankind’, ‘the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy … a sect of treachery and betrayal through history’.15 The casting out of the enemy as a mythological force requires a vital response from the community. The mythological nature of the enemy, in this case the Shi’is, shapes the understanding of contemporary conflicts. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a leading Sunni theologian and jurist formerly based at Al-Azhar in Cairo, declared in a fatwa that, since the Syrian civil war was a plot by the invading Shi’is, it was the duty of ‘every Muslim trained to fight … to make himself available’.16 In the Wahhabi penal code, which is de facto the law of the land in Saudi Arabia while being influential across the Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf overall, the concept of loyalty to Islam and rejection of un-Islamic ways (wala wal bara) has facilitated the targeting of Shi’is both in terms of morally not belonging to the community and as a practical endeavour against them. Together with tawhid (the oneness of God), the concept of loyalty has played a central role in the Islamic State’s governance of otherness.17 In 2004, King Abdallah, the Hashemite monarch of Jordan, described the escalation of conflicts in the Levant as a sign of ‘a Shi’i Crescent’.18 Such an assertation, rooted in mythological thinking,

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worked as a self-fulling prophecy. In 2005, Ali Allawi, Iraq’s interim defence minister in the Iraqi Governing Council and Iraqi Trans­ national Government (2003–06), circulated a document proposing a grand political strategy to fellow party members of the United Iraqi Alliance whereby Iraq was envisioned with a dominant Shi’i ruling group along with smaller sects and ethnicities.19 Competing ideas about what national identity is foment the questioning of localised expressions of it. The sectarian rift, what some call the sectarianisation of the region, is not simply the effect caused by historical mistakes or the manipulation of autocratic and destabilised regimes. As Haddad argues, in Iraq the fall of Saddam Hussein was ambivalent even for those Sunnis who had opposed his rule because the celebrations were ‘so heavily tinged with someone else’s mythology of victimhood and entitlement’,20 that is to say to the Shi’is recollecting elements of the myth of Hussein’s martyrdom at Karbala (in 680 ce). Indeed, the martyrdom of Hussein and his family is the source of much mythological thinking. Cultural producers and leaders in the Islamic Republic of Iran have made ample use of the Karbala paradigm to frame the ethical and even geopolitical standing of post-revolutionary Iran after 1979. In this frame, defeat against the United States is necessarily written in the destiny of the Iranian nation (as a representative of the Shi’a community in the world), even when a rising victory is proclaimed at each turn by Iran’s political, military cadres. One example of this mythological thinking – and indeed performance – is the maddah (eulogist) singing during the ten days of Ashura, the yearly recurrence commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussein during the Islamic month of Muharram. On the sixth night of Muharram in 2018, the maddah named Hossein Taheri recited a rave-like performance in one of Tehran’s dedicated venues (known to be popular among i rg c networks).21 The attendants invoked him at the call Haydar, Haydar (an appellative of Imam Ali, meaning ‘lion’ in Arabic), to which he opened the couplet of his eulogy (nowheh): They have colluded by force, gold, and trickery The world is ready for a world war The cry of the world-eating Jewish devils Is coming out of the throat of the Saudi King The Takfiris, the Wahhabis, and Daesh they have teamed up together

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All of them under the Head of the Great Satan. Till the spirit of God is in the heart of this pure land The enemy will not witness a calm night ... Little by little Hossein’s voice reaches everywhere Khomeini’s legacy becomes international Tomorrow when Haidar’s blood [Ali’s descendants] will be in the Kaaba The era of Muawiya-like ones will come to an end. This is the flag of Shi’a that is on the top of the world Anyone who calls upon Ali is our compatriot [ham-vatan] Oh, soon be the seal of Haidar-e Karrar [literally ‘attacking lion’] drawn On the green flag of Saudi Arabia.22 The nowheh closes with the performer inciting ‘Haydar, Haydar’ supported by a rhythmic techno-base, which has become a feature of Muharram commemorations among the youth. The text of this recitation reveals several mythological tropes intertwined with geopolitical and geocultural aspects. First, as is evident in the first few lines, it taps into a generalised antisemitic trope of Jewish greed and world power, amplifying a subgenre of Iran’s republican-era critique of American and Israeli imperialism. It connects this to the geopolitical developments manifested over the past decade, with the rapprochement, covert and public diplomacy between Arab monarchies and Israel, much of which evolved in anti-Iranian strategy. Then it moves to knot the tale of resistance, imbued in the myth of Karbala and Hossein’s martyrdom, with that of the geopolitical strategy of Iran across the Levant, Iraq, and Yemen. The mythological contraposition of Haydar versus Muawiya, the latter being the Omayyad military leader who ordered Imam Ali’s killing, is played out in the shade of the Iran– Saudi strife for regional power. In this way, the exploration of the myth, itself unknowable in its original form, sustains the mythological machine of belonging (‘Anyone who calls upon Ali is our compatriot [hamvatan]’), the way it moves onto the terrain of the contemporary. These mythologies produce laws and regulations, hence models of behaviour, but also mythological thinking on communal history and inimical communities. They are powerful, mobilisational tactics, but not only that. They eventually shape the broader conceptualisation of oneself in the world, displacing existing realities of connection and shared experience, as we will discuss in the final section of this book.

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In this way, sectarianism is the commonplace, the ‘myth’ – which cannot be accessed or ascertained – of the Great Civil War. This mythological narrative is the product of localised as much as globalised processes of knowledge production obtained through the work of a mythological machine.

A W a r o v e r the House The mythological machine reifies the category of ‘civil war’ because it sets clear boundaries between competing communities, which become, in turn, insoluble. The Arabic concept of ‘civil war’, usually translated as harb ahliyyah, differs in its connotation from the English ‘civil war’ and the Latin bellum civile. Harb ahliyyah refers to kith and kin, to community rather than to citizens, whereas ‘civil war’ and bellum civile highlight the civic dimension of the conflict, i.e., a conflict over the city-power, the polis. In harb ahliyyah, communities set their origins in mythological communities (such as the early Christian communities; the Sunni/Shi’i communities; the ancient Judean tribes; the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian Iranians). In this, the Arabic term captures the genealogical origin of the ancient Greek idea of civil war, as the war over the oikos, ‘the house’ as a subgroup of the community. More precisely, the classical term for civil war in Persian/Dari is khaneh jangi, a ‘house war’, a war over the oikos.23 The outbreak of civil wars following the Arab Spring has led to a revival of another Arabic term, fitnah (also used in Persian as fetneh). A strongly connoted word, this is a term used outside intellectual and academic circles but adopted by active agents in the civil war, particularly in reference to the archetypal Sunni–Shi’i divide throughout the region and, more specifically, vis-à-vis those perceived as pro-Iranian forces. However, the Iranian government and security officials have regularly used the terms fetneh and fetnegar to refer to the internal opposition to delegitimise protesters as rioters. In the use of fetneh, all internal seditious elements are necessarily also outsiders. This occurred in 2009 in Iran with the Green Movement, which contested the electoral results in favour of Mahmud Ahmadinejad, and it recurred in 2018, 2019, and 2022. The theological implication of the concept of fitnah alludes to underlying (geo)political events within the history of Islam, in particular the great sedition between Shi’i and Sunna over government in the early Islamic Caliphate (seventh century). Fitnah is a moment

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of crisis in which the community of believers, the mythological community of the ummah, is split and faced with judgment over who should command the community, who should form its government. The reference to this distant historical period to characterise the nature of the contemporary conflict is void of political value. The contemporary use of fitnah in the Great Civil War alludes to a framing of the events following the Arab Spring in fundamentally sectarian ways, which implies and produces a process of depoliticisation of the popular struggle initiated in 2011. It includes references to non-Sunni groups as heretic majus (Zoroastrians, polytheists), munafiq (hypocrites), and zindig (atheists)24 who do not belong to the original Islamic community (the Salaf). Following the accusation of fitnah comes that of polytheist practices (shirk), which is an accusation of venerating false mythologies, of speaking ‘untruths’. For instance, when in control of new territories, the Islamic State has targeted shrines and devotional sites often belonging to Sufi congregations and Shi’i groups. This clearing of other mythologies is material, but it also pursues a semantic objective as it seeks to extirpate the cultural practices of healing and benediction that exist around these sites. It is also to combat the Other’s capacity for magical thinking through the power of mythologies. The shift from a struggle over how to govern a nation to who belongs to it empties the political value of a conflict often born out of a defeated revolt. The failure to achieve change, either because the existing order remains in place (i.e., Syria, Iraq) or because the new ruling cadre does not hold the dynamism to exercise power and marshal a new order (Libya, Yemen), brings about a situation of civil war, whereby regional and international powers project their respective mythologies (together with military hardware) upon the conflicting parties. From a confrontation, even with armed means, over the nature of the political order, the question transits to the confrontation over control of territory, the foundation of new mythological communities, and the reification of belonging, all of which requires the targeted pumping of violence against the Other. This brings about ‘the depoliticisation of citizenship’ – the lost right of governing the city-space – in favour of the ‘mobilisation of the unpolitical’ – the enfranchisement of values related to ‘blood’, ‘family’, ‘creed’, and foundational myths. Defeat in revolts leaves space for disillusionment and cognitive displacement in political subjects – or citizens – which in turn facilitates the embracing of cultural tenets of the right, as we will explore in the

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next chapters. It also prepares the ground for dépaysement, a form of multi-latitude displacement, which we explain in the final section of the book. It is common to find the use of such terms as ‘alien’, ‘satanic’, ‘apostates’, and ‘traitors’ to refer to the enemy. Cynicism towards political engagement and organised collective action drives the interpretation of world affairs, with apathy and fear becoming a central sentiment.25 It leads to appeals for a strongman to lead the community, a man of order who opposes the paradigm of the partisan and the revolutionary, whose power lies in his communal bonds with powerless categories. Fear and mythologies are genealogically tied, as all mythologies, Furio Jesi reminds us, are ‘about death and [the nationalists’] religion of death’.26 The emphasis on purifying the community, extracting the alien elements from it, and embracing death – both meted and martyred – co-opts mythologies that, while deploying ancient referents, also formulate a love for death. In this context, mythologies are the prelude to the mobilisation of the unpolitical: the cultural, psychological, and even physical (gendered) elements ousting ideological civics, the family which in turn props up the nation.

B l o o d A c c u s a t ion and Takfir As we have discussed, the mythological machine feeds the civil war parties through processes of ‘othering’ vs ‘belonging’ and ‘insider’ vs ‘outsider’. The process of ‘othering’ in the work of the mythological machine is given by the paradigm of the ‘blood accusation’ (known also as blood libel). This practice dates to the accusation that Jews used Christian blood in the preparation of their Passover food and drinks. For example, in 1144, the Christian community of Norwich, England, accused Jews of having murdered a young boy, William of Norwich, and to have performed a ritual sacrifice using his blood during Passover. The myth propagated across the island and Europe. It reappeared in the trial of the Jews in 1840 Damascus, where Tommaso da Calangiano and Ebrahim Amarah, a Christian missionary of the Capuchin order and his servant, were alleged to have disappeared after visiting the Jewish quarter in Damascus.27 This ‘event’ becomes a trope in the antisemitic ideology of later decades, including charges that the Jewish community fomented the antiChristian purges of 1860 Damascus.28 What matters in this example is the way the mythological machine produces an image of the

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Other as not simply different but opposite to the one of the accuser (e.g., Jesus’s sacrificial blood in the Eucharist versus Christian blood in Jewish Passover rituals).29 Ussama Makdisi, writing about the July 1860 anti-Christian riot in Damascus, states: Despite the edicts promulgating nondiscrimination, a Muslim mob rampaged through the city, pillaging churches and terrorising the city’s Christian inhabitants. Newspapers in London and Paris and missionary societies condemned what they saw as ‘Mohammedan’ fanaticism … European powers set up a ­commission of inquiry to investigate the massacres … Their humanitarian motives, however, were conditional and political. No corresponding commission, after all, was formed to investigate the US oppression and persecution of people of African descent or its extermination of Native Americans, the decades of French ‘spectacular and slow’ colonial violence in Algeria,30 or the British suppression of the anticolonial uprising in India in 1857. It is the ‘Other’ as the insoluble alien that is the object of the mythological machine.31 In the Great Civil War, the equivalent of the blood accusation is takfir. Takfir means ‘accusing someone of apostasy [kufr]’. The accusation is used by Islamist groups in the fight against those Muslims who do not align with the former’s fundamentalist, often militant vision of their creed. More often, radical jihadi groups, especially the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, have addressed Shi’is and heterodox Muslim groups – and Iranians overall – with the accusation of takfir, apostasy, claiming that they are not true believers, attributing to them a set of mythological crimes akin to the blood libel.32 As in all mythological machines, the enemy is rendered void of human value and of the civic right to exist, removed from its place within the political and ethical order of life, which we could link to Agamben’s enunciation of homo sacer.33 Hence, the Other is also seen as the conspirator moulding history, over-powerful, and omnipresent yet deceitful and miserable. The mythological machine of takfir – as that of the blood accusation, of eugenics, of the migrant barbarism – aims at a process of purification, of cleansing of the community, of the body politic. It is an essential recipe for the foundation of the mythological nation as

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the true nation-state, from being a utopia (‘a place that does not exist’) to being the eu-topia (‘the good place’).34 In the Great Civil War, the cleansing occurs against the grain of twentieth-century colonial ­history. It targets Sunnis in areas of Shi’i rule, and Shi’i and Christian and other heterodox communities such as the Yazidis in those territories where the radical jihadists take control. In the case of isis – and, generally, Salafism which embraces takfir as an ideology – we can see the work of the mythological machine more blatantly. As a social practice, takfir concerns the definition of who is a Muslim among those who live within the community, that is within the house-nation. This view holds that the enemies within are far more dangerous than the enemies without, for instance those in the West, bolstering the logic of civil war. To ascertain membership of a community, the Islamic State has adopted a process of investigation (tabayun), turning on its head the traditional practice of trusting those who profess Islam as their religion (through the shahadah, i.e., ‘profession of faith’), unless proven otherwise. Instead, takfiri mythological thinking instructs that one is a kafir (an unbeliever, an apostate) unless the contrary is proved. Practices that fall under the category of takfir are many, and they are mostly identified with Muslim groups that do not follow the strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islamic law. Its implications are major: it allows the killing and robbing of Muslims deemed infidels, that is to say, the ‘malignant other’.35 These teachings are enshrined in the sermons of several Saudi clerics who regularly legitimise violence against Shi’is as a justified means of combat.36 In itself, the establishment of the Islamic State was based on reclaiming the foundation of a new purified state, a promised land for all discontented Muslims living either in the non-Muslim West or in the usurped land of hypocritical Muslim  governments. The call for return addressed all discontented Muslims as members of a new ancient community envisioned as the mythological community of the prophet. The establishment of a Caliphate – rather than a republic or an emirate – also indicated the foundational importance of a new and ancient space of power. It is the promise of a Sunni nation that has yet to be and, at the same time, a nation that existed in a past which is not only remote but also the archetype of all times, the times of origin, of myths. In the absence of political principles around ways to organise the community, the mythologies become a substitute in the form of the principles of a promised land, the return to a golden era and the embracement of timeless moral codes – as opposed to the time-bound laws of contemporary societies.

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This process occurs in localised forms but also in the shape of global developments in the idea of modern nations/states. As a neo-settler historical movement, the closest modern historical parallel to the Islamic State is that of the Jewish State and the Zionist movement, though there are profound sociological differences too. The second wave of Russian Jews fleeing pogroms in tsarist Russia included some who responded to the call of the early Zionist movement for aliyah and moved to Palestine at the turn of the twentieth century: a ‘return to the promised land’ or ‘ascent to’ the higher status of original state. The movement identified Palestine as the space for its nation and for the nationalist cause, declaring it as ‘a land without people for people without land’ where Jewish immigrants could settle freely to re-establish the mythological community of Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel. Historian Ilan Pappé examined numerous diaries of Russian settlers and identified a recurrent theme in those pages, namely the description of local people, the Arabs, as ‘aliens’. This is no surprise given that their trip to Palestine had been framed by the Zionist organisations as one towards an empty land, ‘a land without people’. One of these settlers wrote in his diary: ‘People … were more strange to us than the Russian or Polish peasant … We have nothing in common with the majority of the people living here … They were not just “aliens”, they were aggressive aliens.’37 Another settler, Yosef Rabinowitz, who was a zealot fighter opposing the employment of Palestinians in agricultural labour, defined the local population as ‘the evil [hara’ hazeh]’. Even when comforted by a pleasant encounter with an indigenous person, he would say, ‘I met a decent farmer … [potentially] a Raa Hola [malignant evil].’38 The recurrence of ‘evil’ and ‘malignant other’ represents a trope in the work of mythological machines, which, as said earlier, qualifies the other not only as the enemy, as diverse, but also as the ultimate opposite to the community of belonging. One could draw some similarities with the way Europeans viewed the presence of Indigenous people when they landed in the Americas and the nefarious destruction and confinement of such communities. The paradoxical way Zionist settlers then, and many Israeli Jews today, refer to the native Palestinian population as ‘alien’ is the work of the mythological machine of the promised land which rejects the existence of a distinct Palestinian humanity, othering them into an inescapable evil, which motivated past policies and probable future visions.39 The processes at work follow similar lines of production as

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those of the Great Civil War with, in the case of the promised land, a jihadist embracing of the Islamic State in spite of the latter’s failure to achieve their eu-topia. Nationalists supporting the Jewish state’s cause have embraced this framing all around the world.40 The reifying of one’s mythologies goes hand in hand with the denial of mythological truth in those of others. One example is represented by the far-right Israeli group Lehava, which among its core objectives has that of expelling all non-Jews, including Christians, from the land of Israel. The plan would guarantee the genetic purity of Jews, as instructed by Orthodox Judaism (e.g., prohibition of interfaith marriage).41 The group has accused Christian Arabs of being ‘blood sucking vampires’, redeploying the ‘blood accusation’ against Palestinians living in Israel.42 These tropes are not marginal expressions within the political scene; instead, they are part of a broader movement embracing religious nationalist mythologies around purity. For instance, Rafi Peretz, a minister of education in 2019, declared that assimilation of American Jews is a ‘second Holocaust’; in other words, it equates to the disappearance of the Jewish race.43 In January 2024, the Ministry of Education put out a letter saying that ‘a woman who represents a mixed marriage cannot represent Jewish culture’.44 Along this thinking, mythological scientific practice has gained legitimacy. Racial thinking and genetic purity have returned to the foreground, while their development and broad reach remained significant throughout the twentieth century. In 2020, Israel’s High Court declared legitimate the use of dna testing to prove a person’s Jewishness and, therefore, their eligibility to request aliyah, according to the 1950 Law of Return.45 The othering of the enemy works through the mythological machine of the rightful nation, which demands return to the promised land now almost purified of the malignant other, the Palestinian. Within the logic of the civil war – which governs Israel’s politics toward the Palestinians and, prior to that, the Zionist movement’s conquest – there is no place for the life of the other as Other. This was evident well before the escalation of 7 October 2023. As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared during the 2015 unrest, ‘Whoever wants to be Israeli must be Israeli all the way … I will not accept two states within Israel.’46 His son, Yair, speaking to a Christian Evangelical audience in Alabama, explained what this vision entails: ‘Most of the Arabs who live today in the land of Israel and who call themselves “Palestinians” only came to the land about one hundred years ago from neighboring countries.’

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To support his claim, he added that ‘one of the most common last names in the Palestinian Authority is al-masri [Egyptian]. Another is al-halabi [from Halab, Aleppo] or al-hijazi [from the Hijaz in Saudi Arabia]. You see, not only the Jews were the first in the land of Israel in ancient times, they were the first in modern times too.’47 With the electoral force of Jewish supremacist groups, led by Ben-Gvir, the practical work of the mythological machine has come to hold governmental effect. The militaristic ethnic cleansing that has taken place with more vigour since late 2023 is the material outcome of the mythological machine of the Promised Land. It is now time to move beyond the discussion of the mythological machine and concentrate on the kind of political culture that underpins and arises from it. This is the culture of the right.

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Vignett e 2 Damascus Suburbs, May 2010

It was more than nine months since we had moved to live in Damascus, in the Shamsiyyeh neighbourhood, just on the slope below Mount Qasiyun, the place which someone told us was where Cain killed Abel. A conservative neighbourhood, inhabited by ­several large Salafi families, it had affordable rent, a beautiful flight of steps down the side of the mountain with a view on the city, and an easy path to the Dar al-Assad library where we (both authors) worked our way through archives. Nothing to envy the by-then tourist trap of Montmartre in Paris. In one of the informal tabadol, language exchanges, with a young Palestinian student, who lived with his mother in the Yarmouk refugee camp, we often engaged in discussing politics. We both had strong views and could hardly hold ourselves back. In one of these discussions, we started a lengthy and often verbose conversation about what is a state and what it means to be a citizen. Recalling the minutiae of that conversation is difficult, but it turned around the importance (or not) of the nation and the place of Syria and Palestine in the Middle East. It also led to some unforeseeable encounters. At the end of the conversation, our Palestinian acquaintance asked, ‘Would you like to carry on this conversation with someone who knows much more about politics?’ As someone never shying away from a political chat, even in Syria where talks of politics were not one’s bread and butter, one of us eagerly accepted. ‘o k. That’s great!’ he said, ‘I will be in touch with you soon. I want to introduce you to someone.’ Two days later, Maziyar (one of the co-authors of this book) received his call. ‘Be ready at 7 p.m., I am picking you up in Marjeh and we go to meet someone.’ He turned

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up in his friend’s car, which took Maziyar to a neighbourhood he didn’t know. They were in the outskirts of Damascus, not far from Babila. The exchange contact knocked at the door, and, after a brief time, they all entered a relatively modest apartment. A couple in their sixties greeted them. Maziyar noticed a logo when stepping into the entry hall. It was the zawba’a, the red hurricane, symbol of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (ssn p ), one of the historical parties of the Arab world, founded by the Greek Orthodox intellectual Antoun Saadeh (1904–1949). What followed was a long evening of conversations in Arabic and, when that fell short, in French, with one of the Damascus-based representatives of the ssnp, whose name we agreed not to reveal. Obviously as a foreign student in Damascus talking politics, it was not unusual to attract attention. But perhaps Maziyar being Iranian Italian had added curiosity. The conversation diverted to what was happening in Iran under Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s presidency (2004–12) and the politics across the Arab world. Some jokes about Silvio Berlusconi, then pm of Italy, made sure we also had a good laugh. Maziyar’s interlocutor was adamant in expressing his dissent to the use of religion as a public policy measure, as was the case in Iran and some of the rising forces in the Arab world, but he was also eager to express the importance of Iran’s role in the broader struggle against Zionism, ‘the shared enemy of everyone in the region’. They also spoke about what it means and what are the means to change the world. ‘You know, in Syria, we divide people who are active in politics and want to engage in change into two categories. ‘These are simplistic, and don’t get us wrong on the division, but I will explain to you why they matter later … We have two types of people: those who follow Che Guevara and those who follow Hitler … Listen, I am not talking about Hitler’s Holocaust or his desire to go to war with the world. That was something that doesn’t concern us. My concern is the way we need to organise what we do in politics. It is about how you do things, not what you do. So, that said, are you with Che or with Adolf?’ ‘Che, 100 per cent, always with him!’ Maziyar responded, without blinking. ‘Well, you see, so we are with Hilter’, he replied, adding, ‘because we like our politics to have a strong organisation, to have clear plans, to follow the leadership, and the rules based on the hierarchy of responsibility [ma‘suliyyah].’

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It was a revealing moment because in our conversation up to then there was little we had disagreed on. The ideas of Maziyar’s interlocutor were sound and carefully worded to the reality around him: he was a supporter of women’s equality in law and practice (we didn’t discuss gender equality in toto); he didn’t like religious influence in public policy and in influencing people’s political participation; he thought Arabism was a fake idea that could never have practical outcomes; he believed that Syria, not a nation-state but as an idea compromising a plurality of groups, was the best historical outcome (though we later learned about the nuances of the ss np on this matter). As an outsider, Maziyar did not hold a strong opinion about what Syrians should do; and he had little interest in nationalist plans which sounded equally unfounded. From then onwards, our conversation moved to how the left had failed to deliver its promises. How it was defeated, again and again, ‘like Che’, he reminded us. How, without a strong and militant base and organisation, disciplined and moved by ideals rooted in a shared ‘myth of the nation’, there was no chance to succeed and change the state of things in Syria and beyond. He brought examples from Iran as well as Israel: ‘Iranians have ancient history and one day this will turn the Islamic Republic into a different state and society.’ But what most struck Maziyar was the openness with which his interlocutor, otherwise staunchly anti-Zionist, did not forgo or abstain from referring to Israel as a successful model of political organisation, of state. ‘It is rooted’, Maziyar recalls him saying, ‘in a national myth – yes, it is fake [ja’ali] – but it is a strong one and it is disciplined and built as an army. That is a state that works.’ Maziyar left discombobulated. The only thing he did then was to go home and jot down the exchanges we had that night, discussing them with the other co-author of this book (Billie Jeanne). Later, in the aftermath of the Arab Spring and its defeat, we had the chance to follow up on these conversations with other ss np interlocutors in Lebanon, and on these themes – which we refer to as the culture of the right. We agreed on one thing: the culture of the right was broader than the remit of right-wing parties.

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3 The Culture of the Right: Statolatry

In all this annoying chore we are interested in only one thing: to ­project onto the past the picture of our nation as we conceive of it for the future.1 Cited in Furio Jesi, Cultura di destra

W h a t Is t h e C u l t u r e of the Ri ght? What happens to political imagination and ideas of the state after the defeat of a popular revolt? To respond to this question, in the next two chapters we will explore what accounts for the culture of the right. Rather than proceeding through a taxonomy of countries, we discuss the phenomenology of the right in a back-and-forth across the Middle East. This is because we have come to the conclusion that, in spite of cosmetic differences and different ideological outlooks, we are faced with a comparable phenomenon regionally and, all in all, globally. So, we bring cases from Egypt, Lebanon, and the Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf, as well as Israel, Iran, and the Islamic states of Syria and Iraq. What we aim to deliver is not a clear-cut picture of right-wing parties or social movements. Instead, we provide an analytical template that helps to identify cultural processes that support the rise or the embracement of right-wing politics beyond party affiliation or ideological cadres. The culture of the right is not the domain of right-wing parties. It cuts across the spectrum of left and right. The vignette preceding this chapter described the author’s exchanges with one of the representatives of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (ss n p )

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in 2010 in the suburbs of Damascus and is meant to illustrate what we refer to as the culture of the right.2 Political culture throughout the region  – and indeed trans-­ regionally – has shifted towards what we refer to as cultures of the right. When speaking of cultures of the right, we do not intend to square-fit an exogenous category upon the variety of social, economic, and (geo)political realities and sociological phenomena unwrapping in the context of the Middle East. We claim that what has come to be globally understood as ‘right’ (political right), with its entrenched roots in European history, has phenomenological value and commonalities in the Middle East. Here, the culture of the right is reappropriated and becomes a distinctive form of political culture, which takes the historical experiences and ideas of right-wing culture to new semantic, social, and ideological territories. Defeat is a constant reference to the shortcomings of social mobilisation in producing reform towards justice (and democratic representation) or intercommunal and regional peace. It is within this imaginative scheme that we engage with the culture of the right as an evolution of inter-citizen and citizen–state relations. We are not concerned with where the origins of the culture of the right belong. Rather we aim to use the frame of culture of the right to reflect upon what are the common cultural and ideological elements affecting state formation, state–society relations, and political imagination. We do so by situating the return to the right – in an overt ideological sense, even when not overtly embraced by those practising it – in a historical moment characterised by the disillusionment and defeat of popular revolts and calls for democratisation. The culture of the right is an ensemble of psychological, imaginative, and social traits that has been shaping political culture in a latent way over several decades, across the socio-economic spectrum, from conservative to radical movements alike. In this chapter, we identify several coordinates that help us place the cultures of the right within an epistemological space of contemporary politics. The culture of the right is distinct from liberal capitalist culture and its emphasis on private capital and economic profit, management of political risk, and general persuasion that political life should be animated by technocratic knowledge (when it serves the interests of private capital). The culture of the right, instead, builds upon claims to a different world, and lifeworld, which would enable alternative forms of life based on a set of values that, prima facie, contrast radically with those of liberal capitalism, such as individual freedom for profiteering,

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protection of private property, and lassitude towards social restrictions. The historical evidence, we should not forget to mention, shows that exponents of the culture of the right have had more than cordial and collaborative relationships with their black-suited business, financial, and industrialist partners in Europe, North and South America, and East and West Asia. The right-wing agitators had the industrialists – and more recently i t venture capitalists – behind them. So, what is distinctive about the culture of the right? We refer to it as ‘a culture characterized (in good or bad faith) by a vacuum [dal vuoto]’.3 This emptiness of meaning, and especially of proper ideological organisation and intellectual structure, was seen as diametrically opposite the cultural world of the left, that for the best part of the twentieth century had produced a pluriverse of ideas about itself and how to bring about political change.4 Things look quite different when we move to the Middle East. There are numerous intellectuals that have contributed to the theoretical formulation of the right. Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky is doubtless the leading authority in formulating an intellectual tradition of Zionism from the right, also known as Revisionist Zionism. In Iran, Ahmad Fardid, the  Heideggerian philosopher who first coined the term ‘Weststruckness’ or ‘Westoxification’, is one example of a (quite erratic, though influential) intellectual of the right, with a strong influence among religious, cultural, and political figures including Ali Khamenei and Mahmud Ahmadinejad.5 In the Arab world, Antoun Saadeh ­(­1904–1949) was one of the leading intellectuals with a profound influence on the idea of nationalism and liberation, which in turn influenced Michel Aflaq, the founder of the Ba’ath Party. Whether with ideological strength or without, the culture of the right has gained near-hegemonic force and is deeply entrenched in contemporary forms of life, even though this is rarely commented on. This is not only through the return of bombastic nationalism and an obsession with the enemy; it is also through emerging forms of the right fusing with the advancement of global consumption culture, its aesthetics, and its capitalist forms of life. The glorification of bodies, either in muscle weight or in sexualised performance, the gossip world of royals and vips, the centrality of money and of ‘being rich’, the inviolability of national borders, and the untouchability of the so-called basic tenets of capital-lettered ‘Culture’ … these are venerated in the embrace of unidentifiable ideas such as Tradition, Freedom, Homeland, Nation, Democracy, Justice, Security, etc. These capitalised categories are

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counterpoised with ways of being and thinking that are seen as out of touch and referred to as ‘woke culture’, ‘left hegemony’, if not in less polite ways such as ‘satanism’, ‘idolatry’, and other dismissive terms. In reality, such things as ‘woke culture’ and ‘left cultural hegemony’ are marginal elements of contemporary culture and absentees in the mainstream political debate, often spoken about only as ideological fetishes to wage war against or embraced in commercialised strategies as in the global brands’ embrace of gender-inclusive campaigns during Gay Pride or lgbtq+ history month (see the advertisements of global corporations such as Coca-Cola, which, meanwhile, allegedly violate workers’ rights around the globe).6 What has this to do with our attempt to analyse political life and imagination in the Middle East? First of all, political culture does not evolve or regress in isolation. Struggles travel the world, moving and, by so doing, transforming into new forms of politics. The region is systematically excluded from the application of the categories ‘left’ and ‘right’, making it exceptional in today’s world politics. Apart from Israel, no country in the region is analysed through these categories. This is not surprising if we consider that the region is seen as lagging in political development compared to all other regions of the world. Yet, as we show in this section, the region is home to a competing yet somehow conniving culture of the right, with far-reaching effects on citizen-on-citizen and citizen–state relations. Equally, these conditions in culture affect ideas about the state and the people within and outside the region. In the coming pages, we explore some of the main tenets of the culture of the right in the region, connecting them to historical and geocultural phenomena elsewhere. Through this exercise we aim to recalibrate the understanding of political culture and state–society relations in the region through an integrative interpretivist frame.

C l a im in g t h e Past f o r t h e S a k e o f the Future One of the defining features of the culture of the right is ‘projecting in the past the image of our nation as we conceive of it for the future’.7 Historical claims are central to this endeavour. These can be situated at the national level, protecting the effigies of past victories through violent conquest and dispossession, or at the local level, with the reclaiming of old mythological names (or completely new ones clothed

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in myths). Ilan Pappé reminded us of this when commenting on the role of archaeology in making Israel ancient: ‘The archaeological zeal to reproduce the map of “Ancient” Israel was in essence none other than a systematic, scholarly, political and military attempt to deArabize the terrain – its names and geography, but above all its history’.8 Wael Hallaq puts this question in clear terms when he writes, ‘The modern subject is by definition a nationalized entity, a subject that identifies with the nation as a way of life.’ In this process, the citizen formulates the meaning of its citizenship ‘by virtue of accepting and absorbing, well-nigh as a second nature, the meaning of the state, of territory, and of the greater family – the nation’.9 The culture of the right, hence, is the product of the spatial arrangement of the state order along putatively national lines. Its origins, in most of the region, align with the colonial project of drawing national boundaries. Nation-making, regardless of the political persuasions of national liberation movements in post-independence Arab states as well as in Israel, Iran, and Türkiye, was a conservative – at times reactionary (in the sense that it looked at a mythological past) – project.10 Mythologies play a very central role in the formation and rooting of the culture of the right. Religion, obviously, comes to good use in this case. The culture of the right is not necessarily religious in the orthodox or institutional sense of the word. In Europe and North America, it has often been associated with esoterism and exoteric cults, with paganism, and, in some instances, with outright anti-religious sentiments. This often comes with the adoption of a ‘religious’ attitude towards leaders and so-called sacred ideas, which paints them with a cultish allure. Take the example of the Garda de Fier (‘Iron Guard’, aka the Legion of Archangel Michael or the National Christian Defense League), the Romanian fascist movement led by Cornelius Zelea Codreanu, which, while embracing a call for the spiritual renewal of men and the nation-state, was imbued with Romanian Orthodox Christian mysticism. The Garda espoused a reactionary form of religious observance, highly antisemitic and socially militant, based on community fellowship. Equally religious was the Spanish Legion. Known informally as El Tercio de Marruecos, then just Tercio, it played a significant role in the Spanish colonial project in North Africa, then propped up the nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). Through its chants, symbols, and public conduct, the Tercio remained at odds with Catholic practice but not with the Roman Catholic Church. For example, it was common for

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legionaries to glorify death and pray for its manifestation. For this they were known as novios de la Muerte (grooms of death); their motto was ¡Legionaries a luchar! ¡Legionarios a morir! (Legionaries to fight! Legionaries to die!). This death wish is akin to the religio mortis, ‘religion of death’, a feature in other religious and, indeed, secular movements of the culture of the right. So, mythologies and death are driving forces in the culture of the right. The case that had historically attracted observers’ attention – before the rise of isis – is the cult of martyrdom in the years following the Islamic Revolution of Iran. Martyrdom has been institutionalised in post-revolutionary Iran, with welfare services for martyrs’ families – a state-orchestrated and a grassroots public display of commemoration – and is regularly evoked by the political cadre across the spectrum and in the opposition to support specific political discourses or goals. A martyr is a shahid, ‘a testimony [to God]’, and serves to legitimise the status quo as conceived by those interpellants of the martyr. Following the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani (1957–2020), the irgc displayed a large billboard in downtown Tehran featuring several prominent martyrs with the Davamand mountain in the background. The mountain is the symbol of Iran conceived of as per its mytho-spatial history. The post was headlined ‘we are the people of martyrdom [mā mellat-e shahādatīm]’. In Iran, the state recognises multiple categories of martyrdom: martyrs of the revolution, martyrs of the war with Iraq, martyrs of foreign-backed terrorism, nuclear scientist martyrs, and even martyrs of the war on drugs.11 The rituals of Twelver Shi’a Islam provide a specific avenue for public expression of sorrow and emotions towards death, punctuated with songs, eulogies, theatrics, and mourning parties, which have come to be known as ‘Hossein Parties’, because they gather people who enjoy the performance without necessarily believing in the canonical content of the ritual. Politicians and opposition members appeal to the martyrs’ judgement on the present to wage attacks or to disqualify policy proposals or criticism. In autumn 2022, for instance, during the countrywide wave of protests, state officials denied legitimacy to popular demands for the abolition of mandatory wearing of the hijab, instrumentalising  the blood of martyrs. ‘In their testaments, the martyrs  … considered the preservation of the koranic and Islamic values, especially the hijab, more important than their own blood, and they ordered women living in an Islamic society to maintain the hijab to protect the blood of martyrs [az khun-e shohada’ pasdari konand].’12

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The use of martyrs’ sacrifice in the pursuit of unrelated and posthumous political goals is not, however, specific to the Islamic Republic. In Israel, Holocaust victims of Nazi atrocities are considered ‘martyrs’ by the state of Israel and by most rabbinic scholars, who consider them kedoshim, ‘holy ones’.13 The Israeli state, particularly under Netanyahu, has co-opted the memory of the Holocaust and its victims as a legitimising tool in Israel’s international relations. Hagai El-Ad, an Israeli human rights activist, wrote in an opinion piece in Haaretz that ‘Netanyahu didn’t invent the idea of leveraging the Holocaust for political gain … [but] he is taking that event to new depths, stripping Palestinians of basic human rights in the name of the survivors of the Holocaust’.14 This use of the Holocaust to justify domestic or foreign policy goals has become a regular feature of Israel’s public standing. It has also meant that the Israeli state has taken diplomatic steps or media stances to police the use of the term ‘genocide’ or to criticize comparisons between the Holocaust and other examples of systematic inhumane violence against a selected population, as in the case of the Armenian genocide, the Rohingya genocide, and the Bosnian genocide, and, since 2023, the Palestinian genocide.15 The policing of terms such as martyrdom and genocide has little to do with religious zeal and more to do with maintaining control of the historical narrative as a weapon against criticism. It is not only religious sentiment and religious parties that embrace a religion of death in interpreting the present through the past and the future. The Syrian Social Nationalist Party (ssnp), founded by Antoun Saadeh, is amongst the region’s most fervid secularist groups. With a historical connection to the Greek Orthodox community in Lebanon and Syria, the party follows a secularist ideology with no reference to religion or religious practices in its manifesto or its public posturing. However, in line with a tradition within the culture of the right, sacrifice occupies a defining place in its ideology and its cultural praxis. A member of the ssnp referred to this in a conversation with the authors, allegedly quoting Saadeh: ‘We are in the path of loving life, and we love freedom, but we also love death when that is the way to life.’16 Sacrifice and the glorification of death as a worthwhile nationalist endeavour are recurrent, transcultural tropes of nationalist groups, left and right, especially when moving beyond centrist groups. But the quote reminded the authors of a recurrent, possibly apocryphal, sentence attributed to the prophet Muhammad and cited by various jihadi Islamists: ‘we [Muslims] love death as much as you [Westerners] love

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life’.17 This statement has appeared in different places such as the alQaeda declaration on the Madrid terrorist attacks in 2004; in reportage by the bb c on the i s i s capture of the Syrian city of Palmyra; and in the quotes of British Muslim terrorist Mohammad Seddique Khan in his martyrdom statement before the terrorist attacks in London.18 Counterpoising the ss np quote with the Islamist motto should help clarify that what we suggest is not intrinsic to Islamic culture; the connection of love with death is a matter that has been debunked by the works of scholars such as Talal Asad and Olivier Roy.19 Quite the contrary, we argue that it is the culture of the right which is the origin of the cult of death, and that, depending on the context in which it is adopted, it acquires Islamised, Christian, Jewish, or secular-patriotic forms. These themes are recurrent tropes showing transhistorical and transregional commonalities that help us understand clearly what we mean when using the category of culture of the right. Religious sentiment and spiritualising vision also define the culture of the right’s relation to the future. This relation is projected in calls for the coming apocalypse, understood as the ultimate revelation of  the  true being of the world. Supremacists of various strands (Evangelicals and Pentecostals, Jewish, and Hindu to name a few) and jihadi Islamists as well as Shi’a radicals share claims over the approaching apocalypse. The period of waiting is the present – and not the unknown future – a timeframe used to advance escalatory politics and justify unconventional decisions such as mass-scale expropriation, repression, and arming. The thread of apocalyptic politics has an equally long historical line. The construction of the Jewish Temple on the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque is, for instance, seen as a required facilitatory step for the arrival of the Jewish Messiah – and for securing the end of times among pro-Israel supporters in Evangelical and Pentecostal communities in the Americas. Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president, boosted his loyalty and alliance with Israel and has made use of the Israeli flag, idf shirts, and even Hebrew sentences as a distinctive totem of his political theatrics. For outsiders to Latin American politics, the fetishisation of Israel falls beyond logic, but on closer inspection this Zionist iconophilia has electoral, pr, and security implications. One-third of the Brazilian electorate is Evangelical or Pentecostal, which means that many voters believe Israel is where all exiled Jews should return, a step that would be a catalyst for the salvation and the return of Christ. Total control of the ‘holy land’ by Jews is necessary to trigger

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‘the Advent’. In terms of p r , an unconditional and ‘more papist that the Pope’ approach on Israel by Bolsonaro and his followers is a tactical cover-up for the adoption and glorification of neo-Nazism in Brazil. For instance, in 2021 Bolsonaro and several members of the Brazilian government welcomed Germany’s neo-Nazi party Alternative für Deutschland (afd) during a visit by the deputy leader of the party Beatrix Von Storch, who is also the granddaughter of Adolf Hitler’s finance minister. a fd and Bolsonaro both profess strong support for Zionism and Islamophobia. The connection between global far-right – even neo-Nazi and neofascist – movements and Israel is no longer the exception. The Israeli flag has become a fetish for many new far-right movements across the Global North and South: from Bolivia’s coup president Jenine Añez, to US gop Republican supporters, France’s Marine Le Pen, Spain’s right-wing Vox party, the UK’s English Defence League (e d f ), and India’s r ss (the governing bjp ’s Hindutva militia), just to name a few. Italy’s new premier from the far-right Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) Giorgia Meloni even went as far as to describe her own party, which many see as the direct heir of Mussolini’s Fascist Party, as inspired by the Likud of Israel (as well as the Tory Party in the UK and the gop in the US).20 This infatuation with Israel is in part justified as a reversal of leftist sympathy and support for Palestine (e.g., Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Brazil’s Lula da Silva, and India’s Congress Party), but there is something deeper than that. For the global right, Israel is the model of nation-making, the paradigm for the culture of the right. All the above-mentioned movements embrace, in one way or the other, ethnic supremacism, either as the right of settlers to dominate the state/nation (e.g., Brazil, Bolivia, us a ) or as the right of the imagined indigenous citizens to control absolute power denying the external Other – Muslim refugees – and internal dissident – left-wing radicalism (e.g., France, UK/England, Spain, Italy, India). Islamophobia here espouses anti-indigenous claims and instead embraces calls for militarised security as the guarantor for development and prosperity. This is also what, more tacitly, is embraced by those calling for a renewal within the politics of the Middle East, without going as far as celebrating Israel’s model. Saudi Arabia, the ua e , and Bahrain are the latest in seeing Israel as a partner and successful model of financial power, high-technological advancement, and the building of a security state. Some in Iran’s exiled opposition are also of this same persuasion, more

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clearly demonstrated by their support for Israel’s war on Gaza.21 In its own way, Israel is a paradigm through which to imagine the future. The essayist Jalal Al-e Ahmad captured this early fascination with Israel as a paradigm for the modernising of the East, especially among Muslim nation-states, starting with Iran. In the 1960s, after travelling to Israel, inclusive of a never-failing kibbutz visit, he wrote, ‘In the eyes of the Easterners, Israel, despite all its defects and despite all contradictions it harbours, is the basis of a power: the first step in the promise of a future which is not that late … Israel is a model [better] than any other model, of how to deal with the West.’22 Domestic dynamics in Israel equally promote the pursuit of a utopian politics of ethnic supremacy which is messianic and apocalyptic at the same time. Israel’s movements belonging to religious Zionism espouse a messianic view of politics, which is aimed at facilitating the coming of the Messiah; when embraced by xenophobic and militaristic groups such as Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), messianism and a love for the apocalypse have violent implications for Palestinians across Israel and the Occupied Territories – and indeed beyond this horizon through the threat of large-scale conflict with Israel’s putative enemies across the Middle East (Shi’as in Lebanon and Iraq, Iranians). But the ideological outlook of Jewish supremacism is in continuity and fluid dialogue with mainstream Israeli politics. In a speech in front of the Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s Memorial for the Holocaust, Netanyahu said that those dismissing the Iranian threat ‘have not learned anything from the Holocaust’, and elsewhere he reiterated ‘[i]t is 1939 … Iran is Germany and it is about to arm itself with nuclear weapons’. He has also referred to Iran as today’s Biblical Amalek, the quintessential enemy of the Jews as reported in Deuteronomy, a metaphor that he also used in the early days of Israel’s bombing of Gaza following 7 October 2023.23 What he left out, as pointed out by Daniel Luban, is that ‘the most striking and well-known fact about the Amalekites [is  that] they were the targets of divinely sanctioned genocide’. Samuel 1:15 says, ‘Go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass’. The other side of this messianic–apocalyptic end is the figure of Mahmud Ahmadinejad, former president of the Islamic Republic of Iran (2005–12). Ahmadinejad did not hide his love for the twelfth imam, the Mahdi, and the belief that his actions as president of the republic and those of his supporters would eventually facilitate

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the return of the Mahdi from the period of Occultation (ghaybat). His stance on this matter caused much alarm among the traditionalist clergy, which had repeatedly clarified that Muslims cannot prefigure the timing of the return of the Mahdi (perhaps also because the return of the Mahdi would mean the abolition of the Shi’a clerical institution as legal intermediary between Muslims and Allah). One of the manifestations of Ahmadinejad’s messianism was his devotion to the then little known Jamkaran Shrine on the outskirts of the religious city of Qom. He and his entourage gave credibility and voice to popular hearsay about the Mahdi having fallen into the well located inside the Jamkaran Mosque. Together with the circulation of this belief, the mosque buildings were upgraded and expanded, turning it into a major site of pilgrimage, not only amongst devout Iranians but also among Shi’a pilgrims from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, and Iraq. Ahmadinejad capitalised on this growing messianic mood in the public to claim a special relationship with the divine through his love of the imams. Premonitory signs of the messianic return started to characterise the semiotic practice of the president. An empty chair for the Mahdi would always be left at the executive table of government. In his public speeches he would make recurrent comments about dreams and visions of the coming apocalypse. All of these revitalised the messianic dimension of populist politics projecting the times of the present into the shade of the coming apocalypse.24 Since Ahmadinejad’s refashioning, elements within the i r g c and reactionary forces in the state have reutilised messianic references in the public discourse, ­especially by claiming a mytho-historical, extraterritorial role for the Islamic Republic in countering foreign forces, such as the United States, Israel, and i s i s /Daesh. A discussion of apocalyptic politics cannot leave out one of its most recent and most bombastic expressions. The Islamic State’s vision to bring back the civilisation of the seventh century falls aptly in the reactionary politics of the culture of the right, with its distinctive use of the past for the making of the future. But there is a twist in the vision of those groups that embrace, perhaps more fully, the apocalyptic potential of their agency: the power to bring about the apocalypse, the end of times. In the group’s eschatology – its vision of the end of times – the army of the i s will defeat the army of Rome (rum, i.e., Christian Byzantium) in the city of Dabiq in Syria. This event will trigger the start of the apocalyptic period. This is different

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from groups such as al-Qaeda, which acted more in the style of underground political cells, and isis, which has a distinctive ideology about the end of history. One i s i s fighter put the coming final battle in descriptive geoenvironmental terms: ‘Dabiq is basically all farmland … you could imagine large battles taking place there’,25 when the Dajjal (anti-Christ) will come from Khorasan and kill all the fighters of isis except for a chosen 5,000 based in Jerusalem, who will be saved by the coming of Jesus who will announce the day of judgement. Seeing signs of the end of times everywhere is a distinct feature of the culture of the right, regardless of whether those signs prompt the coming of the Mahdi, the Dajjal (anti-Christ), or the Messiah. Once becoming a public trait of political culture, the use of messianism and apocalyptic references is hard to dispel. They become entrenched. For instance, the otherwise uncharismatic President al-Sisi has referred to himself as the ‘alpha and omega’ of Egypt. His expression derives directly from the Bible (Revelation 1:8; Revelation 21:6; Revelation 22:13). Putting God’s words in his own speech signed a shift in the style of Egyptian presidential politics; Sisi was pursuing the establishment of an Islamic caliphate26 that would be heir to the Fatimid caliphate (tenth to twelfth century) with its capital in Cairo. A modernist form of a messianic future is provided by Mohammad bin Salman (mbs), the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. In the context of Saudi Arabia, messianic calls do not refer to a renewal of religious or spiritual life as these are the domain of Wahhabi religious jurists who reject any heterodox formulation of religious or spiritual pasts/ futures. Rather, messianic politics takes the shape of technocapitalist forms of life. In October 2018, the crown prince opened a global investment conference in Riyadh – one could say the equivalent of today’s Vatican Councils – announcing that ‘only dreamers are welcome to join’. Beside the pr stunts that have characterised his tenure in power, mbs is advancing the equivalent of a messianic politics for the future of the kingdom. The most grandiloquent example capturing this approach is The Line, a new high-tech smart city 170 kilometres long and 200 metres wide that promises to host up to 9 million people in the middle of the desert. A self-described ‘civilizational revolution that puts humans first, providing an unprecedented urban living experience while preserving the surrounding nature’, mbs promises that ‘The Line will tackle the challenges facing humanity in urban life today and will shine a light on alternative ways to live. We cannot ignore the liveability and environmental crises facing our world’s

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cities.’27 Without entering into the merit of the project, it is the civilizational scope of the thought and the projection of a miraculous future that qualifies mbs ’s approach as a specific subgenre of the culture of the right. For a country that has built its wealth on hydrocarbons and that spends more than any other country on hyper-polluting military equipment, The Line represents a form of techno-futurist ideology where prosperity and life itself are privileges for a select minority who can afford to live in a utopian human satellite, whether on this planet or somewhere far in the universe. The requirement at the base of this vision is that the greatest part of humanity (the poor) will not be part of it. One consultant worker on the project described the work of The Line as ‘[s]eeing the dystopias of your own imagination being created’.28

C o n c e p t u a l is in g the People The second element that characterises the culture of the right is the concern over the definition of ‘people’ as essential to shaping the ­political and cultural life of a polity and nation. Defining who belongs to the people becomes a step towards drawing the contours of acceptable citizenship. Carl Schmitt, in his seminal contribution The Concept of the Political, reflected upon the relation between the historical appearance of the state and the determination of a specific entity as the people.29 This definition rests upon another elemental distinction which is central in the cultures of the right: who is an enemy and who is a friend.30 One of the slogans emerging, for instance, in Syria at the outset of the 2011 revolt was wahid, wahid, wahid, al-sha‘b al-suri wahid, i.e., ‘one, one, one, the Syrian people are one’. The implied message is that those in power are not the people and that those not aligning with the revolt are not Syrians. The converse message ran in governmental and pro-Assad propaganda, with the implication that protesters were manipulated by the enemy and not authentic. The distinction between enemy and friend is transposed from the realm of interstate or international conflicts to the domestic space. It becomes the principal definer of politics at home. When this happens, the enemy becomes domestic and foreign at the same time, and the conflict turns into a civil war in which the other is no longer considered a citizen but a ­traitor, a barbarian, a foreign-backed combatant, as we explored in chapter 2. The resolution of the conflict, therefore, terminates with

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the physical removal of the enemy from the land, either by elimination, displacement, or exile. The definition of who is the people occurs through a negative logic (saying who is not the people) and some positive steps (outlining what makes you worthy of being part of the people). The idea of the enemy as either a non-existent community/people as such or as a malicious people existing to undermine existing rightful communities is widespread in what defines the culture of the right. Prominent exponents of the culture of the right – regardless of their mundane affiliation with party politics, left or right – provide a clear-cut example of what we mean. For instance, American businessman Sheldon Adelson, a staunch supporter of Israel, referred to the Palestinian people as ‘an invented people’ created to destroy Israel as the Jewish state.31 In an interview with the newspaper Haaretz, one of Israel’s most prominent historians, Benny Morris, also known as a left-leaning ‘new historian’, argued that Israel was the avant-garde of Western civilisation against what he referred to as the barbarians, i.e. the Palestinians. To define who is the people, with a rightful claim to the land, Morris argued that Israel had only one option: the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the territories under Israeli control.32 Morris’s case is emblematic of the culture of the right: it is cultural baggage and an interpretative lens of mythological history that is not an exclusive feature of right-wing and reactionary forces. It is also deeply embedded in the left, historically and at present. Later in this section, we will discuss why and how the culture of the right is entrenched in modern thinking about the people and the state. Pharaonism, Phoenicianism, Aryanism, Zionism, and more recently Saudi and Yemeni nationalism rooted in the pre-Islamic era – shall we call it Jahilism? – have returned to the centre stage of political imagination and nation-making as we discuss below. The question of ‘who is the people?’ had its best-known precedent in European history when Jewish communities were progressively cast out of the nation-state as not part of the volk (German for ‘the people’). Contemporary Islamophobia is the new face of this phenomenon and, as with antisemitism in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, Islamophobia today maintains a legitimate place in most of the Western world. Mainstream political parties and leading politicians across Europe and North America – as well as Israel, India, and Myanmar – have not shied away from taking clearly Islamophobic positions. At times, adopting Islamophobia is a

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political expedient (if not a thoughtful conviction) which serves the purpose of gathering electoral support and governing legitimacy. The accusation against Muslims in the West ranges from their lack of integration and their sympathy for or support of terrorist organisations to the theorisation of a grand plan for taking control of Europe. The latter has become an influential idea known as the Great Replacement Theory (g r t ). Popularised by Gisèle Littman, aka Bat Ye’or (Hebrew for ‘daughter of the Nile’), the theory claims that Muslims and European political leaders are facilitating the arrival of large numbers of immigrants who will progressively take control of Europe and establish a continuum of Islamic rule over the land: Eurabia. Bat Ye’or complements her theory about the claim to the pursuit of geographical continuity and ethno-religious supremacy by Arabs/Muslims with another concept which has gained resonance in left/right political circles: dhimmitude. Dhimmitude is a concept that derives from the category of dhimmi as formulated in Islamic jurisprudence. The dhimmi indicates those non-Muslim religious groups living under a political authority qualified as Islamic. It is the jurisprudential guarantee of the protection of religious minorities (only those recognised, however, such as Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians, but not Baha’is) against persecution but also the reification of their inequal and disadvantaged status vis-à-vis Muslims. Dhimmitude in Ye’or’s formulation is a warning of the risk of reducing the self-­ proclaimed Judeo-Christian groups of Europe and the West to the status of dhimmis. Ye’or’s influence has been far-reaching to the point that white supremacists across the world refer to her works as a reference in their manifestos, on alt-right websites, and in other online venues of the right. But as Zia Ebrahimi points out, ‘what is far more alarming … is that Eurabia enjoys some academic support as well’. It is no surprise that this support is led by the person whom we referred to earlier as the medievalist-in-chief Bernard Lewis but also by Sir Martin Gilbert, an expert in Jewish history and member of the Chilcot Inquiry, which looked into the role of the UK in the Iraq War, and Niall Fergusson, British polemicist and historian.33 What is less known is that g r t and the portrayal of Muslim communities as encroaching upon local indigenous communities in the Middle East is an idea which has its origins not in Europe but in the Middle East itself. Ye’or’s theories on Eurabia and the great replacement theory and dhimmitude are repurposed from the work

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of other writers, though she can lay claim to bringing these ideas onto the global stage and, tragically, influencing those putting them into practice. Chloe Kattar, a historian of Lebanon, argues that the first enunciation of g r t and dhimmitude were formulated by Antoine Nejm, one of the leading intellectuals of the right in Lebanon and an ideologue of the Kataeb, the Lebanese Phalangists.34 In the context of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) and with the spectre of a Christian minority being ousted politically by the other religious groups, Nejm formulated the slogan lan na‘īsh dhimiyye, ‘we won’t live like dhimmi’.35 At the height of the civil war and a few months before the Israeli occupation of Beirut in 1982, Nejm said in a public speech, ‘We won’t run away, we won’t kneel down, and we won’t live as dhimmis in this region. We want to live free and, in [that] possibility, to reach what we want.’36 This idea of dhimmi was reiterated over the decades in internal debates as well as addressing foreign concerns for the place of Christians in the region. The idea of Maronite Christians being relegated to a protected minority in a Lebanon governed by Muslims applying shari’a law was anathema to Christian political forces. Their connections with European interlocutors and supporters proved to be key in translating and transposing local fears of Muslim conquests and trickery across the Mediterranean to Europe, where they were already present in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, when concerns over political Islam were bubbling in the wake of the Islamic revolution of Iran in 1979. The role of diasporas is central to the conveying of local anxieties in the Middle East to the global anxieties of the West. The Lebanese diaspora influenced European (mostly French) Islamophobia starting with the Lebanese civil war in 1975. Similarly, following the 1979 revolution, the Iranian diaspora in the United States contributed to the portrayal of Islam as threatening and barbaric. It has become a cliché to consider the early waves of Iranians who left for the United States as emblematic of right-wing monarchist and nationalist revivalists. From local neo-Achaemenid architecture to nostalgic icons of pre-revolutionary time, the Iranian American diaspora has been ­dominated by calls for salvation from barbaric Islamism. ‘Persian supremacists’ or ‘Aryan supremacists’ in Iran and among F ­ arsi-speaking Iranians in the US-based diaspora have often embraced anti-Islamic and anti-Arab rhetoric which is consonant to the one preached by Bat Ye’or. This attitude has a historical trajectory dating back to the Pahlavi-era nationalism built around an ancient Persian identity as

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opposed to the multi-ethnic, plurinational composition of Iran, past and modern. In its own way – as we discuss later – this attitude conflated the imagined ethnicity of past dynasties (therefore of the state) with that of the whole nation/people. In one explicit instance, in an article titled ‘The Islamisation of Europe’ on the website Parsi Khabar, a portal of information about Parsis and Zoroastrians, the author puts the plight of Zoroastrians under the emergent Islamic rule in the Iranian plateau in the following terms: Mary Boyce, Emeritus Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of London, has confirmed the external validity of Bat Ye’or’s analytical approach in her description of how jihad and dhimmitude (without the latter being specifically identified as such) transformed Zoroastrian society in an analogous ­manner … The Zoroastrians experienced an ongoing, ­inexorable decline over the next millennium due to constant sociopolitical and economic pressures exerted by their Muslim rulers, and neighbor. The author of the article moves on from applying Ye’or’s infamous theories on dhimmitude and g r t , turning to the historical portrayal of Zoroastrian everyday life during the early Islamic conquests and, peculiarly, Mary Boyce’s personal observations ‘living in the (central Iranian) Yezd [sic] area during the 1960s’: Either a few Moslems settled on the outskirts of a Zoroastrian village, or one or two Zoroastrian families adopted Islam. Once the dominant faith had made a breach, it pressed in remorselessly, like a rising tide. More Moslems came, and soon a small mosque was built, which attracted yet others. As long as Zoroastrians remained in the majority, their lives were tolerable; but once the Moslems became the more numerous, a petty but pervasive harassment was apt to develop. This was partly verbal, with taunts about fire-worship, and comments on how few Zoroastrians there were in the world, and how many Moslems, who must therefore possess the truth; and also on how many material advantages lay with Islam. The harassment was often also physical; boys fought, and gangs of youth waylaid and ­bullied individual Zoroastrians.37

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This type of historical claim applied to the understanding of politics in the present, with a gap of 1,300 years between the two, fuels undercurrent trends against Muslim communities worldwide. It also builds upon a certain cultural xenophobia which gained traction and become mainstream before the 1979 revolution in Iran. In fact, the Pahlavi monarchy (1925–79) made a point of defining Iranian identity as belonging exclusively and to a degree exceptional to the pre-Islamic Persians. This was in overt dissonance with the linguistic plurality and ethnic composition of the Iranian plateau and of Iranian forms of rule spanning more than a thousand years. The conflation of ‘Persian’ with ‘Iranian’ became a distinctive trait of the claims that the people of Iran were descendants of the Aryans – a trope that has lost its academic legitimacy but keeps returning in the popular imagination. Mohammad Reza Shah (1919–1980), while never publicly rejecting Shi’a Islam as his family faith, made ample use of Zoroastrian symbolism and ancient Persian mythological semantics to characterise his rule and dynasty. From 1965 to the end of his reign in 1979, the shah referred to himself as Aryamehr, a neologism coined by the Iranian intellectual Sadeq Rezazad Shafaq, meaning ‘light [or sun] of the Aryans’. The label, clothed in mythological language, had no precedent in the long ­2,500-year chain of monarchical rule of Iran. It adopted semantics that legitimised the shah as the heir of the ancient kingdom of the Persians and not as a dynastic ruler successive to the Safavid and Qajar dynasties, both of which were of Turkic ethnicity, which had acquired and contributed to the formation of modern Iranian civilisation and connoted a religious zeal for Shi’ism. This Aryan thought model dated back to the Qajar period ­(1789–1925). In 1969, the nationalist intellectual Mirza Farthali Akhunzadeh c­ onceptualised the mellat-e Iran (Iranian people) as the heirs to the ancient imperium of the Achaemenids and Sassanian dynasties. The concept of mellat was later transferred in a more direct fashion to mellat-e Arya in reference to the presumed non-Arab, non-Semitic nature of the Iranian nation. This ethno-cultural invention was a stratagem to show Iran’s place in global modernity. These theories were later sustained by the publications of other intellectuals, often living for spans of time in Mitteleuropa, as in the case of Hasan Taqizadeh. The Italian Orientalist Alessandro Bausani referred to this process as ‘Aryan and Neo-Achemenid nationalism’, which later became formalised with the Pahlavi dynasty. The event that celebrated this emerging ideology of the state and the idea of the people of Iran

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was the celebration of the 2,500th anniversary of monarchic rule in Iran. During the event, the shah hosted one of history’s largest and most blazoned gatherings of kings, queens, emperors, and political leaders with a performance of neo-Achaemenid rituals and fanfare. All came at a stellar cost. In his view – and that of the consultants organising the event – this was the occasion for his reign to be presented as the fulcrum of human civilisation rooted in Iran’s ancient pre-Islamic history. One can glimpse some parallelism between this mytho-futurist vision and the current techno-futurism of Saudi Arabia. This neo-Achaemenid vision acquired geopolitical prospects when Mohammed Reza Shah called for a ‘renascent Aryan brotherhood’ between Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Similarly, several political parties with minor presence in the Iranian parliament but with ground activists in universities and intellectual circles animated the cultural politics of the pre-revolutionary era: Hezb-e Kabud (aka Azure party) nicknamed Iran’s Nazi Party; Hezb-e Aria (Aria Party); Hezb-e Mellat-e Iran (Iranian Nation Party); and Hezb-e Pan-Iranist (PanIranian Party). In different ways and time periods, all these political groups espoused variations of the revivalist politics of Aryanism, either in dialogue with or autonomously from the German paradigm developed during the 1930s and 1940s. They were all strongly anti-communist and anti-Islam – often financed by the cia or the Iranian secret services, sa v a k  – and promoting the tenets of the culture of the right. One would expect this type of political culture to have mutated following the Islamist takeover of Iran’s polity after 1979. However, Islamist leaders have made use of a neo-Achaemenid vision of the past for the future of Iran. In 2019, a billboard next to a busy highway in Tehran made reference to Persian king Cyrus the Great: ‘The Iran of tomorrow, the continuation of Cyrus’s ideal: a territory protecting its “strategic depth”.’ More script added, ‘The Achaemenid Cyrus made a base for himself from Sindh and Sojun in the East to Gaza and Lebanon.’ The poster repurposed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s formulation of Iran’s geopolitical strategy in West and Central Asia, which in his view represented Iran’s strategic depth (‘omq-e rahbordi). In doing so, it also legitimised the twentieth-century ideological vision of right-wing movements such as the Pan-Iranist Party, an organisation that was banned in the Islamic Republic but which has been tolerated and has operated underground since the 1990s. The use of the past, even the distant and problematic past, as in the case of pre-Islamic dynasties, is an influential tool in the making of

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the state and the people in contemporary Iran. Ahmadinejad himself, despite his Shi’a messianism and profound devotion to the imams, planned the celebration of Cyrus and the pre-Islamic past on multiple occasions. He reintroduced the celebration of Cyrus’s so-called Human Rights Code (The Cyrus Cylinder, 539 b c ) during his presidency, repeating almost verbatim the slogans once pronounced by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi during similar occasions, including during the previously mentioned 2,500th celebration of the Persian empire. One of Ahmadinejad’s closest aides moved a step further, arguing that to uphold the ‘truth of Islam in the world, we have to raise the Iranian flag … without Iran, Islam would be lost. It’s time to introduce the world to the Iranian School [maktab-e Iran]’, hinting at the centrality of Iran’s ancient, more-than-semitic civilisation.38 This discussion of ethnic ancestralism or neo-ancestral politics could not be exhaustive without reference to the Egyptian case, especially following the coming to power of General al-Sisi. The Egyptian state under al-Sisi promoted a grandiose performance of its glorious past. This aimed at linking the legitimacy of the present, the new military order under s c a f and al-Sisi, to the historical rule of the pharaohs. The means of achieving this goal was almost entirely aesthetic. In one instance, during a televised programme of more than two hours that was aimed at an international and foreign audience (as evidenced in the use of English as the main descriptor), military honours were given to the pharaohs’ mummies when they were moved from their old (inadequate) dwelling in the National Museum of Cairo into the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation. The spectacle included little dialogue, except for a short commentary by presenters repeating lines about Egypt’s glorious ancient history. The remaining time concentrated on a display of choreography and military theatrics for the parade of the mummies, which included a gun salute. The historian Khaled Fahmy compared the ‘Pharaohs’ Golden Parade’ to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin as celebrated in Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia.39 Introducing Pharaonic Egypt as the symbolic origin of the modern Egyptian nation has the objective of bolstering nationalistic discourse as a counterweight to Islamist politics. This is not the first of such developments in Egypt’s modern history. In the 1920s, Egyptian nationalists embraced Pharaonism, which claimed that Egypt was a distinctive territorial entity, separate from the rest of the Arab and Islamic world.40 Al-Sisi ordered a Pharaonic obelisk to be erected in Tahrir Square on the spot where the 2011 revolution started. The

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semiotics of this decision are clear: the coming to power of the army is the path to Egypt’s renewal of its ancient glory. This has gone hand in hand with the declassing of Islamic architecture and buildings across Cairo, for instance in the City of the Dead (al-Qarafa) where a bridge was built on the site of historic Mameluke mosques.41 The redefinition of who is the people serves as a tool to cast out forms of cultural identity and political ideology that do not fit with the culture of the right, as it is the case with al-Sisi casting out political Islam. But perhaps the most surprising neo-ancestral turn in the region is embodied by Saudi Arabia’s reinvention of the pre-Islamic past under Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. Since his ascension to power in 2017, mbs has invested in the ancient archaeological sites of Madain Saleh and Al-Ula, icons of the pre-Islamic period. Prior to this turn, the Wahhabi clergy prevented any serious work on these archaeological sites, which were neglected and left out of the national imaginary in favour of the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina as definers of the Saudi Kingdom’s historical legitimacy and cultural identity. The new identitarian push for a Saudi nationalism – or what some have dubbed hyper-nationalism – shifts towards the Najd as the core mythological and cultural grounds for the Saudi state. This is in line with the secular process of the formation of modern Saudi Arabia, which occurred following the unification of – or actual takeover by – the Najdi dynasty of the Al Saud on Hijaz. The exclusion from imaginal nationhood of the Hijazi comes along with that of the Shi’a Qatifi tribes from eastern Arabia and the Yemenis along the southern belt. Indeed, the culture of the right is exclusionary in defining who the people is. In dehumanising the Other,42 it invites a gregarious and collective sentiment among those who are part of the people, softening social, economic, and political differences within the nation. Class conflict is refuted as insidious to the homeland, social and political differences are downplayed in favour of unity and respect for status quo hierarchies, which are legitimised as out-of-time or natural.

S t a t o l a t r y : L o v e and Desi re f o r t h e S t ate The combination of politicising myths and the narrow definition of who is ‘the people’ brings about the distinctive feature of the culture of the right. This is a form of sacralisation of the state or statolatry. It is an ideological as much as practical form of conceiving politics,

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which leaves little or no space for the category of ‘people’ understood in its open-ended form. It is the prelude to the emergent form of polity we refer to as states without people. So, what is statolatry? Statolatry is a concept that was first enunciated in fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile’s manifesto Dottrina del Fascismo (Doctrine of Fascism, published in 1931). The book initially came out under Benito Mussolini’s name, and it discussed the concept of statolatry as a cornerstone of fascist ideology. The word is a neologism made of two parts: stato = state and latria (or latreia) from the Latin, which is a suffix used in Christian theology (not Protestant) to signify ‘adoration’, ‘adulation’ in an intimate and often sacrificial manifestation of worship of the Holy Trinity.43 Mussolini (and Gentile) conceived it as a positive and vanguardist sentiment required to advance the nation’s place in history. In that text, they wrote, ‘Antiindividualistic, it is the fascist conception of the State [sic]; and the same applies to the individual as this latter coincides with the State, universal consciousness and will for humans in their historical existence … It is not the nation that generates the State … Instead, the nation is created by the State, which gives to the people, conscious of its moral unity, a will, and hence a real existence.’44 This conception of the state is a powerful undercurrent of the culture of the right, including contexts that have had no direct relation to fascist history. An equivalent term for statolatry in Arabic is haybat al-dawla. Mona El-Ghobayshi translates it as ‘state prestige’ in her cutting-edge book Bread and Freedom. The expression first emerged in the context of the Algerian civil war when in 1993 the Algerian military-installed president Ali Kafi said in a meeting, ‘We are in no need of elections that sweep away the state, we will not sacrifice Algeria for the sake of democracy. We must recover the prestige of the state and re-establish its foundations’.45 Similarly in Egypt, haybat al-dawla was summoned in justifying the military coup against Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Muhammad Morsi. An Egyptian pro-government commentator put it in words that are not distant from Mussolini’s original rhetoric: ‘[T]he people must have access to the majesty of the state, their hearts filled with its love and sublimity’.46 Haybat al-dawla was a political and cognitive expedient utilised in the context of the civil war in response to the defeat of popular revolt (which we discussed in chapter 1) and to identify the enemy (as we explored in chapter 2). As a historical concept, statolatry was brought to public fruition amidst and in the wake of political violence led by

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Mussolini and referred to as ‘the fascist revolution’, the militarist takeover of the Italian state and the institutionalisation of a de facto one-party rule under a new cultural dogma. Yet, statolatry should not be confounded with raison d’etat or state security, though obviously the latter are part of the way statolatry is put into practice (see chapter 4). What differentiates statolatry is the claim over unity between the state and the people, a unity that serves higher goals in historymaking as a moral accomplishment. Wael Hallaq reflects upon the ‘readiness of self-sacrifice’ as the constituent rule for the affiliation to the state,47 something that we would see akin to a desire for the state, for one becomes part of the state only through sacrifice, through the bodily transition into state martyr. Another emblematic example of how state-making is also about making the people is provided by the Zionist movement. The founder of the state of Israel, David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), claimed that it was only through the creation of the Jewish state, and hence through the negation of exile for the diasporic Jews, that it was possible to conceive of a ‘Jewish history’ because ‘a history of a people is only that which the people create as one whole, as a national unit, and not what happens to individuals or groups within the people. We have been extricated from world history, which consists in the annals of peoples.’48 Ben-Gurion and other intellectual supporters of Zionism echo this idea: the state creates the nation rather than the other way around. For instance, Avraham Gabriel Yehoshua, one of Israel’s foremost novelists and part of the country’s leftist intelligentsia, wrote in a letter to a fellow novelist, the Palestinian Israeli Anton Shammas: ‘For me, “Israeli” is the authentic, complete, and consummate word for the concept of “Jewish”. Israeliness is the total, perfect, and original Judaism, one that would provide answers in all areas of life.’49 The Israeli state is the true means through which Jewish identity becomes part of history or, to use the semantics of the culture of the right, history. If Ben-Gurion’s concern was to make Jewish people part of world history through the creation of a state, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–1989), the founder of the Islamic Republic in 1979, thought of the state as being ‘the most important of God’s ordinances [with] precedence over all other derived ordinances of God’.50 In a letter to his then president of the republic Ali Khamenei, dated in the year 1988, Khomenei claimed that the state, the Islamic state, was the highest of all values and precepts and had precedence over religious

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jurisprudence. Implicit – but obvious – in this claim is the sanctity of the state as the accomplishment of a higher divine will and the accomplishment of the secular, centuries-old quest to materialise the divine republic on earth. In times of crises, influential clerics and politicians have underlined the absolute sanctity of the Islamic Republic as a nezam (a political order) that cannot be brought down through the will of the people. In autumn 2022, with thousands of protesters calling for the fall of the Islamic nezam, Iranian member of parliament Hosseini Jalali addressed Iran’s secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (s ns c ), saying that ‘the preservation of the nezam is more important than the most important issue [awjab al-vajiavat], it even precedes the preservation of the life of the Imam of Time [i.e., the twelfth imam, al-Mahdi, emam-e zaman]’. In other words, the state is above all sacraments and any sacrality can be sacrificed in its defence. The parallelism, despite semantic differences, is striking when considering Ben-Gurion’s representation of the Israeli state as the historical destiny of Judaism. The latest claims to divine statehood come from the Islamic State. Its emphasis on statehood and the divine role of the state in the ideological output of the Islamic State is evidenced by the call to join the dawla (the state) as an individual and collective duty upon Muslim believers. The calls for hijra, immigration to the Islamic State territories, or the end of the hijra, understood as the end of the diasporic conditions of Muslims in the West, have been at the centre of i s i s strategy to bolster its demographic statehood. On 1 July 2014, Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri (or al-Samarrai), known to the world as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, issued the ‘Message to the Islamic Umma’ which included an incitement to immigrate to the Islamic State, to the land of the Caliphate.51 Later, in a video released by isis propaganda outlet Dabiq and titled ‘The Birthed Nation’, the group refers to life in dawla as the essence of being a Muslim, the accomplishment of the true faith. The recurring reference to life in a state as polity and divine mandate again implicates a sacrality of the space of the state, which one is forbidden to alter. In other words, the Islamic State’s claim to statehood is a statement of how the creation of the Islamic State is giving birth to a nation, the nation of Muslims.52 The nation was given statehood legitimacy in view of its propagators when, in a fifteenminute video statement named kasr al-hudūd (shattering the borders), isis partisans bulldozed the sand wall between Syria and Iraq, materialising the continuity of the Muslim nation they claimed to represent.

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By the end of 2014, it was reported that about 30,000 militants had reached the two epicentres of isis as a polity, in Raqqa and Mosul.53 This escalation between the state and its divine mission follows Carl Schmitt’s intuition that ‘[t]he juridic formulas of the omnipotence of the state are, in fact, only superficial secularizations of the theological formulas of the omnipotence of God’.54 A fact that may appear blatant when thinking of cases such as the Jewish state or the Islamic Republic, the theological foundation of the modern nation-state is visible in distinctive terms across the world – and it has been the object of numerous investigations over the past two decades.55 Take the example of the United Kingdom where the monarch is crowned also as ‘defender of the faith’ – a label that is a good translation for amīr al-mu’minīn (‘commander of the believers’), a title used in the Islamic world for the king of Morocco and the late Mulla Omar of Afghanistan, and in Iran, for the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who is the political heir of the Shi’a juridical leadership through Imam ‘Ali Ibn Abi Taleb (599–623), himself known as amīr al-mu’minīn.56 The sacralisation of the state is the essence of statolatry and haybat al-dawla.57 Restoration of it is a political as much as a moral duty upon those pledging to preserve state prestige. For instance, in February 2020 the Egyptian president al-Sisi held a state funeral with full military regalia for ousted president Hosni Mubarak (1928–2020). This is in spite of Mubarak having been charged with multiple crimes during the short-lived revolutionary situation following 2011, with accusations including corruption and the mass slaughter of protesters. Restoring the fallen statesman’s image was an act done out of respect for the sacred being of the state. El-Ghobashy punctuates this aspect by referring to Mubarak’s funeral scene, busy with former regime officials and current military representatives, with the following words: ‘it was an interrupted line of state prestige’58 or statolatry.

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4 Partisans of the State: Statopraxis

War remains bracketed, and the partisan stands outside of this bracketing. Carl Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan

In the second part of our analysis of the culture of the right, we focus on the empirical elements that stand below the statolatry upon which the culture of the right bases it claims. We refer to this as statopraxis. Statopraxis, in our view, captures the biunivocal condition of politics after the defeat of popular revolts: it refers to the way the state moulds political culture through mythological claims and war-making ideology, either directly or through co-option of figures of public authority, and, in parallel, it refers to the way societal agents and ordinary people take up the role to enforce statist goals, autonomously from the state. The latter has its strongest expression in what we discuss as grassroots authoritarianism. As we have seen, the culture of the right is distinct from the ideas adopted by right-wing political parties. As a specific form of political culture emerging with the establishment of the modern nation-state, the culture of the right impregnates left and right, secular as well as religious groups (Islamic, Christian, Jewish, or other persuasions). In the first section, we analysed the ideological and discursive elements that characterise it, such as its relation to the past and future, the conception of the people, and the sacralisation of the state. In the next section, we discuss the empirical elements that enable a display of the culture of the right in the organisation and formation of the social order: militarism, the cult of the strongman, and grassroots authoritarianism, including in the digital sphere.

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T h e C u l t u r e o f Mi li tari sm The cogito ergo sum of the state is, according to Carl Schmitt, protego ergo sum: ‘I protect therefore I am’.1 This protection is metaphorical, as in the case of the prestige of the state which we discussed in chapter 3, and physical, when it comes to the borders, territorial integrity (chapters 5 and 6), and leadership of the nation-state. It refers to the territorial borders against invading neighbours or foreigners such as migrants and refugees, the integrity and security of the polity against infiltrating forces, and the moral prestige of the state’s institutional legitimacy and lineage and its mythological history. Besides the need for persuasive force, protecting the state as a divine entity or a God-given promise requires hard power. The military is the institution that best serves this purpose. Built upon hierarchical organisation and (blind) obedience to rules, the building blocks of military culture are also central features of the culture of the right. One could think there is a degree of mutuality and transition between them. Indeed, the historical assonance between the military and the right is enshrined in the history of nationalism across the world; it is visible also in the sociological formation of groups enlisting in rightwing movements. This is not only buttressed by what has come to be the commonality of intents between right-wing groups and the military but it is also mutually reinforced by their shared public ethics: a ­deferential attitude towards leadership; the belief that the army is the highest embodiment of state and nation; the positioning of the military as above the realm of politics (as metapolitical); but also, in times of crisis or legitimacy challenges, the army as arbitrator between conflicting parties and as avant-garde in the movement towards the future. Ultimately, this means that the army is the untouchable institution of the state. Consider global royalties dressing in military regalia as legitimising the code for statehood or the role of army generals in claiming the role of saviour of the state/nation. Modern history abounds with a deferential attitude to men-at-arms. In the Middle East, all the republics have been governed by generals for the best part of their recent history, except for Lebanon, Tunisia, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Algeria’s post-liberation Revolutionary Council was made up of members of the army and most of its presidents were army generals (Houari Boumédiène, Chadli Bendjedid, Liamine Zéroual, but not Abdelaziz Bouteflika); similar examples appear in Libya (Mu’ammar Ghaddafi), Egypt (Jamal ‘Abdel Nasser, Anwar

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Sadat, Hosni Mubarak, Abdelfatah al-Sisi), Syria (Hafez al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad), and Yemen (Ibrahim al-Hamdi, Ali Abdullah Saleh). Iraq has been the exception as Saddam Hussein never served in the Iraqi army, though he took the title of army general through his position in the Ba’ath Party. Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf do not adopt military regalia in public because the role of armed forces has for many years been outsourced or marginal, but there is ample evidence that the wars in Yemen and Syria have put the question of military experience at the core of state-making, a fact further buttressed by the stellar import of armaments among the Gulf monarchies. Israel, despite its claim to a democratic superiority, has been ruled for long stretches of its short history by former high-ranking military men: Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Benny Gantz, to name the most prominent. With the exception of Golda Meir and Menachem Begin, all prime ministers of Israel have had an active role in the army or Mossad – Israel’s intelligence service – even though only some of them reached the rank of general (e.g., Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak, Benny Gantz).2 Though Israel’s civilian government has putative control over the army, the military complex and its leadership is closely integrated in matters of domestic (occupation) and foreign politics. The sliding door between public office and military training grounds oils the wheels of this cooperative machine. Not coincidentally, Israel can be described as an army with a state. Across the region, militarism is a visible feature and mutates according to the political circumstances, the need to display the force of public authority and restrain opposition, and the individual persuasions of the people in power. Yet, militarism remains alive and thrives as a cultural component of politics as long as it is not overtly contested.3 Nowhere more than in Egypt under president al-Sisi does this deferential attitude towards the military take centre stage. With the counterrevolution that toppled Morsi in 2013, the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces (scaf) became the upholder of national sovereignty and the personification of the state. Militarism became a principal expression of this transformation in the political and social order of Egypt. On 25 January 2014, Tahrir Square in Cairo hosted celebrations for the anniversary of the revolution that had ousted Mubarak in 2011. Policing restricted access to the square to al-Sisi supporters only, many wearing masks of the general’s face or bringing in banners with his portrait. A stage blasted a song dedicated to the

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armed forces, ‘Bless your hands [Teslam al-ayyadi]’, with the refrain ‘may the military of my country be safe’. Written by Mostafa Kamel, it is a nine-minute multi-singer piece which was widely played following the coup of 3 July 2013 as a tribute to the army.4 Through this public display of loyalty and reverence, together with the excessive use of violence against dissenters, s c a f ’s position in Egypt’s postMubarak politics shifted in paradoxical ways. First, s caf declared itself guardian of the people’s revolution in 2011; then, it came upfront as guardian of the state against incompetent and conspiratorial Islamists; finally, it embraced ‘the revolution of the army and the people’ as the glorification of the state and the Egyptian nation. Through constitutional revisions, the army was placed beyond the reach of any legal and formal control, from all entities outside of itself. As an entity, the army was the state and, at the same time, it was beyond the state, a move that defies traditional state theory. Instead, this repositioning of the army recalls the notion of the ‘party’ as vanguard of the nation, the organisation in charge of the state in pre-1990s communist political orders. Practically, the change in the military oath exemplified this new status of the military. Prior to 2014, the customary oath was to the president of the republic. After a change in the text, the new oath was only to the military leadership, meaning the generals and the army command itself. Another interesting, though so far overlooked, example is that of the United Arab Emirates. Since the outbreak of the Arab Spring, the uae has entered a more vigorous phase of nation-making, one that is rooted in its role in military adventures and diplomacy across the region and beyond. In particular, the war on Yemen has been the ground for this new process of militarism. There, Emirati military personnel directly engaged in war operations, in some instances suffering casualties. In this context, the state declared its first martyrs, not in the name of religion or independence, but in the name of the state military. This shift did not simply represent a discursive transformation within Emirati politics, but it had sociological and cultural implications too. The dead soldiers of Emirati adventurism in Yemen belonged to poorer families, mostly from the Emirate of Fujairah, the poorest of the uae’s seven Emirates, though the one with the largest national population. Royals from Dubai and Abu Dhabi paid tribute to them by staging visits to these areas in a push to show unity in diversity.

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Similar tributes have also become common in settings where the display of support for the political order or for the leading ideology had less explicit ties with the armed forces or militarism in general. Following the assassination of the i r g c Qods Forces commander Qasem Soleimani (1957–2020), the i rg c media bureau released a poster portraying the martyred general in military clothes in front of a crowd representing the youthful Iranian nation. This was one of many well-crafted public displays of political art that the bureau had completed over the past decade. The message was clearly expressed in militarist terms: all Iranians, and the youth especially, were executing a military salute behind the late general’s shoulder, a setting that resembled that of a Friday prayer, but in this case, there was no prayer involved. The message above the image read, ‘All forward with one voice my life sacrificed for Iran. Long life to our dear Iran.’ More surprisingly, not a single cleric was portrayed in the poster. Qasem Soleimani’s funeral, which took place in dozens of cities across Iraq and Iran, from Karbala to his hometown Kerman, was the largest state funeral held in Iran after the million-strong funeral of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. A military man, with no religious credentials or aspirations (contrary to other lay politicians), Soleimani represented the heart and mind of Iranian resistance against US imperialism, the spirit of nationalism, and at the same time the way militarism became entrenched in the public culture of the day. This political culture does not express itself consciously and people who take part in the mourning ceremonies may well come from sections of the population that are at odds with the political doctrine of the Islamic Republic or with the role of the revolutionary guardsmen in politics. Yet, it is through these moments of affect that the culture of the right becomes rooted in the metaphors and narratives of blood and soil. Mahmud Dowlatabadi (b. 1940), one of the leading Iranian writers of his era and a critic of the Islamic Republic since the early days, wrote a short epigraph in a national newspaper, titled ‘The worthy son of Iran’. In the short excerpt he wondered whether it was the destiny of every Iranian child of worth to be destroyed. He also eulogised the general for ‘creating a dam against the bloodthirsty Daesh … and protecting our borders from them’. The novelist was subsequently criticised by diaspora opposition members, but his words did not fail to capture the emotions of the millions who took to the street to commemorate Soleimani, including people who had little sympathy or support for the Iranian political

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order. Others followed suit, like the exiled Ardeshir Zahedi, son-in-law of Mohammad Reza Shah and former Iranian foreign minister and ambassador to the United States and United Kingdom from the 1960s. Zahedi, a loathed figure in post-revolutionary state depiction, referred to Soleimani as an ‘honorable and patriotic soldier of the homeland’.5 The same occurred among long-standing religious dissidents living in exile, Abdol-Karim Sorush and Mohsen Kadivar. A specific aspect within nationalist culture, militarism comes to prominence in moments of internal destabilisation, where civilian groups fail to form a solid political agreement over governance. In autumn 2022, Iran was rocked by the most widespread and confrontational wave of protests since the revolutionary years of 1978–79. Universities, schools, factories, workplaces, and the streets became avenues of dissent, and the display of anger towards the Islamic Republic by women and men in their twenties or younger was unprecedented. Pro-government groups staged counterdemonstrations, usually showing a consistent level of organised choreography, made of identical banners, national flags, and the leader’s picture. A distinctive performance during this wave of protests, however, was the result of the rise of the culture of militarism – and more broadly pro-security culture – espoused by demonstrators filling the streets in support of the Islamic Republic. People would bow and express their gratitude to the law enforcement and anti-riot police who were in attendance at the protests by attempting to kiss the policemen’s hands, by holding their hands on their hearts in a traditional gesture of respect, or by kissing the men on their shoulders as a sign of brotherly love and respect. Members of the Majles, Iran’s parliament, chanted slogans in support of the police and security forces during parliamentary sessions. These exposures are meant to highlight the difference between the disciplined, law-abiding, moral citizens who are pro-government and the vulgar, immoral, and law-breaking protesters, who confront the police – and for whom the police act as a repressive machinery. Connecting this with our previous discussion of militarism as enabling a culture of strongmen shows how this process in political culture has a deep gendered effect. The third case we aim to analyse is that of militarism in Israel. Since its foundation, the Israeli Defence Force (i d f ) has had a central role in the cultural and social life of Israelis. Haim Breshcht, in his book An Army Like No Other, describes the i d f as the real historical creator of the nation and of the Jewish state. To give an idea of how

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far militaristic culture has gone in Israel he mentions an advertisement by a maternity hospital in Tel Aviv in the newspaper Makor Rishon. The advertisement portrays a foetus mobilised in Israeli military gear, reading ‘Recipient of the Presidential Award of Excellence, 2038’.6 This type of public appeal to be part of an occupying military before the age of consciousness, or before being in the world, is further ­bolstered by early training and teaching in the use of weapons in adolescent and pre-adolescent school years. Pride in the military industry tested on the civilian Palestinian population on a regular basis is a signpost of the rootedness of the culture of the right through the enchantment of arms. Militarism becomes the way one becomes a citizen, where in the specific case of Israel, refusing military conscription means losing civil rights and being cast out. Those who do accept to serve in the army do so for the best part of their lives, active until the age of fifty-five as reservists with yearly calls of duty in boot camps. The army becomes the main social club for the (Jewish and Zionist) citizenry.7 This trend entered a more muscular stage following the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023, which triggered a full militarisation of Israeli society with no end in sight. That said, the roots of Israeli militarism are intertwined with the settler conquest and expulsion of the indigenous population of Mandatory Palestine. In the Zionist ideology, the army comes to perform a mythological, biblical agency actualising the word of the Bible. Ben-Gurion internalised the biblical trope and transposed it into military operations throughout the land, thus seeing the i d f as operating in the light of a historical revanchism. In Return to Zionism, Gabriel Piterberg reports the following statement from the first Israeli president: ‘None of the Bible interpreters, Jews or Gentiles, in the middle ages or in our time, could have interpreted Joshua’s chapters as did the adventures of the Israel Defense Forces last year [1948].’8 The army comes to occupy an existential, sociological, and ethical dimension of being an Israeli citizen, which also means that militarism turns into a mundane, internalised dimension of life. Some Israeli officials do not shy away from describing Israel as a modern Sparta,9 a fact that reached an apotheosis with former prime minister Naftali Bennett’s posting the following on X/Twitter: Israel needs now to live as a Silicon Valley in Sparta. Part of Israel’s colossal failure of October 7th was a result of ­complacency … We got soft … We forgot that we’re surrounded

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by the craziest terror savages on earth: Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hizbullah and isis … Imagine San Jose neighboring Kabul. October 7th is as if savages with machetes tore down the screens of The Truman Show and we saw the barbarism hiding behind those tenuous facades. We realized that our neighbors aren’t Belgium, Canada or Vermont. We were cruelly reminded that Israel’s existence depends on our being constantly alert, vigilant, strong and very very tough. At the same time, we must continue to be the StartUp Nation: innovative, technology savvy, agile and connected to the latest and best stuff going on. It’s a challenge no other nation faces: To be a Silicon Valley in Sparta.10 The army in the contemporary Middle East is less concerned with defence of the homeland from invading armies than with targeting the unwanted Other in the form of refugees, migrants, non-citizens, and opposition groups. In this shift, the army has more overtly embraced the tenets of the global culture of the right with its obsession with heterodox insiders, refugee flows, and the protection of the nation’s cultural legacy.

S t r o n g w o / m e n Culture An offshoot, integral part of militarism – and a core constituent of the culture of the right – is the cult of strongmen. This has variations across the region. Local cultural environments and gender codes as well as historical trajectories of state–society relations influence the making of ‘strongmen culture’. Overall, however, the culture of the right is enamoured with the idea of the strongmen and the gendered representation of active bodies. This is nothing new when we compare it to the cult of the body during the early twentieth-century nationalist movements across Europe (and equally, for instance, in India and Japan). Placing hope for national renewal and political change on a single man, a leader, or on a group of strongmen was a sentiment that many embraced at the time of high nationalism and state formation. For instance, many (but by no means all) Italian Jews supported the fascist militias and the leadership of Benito Mussolini in the 1920s up until the promulgation of racial laws in Italy. While most Jews in Germany were suspicious of and antagonistic toward the rise of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism from the early days, the fascist movement in Italy enjoyed open and strong support from the Jewish

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community. Among the most renowned cases was that of Ettore Ovazza (1892–1943), a banker and public intellectual from a prominent Jewish family in Turin. Ovazza joined the black shirts (camice nere) participating in the 1922 March on Rome, the coup d’etat led by armed protesters in favour of Mussolini.11 He was also among the founders of the journal La Nostra Bandiera (Our Flag) which had the explicit objective of persuading the Jewish community of Italy to join the fascist movement. In his book Diary for My Son, published in 1928, Ovazza confesses: Sometime, in the turbulent turning of centuries, a man is born who can proclaim himself shepherd of peoples, and this man is adulated and deified. Thus Moses was born, who gave the world the concept of the one God and the fundamental tables of civil life, thus Jesus of Nazareth was born, who while facing the ­interested deviations of the doctrine and the iniquities of the times launches the cry for liberation and the comeback for all those persecuted and he starts the greatest Revolution in history. Thus were born Mohammad [Maometto] and Gothamo Budda [sic] … Beside these great figures who belong to all the peoples and to the history of humankind, there are great figures in the history of different nations … To the prophets and the authors of our Risorgimento [Italy’s national unification process in the ­nineteenth century], the world war has added a rank of new ­fulgurant heroes, and has above all exalted two great spirits: Gabriele D’Annunzio and Benito Mussolini.12 In conflating the assonances between the ‘sister religions’ of Judaism and Christianity, Ovazza was effectively embracing another religious sentiment, much less ancient and juridical, centred around new military men and their wartime experiences.13 He was celebrating the irredentist calls of Mussolini and the poet-in-arms figure of Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), an early enthusiast of the fascist movement and a frontier fighter for Italy’s military expansion in Istria, where he established the short-lived Italian Regency of Carnaro (aka Impresa di Fiume [the Endeavour of Fiume], 1919–1920).14 Ovazza and his Jewish camerati were not alone in their embrace of the strongman cult. Across the border, Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), the founder of modern political Zionism, wrote in his personal diaries about his desire to abandon the image of what he described as the weak Jewish

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manhood characterising his co-religionaries living in Europe. His ideal of man was to be a Prussian Junker, a knight in arms and noble, the essence of Mitteleuropa macho imagination. It does not come as a surprise when we learn that Herzel completed the writing of his magnum opus Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) while listening to the symphonies of the German composer Richard Wagner. Wagner, it should be remembered, was the author of the antisemitic pamphlet Judaism in Music, where he argued that Jews could not be part of the German spirit because their artwork was only aimed at financial gain rather than for the purpose of meaning and beauty.15 It was the German composer, after all, that ‘loomed largest in his attempt to construct a new mythos for human being’.16 The influence of muscular politics in Israel has its roots in the vision of Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky (1880–1940), who elaborated his ideas in the early 1900s while living (and studying) in Italy. He conceived of it as creating the opposite to the image of the Hebrew man in popular imagination. Ipcha mistrava, ‘deriving a result from its opposite’, was the Aramaic concept he used to call for this revitalisation of Jewish culture: Because the yid [the Jew, pejoratively] is ugly, sickly, and lacks handsomeness, we shall endow the ideal image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty, stature, massive shoulders, vigorous movements, bright colors and shades of colour … The yid has accepted submission; the Hebrew ought to know how to ­command … the Hebrew, with brazenness and greatness, should march ahead to the entire world, look them straight and deep in their eyes and hoist them his banner: ‘I am a Hebrew!’17 Jabotinsky’s influence over the making of modern Israel is profound and long-lasting, embraced by all political movements across the Zionist spectrum. He had a foundational role in the establishment of the Jewish Self-Defence Organisation in Odessa and the necessity of Jewish militias in Russia amidst the escalating violence of the pogroms and later applied in support of the Zionist project in Palestine. The pursuit of creating a modern Hebrew man (and indeed woman) as a citizen-inarms, with defensive and offensive capabilities, is today a distinctive trait of the modern Israeli vision of society. A warrior ethos is what stands before the culture of the right, which is embodied by the idf as a culturally and logistically central maker of the Hebrew citizen. We

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shall look at some of the features of strongman culture in the next pages. But before then, let us take a look at examples from the region.18 Though not as engrained, there are other countries where the ethics of strongmen bears significant societal influence. Egypt is one such case, especially following the counterrevolution led by al-Sisi. The formerly little-known general sitting on the board of s c a f had activated a country-wide campaign rebranding his image as a saviour of the nation (and of the state), a plebian and transcendent figure with all the features of a military genius, a political statesman, and an ethical guide. Nothing comparable had existed at least since the Nasserist era. The propagation of the al-Sisi cult has moved hand in hand with the idea that the Egyptian people cannot be governed by less than an overwhelming and dictatorial authority. This idea transpired from al-Sisi himself, and repeatedly from pro-governmental voices, when amidst the depreciation of the Egyptian pound in 2024, al-Sisi said, ‘We are not a real country … It’s something that looks like one.’19 It is hard not to see the parallelism between this sentiment and the sentence attributed to Mussolini: governing Italians is not difficult, it is pointless. It rests upon the self-Orientalising mindset that wants so-called disorderly and reluctant-to-be-legible societies to be put in order by the iron fist of the strongman, often the military – or policeman. Rational force for irrational people. It doesn’t fall far from the representation of internal enemies of the state, such as ethnic, religious, or cultural minorities, unorthodox groups, as unfit for modern governance. The body as a display of one’s worth is a powerful element of the culture of the right. The rise of body-building culture, of intensive aim-oriented (muscle-oriented) gym training, and their reproduction and lifeworld through the internet is a distinctive phenomenon of a new aesthetic only apparently unpolitical. The cult of the body has ancient roots, but its modern manifestation overlaps and, in fact, intermingles with the rise of the nation-state and of nationalist movements, including grassroots movements. Jabotinsky’s call for a ‘broad-shouldered Hebrew man’ resonates with the long tide of muscular politics and show of strength as a central piecework of the culture of the right. The grassroots expression of this phenomenon is a topic beyond the scope of our work and more a potential subject of anthropological investigations. But reflecting on the state-led manifestations of bodily culture allows entry to the culture of the right. One of the most spectacular, almost caricatural, displays of bodily ideology occurred in post-coup Egypt under al-Sisi. It concerned the

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public broadcast of a police parade in October 2020. In a long queue, with trucks, vans, cars, and anti-riot fortified vehicles, 1,500 young men with sculpted oiled bodies, shirtless and with unworkably tight pants, performed acrobatic movements punctuated by muscular poses displaying their well-cured bodily infrastructure in the Cairo Stadium.20 The parade mirrored the aesthetic athleticism of gay pride parades, without the unbridled joy and challenges to normative sexuality. (Readers of this section may see these comments as disguising the authors’ guilty envy for better working bodies; we admit that any such sentiment, if it is there, is unconscious and unwanted. Meanwhile Cairo security forces were arresting lgbtq+ activists and subjecting non-conforming people to humiliating violence.) This celebration of the body ties in with the politics of nationmaking. It is the public sign of a focus on the body as opposed to a focus on the spirit and the mind, on the dangerous intellect. Without naming it, a glorification of the body in Egypt is therefore a critique of the religious opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood, and of the leftleaning intelligentsia which is erudite (and with less athleticism), connected to global networks of expertise and social activism. The body is the means to defend the nation against the threat of others and the threat of itself, of dwelling upon unnecessary thoughts of critique. During his meeting with Arab ministers of youth and sports in Cairo in 2022, al-Sisi remarked that it is vital to encourage Arab youth to focus their energies on healthy lifestyle practices, such as physical activity and sports, rather than on pondering for too long ‘radical ideologies’.21 There is a historical link between reclaiming the body and the rise of the culture of the right. In the early twentieth century, Christian and Jewish groups organised forms of muscular activism with the aim of training new active and self-defending bodies. The muscular body and the rejuvenation of the ancient mythological past had a strong nexus and has been a strong trope in the culture of the right. A casebook for this philosophy of masculinity is the worldview of Theodor Herzl, who crafted his political vision of Zionism upon a ‘distaste for the Jews’ as weak and victimised bodies with an inferior sexuality when compared to the white race.22 For instance, Herzl was a member of Albia, an ultranationalist German fraternity dedicated to the art of duelling. Once expelled following Albia’s growing antisemitism, he started conceiving of the mythological past of the land of Israel as a vision of noble, Junker-like politics and of Palestine not portrayed as

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the promised land but as ‘Phallustine’, the place where the Jews could recover their masculine sexual force.23 The sensualisation of bodies in the lifeworld of war and repression goes hand in hand with another use of sex and sexuality in Israel’s strategy. The most evident case was revealed in spring 2023 when a Palestinian man from Nablus assassinated one of the leaders of an emerging Palestinian insurgent group known as ‘Lions’ Den’, after having been blackmailed because of his sexual orientation. The man, tricked into having sex with an Israeli man who later revealed himself to be a gay i df soldier, was blackmailed into acting as an informant and eventually into carrying out the assassination of a Palestinian militant. The idf’s 8200 unit is known to be ‘gay-friendly’, a category promoted by the idf itself in its social media outreach, often accused of pink-washing. It is also known that gay Israeli soldiers have been used in operations to blackmail Palestinians with a homosexual ­orientation and oblige them to act as informants out of fear of being exposed to their communities’ judgement. What emerges here is the apparently non-problematic exploitation of love and desire for the ­benefit of the state, even when it comes out of an exploitation of the patriarchal environment in which many Palestinians live. This masculine (macho) concern has evolved since the establishment of Israel. No longer concerned with reproducing old masculinist tropes, the idf has been at the forefront of promoting a transversal cult of physicality, gender friendly, and capturing the imagination of those who would not usually be persuaded by militaristic models of the body. This has occurred especially through the portrayal of female participation in the army with an emphasis on the sensualisation of the body in military clothes and, on the other hand, on the marketisation of idf-conceived martial arts such as Krav Maga in Europe and North America, progressively globalised also through film and series production as exemplified in Fauda. The first element, sensualisation, applies to female bodies. It features amply on social media, especially Instagram and TikTok, where there are numerous and widely followed profiles such as ‘Hot i df girls’ or ‘girlsdefense’, which counts more than a hundred thousand followers. This account has a long list of profiles of current or former (reservist) i d f soldiers with a picture of them in a sexy pose, often highly provocative, on the left, and a photo of them in i df uniform on the right. The profiles which are advertised have high visibility and their bio descriptor includes, systematically, texts such as ‘I i df ’, ‘i d f reservist’, or ‘Zionist’. vice

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magazine has carried out a more nuanced version of this body celebration, blind to the politics of the occupation.24 While portraying the sensual bodies of teenage soldiers, this type of coverage has the double edge of reinforcing masculine expectations of strongmen with muscular bodies and sexy women with feminine features, both with weapons.25 This aspect has recently surfaced in Lebanon, where amidst the falling apart of the politico-economic order, the place of women continues to be one of the remaining pretenses of the national political culture. On International Women’s Day on 8 March 2023, the newspaper alModon published a frontline article titled ‘The Lebanese Woman … Army Soldier and Security Guard’. In the piece, the journalist highlights women’s active participation in the army, police, and security forces as the most telling feature of female citizenship and achievement. The annexed Lebanese Army video for this celebration concludes with a woman performing a military salute, captioned ‘Beside every great man … a great woman [junb kull rajul ‘azim … imra’ah ‘azimah]’.26 The gendered dimension of militarism combines with the use of women’s participation in the state project while not challenging, indeed reinforcing, the tenets of the culture of the right. The second element of the culture of the right and the use of bodies in Israel centres on the industry of self-defence, to which we briefly referred when speaking of Jabotinsky’s propagation of Jewish selfdefence. Born out of necessity in the ghettoes of Eastern Europe, Krav Maga mutated as it moved out of the ghetto and into the realm of the Zionist state’s nation-making. In this journey from resistance to oppression to oppression of resistance, Israeli close-combat arts became a founding myth for the nation-sate. No one embodied this journey more than Imi Lichtensfeld (1910–1998), the Hungarian wrestler who migrated to Palestine and developed this technique for use in the proto-units of the i d f . Trained at his father’s gymnasium, named Hercules after the Greek human-divine hero known for his strength, courage, and sexual stamina, Lichtensfeld was a multi-­ discipline athlete of international fame. He developed his philosophy of defence confronting fascist violence against Jews in Europe and later exported this knowledge/experience to Palestine to support the Zionist expansion. French philosopher Dorlin refers to Krav Maga as an offensive technique in a ‘continuous space of imminent violence’ and the basis for Israel’s national ideology of ‘offensive defence’. 27 Israel is a worldwide exporter of self-defence techniques, which together with its counterinsurgency strategies and spying software are

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considered highly strategic assets in its defence and war-making. As a ‘security society’, military, paramilitary, and citizen-led defence are means to protect the state and the land of its citizens. It is not surprising, therefore, that Krav Maga has become a trademark of the global right outside of Israel too. For instance, in Leipzig, Germany, neo-Nazi groups run a Krav Maga centre which was identified as the hub of violent attacks against anti-fascist and migrant demonstrators. The irony of neo-Nazis adopting a technique developed for Jewish selfdefence, marketed as a useful, practical defence technique, is lost in its embrace by the i df and Israel’s state security industry.28 This connivance has deeper political implications. Martial arts exist on the assumption of the possibility of violence, even when they do not pursue the performance of violent acts. For a discipline such as Krav Maga, which is built upon and marketed as an empirical, pragmatic response to real-world situations of danger (the threat of rape, burglary, knife attack, terrorists, etc.), the assumption for those practising it is to be ready for attacks by immoral, malicious enemies at any time. Violence, in this setting, produces solidarity among individuals who are potentially the object of it and makes possible the adoption of a common cultural-political frame of response, which is a defence-attack culture as instructed by Krav Maga. Through training, a person perceives the world as a hostile environment where attacks are always possible and imminent and for which immediate devastating – though short of fatal – reactions are necessary. This mindset aligns with a survivalist worldview, one that is always ready to react to emergencies or danger, two pillars which credit the political imagination of the right. Throughout the world the rise of right-wing movements has had strong links with the rise of the culture of aggressive self-defence. Mixed martial arts (mm a ) is described as the fastest-growing sport in the world. It has gained popularity and has been put on display in right-wing mobilisations.29 Initially banned because of its hyperviolent outcomes, mm a has been included in the US-based Ultimate Fighting Championship (uf c ) and given ample media coverage by Donald J. Trump through public tournaments and merchandising. In this way, it has become a ‘perfect way to channel ideologies and narratives about national defence, military-style discipline, masculinity, and physical fitness to mainstream markets’.30 Across the world, the embracing of mma (and the like) as a means of statopraxis and the emboldening of the culture of the right occurs through tournaments and in the praising of these techniques by

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officials and cultural promoters of the state. Sambo in Russia, of which Vladimir Putin is an advanced practitioner, is widely taught within Russian policing, psychiatric, security, and armed institutions.31 Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader and Putin ally, has cultivated a version of right-wing Islamist militarism, with martial arts holding a ritual place in Chechen fighting clubs, which in turn have allegedly served to train Kadyrov’s own militia, known as 141st Special Motorized Regiment (aka Kadyrovites). Kadyrov’s promotion of mma has been formalised with the creation of the Akhmat mma tournaments and clubs – named after his late father, killed in a car bomb attack in 2004. To underpin its right-wing nature, the semi-official chant of these clubs is ‘Akhmat Sila’, ‘Akhmat Power’.32 In the Arab world, mixed martial arts and ufc are in strong expansion although they are not overtly embraced by political leaders. The Emirates have invested a great amount of financial assets in the sport, which does not clash with the political alliances adopted by the ruler Muhammad bin Zeid al-Nahyan (aka MbZ). The sheikhdom is also the hub and the biggest investor in the discipline. Across the Middle East, the only Krav Maga training centre outside Israel is located in Dubai. Outside the u a e , mm a is equally expanding in popularity. For example, after attending the military academy at Sandhurst, Sheikh Khalid bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the son of Bahrain’s ruler, invested in the mma industry.33 Even in Iran, where the state is no proponent of mma or other extreme fighting sports, there is a growing scene, often mediated by traditional disciplines such as Greco-Roman or free wrestling, a sport that has an ancient and moral tradition in Iran. In 2021, there were reports about an underground women’s mma fighting scene in Iran, hinting at the expanding influence despite governmental strictures. The spread of aggressive self-defence techniques and the marketisation of mma has implications for the way public culture shifts in its reinterpretation of social norms and people’s agency in state–society relations. Beside the sensualisation of the body and the adoption of military-like training to be used in everyday life occurrences, aggressive self-defence promises to put the ‘initiated’ individual on higher ground compared to the brutal undisciplined body of non-initiated individuals, conceived as barbarians. Thus, it confirms one of the tenets of the culture of the right, i.e., physical superiority begets a higher place in the moral hierarchy. The capacity to operate and to perform with physical domination upon others in society, whether as self-defence against potential threats

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or as a preventive display of bodily superiority over enemies, gives agency to individuals. This agency, especially when espoused by a militaristic and security-oriented vision of politics,34 produces what we refer to as ‘grassroots authoritarianism’.

G r a ssr o o t s A u t h ori tari ans Militarism, strongmen culture, and the top-down definition of ‘who is the people’ or ‘how a people should look’ are core features of authoritarian political orders. Streamlined in public culture, they are put into practice and given agency through mundane iterations of everyday life. They are given political agency. While agency is most often understood as a form of action and expression by those not having power and against the grain of public authority or those higher in the socio-­ economic order, we cannot dismiss the way agency at a grassroots level can be equally reactionary, what we refer to as ‘grassroots authoritarianism’. This is a development that follows the outbreak of civil war conditions across the region, either as actual material conflict or as the condition in which people feel they are living. Grassroots authoritarianism implies semi-organised or autonomous individuals (though perceiving themselves as part of an ‘imagined’ collective), who actively intervene in the social field by reproducing state-led ideology and the alleged moral imperatives of public authority. Grassroots authoritarians’ intervention is autonomous but consciously or unconsciously linked to the vision and mission of the political order in enforcing discipline, punishment, control, ‘correction’, and expulsion of forms of social behaviour or cultural identity (performance) that are considered at odds with the normative order. While rarely acknowledging formal ties to public institutions, it is not unusual for grassroots authoritarians to maintain clandestine networks of support to and from the state or elements within the state’s ruling and enforcement cadres. Though the state and people in power may play the game of ‘rhetorical condemnation [and] haphazard prosecution’35 against grassroots authoritarians, they never seriously act or object to it, for instance by calling for public scrutiny into the operation of social groups involved in grassroots authoritarian actions. A paradigmatic example of grassroots authoritarians is that of Jewish Israeli settler organisations and militias. These groups operate as a frontier army, with advanced military equipment and logistics, but without public accountability for their actions. The settlers’ direct

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and concerted collaboration with the idf is publicly known and welldocumented. Their objectives are to expand the frontiers of the Israeli state in the West Bank and elsewhere and to secure Jewish settlements in strategic areas, guaranteeing access to resources and roads. This puts the settler movement in Israel at the edge of the definition of grassroots authoritarians and closer to the definition of paramilitary groups, as known in the context of South and Central America. Contrary to the paras, however, settlers are not officially on the payroll of the Israeli state. They mobilise for what they consider their rightful homeland and based on their hatred of non-Jewish people in that land. However, they receive systematic support in the form of logistical resources, monetary benefits, and material concessions, besides having moral and legal state protection against domestic and international accusations or judicial prosecutions. idf commanders, including West Bank commanders, regularly visit settlements and provide lectures and training to local militias. Following the October attacks in southern Israel, the minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, distributed 10,000 weapons to illegal settlers as a policy to integrate ‘civilian security teams in the Border Police in mixed Jewish–Palestinian towns’.36 The relation of grassroots authoritarians with the law is one interesting way to understand their twilight nature. In some circumstances, these groups exonerate themselves from the law and transgress it to undertake public action aimed at their material or ideological interests. In other instances, they see themselves and portray their duties to the public as the last line of defence against the breaking of national laws and interests. Existing between transgression and deference to the law, their agency can be a powerful disruptive force in everyday politics, but this often comes with reactionary outcomes. Beside the grassroots form of territorial control, settlers’ organisations have a powerful influence over the culture of the right in Israel. As we discussed earlier, they adopt the tenets of this public culture in the form of militarism (e.g., displays of weapons and military-style operation); glorification of local militia leaders; enchantment with the mythological history of the land they live in and the lands they claim to be theirs; reconfiguration of public culture towards a muscular form of Judaism and the pursuit of the ‘new Hebrew man’ where the body is potent and glorified; and maintenance of traditional forms of social and gender hierarchies within their walled communities, with women being relegated to the role of mothers and home workers and men to the role of war-makers and security providers.37

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Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) and its leader Itamar Ben-Gvir are the leading exponents of this trend, though far from the only example. The movement is part of the Religious Zionist parties which have emerged as one of Israel’s ascending political movements, receiving the third-largest share of votes in the country’s 2022 parliamentary elections. Their influence, however, goes beyond electoral politics and is built upon their rootedness in settlers’ communities and in the capacity of having translated the already hawkish culture of Israeli politics to the extremes. This is giving way to the adoption of settler modes of governance of the public space outside the Occupied Territories, such as in Tel Aviv and other coastal cities. Prior the 2023 October attacks, south of Tel Aviv in Bat Yam, Ben-Gvir’s followers were setting up a civilian armed militia to patrol the streets against what they refer to as the increasing threat of Arab labourers from Jaffa and the West Bank.38 The move suggests that, in the event of appeasement and compromise in the strategy to deal with Palestinians across Israel’s occupied lands, much like the actions of South Africa’s white supremacist militias amidst calls to reform or practise a softened version of apartheid, Jewish grassroots groups will take the lead in the repression of non-Jews and non-conforming Jews autonomously from the state of Israel. Moving to Israel’s north, in Lebanon, we can find other forms of grassroots authoritarianism. Hezbollah members, for instance, enforce social control on the public space in neighbourhoods where the party has its foothold, especially in the southern peripheries of Beirut, known as Dahiyeh. The enforcement affects public codes of conduct, especially for women, but also, and more importantly, it acts to control the space against infiltrators, given the history of anti-Hezbollah operations over the past decades. Obviously, this infrastructure of social control is put to good use during events that go beyond the spatial remit of the aforementioned areas. For instance, during the socalled Lebanese Revolution of 2019 (al-thawra), a protest movement calling for the dismissal of all leading political parties and the authorities of the state – emblematised in the slogan killon ya’ani killon (‘all of them means all of them’) – plainclothes members, allegedly belonging to Hezbollah and Amal movements, clashed with street protesters. This intervention occurred autonomously from the internal security forces (‘amn al-dakhili, isf) or the police (darak), but it had the objective of enforcing public control over dissent. This trend towards grassroots security is visible also beyond Hezbollah’s militants. In Achrafieh, a neighbourhood historically close

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to the Maronite community, Nadim Gemayel, a member of the Lebanese parliament, created Ashrafiyyeh2020, a neighbourhood watch that patrols the roads and alleys of the suburb. Groups of men walk the streets from dusk to dawn, 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. With torches and batons, the sight of local inhabitants patrolling the streets is reminiscent of the militias during the civil war, though the founder of the group guarantees that their work is carried out in syntony with law enforcement institutions. Indeed, the phenomenon is expanding in conjunction with the withdrawal of the Lebanese state from its obligation of public order and governance. In June 2022, a Christian militia under the name Jnoud al-Rab (‘Soldiers of the lord’) attacked an lgbtq+ stand with a flower billboard announcing ‘Love always blossoms’, destroying it and declaring a war on homosexuality, satanism, and the defence of the existing regulatory regime on gender codes in the country. Prior to this event, they had shut down a concert by famous Lebanese group Mashru’ Leila in the 2019 Byblos International Festival. In an interview with the magazine L’Orient du Jour, their leader declared they were guided ‘by the word of Christ’.39 A workingclass group of men, the Jnoud acts autonomously from the state and political parties – though reports suggest that they are close to Samir Geagea’s Lebanese Forces (Quwwat Lubnaniyah), the far-right group sitting in the Lebanese parliament. Te Jnoud’s coat of arms includes a white and red crossed shield, the wings of Saint Michael, and the Bible. A motto frames the image: ‘Always ready my Lord’, with the face of the group’s leader Abdo Lahhoud in the background. Besides attacking lgbtq+ events and organisations, this militia has also been proactive in Islamophobic actions and online activism, which in the context of Lebanon targets refugee communities of Palestinians and Syrians. Their actions rest upon a general ill sentiment towards refugees and unorthodox groups, therefore finding support beyond their immediate rank and files. They are one expression of the evolving and expanding culture of the right in Lebanon. At the secular end of the spectrum in the grassroots authoritarianism of Lebanon stands the ssnp. Headquartered in Makdisi Street, a street just north of the trade and restaurant area of Hamra Street, party members consider the area an internal district of the ssnp, confirmed by the ample display of flags, road blocks and banners, disparate but regular presence of uniformed militia men and women, and the occasional unauthorised closure of the street for party-related commemoration, as has occurred on recurrent visits by the authors to

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Beirut in the month of October, year after year. This public presence also has the effect of providing security for businesses and offices and the buildings in which they are housed. The embassy of the Syrian Arab Republic is on Makdisi Street, in a tacit acknowledgement of the connection with the ss np  – and Syria’s historical connection to West Beirut, consecrated during the Lebanese civil war. In 2011, when protesters demonstrated against the repression of people in Damascus and other Syrian cities carried out by the Syrian state, ssnp members intervened as the first line of pro-Syrian defence. Members of the party attacked protesters with sticks and held a counterdemonstration which ended up in expeditionary interventions against anti-Syrian protesters, much akin to the work of anti-riot policing.40 The ss np also provides funding for night patrols and community security vigilantes in small towns and cities, especially following Lebanon’s economic collapse in 2018–19, which caused a massive spike in the crime rate. These groups usually work from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., most days of the week. They hold no formal power, they cannot make arrests, but they can stop suspected criminals and take them to the police or the internal security forces. With gun ownership widespread, these vigilante groups operate instead of the police. In Iraq, the Hashd al-Sha’abi (Popular Mobilisation Units – pmus) have performed the role of enforcers of public control over dissent. Their operation has given way to a militaristic social group that confronts its antagonists with violence. Especially following the war against isis, the pmus have progressively turned into an official arm of the Iraqi state and a tool used by pro-Iran parties in the Iraqi parliament; step by step they have moved towards the adoption of a militaristic culture, with a strong hierarchy and the enforcement of strict codes of conduct. Many vigilante groups have started to operate with the purpose of guaranteeing safety of the public (from themselves), while claiming autonomy from the main pmus such as Kata’ib Hezbollah, Kata’ib Ahl al-Haq, or Ahl al-Kahaf. Here we witness a process that is similar to what happened in Central America following the end of decade-long civil wars. Militias can turn into gangs (see the epilogue of this book) forcing protection rackets on private citizens and businesses. Racketeering for restaurants and shop-owners, checkpoints along major routes by non-state groups, and involvement in criminal enterprise involving narcotics, psychoactive substances, petrol, and other high-profit-generating commodities have become daily business in a disrupted governance system.41 The failure to

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deliver on basic economic and security needs has prompted the emergence of grassroots groups, stepping in through a new model of authoritarian citizenship. In a less volatile – though rapidly changing – environment, we can see a centralised model for grassroots authoritarian groups as embodied by Iran’s basij-e mosta‘zafin, ‘The Organisation for the Mobilisation of the Oppressed’, better known as basij. This volunteer army was created in the 1980s with the objective of defending the Islamic Revolution against its enemies: it soon turned into a long and flexible arm of the state in matters of Islamisation of the public space, social control of dissent – including in educational settings – and display of regime support. Though a powerful example of authoritarianism at the grassroots level, the basijis have a formal and direct line of hierarchy within the i r g c , and so they cannot be analysed as an autonomous social group. Instead, in Iran, it is drug-related crime and cleansing of the urban space that are carried out by grassroots groups with an authoritarian ethic. Given the country’s very large drug-using population, a number oscillating between two and five million users, ‘addiction’ in the public space has become a motif of concern for the public and a source of recurrent criticism towards municipalities and the police. To supplement the lack of police initiative, which is focused on other forms of criminal enterprise, including the targeting of political dissent, local groups of young men with physical stamina are dispatched by informal rehabilitation centres (also known as detoxification camps) to collect drug users. These men act either on the invitation of the police or following calls from local neighbourhood groups or families.42 ‘Arrested’ individuals are kept in informal settings and forced to kick their habit in many instances in a violent and dehumanising way which has resulted in several deaths in custody. Citizen-led policing has the effect of buttressing calls for them to be ‘tough on crime’ and ‘tough on drugs’, two long-lasting pledges of right-wing groups across the globe. It also engrains the mechanism through which vigilantism spreads as a local means of authority and public control beyond the remit of anti-addiction intervention or drug control similarly to other cases in Latin America. The mechanisms used to punish drug users are indeed transposed into other fields of societal intervention. In times of need, they can be equally legitimised to cleanse the public space of the homeless or are adopted to repress political protests.

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Part of the evolution of grassroots authoritarianism is a side effect of widespread disruption in the potential, capacity, and legitimacy of the state – as in the case of Lebanon and Iraq. It is equally ascribable to the transition towards outsourcing of governance to non-state agents and citizen-led groups, which some authors have critically described as a neoliberal turn or criminal governance – as in the example of Iran – aimed at imposing on, or at least at persuading through more than rhetorical means, the public.43

D ig it a l G r a ssr o o t s Authori tari ans So far, what we have described as being the role of statopraxis and grassroots authoritarians can be placed in continuity with the his­ torical role of paramilitary militias, volunteer patrols, temperance enforcers, and non-state ideologues of state authority. Their revamping in contemporary times is a sign of the changing nature of the political game. Yet, grassroots authoritarianism is not just a re-proposition of an old model. When it comes to its modes of communication and dissem­ination, it is highly novel. Its encroachment in the digital sphere is evidence of this. The Twittersphere (now X) is the mainstream environment to observe and study how user-led (grassroots) authoritarian practice builds up the ideological contours of the culture of the right. The content of what is being said can vary from one end to the other of the political spectrum, but the means to put it into practice or to intervene in forms of digital vigilantism are strikingly similar, including the collusion between citizen-led and state-run digital activism. Let’s consider the Iranian women’s movement against the compulsory imposition of the hijab which went viral under the hashtag #­zan-zendegi-azadi. The movement was prompted by the death of Mahsa Jîna Amini, a woman from the city of Saqez in Iran’s western region of Kurdistan who died in the custody of the morality police (gasht-e ershad) on 16 September 2022. In the weeks following her death, protesters reclaimed the slogan zan, zendigi, azadi (in Kurdish žina, žian, azadi, ‘woman, life, freedom’, an original motto coined by p kk ideologue Abdullah Ocalan) to contest the Islamic Republic’s morality police and, contextually, the ruling polity. These protests soon extended throughout the country and connected with existing contentions over welfare, rights, corruption, and state-led violence. Parallel to the

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protests on the ground, a massive online movement emerged. On Twitter/X, this movement accounted for the most popular trend in hashtags in Twitter’s Persian-language history, amassing about 80 ­million posts up to 28 October 2022, about five weeks after the start of the protests. Marc Owen Jones, a leading expert on digital information wars, analysed a large dataset of samples from the online activity connected to the hashtags and concluded that many of the accounts were part of a concerted propaganda campaign on behalf of anti- and pro-Iranian accounts, many of which were created in the month of September. This suggested that these accounts were in good part fake or bots. Beside this aspect, which is recurrent in the online life of protests, what stood out was the level of hate-mongering and toxic accusations between discussants on online portals. ‘Apologist of the Islamic Republic’, ‘terrorist’, ‘blood-thirsty’, and other strong labels were regularly used to target people who did not embrace the call for ‘regime change’ or uncompromising positions, including the call to cut diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic, abandoning the jcpoa, or even calls for direct US-led military intervention. Pro-government accounts mirrored this by accusing all critics of the Islamic Republic as being ‘foreign enemies and agents’. US-based journalist Farnaz Fassihi, working for the New York Times, and Negar Mortazavi, who is a columnist for the Independent, were targets of systematic, misogynistic, and violent threats online. In one instance, when Mortazavi was meant to attend a public panel discussion on the Iran protests, the event was cancelled because of a bomb threat call by an anonymous individual. The online campaign against the National Iranian American Council (niac), a non-partisan lobby group that has been a diplomatic avenue of mediation between the US government and the Islamic Republic, was another case in point that occupied a consistent place in the delegitimisation of anti-war, pro-diplomacy voices on Iranian policy in the US. It is common to see this hatred expressed through gendered offences, with threats of ‘rape’, slurs such as ‘whore’ and ‘son of a bitch’, ‘pimp’, etc. This was made paradoxical given that the Iranian protest movement had mobilised under the slogan of ‘woman, life, freedom’. This online aggression spilt over into real life, with many instances of violence towards people, in Europe and North America, who were thought to be supporters of the Islamic Republic or not conforming to the calls for aggressive action against it. In some instances, having a beard or being darker in complexion would be sufficient to trigger

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a physical attack against people taking photos of protesters. The rhetoric and content of the diasporic protests manifested strong commonalities with the neo-con agenda, in part broadcast through foreign-funded news organisations such as Iran International (Saudi Arabia and Israel) and Manoto (Monarchists). The protest movement of 2022, in this way, rejected any group that over the past decades had had working relationships with the Islamic Republic, including niac, the reformists, and even diplomats in the US State Department. In a rapid escalation of the rhetoric of ‘the enemy’, the online protest movement adopted long-lasting elements of neo-con language and strategy on Iran, supporting maximum pressure, conflict escalation, and ‘regime change’. Digital grassroots authoritarians became enablers of the culture of the right, even though theirs is a minority inside and outside of Iran. They become partisans in a fight where the domestic and the international intersect through the online world – and transpire into the world of the street protests. The rise of digital technologies grounded conflicts in the online world, which in turn has produced similar transformations to the rise of partisan war-making in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, if we think of Schmitt’s theory of the partisan. In a way similar to what Schmitt considered the effect of the advent of motorised vehicles and communication technologies in modern warfare as having brought the partisan into new ground for war-making, we consider the creation of digital grassroots groups as the new stage of the partisan fight and interstate, interregional conflicts.44 We are not arguing that online partisans are carrying out the same task as real-world partisans. But we must acknowledge that ‘the [online] partisan does not fight on an open battlefield and does not fight on the same level of open fronts’, as Schmitt wrote. Instead, ‘he forces his enemy into another space’ – this is the new space of online social media where users are often anonymous or fake – and by doing so ‘[the online partisan] displaces the space of regular, conventional theatres of war to a different darker dimension – a dimension of the abyss’, which is the abyss of information wars through asymmetrical attacks and concerted state-led propaganda.45 With technological advancement in the use of equipment, partisans of twentieth-century conflicts became dependent on third-party (international) support to put their new tools to good use. These are provided either by Western capitalist allies, spearheaded by the United States, or by socialist-oriented countries under the aegis of the Soviet Union.46 Today support for such groups comes from proponents of

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the culture of the right, such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United States, or the Islamic Republic and Russian state media industry. The result is a clash of cultures within the right, rather than a clash of civilisation as they are, instead, portrayed. The cyberisation of partisan conflict has a deep impact on the making of political subjectivities. It is no surprise that Elon Musk’s company Starlink was asked by the State Department to provide internet access to Iran’s protesters through its satellite system, thus showing the potential of private logistical infrastructure for the purpose of geopolitical conflicts. More than that, it is the Mojahedin-e Khalq (mek), the exiled cultish opposition movement led by Maryam Rajavi, which has taken the lead in the (pseudo)grassroots partisan-led online war. The m e k ’s main opposition activities concern the spread of false information and the harassment of commentators, intellectuals, and public figures who do not embrace neo-con political rhetoric against Iran (and are in favour of regime change). Based in Albania, the group runs ‘bot factories’ operated by thousands of m e k members who, in this way, affect the algorithm of discussions by the creation of fake accounts and violent commentaries. As confirmation of their political strategy, the mek leadership has had a strong, lasting relationship with dozens of liberal and right-wing politicians in the US and Europe, including Vice-President Mike Pence, John Bolton, and John McCain as well as mps from the UK. The same applies to the most visible and influential diaspora activist against the Islamic Republic, Masih Alinejad. Alinejad has now lived more than two decades in the US working as a v oa contractor and setting up the portal ‘My Stealthy Freedom’, where she posted images of women inside Iran taking off their hijabs, giving them resonance globally. Her declared feminism, however, has stood in evident contrast with the political allies that she has cul­ tivated over the years. Throughout Trump’s first term in power, Alinejad became a regular supporter of Mike Pompeo’s maximum pressure and war-mongering policies on Iran. Later, during the Biden administration, she shared pictures of herself with Morgan Ortagus, a Republican Party member with strong anti-abortion and extreme conservative views and a staunch Trump supporter. The contrast between Alinejad’s embrace of the ‘woman, life, freedom’ slogan and her neo-con support reflects an oxymoronic condition between online activists and on-the-ground struggles. The online space is increasingly policed not only – and no longer overtly – by state authorities but also by profiles that are, or pretend

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to be, ordinary citizens or netizens of the world. Diasporic individuals, because of their distance from on-the-ground politics, tend to be hyperactive participants in these campaigns (see chapters 6 and 7). This adds to the dissonance between ideas, imaginaries, practices, and demands emerging at the local level of protests and negotiations, and the ideas, demands, and pressures generated from diasporic online communities and fake publics. The two camps, though fluid and not monochromous, are hard to differentiate when participating in online activism or in information gathering. When steered for specific political ends under the manipulation of state agents, this brings into play the game of self-censorship, which results in silencing dissident voices out of fear of being targeted by putatively fellow citizens or being reported to the authorities, back home or in host countries. A more sinister – and in the strictest sense of the word, fascistic – feature of the culture of the right is also on display: the policing of silence. Citizens (or netizens) are encouraged and supposed to be proactive in their support for the country, the leadership, and their advancement of national interests in the cybersphere or in antagonising the enemy. The citizen must become a partisan of the online combat to defend the state and to attack the enemy. Why didn’t you [or she/he/they] take a stance or share on this issue in your online profile? is a question that resonated strongly during the Iran protest in autumn 2022. Thomas Zeitzoff wrote that social media platforms can ‘serve as a quasi NextDoor app for communal violence’.47 The extent to which online activism is affecting the political culture is hard to determine and there is ample and much-needed scope for new research in this field. However, what can be inferred is that the online space of dissent has been quantitatively occupied by state-led publics, grassroots authoritarians, and fake accounts in the form of bots and trolls. This is a step towards the formation of fake publics that legitimise state-led discourse and give the impression of ruling over docile subjects of power with the support of active partisans of the state. The mass number, by real and fake accounts, generates information and news that is hard to distinguish from real and pre-existing profiles. It is impractical, due to the time it takes, for an ordinary citizen surfing the net to discern a statement made by a profile belonging to a real person from one generated by a bot or a troll account. This confusion produces indeterminacy and detachment from political engagement because of the incapacity to understand the world of events and opinions, while it also dissuades the verbalising of personal opinions out

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of the fear of being attacked by cyberbullies in plainclothes (accounts not identifiable that do the job of the state: digital grassroots authoritarians). Because of the sheer number of fake accounts, manipulated and managed by the fake public online industry,48 real individual accounts are outnumbered and disappear in the ocean of information, becoming untraceable and voiceless. In Algeria, during the outbreak of the Hirak movement in 2019, Amro Ali refers to the intrusion of u a e troll farms promoting anti-Amazigh sentiment clothed in their putative alliance with the former colonial power, France. The strategy to derail a social movement started from the alteration of knowledge production and the digital cyber-operations led by u ae petrodollars. How does the creation of fake publics affect emerging visions of citizenry? Let us start with an example. In October 2017, Saudi Arabia was the first country in the world to provide citizenship to a robot. The machine, called Sophia, was made in Hong Kong by Hanson Robotics as part of a p r operation to cast the Saudi kingdom as at the avantgarde of the tech economy.49 However, it also made us reflect on what kind of citizenry the kingdom imagines for its population. The Saudi state has not stripped citizenship from its citizens, opting for harsh penalties and punishment against dissidents, as in the case of Saudi protesters in the Eastern provinces or against the Shi’a cleric Shaykh Nimr al-Nimr, who was executed in January 2016. Other Gulf monarchies, such as Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait, have resorted to stripping citizenship rights from people deemed dangerous to the political order, especially when individuals belong to political minorities (demographic majorities as in Bahrain). In the u a e , citizen classification is based on three categories: those having a family tree book determining their khulasat al-qaid (purity of lineage), with antecedents that possessed full citizenry and state benefits; those without a family book but with other documentation attesting their lineage in the uae; and those stateless, known as bidun jinsiya, ‘without nationality [Bidoon]’. The latter group has been offered Comoran Island citizenship as a substitute that can help them navigate the national and international administrative spheres of their otherwise legally outlawed lives. In the 2010s, the uae and Kuwait were even in discussion with the Comoran government to transfer the Bidoon population of the two Arab monarchies to the East African island.50 There seems to be some undercurrent of similarity between these plans and those now espoused by the British government as exemplified in the latter’s plan to transfer asylum-seekers to Rwanda,

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or the plans to transfer those remaining Palestinians in Gaza to a satellite location outside the Gaza strip. The manoeuvring of citizenship rights is a development that has emerged in the post-9/11 security framework adopted by states in the European and North American context as well as by Middle Eastern states from where members of terrorist cells and groups originated. This is a new practice that goes hand in hand with the infatuation of regional leaders with the liberal economic order and the pursuit of effective membership in the liberal world economy. The monetisation of citizenship is a global trend, but hyperliberalism in the pursuit of capital and financial accumulation has coincided with a tightening of social control over groups that could have a destabilising effect on the nature of power, such as religious or ethnic groups that are not from the Sunni tribal groups in power. In this way, we can see how grassroots, citizen-led or netizen-led activities online echo developments in state–people relations and the actuation of norms and measures that have the objective of engineering what is a citizen and how a citizen is expected to perform. Meanwhile we are witnesses to the expansion of fake public discussions and promotion through robotic accounts (bots) and paid partisans of the state, including through privately owned foreign companies. These developments acquire different faces, from the effective control of social space and the censoring of public expression, as mentioned, through the work of grassroots authoritarians; the armed forces of para-state and para-military groups such as settler militias and volunteer groups in Israel, Iraq, and Iran; to the online vigilantism of diasporic accounts and the industry of bots and trolls delimiting the scope of discussion and digital presence. Through this concerted flux of grassroots agency, we are witnessing the rooting of the cultures of the right in the Middle East. This culture has agency and deep political implications, cutting across religious, societal, regional divides in a way that is incomparable to any other political phenomenon in previous decades. We are seeing the rise of states without people, where there is no ideological space for citizens but only space for partisans.

P a r t is a n s , N o t Ci ti zens! The Great Civil War has created states without people. These states lack the fundamental demos on which to re-enact political life and social organisation. The category of ‘the people’ becomes an empty

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box used in bolstering state prerogatives. It is recognised only inasmuch as it contributes to the making of a state and its existential plans. Citizenship itself becomes contested not as a bond between people living in a land and therefore as an organisational solution to life; instead, it becomes a non-historical bond legitimising the culture of the right, ‘a mush’ characterised by a void, clothed in the myths of blood and soil. In these historical and symbolic conditions, states become empty boxes: the category of ‘people’ is displaced along physical and ideational spaces. It is confined to a liminal condition, which compels people to search for and imagine a new home or a promised land, which is projected as a mythological memory. However, a home (oikos) differs from a polis: the latter is a community based on the civic and the social; the former, instead, needs to be homogeneous, constituted by unpolitical elements, i.e., blood, family, religion, mythologies. Hence, a state without people is a state where there is no space and no ethical ground for the category of people conceived in its unobstructed, open-ended non-definition. It is a state governed by the logic of the partisan, not of citizenry.

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ac t thre e On Displacement

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Vignett e 3 Erbil, Iraq, November 2014

It is 4 November 2014. Human Rights Watch publishes a report on the state of displaced populations in Iraq. We read it and discuss it through a series of written exchanges about the emptiness of ­polities and the way governments can do without people. The report contains a quote from a Kurdish peshmerga commander who said, ‘[T]here is no one left in any of these villages [around Erbil], they are all empty.’ This, the author of the report comments, ‘was not entirely true’. Driving south of Kirkuk in the area previously occupied by the Islamic State, ‘streets were packed, but not with residents’. The author adds, Men who looked like soldiers lined the main street, scores of them standing at attention with ak-47 assault rifles slung over their shoulders. With U.S.-provided Humvees parked along the side of the street, what was about to start looked like a military parade. But there was nothing official about this army. The men bore no insignia of Iraq’s armed forces: Most had on mismatched military fatigues, while some wore black balaclavas printed with a menacing skeleton face. From their slender frames, it looked like some were no more than 16 or 17.1 It was the Saraya al-Khorasani Brigade, which later became the eighteenth brigade of the Popular Mobilisation Forces of Iraq (pmu ), founded in its post-2003 form in 2013 with the support of Iran; its origin dates back to the anti-Baathist operations of the 1980s. A leading military unit against the Islamic State, the Saraya Karrar (its name in use) counts Iraqis and Iranians among

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its commanders. Other such forces had emerged across Iraq and Syria by the mid- to late 2010s, made up of Afghan and Pakistani Shi’as residing in Iran or under persecution in their own countries. The best-known battalions are the Liwa Fatimiyun and the Liwa Zeinabiyun, the latter born out of the defence of the Seyyedah Zeinab shrine on the outskirts of Damascus. Militiamen, partisans, and the like are taking the place of citizens in the spaces of war and of displacement. Those killed serving in these units are buried in the sections for martyrs in the cemeteries of Qom or Tehran, such as the Behesht-e Zahra Complex beside the Imam Khomeini Shrine. A few months after we had read this report, Giorgio Agamben published the final episode of his Homo Sacer series, started in 1998, with the title Stasis: Civil War as a Paradigm of Government, in which he calls for an exploration of a theoretical practice on ‘civil war’, what he calls stasiology – the study of civil wars. In his book, in his customary style, he dwells in epiphanic mode on e­ pochdefining ideas, such as stasis (ancient Greek for ‘civil war’) and ademia (ancient Greek for ‘a state without demos’). In the final section of the book, he writes, ‘In front of the cathedral painted in the frontispiece of Hobbes’s book The Leviathan, there are two human figures, the only ones present in the city. They are two physicians with the typical mask of the plague-ridden [appestati] … The irrepresentable multitude, similar to the mass of the plagueridden, can be represented only through the guardians who are observing obedience, and the physicians who are curing it. It dwells in the city, but only as an object of duty and of the care of those who are exercising sovereignty.’2 The condition of the citizen, or of the subjects of polity, Agamben adds, is that of a dissolute moltitudo, ‘the dispersed multitude’, which is akin to that of the ‘sick [malati], implicit in Hobbes’s statement “the condition of the inhabitants [of the city] is that of not being sick”’.3 Agamben wrote these words in 2015 in quite a prophetic way when we think of the 2020 pandemic and its absolute exercise of public authority over people, seen in the latter’s absence from the public place, tutored by the role of medicine and police. This digression over the nature of the state, from its outset in European modernity, concludes with the terse statement: ‘The Hobbesian state, as every state, lives without people, in a condition of ademia.’

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We traced the link between Agamben’s intuitions about how civil wars are emptying the civic dimension of citizenship and the reality of civil war across the Middle East in the wake of the defeat of popular mobilisation. We concluded that states without people was not a metaphor for a theoretical intuition based on Hobbes’s idea of the state; rather, it was a practical outcome of the ongoing civil wars. What follows is a rethinking of this idea as embodied in the historical experience of revolt and civil war in the Middle East since the start of the new millennium.

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5 Displacement as State (De)formation

[W]alls confer magical protection against powers incomprehensibly large, corrosive, and humanely uncontrolled … they produce not the future of an illusion, but the illusion of a future aligned with an idealized past.1 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty

D ispl a c e m e n t a f ter Defeat Civil wars produce displacement. Its manifestation materialises not just in terms of the dislocation of humans across territories that are no longer inhabitable or their territories of belonging. It happens as a form of multi-latitude displacement, which is exacerbated by the rise of the culture of the right. This occurs under the violence driven by armed conflict which causes the physical and geographical dislocation of people, but it also occurs in the displacement experienced by those living under protracted civil wars who find themselves in a condition where ideas about their civic-politics, their polis, are unsettled and unsettling. These two types of displacement are not disjointed; their relationship is circular because physical displacement enhances the ideational dislocation, which in turn sharpens the territorialisation of mythological claims around who belongs to the house-nation. It is this second type of displacement upon which the mythological machine has greater influence. One no longer can imagine the nation; neither can one conceive of communitas in those terms agreed upon prior to the revolt because the rite of passage that distinguishes those within

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the community from those outside it was abolished with the outbreak of the civil war. Bonds of social relations become part of new mythological communities. The failure of the revolt to institute a political community organised around civic values – as opposed to sectarian belonging – reifies the rite of passage into civil war. The boundaries of civic recognition – the social glue of communitas – disappear. Not to make way for the logic of the partisan, which rules in revolutionary struggles, but to make space for the logic of blood, of the householder, of the father, of those who share common mythologies, the partisan of the state. The condition of life in displacement is therefore that of ­liminal life, a life harboured along a passage from the condition of the past order (the object against which the revolt or civil war occurred in the first place) and the completely new order, the coming community (the desire for political renewal).2 In this liminal space, the mythological machine drives the culture of the right and it governs the politics of displacement, in ideational as well material effects. The 2003 Iraq war was a watershed moment that set the pattern for the outbreak of what we have referred to as the Great Civil War. In the period between 2006 and 2008, sectarian violence forced 5 per cent of Iraq’s total population to leave their homes and settle elsewhere inside Iraq, while an additional two million fled the country entirely.3 With the consolidation of the Islamic State in 2014 and the erasure of international borders between Iraq and Syria, the ethnic and sectarian landscapes of towns, cities, and regions has changed, seemingly indefinitely. Beyond Iraq, the ethnic and religious heterogeneity of the region was reconfigured by the design of new human geographies and political imaginations driven by the logics of the mythological machine. Ongoing identity-based population displacements are not only reconstituting Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni societies but also reshaping those countries that are absorbing them, like Lebanon, Jordan, Türkiye, Tunisia, and Egypt (and Iran in the case of Afghans). For instance, the prolonged displacement of Syrian refugees beyond national borders is not only shifting the ethnic balance within Syria but also triggering national anxieties in countries like Lebanon, Jordan, and Türkiye where the presence of refugees is seen as transforming current demographics and overthrowing existing social orders (i.e., Syrian workers competing in the low-wage economy while threatening potential future electoral divides, in the event of integration through marriage or naturalisation).

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What we conceptualised earlier as the workings of the mythological machine unwrapped a sequence of events that forced many communities to flee from their homes and neighbourhoods and to seek refuge in areas where their community of belonging was a sectarian issue, in an imagined homogeneous unity, or in a diasporic condition. A profound state–society transformation ensued. The mass movement of people across territories has had a structural effect. Those displaced within the borders of the nation-state redefine and reclaim its space through the foundation of new mythological communities, either coexisting with armed rebellions or in the liminal space of survival as in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya. Those displaced across international frontiers maintain a virtual link with their community but effectively belong to new liminal ones often patronised by hosting governments (Türkiye, Jordan, Lebanon) or humanitarian organisations as in the case of the Palestinians. The idea of a nation-state built on societal diversity is now progressively replaced with the notion of a sectarian or ethnic enclave that celebrates uniformity and homogeneity (hence readability) along the ideological lines traced by the mythological machine. This implies a redrafting of a new political identity map which exists simultaneously with the old cartography of colonial invention made of international state borders that remain hardly permeable to redrafting. The Great Civil War has produced an epochal deterritorialisation. The case of Syria speaks clearly: from a country of 20 million people in 2009, 5 million, or 25 per cent, fled. An additional 6.3 million people are internally displaced and living in temporary dwellings in areas near Syria’s borders. According to recent estimates, 500,000 people have died since 2011.4 Beyond this toll on human lives and physical economic infrastructure, the Syrian government and subnational military groups have used identity-based population displacements as a strategy of war. Despite the success of the regime in reconquering most Syrian territories, the state has disintegrated into multiple ethnicreligious enclaves where Shi’as and Christians live in contiguity. For all those displaced beyond national borders, the likelihood of an eventual return is linked to the regime staying in power and to who controls their homes in towns of origin (similarly in Iraq, Libya, and Yemen). In addition, the government is orchestrating a demographic shift: taking action to tip the balance of power among the country’s different ethnic groups in Assad’s favour by blocking the return of Sunni refugees to areas of strategic importance. One important

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measure that threatens any Syrian who is not explicitly pro-Assad is the release of the property law (Law No. 10), which is meant to ­dispossess the majority of those who fled and/or are associated with anti-regime groups.5 For many i d p s (internally displaced persons) and those who remain refugees outside of Syria – most of whom are of the Sunni denomination/faith – the requirement of establishing proof of ownership miles away from home is essentially unfeasible. Even more unlikely is the prospect of receiving notification that their properties happen to fall under the government designation of a ‘reconstruction’ zone. The least realistic expectation is the option of registration within large parts of Syria given that more than half of the total private properties within Syria are either unregistered or lacking documents of ownership, which have been destroyed or lost because of the war. The realities of property ownership in the postwar climate demonstrate the potential for the law to displace permanently those who have already been forced to flee the country once. Even when international state borders do not change or are temporarily put out of order, we are witnessing a transformative moment in the political imaginary and social formation of states and societies in the region. Mass involuntary movement of people challenges decades of state-led institution building and the attempt to form ­relatively uniform or coherent national histories and trajectories. This process of fragmentation, exclusion, and the requalification of what constitutes citizenry and who is a citizen does not occur only in spaces where refugees have left the country. It happens equally in spaces with high rates of internally displaced people. In these contexts, identarian groups materialise in spatial contiguities and become an expression of modern ethnic or ideological enclaves. They may be borne out of extraordinary conditions of conflict, but they tend to endure and effect the making of state–citizen relations in the longer run.

T h e L o n g B a ckdrop o f D ispl a cement There is a long history of displacement in the Middle East. The Middle East is the global region second-most affected by internal displacement (after sub-Saharan Africa). The International Displacement Monitoring Center (idmc) recorded as many as 12.4 million idps in the mena as of the end of 2019; the destruction of Gaza since 2023

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dramatically exacerbates an already tragic situation. Displacement is by and large of a political nature. It is caused by conflict over the nature of the political order and its aftermath, what in this book we refer to as after the defeat. Obviously, this does not mean that the displaced populations from Syria, Iraq, and other places are political refugees as such. The rationale behind collective and individual journeys is traced to the crumbling of stable conditions of human security. These have come to an end, contextual to the failing of economic, social, and humanitarian infrastructure across the wider region. Hence, displacement transforms everyday political life in Lebanon with an inflow of millions of Syrian refugees redrawing the socio­ cultural and political map of the country. This is also true in Iran and Egypt, where political repression and the ensuing economic fallout oblige those who can (and those who believe they can) to leave, to choose a life of displacement instead of continuous subjugation and threat to their individual and communal security. With displacement becoming a chronic feature rather than a temporary one, how will it affect the trajectories of the state amidst escalating crises? What will it make of past and emergent forms of belonging? We are seeing the emergence of political orders which are governmentally void – or to quote Fawcett, ‘governmentally empty’.6 From the professed unity of nation-states, with their long claims upon past and future, we are moving to a new form of statehood, that of states without people. The shell of the states, made of their institutional formats and mannerist regalia, is no longer inhabited by (pretended or imaginary) citizens but by partisans of the state, whether as active endorsers or as passive supporters. Displacement is not only the cataclysmic event through which states have been emptied of those who do not stand up for their cause; it is also the active means to produce states that are void of the conception of the people as a plurality. Displacement, thus, becomes an idea and a practice of the culture of the right, to produce a state of partisans only. We have come to the realisation that displacement is a multi-latitude phenomenon and, at the same time, an epiphenomenon. In other words, when we speak of ‘displacement’ we refer to different latitudes – building upon the Latin etymology of the word, latus meaning ‘breadth’: a) a material, physical dislocation of people from their dwellings and their communities of belonging,

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b) a cognitive experience through which citizens and state-makers reconfigure their projection of public authority and polity, c) and an affective and virtual condition which fractures political imagination leaving individuals and communities without ­civic–political coordinates and compass or in search of new modes of belonging. In conceiving displacement in such terms, we project the material experience of physical dislocation, abandonment, and resettlement onto a realm that is also political and which affects and impinges upon the nature and transformation of state–citizen relations. Based on this initial reflection, which is in furtherance to the previous chapters on the culture of the right, this chapter analyses ways in which refugee flows transform state-making and sovereignty and the social fabric in the aftermath of the defeat of popular mobilisation, civil war, and large-scale conflicts. Related to our discussion of multi-latitude ­displacement, we explore the thinning of borders and waning of state sovereignty, the rooting of international organisations and humani­ tarian aid workers battening onto the authority of states, and the projection and challenges of extraterritorial and transregional activism among refugee communities, with annexed anxieties of nationhood, and the socio-demographic engineering that reifies them.

D ispl a c e m e n t Li feworld The Iraqi displacement which followed the second Gulf War in 2003 was a watershed moment for the whole region and prepared the ground for the (de)formation of states. Beyond the massive destruction of lives and infrastructure, the divisive policies made in the postwar period aggravated ethnic and sectarian tensions and triggered the displacement of 1.6 million Iraqis between 2006 and 2008 and allowed new sect-based actors to gain prominence in Iraq. The sweep of the Islamic State into Iraq in June 2014 further intensified the process of identity-based displacement and the fragmentation of the territory along sectarian and ethnic lines. In 2015, 2.57 million people fled their ancestral lands, with Christians, Yazidis, Shabaks, Mandaeans, Shi’a, and Turkmens particularly targeted by the Islamic state. The Islamic State had initiated an ‘Arab pogrom’, meant to erase centuries of ethnic and cultural diversity in Iraq, in revenge upon those groups

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perceived as beneficiaries of the US-sponsored administrations in Iraq, namely non-Sunni groups. Ethnic and sectarian decision-making by Iraqi policy makers keen to bolster support among their constituency aggravated social tensions and reinforced subnational identities at the expense of national belonging. As of 2021, 9.2 million Iraqis were internally displaced or living as refugees abroad.

L a t it u d in a l Walls The proliferation of walls, fences, and separation barriers is one of the most visible infrastructural consequences of the current displacement phenomenon. Hard borders are again the rule, while financial capital and elites move with greater freedom than ever before. Globalisation comes with an intricate display of contradictory patterns, such as the tension between national interests and the global market, the nation and the state, territorialisation and deterritorialisation, virtual and physical power, private appropriation and open sourcing. The building of new walls, frontiers, barriers, fences, and checkpoints, and the thickening of existing ones, though often declared as temporary structures, clearly epitomises this tension and calls into question statehood and sovereignty. From the outbreak of sectarian violence that followed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, to the dragging on of civil wars in Syria and Yemen, the Middle East has experienced a process of border thickening and the crumbling of state sovereignty in the face of subnational entities. Ethnic diversity, which has been a defining feature of the region, is being replaced by sectarian or ethnic uniformity enforced by semi-permanent physical and virtual systems that control the human flow. While the so-called separation barrier built by Israel through the West Bank is the first wall that pops into our minds as we think of the region, many more exist. One the most visible representations of the thickening of borders in recent years occurred in ‘response’ to the displacement of people in Syria. Neighbouring countries, faced with severe challenges in absorbing millions of refugees, decided to impose a system of border restrictions during the peak of the crisis between 2015 and 2018.7 The Lebanese government was the first to implement a quasi noentry policy for Syrians, stopping the registration of Syrian refugees with UNHCR in January 2015 and applying a visa requirement for Syrians wishing to enter Lebanon (the regulations established a list of six types of visas and required official documents and the approval

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of the Ministry of Social Affairs). The decision signalled the end of a brotherhood agreement that had existed between Syria and Lebanon since the 1990s. In addition, the council of ministers decided to make it more difficult and expensive to renew residency permits for refugees present in Lebanon, forcing them into a status of irregularity. Similarly, in June 2016 the Jordanian government effectively sealed its borders with Syria following an is i s attack on its soldiers. This move extended an existing restriction that applied to Palestinian refugees living in Syria without valid identity card to Syrian citizens. It is worth mentioning that the border between Jordan and Syria had no clearly defined demarcation line. Known as ‘The Berm’ or ‘Rukban’, the border is in desert land at the convergence of the Iraqi, Jordanian, and Syrian borders. There, in 2016, 55,000 Syrian refugees remained trapped when Jordan closed its border, leaving them in a no-man’s land.8 Paradoxically, despite the reopening of the border in 2018, the camp residents of Rukban were never allowed to leave their settlements, prolonging a grim life stranded in this inhospitable area. Despite being heralded as having the most accessible border policy out of the three countries, Türkiye started building a concrete wall along its 900 km border with Syria in 2014. At the height of the refugee displacement in the midst of the Syrian civil war, Türkiye closed seventeen of its nineteen border crossings, besides already having employed physical force on a regular basis throughout 2016 to prevent Syrians from entering its territory. These pushbacks increased with the e u –Türkiye deal that allowed European states to return those refugees who had crossed the Mediterranean from Türkiye to Greece, back to Türkiye. This was done in a barter agreement conceding the easing of the visa application for Turkish nationals to come to Europe. Moreover, following the defeat of i s i s in 2019, a buffer zone, also known as the ‘safe zone’ or the ‘peace corridor’, a demilitarised zone on the Syrian side of the Syrian–Turkish border, was established by Ankara and Washington to maintain security along the border. Its purpose was to dissuade Türkiye from invading the US-backed selfproclaimed Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria and produce a drastic demographic change in this area by inducing Syrian refugees to ‘independently’ move back to Syria.9 Although most of the border crossings have been formally reopened since 2018, all three countries maintain control over the movement of people across the borders. Strict visa application processes and military control of the borders has become the rule.

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In 2016, Lebanon received financial support from the United Kingdom’s Backing Stability program for the deployment of four regiments, the construction of more than seventy-five observation towers, the provision of 350 Land Rover vehicles, and the training of more than 11,000 personnel to prevent the infiltration of jihadists and possibly as a control measure for pro-Iranian militias moving across the Syria– Lebanon border.10 Later in 2024, the United States inaugurated the so-called ‘Fortress Embassy’, a complex building that is second only to the US embassy in Baghdad and which is testimony to the fortress vision made of walls and impenetrability in a hostile environment.11 Westwards, the escalating number of Syrians seeking refuge or entry into European states gave a rationale for the thickening of borders in Türkiye, in Greece, in the Balkans, and in eu countries. It is a rush of wall building to stop human migration. The e u built around fifteen anti-migration fences on its borders between 2011 and 2018. The length of such walls amounts to 1,000 km, six times longer than the Berlin Wall. The Schengen agreement, approved in 1988, removed internal border checks within the eu, but suspension of the agreement has become the norm across the displacement routes, for instance from Italy to France and Austria. For those living within the borders of Europe, the feeling is that the borders are still open, yet more walls exist now than ever before in the continent’s history. Rather than as an anomaly, the current regime of human mobility within the Euroland is enshrined in the idea of ‘a safe interior and an unsafe exterior’ and the increasing view that migration is a threat.12 This was made explicit in high representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs Joseph Borrell’s statement that ‘Europe is a garden … and the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden’.13 Coming from a diplomat with socialist credentials, the statement’s racism reminds us of how entrenched the culture of the right is across the political spectrum. In the Middle East, between 2002 and 2010, fifteen new security walls and fences were built. Israel added to its existing ‘separation barrier’ – security fences separating it from the West Bank and Egypt. Egypt built an above- and underground wall between it and Gaza. This caught international attention only in 2008 when people in Gaza tried to breach the wall to get access to items of basic need like food, water, and fuel. Saudi Arabia built an 885 km security wall along its border with Iraq and fences between itself and the u ae , Oman,

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Qatar, Jordan, and Yemen. The ua e erected fences along its borders with Saudi Arabia and Oman with the intent to increase security and decrease migration and smuggling. Jordan built walls along its borders with Syria and Iraq. Iran established walls and guard posts across its frontiers with Iraq, especially in the Kurdish-populated regions, as well as along its long and porous borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan to improve security and prevent smuggling of drugs into and oil out of the country. The construction of such barriers and walls does not necessarily mean that the states are preventing human movement; it just means that movement for certain categories of humans is not to be allowed.14 The Israeli Defence Force claims that the Israeli–Egyptian fence is effective in reducing the flow of illegal migrants from Africa, at a time when Israeli–Egyptian exchange of travellers is at a historic height. More than 1.4 million Israelis crossed into the Sinai by car in 2019 alone.15 Elsewhere in the region more walls are about to be erected: the Iraqi government announced in the summer of 2022 the building of a concrete wall along its borders with Syria to keep I S I S /Daesh out of its border regions, while Ankara decided to extend a security wall along its border with Iran to cover 295 km and deter Afghan migrants from entering its country. Modern borders differ greatly in their level of complexity and enforcement. Among the most securitised borders is that of Kuwait– Iraq, made of electrified fencing and razor wire, braced by a 4.6 m wide and 4.6 m deep trench complete with a 3 m high dirt berm and guarded by hundreds of soldiers, several patrol boats, and helicopters. The Saudi Arabia–Iraq wall is equipped with ultraviolet night-vision cameras, buried sensor cables, thousands of miles of barbed wire, fifty radars, seventy-eight monitoring towers, eight command centres, ten mobile surveillance vehicles, thirty-eight night-vision camera-equipped gates, thirty-two rapid-response centres, and three rapid intervention squads, all linked by a fibre-optic communications network. Some of the equipment used at the borders can detect a person 19 km away and a vehicle at 39 km. In spite of this ever more sophisticated technology, bordered walls and fences are never impenetrable as was seen in the 7 October attacks in southern Israel. Beside interstate walls, there is the rising manifestation of intracommunal separation walls. Separation walls allegedly aim to reduce violence. Often referred to as ‘Jersey barriers’, they are roadblocks made of concrete which look like a reversed ‘T’ (first used in the

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construction of the highway which crosses the state of New Jersey). The first example was a wall in Baghdad built by the US in 2007 to separate Sunni districts such as Azamya from Shi’a areas but later used in numerous neighbourhoods to protect communities from the threat of sectarian violence. These walls are removed when/if violence decreases or moved if violence spreads elsewhere. They basically play a role in temporarily suspending violence, which is justified in a situation of emergency. Yet, what they actually create are gated commu­nities or ‘ghetto communities’, like the ones found around the Israeli settlements in the West Bank along the ‘separation wall’. For instance, Bethlehem is isolated from Jerusalem with cement barriers; in Ceuta and Melilla, where the eu has allocated forty million euros with the aim of discouraging the immigration of Asians and Africans, intra­ communal walls separate historically contiguous communities. New walls signpost the borders of nation-states, but they are not built to protect states from the attack of other sovereign states or against invading armies (as was the case in the past). Rather, they aim to stop the flow of poor people, workers, and refugees, and of drugs, weapons, smuggled goods, and ethnic and religious mixing.16 The nation is therefore portrayed as ‘under siege’ by ‘invading immigrant hordes’ coming to take what belongs to the nation, whether in pursuit of rightful peace, cultural rights, jobs, First World privilege, democratic values, or human dignity.17 The frenetic scramble to build walls represents an epic battle to preserve state sovereignty: walls working as condoms against the risk brought by post-national, transnational, or subnational penetrations. Paradoxically, instead of expressing a state’s sovereignty, they represent its weakness, fear, and instability. These fortifications are becoming the expression of a separation between inside/outside: us/them, friend/foe. The fifteenminute English-language propaganda video released by I S I S /Daesh on 29 June 2014, entitled ‘The End of Sykes–Picot’, along with its Arabic-language ‘Kaser al-Hudud’ (The breaking of borders), which showed the bulldozing of the earthen wall between Iraq and Syria, symbolically signalled the end of an era that started with the Sykes– Picot agreement in 1916 – though in reality ended nine years later after other deals, declarations, and treaties that ultimately created the ‘Middle East’ out of the Ottoman empire’s carcass. The frenzied construction of such walls, fences, and barriers creates what Martin Heidegger defined as an ‘image of a reassuring world’ and what Edward Said would call an ‘imaginative geography’: the mental

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organisation of a space through borders which define identities. Eventually such borders become frontiers in our minds, signalling a distinctive demarcation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ but also connecting forms of belonging through disrupted geographies of displacement and conflict. Our everyday, too, is made of multi-layered virtual walls: filters, passcodes, and spyware in the devices hosted in our houses, cars, museums, and airports. Compared to the past, we are generally less concerned with the concrete blocking made of bricks or iron, especially if living in the mainstream middle-class Western world. The same would not apply if we were residents of the West Bank trying to move from town to town or if we lived outside Mexico City’s gated communities. In fact, walls of concrete and iron co-exist with the liquid nature of the virtual walls propped up by technological devices. Walls seem to repristinate an ontology of power in its spatial and territorial dimension but effectively represent a ‘ritual performance’ (as elaborated by Peter Andreas) or a ‘political showcase’ (as explored in the work of Mike Davis).18 While ancient temples housed gods, nationstate walls are modern-day temples housing the ghost of political sovereignty, i.e., the state.19 Notwithstanding their physical presence and pursued panoptical control, these new walls only perform theatrics of power and control. The performance of policing and blockading only really reveals the anxiety generated by a declining state sovereignty, which resurrects myths of an authentic nation-state that can be preserved and contained by the aggression of transnational forces, subaltern in their outlook, like refugees and migrants or ‘terrorists’. ‘Walls – solid, visible walls – are demanded when the constitutive political horizon for the “we” and “I” is receding’.20 They spatially demarcate the ‘us’ when conceits of ‘national political or economic autonomy, demographic homogeneity, or shared history, culture and values’ can no longer be fashioned.21 Indeed, the history of walls (to keep people out) is really a history of people managing to surmount them. No matter how spectacular these fortifications might be, the effects they produce are longer, more expensive, increase the life-threatening aspect of the journeys those trying to overcome them take, and exponentially increase the profits of smuggling operations. While walls are built for security concerns, nothing seems to be more dangerous than sealing off a people within closed walls, a statement that we first wrote prior to the Hamas-led attacks in October 2023.

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H u m a n it a r ia n S overei gnty? The protracted nature of displacement includes imposing a semipermanent presence of international organisations and aid workers into the everyday governance of a mass of non-citizen populations, with the inevitable effect of undermining core elements of state sovereignty. Humanitarian intervention on state sovereignty is an issue which has generated debates among academics and policy makers, but the semi-permanent presence of humanitarian and development organisations has not been treated adequately. This is one of the multilatitude effects of displacement. The protracted nature of the displacement crisis is putting under strain social institutions (hospitals, schools, welfare), producing ethnic and religious demographic changes, heightening the tension between refugees and host communities, and making border areas porous and insecure. In many instances, refugee-hosting states are incapable of (or financially reluctant about) dealing with the multi-layered crisis on their own, leading them to accept the support of the international aid system. The broader international community operates in stovepipes, with the United Nations or supranational agencies focusing on political issues, na t o on security issues, and international financial institutions dealing with social and development matters. The international aid system establishes parallel structures to the institutions of the state, performing as the state but with the effect of delegitimising the state in the eyes of refugee and host communities alike. The existence of such a system disincentivises countries in the Global South to integrate refugees, as they are aware that one day, often not too far down the line, financial support will dry up and refugees will become the responsibility of those states in which they reside. It is like playing musical chairs: at some point someone will be left without a chair, and you don’t want to be that someone. Meanwhile, states dependent on foreign aid to support the refugees are defined as ‘hollow’.22 Afghanistan was an excellent example during the period of civil war between the pro-Western government in Kabul and the insurgencies led by the Taliban. The continuing conflict with the Taliban and presence of international armed forces and international humanitarian organisations showed that the de jure sovereign state did not have a monopoly over administrative, juridical, and security matters.23 International organisations and workers operating in Afghanistan

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disempowered those local institutions and actors which should have overseen the governance of the territories and ultimately their country. Despite its alleged and declared good intentions, the international aid system ultimately built the conditions upon which the insurgency, emerging from the hollowness of sovereignty, could materialise as a viable governance force. The internationalisation of the Afghan state was the prelude and condition for its emptying and for the rise of grounded, grassroots forces in the form of the Taliban. Afghanistan does not stand alone as a case; indeed, many other examples can be found in the region. An interesting example of sovereignty gap can often be found in places where United Nations agencies, particularly the un High Commissioner for Refugees (unhcr) or the un Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (unrwa), operate and where they establish structures similar to a ‘surrogate state’ within hosting states.24 These are often put in place indefinitely, damaging the full capacities of the host government. The case of unrwa is significant and generally discussed as the so-called ‘blue state’, in charge of keeping alive the bulk of the dismembered Palestinian nation as if it were a quasi-state or a ‘state within a state’.25 Such humanitarian ‘assistance has been presented to Palestinians as a substitute for their [lost] rights’. Take for instance the case of un support to Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Because of specific political arrangements between the Lebanese state and the Palestinian refugees between 1950 and 1990, refugee camps have turned into spaces run by the refugees themselves with the assistance of unrwa, where the rule of law (of the state) is suspended, thereby turning them into ‘extraterritorial entities’, ‘security islands’, a ‘state-within-a state’, and ‘spaces of exception’.26 Fregonese argues that Palestinian refugee camps are ‘cross-­contaminations of different state and nonstate actors’, which erode Lebanese sovereignty, showcasing forms of political agency that has emerged and transformed over time. Refugee camps became spaces where refugees are identified as noncitizens and therefore cast out of the political life of states. Nations and citizens exist in a separate international regime of humanitarianism, which Agier defines as ‘a space of exception set apart from the common world but still in control’.27 The sovereignty gap is even more tangible in the Syrian refugee crisis. Of all neighbouring countries, Lebanon and Jordan host the largest number of Syrian refugees relative to their overall populations. According to estimates, registered refugees make up one-third of the

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entire population in both countries. Jordan, with a population of approximately 9.5 million, hosts 2.1 million registered Palestinians (who came in 1948), hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who sought refuge over the past twenty-five years due to the Gulf wars, and more than 650,000 registered Syrians since 2011. In Lebanon, with a population of around 6.2 million, there are approximately 450,000 Palestinian refugees and 50,000 Palestinian refugees from Syria, an estimated 50,000 Iraqis, and 1.1 million Syrian refugees, although the number of unregistered Syrian refugees is thought to be substantial. The initial ‘open door’ and humanitarian approach ­(2011–14) was replaced by a security agenda that made the entry, stay, and movement of Syrian refugees more difficult. As previously mentioned, neither country has signed the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention, and neither has specific asylum laws. In order to avoid a repetition of previous experience with the Palestinian camps – built as temporary shelters and never dismantled, after seven decades – Lebanon remained committed to avoiding considering itself an asylum country, referring to Syrians as ‘displaced’ (nazihūn) or ‘guests’ (dhuyuf).28 In this line, Lebanon’s then pm Najib Mikati refused to open refugee camps for Syrians but allowed them to scatter throughout the country in informal camps in urban and rural settings, and with a myriad of different international organisations and n g o s providing relief, aid, and assistance. Although the work of n g o s has come to be essential, given the incapacity and withdrawal of the Lebanese state from its duty of providing public services amidst its financial crisis, the situation also generates great anxiety in terms of the refugees’ temporariness and what could happen after their departure now that the Syrian conflict is in its last stages and many Syrians see no future for themselves in a country ruled by the Assad government. In contrast, Jordan opened four official refugee camps (Zaatari, Mraajeeb al-Fhood, Azraq, and King Abdullah Park) between 2012 and 2014. The government encampment policy was informed by its experience with Iraqi refugees in 1991 and 2003, when by not opening refugee camps, the crisis remained invisible to the international community and prevented attracting international funding.29 In both cases from 2014, despite a camp and non-camp policy, Jordan and Lebanon collaborated with un agencies to develop a response plan to the refugee crisis and received funding for both refugee and host communities. Although initially strongly top-down, the Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan (3r p ) with time embodied a more comprehensive

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strategy that went beyond humanitarian relief and gave a greater role to local institutions and actors. Yet, more than ten years after the start of the Syrian crisis, the cooperation between the international and national levels in both countries has worsened and the indefinite stay of both refugees and international agencies is often questioned at the national level. The displacement of people – Syrians in this case – has not just ­created a sovereignty gap filled by an umbrella of international humanitarian and development agencies from the Global North but has also spawned a plethora of Southern-led Islamic charities and communitybased organisations which have stepped in to provide adequate assistance to the refugees. This was determined by the worsening of the war and the numerous security restrictions which impeded the work of international organisations. Of note is that the u n is bound by certain restrictions when assisting refugees, such as not providing help to fighters. Many Syrian refugees intentionally decided not to register with unhcr and therefore were excluded from all un-linked assistance and their implementing partners. Humanitarianism is no longer a Western-dominated enterprise; many Arab donors are increasingly active in the Middle East and beyond.30 The operational system of Islamic community-based organisations is less bureaucratic and grounded. This guarantees better access compared with the complicated system of the u n , with the advantage of often being present in villages and building localised networks of knowledge and exchange about the needs and challenges of the community. In Jordan, the two most well-known organisations are the al-Kitab wal-Sunna (affiliated to the Salafists) and al-Markaz al-Islam, which belongs to the Jordanian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. In Lebanon, the highest religious authority for Sunni Muslims, Dar al-Fatwa, coordinates the work of Islamic charities around the country. Islamic charities, their set-up, their key networks, and programmes (education programmes) have unclear roles and blurred management practices. This has raised concern among humanitarian actors, as well as refugees, that the type of assistance provided is not simply humanitarian but religious and political in nature, especially when these same charities receive stellar funding from Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf.31 This does not mean that we should assume that the religious and conservative outlook of Islamic charities corresponds automatically with having an Islamist agenda. What we are interested in here is to prove how the displacement crisis is challenging a state’s

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sovereignty through many different non-state actors who are operating at multiple levels. In this instance, the role of Islamic charities in both Jordan and Lebanon is central to the discussion of how displacement transforms state projection and sovereignty, given that they function as a parallel system to un-coordinated international assistance and are strongly rooted in the community where they operate. Multi-latitude displacement is producing forms of sovereignty gaps that have been breached by secular and religious organisations. Despite the undoubtedly important work that these organisations deliver in assisting vulnerable people away from home, their semi-permanent presence is transforming the way public authority evolves in the long run and, with it, state formation.

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6 Demographic Engineering and National Anxieties

The visitor, when he comes to your house, is a prince. If he stays at your house, he becomes a prisoner. If he stands up to leave your house, he must turn into a poet.1 Arabic proverb

D e m o g r a p h ic Anxi eti es Forced population transfer since 2001 has contributed to the dismantling of the idea of nation-state based on societal diversity and the plurality of cultural imaginary. This has been replaced with a vision rooted in ethnic and sectarian enclave thinking, the formation of perceived homogeneous groups, of uniformity. Demographic engineering becomes an important shaper of community dynamics and nation-making, even though this can be traced to the region’s history in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. When talking about demographic engineering we indicate any deliberate state or foreign intervention regarding the composition, distribution, and quantitative presence of a specific population. The state’s programme aims at increasing the political and economic power of one ethnic group over others for cultural, political, or strategic reasons. The scale of these forced population movements – particularly in Iraq and Syria, which account for 90 per cent of the displacement in the region prior to 2023 – represents a demographic undoing of the Sykes–Picot agreement after World War I. Ethnic, tribal, and religious groups who once inhabited vast stretches of land without borders found their community divided by arbitrary state boundaries. They

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were assigned national identities with which they were persuaded or forced to identify through the influence of public institutions and propaganda and came under the control of colonial or popular governments to which they had no pledged alliance and with which they had little or no organic connection. Contemporary Syria and Iraq are the product of such a history and the consequential choices made by French and British authorities during the colonial mandates of the 1920s. In the post–World War II period, the Levant, and more generally the Arab world, witnessed significant episodes of mass displacement on the grounds of maintaining ethnic or religious homogeneity in specific geographical areas. The ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Syria, respectively, since the 2000s and 2010s have amplified decades of latent identity politics performed by the Ba’ath regimes in both countries. In the 1980s and 1990s, presidents Hafez al-Assad of Syria and Saddam Hussein of Iraq distributed state services, goods, and favours to selected communities based on ethno-religious belonging and marginalised and excluded others using the same principle. Both regimes started the ‘Arabisation’ of stretches of land considered of strategic interest, transferring impoverished Arab peasants and workers to those areas and moving out predominantly Kurdish populations (but also Assyrians and Yazidis in the case of Iraq), who had been settled there over several centuries, if not longer. This strategy included varied forms of violence – or as Jenny Pearce would say, violences2 – to consolidate control and authority in displaced and unsettled communities. Displacement worked as a state and nation-making project, but it also affected the longer trajectories of political belonging across the region. For instance, in Syria, the most brutal incident was the crackdown against the Muslim Brotherhood in 1982, which left between 20,000 and 40,000 people dead. The massacre occurred following the mobilisation of the population of Hama and Homs against the centralising power of the state led by Hafez al-Assad. The purge had no overt ethno-religious connotations, but its ultimate aim was to target the population of Sunni Arabs, the demographic majority in Syria, and a perceived potential threat to the rule of the Assad family, Alawite in denomination. In Iraq, the state strategy against the Kurdish population culminated with chemical attacks in the Anfal campaign and the genocidal strike on Halabja in March 1988, which left several thousand dead. The ongoing identity-based population transfers and re-settlements are not only affecting Syrian and Iraqi societies but also affecting neighbouring countries, namely Lebanon, Jordan, and Türkiye.

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National anxieties dominate policy and public discussion in all three neighbouring countries, albeit in different ways. Politicians and the population at large are worried that the dramatic spike in and indefinite stay of refugees might lead to changes in the current demographics and alter the existing social and political order. In Lebanon, the fear is that the predominately Sunni Syrians will disrupt the already fragile sectarian balance in the country, triggering political anxieties among some Christian and Shi’a groups. In Jordan, it is a fear that touches upon issues of national origin and political imagination. The forced exodus of Palestinians in 1948 caused by the establishment of the state of Israel, and in 1967 after the Arab–Israeli War, created the world’s longest-running refugee crisis. Eight decades after their exodus, Palestinians are still being hosted in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan with renewable short-term measures awaiting a political solution. This displacement shaped the consciousness of generations of Arab citizens and influenced the policy response of Jordan and Lebanon. In Türkiye, the fear that Syrian refugees could remain indefinitely has shaped the Erdogan government’s foreign policy to the point of militarily intervening in Syria and occupying a stretch of land designated for the return of refugees. In Lebanon, the influx of Syrian refugees awakened sectarian fears and increased the polarisation among political groups in an already complex political landscape. The Lebanese political system recognises eighteen religious and ethnic sects, and a historic national pact distributes the top government posts among religious communities. The growth and changes in the demographics of the country are being questioned on the basis of this pact, even more so now that a large segment of society is made up of refugees, like the Palestinians, who continue to reside in twelve refugee camps across the country. With the exception of middle-class Palestinian Christian families, the Lebanese state has denied Palestinian refugees (mainly of Sunni faith) citizenship rights for fear of altering the country’s sectarian balance. The Palestinian refugees are also accused of having drawn the country into a fifteen-year civil war and of using southern Lebanon as an operational launching pad for military attacks on Israel. The influx and stay of mainly Sunni Syrian refugees is seen as a renewed threat to their longstanding national pact if granted citizenship rights, which would change the power sharing among its key religious communities. Worldwide, Lebanon is second in the ratio of refugees to the native population, with one out of four people being a refugee. For this

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reason, the Lebanese government categorically refused to build refugee camps for fleeing Syrians which could turn into long-term settlements and threaten the country’s confessional governance and stability. Instances of tensions between refugees and host communities are many, often triggered by the large numbers of refugees settled in areas where the host community is a minority, numerically speaking. This epitomises how fear of the ‘other’ leads to racist and discriminatory behaviour. It also relates to what the previous section argued as being the embeddedness of a culture of the right, palpable at both elite and popular levels. In contrast to what the international community advocates, the Lebanese government has started controversial repatriation schemes, which are depicted as ‘voluntary’ but often incur coercion and reprisal. The presence of Syrian refugees in Jordan and their uncertain stay in the country has triggered feelings of anxiety surrounding the issue of national origin. Different from Lebanon, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, born after World War I under the British mandate, granted full citizenship rights to the majority of Palestinians who fled the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the 1967 Arab–Israeli war. On this basis, the monarchy built its legitimacy around an East Jordanian national identity, one that could not be dismissed by a Palestinian one. With time, the country developed a balance between the power and interests of East Bank Jordanians and Jordanians of Palestinian origin. Maintaining a distinct Jordanian national identity among the nonPalestinian population served the purpose of avoiding Jordan turning into an alternative homeland for Palestinians at large. The arrival of large numbers of Syrian refugees reignited fears that the demographic balance would be tilted away from East Jordanians even further. Pointedly expressed by a former member of Jordan’s parliament, East Bankers risk becoming minorities and guests in their own nation.3 The clearest example came with the selective and racist treatment of Syrian refugees of Palestinian origin, who were systematically refused entry into Jordan or relegated to a specific refugee camp, known as Cyber City – a derelict six-storey building outside a desolate crossroads in Irbid rather than a real refugee camp – and repeatedly processed through repatriation programmes contrary to international law. Formerly built to host migrant workers, the ‘camp’ turned into an open-air ‘prison’, where Palestinian refugees were denied free movement in and out of the camp, epitomising the different treatment that refugees face based on their ethnic origin.

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In Türkiye, amid a deepening economic crisis, popular resentment towards the millions of refugees living across the country’s eighty-one provinces has been growing. According to recent figures provided by the Interior Ministry, Türkiye is home to more than 4 million refugees, 3.76 million of whom are Syrians, in addition to hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees and several hundred thousand Iranian émigrés. Ahead of Türkiye’s parliamentary and presidential elections in May 2023, the anti-refugee sentiment was propped up by multiple candidates, giving way to a general turn towards the right (even by Turkish political standards). The politician Umit Ozdag is a case in point. A former member of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (mhp), he was expelled from the party in 2016; after initially joining the right-wing opposition Good Party (iyi), in August 2021 he formed his own party, the Victory Party. Under the official slogan ‘Victory will come to power, all refugees and illegals will go’, the party has gained some popularity beyond its limited electoral scope. One of the main pillars of the culture of the right is the staunch aversion to refugees based on the fabrication of a make-believe world that others refugees as barbarians, as discussed in earlier chapters. The Victory Party has made systematic use of unverifiable or false claims, such as the one that more than 8 million refugees are currently being hosted in Türkiye, which would amount to about 10 per cent of the country’s population. The latest step taken by the party was the release of a short fictional film called Invasion, which is set in 2043 and depicts a Türkiye where a Syrian political party is elected to power, pledging to make Arabic the official language of the country. Despite the surreal nature of this film, in a matter of a few months from its release, more than 4 million people had watched it on YouTube. Leading figures of the right have made proposals that include ‘isolating’ illegal migrants in ‘concentration camps’ or preventing their access to public parks and other public spaces. They have also signalled their interest in signing agreements with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to facilitate the return (or refoulement) of Syrians back to Syria. National anxieties linked to the presence of Syrian refugees have come to the forefront of Turkish domestic and foreign policy. They are not issues that animate only smaller Turkish political parties in the run to power but also President Erdogan’s Justice and Development party (akp). The establishment of a Kurdish belt in the north of Syria during the Syrian civil war raised the alarm that this could refuel independentist desires among the Kurdish population in Türkiye,

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settled just on the other side of the Turkish border. Through Operation Euphrates Shield in 2016 and Operation Olive Branch in 2018 and later expanded to Operation Peace Spring in 2019, Erdogan launched a cross-border military operation in conjunction with the Syrian National Army (s na ) against Kurdish militias in northeastern Syria, with the intent of establishing a thirty-kilometre-wide ‘safe zone’ in northeastern Syria to resettle some of the more than 3 million Syrian refugees. Although the operation was intended to expel the Syrian Democratic Forces (s df ), designated a terrorist organisation by Türkiye due to its ties with the Kurdish Workers Party (pkk), which had previously been considered an ally against isis, it caused permanent changes to the demographic character of the area and revealed cases of ethnic cleansing and demographic change. Deterring Kurdish mobilisation in that belt and settling more than a million Syrian ‘Arabs’ next to, or within, territories under Kurdish control was the unstated intent of the plan. Demographic rebalancing through displacement and the management of it has been the practical means of achieving long-term Turkish national security objectives. Such demographic engineering was built on the assumption that by resettling displaced Arab Sunnis from across Syria next to a Kurdish-populated enclave would eventually play into Türkiye’s strategy of curbing the emergence of a Kurdish majority continuum across its southern border. The use of a mythological machine of sectarianism is rooted in the ‘us’, i.e., Sunni Arabs, versus ‘them’, secular Kurds, and provokes identity clashes. Moving eastward, Iraq similarly is an example of how making changes to the demographic structure of the state, since the second Gulf War in 2003, has led to profound transformations in state–­ society relations. The dismantling of the Ba’ath regime allowed new actors such as al-Qaeda and external forces including Iran to gain a foothold in the country. The new Iraqi constitution, which guaranteed freedom to all citizens, institutionalised a governance system based on sectarian differences rather than on common bonds. The displacement of about 1.6 million Iraqis between 2006 and 2008 was followed by the establishment and rise of the Islamic State. A further 6 million internally displaced people reconstituted Iraq’s social geography along ethnic and sectarian lines, materialising in segregated cities in distinct administrative zones. Consider the city of Baghdad, home to a multitude of intertwined ethnoreligious groups. After five years of urban-based civil war, Baghdad was fragmented along ethnic lines

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similar to other cities like Belfast. The separation wall constructed in 2007 by the Multi-National Force in Iraq to restore stability and stop suicide bombings carved Baghdad and its neighbourhoods like A’adhamiyah, Amiriyah, Dawrah, and Hurriyah into sections cordoned off by tall ‘T blocks’ of cement.4 The ‘protective walls’ managed to protect the residents from sectarian bombings but did not provide full security, and with time communities drifted apart. Residents started to regard the walls with hatred. As Andrew Griffin argued about the thirty-foot-high walls of Belfast, known as ‘peace lines’, once built they would never come down and would cement victimhood narratives. The narratives feed the political imaginary of displacement, linking a physical displacement to a virtual displacement, which we discuss in the next chapter. With the rise and fall of the Islamic State, many of the old, dismantled walls returned after 2014. By the end of 2022, Baghdad had turned into two sectarian groups, with little communication between the two sides. City bus lines were reduced to servicing particular sectarian sections of the city and after 2015 the Iraqi government set out to encircle the entire city with a wall to prevent terrorist attacks on city residents. The Arab Sunni minority lives in its own delimited neighbourhoods pushed into the far western reaches of the city, while the Christian community is progressively emigrating to safer terri­ tories in the region and beyond. During the military operations to defeat is, between 2014 and 2017, Iraq witnessed its highest wave of internal displacement. More than  6  million Iraqis moved to different governorates such as Baghdad, Kirkuk, Anbar, Nineveh, Salah al-Din, and Diyala, and to Iraqi Kurdistan.5 The Christians of Mosul, the Yazidis, Shabaks, Mandaeans, Shi’a, Turkomans, and Kurds, all fled their ancestral homes to avoid the violence of the Islamic State. Since 2014 Iraqi policymakers across the spectrum have endorsed the sectarianisation of resettlement in response to the onslaught of the Islamic State and to avert the threat of civil war. This has reinforced primordial or subnational identities at the expense of national belonging. Militarisation of ethnic and sectarian communities has ensued, aggravating the identity-based tensions. In Syria, the nature and extent of demographic engineering has not only mimicked but also surpassed the scale and extent of what happened in Iraq. An unending civil war between the Syrian state and different nonstate actors, as well as thousands of smaller paramilitary

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groups, combined with an international and regional proxy war, has not resulted in the fall of the state. By 2023, the Syrian government held the upper hand by virtue of Russian and Iranian intervention that includes paramilitary support. The violence unleashed by these multiple wars and warring parties has resulted in the world’s largest displacement crisis, with 13 million people displaced, of whom 6.9 million are homeless inside their own country. To reconquer opposition-held areas and to fortify control over existing territories, the Syrian government has used demographic engineering as a tool in postwar Syria to transform its social and political landscape. The methods employed to institutionalise demographic change were numerous, including the destruction and seizure of property, promulgation of urban laws, development-centred decrees, and the withholding of basic services such as electricity and water from nonconforming groups and opposition strongholds. The narrative adopted by the Syrian regime to justify these measures was substantiated with: a) the need to rebuild Syria’s war-torn territories; b) the issue of informal housing which was on the government’s agenda before the conflict; and c) the need to revitalise the economy and provide security by boosting the reconstruction industry – also taking into account funding flows from foreign allies.6 Early in the Syrian popular uprising, the regime revealed its intention to change the demographics of key cities such as Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo in an attempt to maintain its grip on the power of what Bashar al-Assad defined ‘useful Syria’ (the country’s western portion, stretching from Damascus City to Aleppo City). Specifically, on several occasions, the Sunni Arab communities living in those areas were pressured to leave or forced out, while regime loyalists and families of Shi’a militias from Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon have repopulated the areas left by the displaced. After the regime began to gain the upper hand militarily, it used Russian- and Iranianmediated negotiations to create ‘reconciliation agreements’ to push out opposition groups and enforce displacement politics as an appeasement strategy for remaining residents. However, ‘reconciliation’ agreements are not a kind of amicable agreement between government and opposition; rather, they are a coercive tool aimed at subsuming people under surrender and regaining territory back into the state.

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Most often, the Syrian regime achieved reconciliation through an agreement after besieging the area, cutting off access to medical, food, and humanitarian support and through the systematic use of aerial bombardment. Population transfers in iconic green buses, overseen by u n observers and Russian military advisers, have come to ‘symbolise dispossession and defeat’.7 For instance, in September 2012 the Syrian government issued Decree 66/2012 authorising the creation of two urban planning zones within the governorate of Damascus, one in the southeast of al-Mazzeh and one stretching south of the southern highway, including the areas of al-Mazzeh, Kafarsouseh, Qanawat, Basateen, Darayya, and Qadam as well as parts of the cities of Homs and Hama. The decree required the city council to create a list of all property in the area, demanding that owners publicly declare ownership of their properties and giving them the choice of selling their stakes in the property. Many of these areas, like Daraya and Moadamiya in the Damascus countryside, became revolutionary hotbeds and later armed opposition strongholds. In August 2012, the Syrian government launched a massive offensive in the area. According to hrw’s satellite images, the buildings on a total of 41.6 hectares of land around the Mezzah military airport were demolished between December 2012 and July 2013.8 In April 2017, an agreement was reached regarding four key cities, al-Zabadani, Madaya, Kafraya, and Fuaa. The agreement was signed between the Syrian state and its allies Hezbollah and Iran on one side and the two opposition groups of Hay’at al-Shams (h t s ) and Ahrar al-Sham on the other. It stipulated an exchange of prisoners and of residents from Madaya and al-Zabadani in the Damascus countryside for residents from Kafraya and Fuaa in the Idlib countryside. The four-cities agreement moved Shi’a loyalists closer to the capital Damascus, while forcing opposition supporters to Idlib. Similar processes took place in other strategic zones across the country like Homs. Let’s consider three cases: the unlawful destruction of civil properties in the neighbourhoods of Bab al-Amr in 2012, which resulted in the forced eviction of 35,000 residents; the forced displacement of the Karam Al-Zeitoun area, which resulted in 50,000 residents being driven out of that territory; and in Bayada and Khaldiyeh where more than 190,000 residents fled without hope of return. Masha’ al-Arb’een on the northern edge of Hama, adjacent to the Hama–Aleppo highway, was demolished between October 2012 and May 2013, having been used by opposition forces to move in and out

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of the city. Initially government forces launched a major offensive against the rebel forces in the area, shelling with artillery and mortars. Later, after opposition fighters had left the neighbourhood, military forces bulldozed all residential infrastructure, preventing any potential return of residents to their dwellings. The neighbourhood largely consisted of poorly constructed houses that were illegally built before the outbreak of the conflict. Government officials justified the move saying that the authorities wanted to remove all illegally built structures and develop the area to improve the living conditions of its inhabitants. Again, the circumstances of the neighbourhood’s demolition indicated that the motivation was mainly driven by ongoing military operations against the opposition forces but with the long-term objective of using displacement as a governance tool for redefining the nation and its citizenry. The ‘reconciliation agreements’ brought about the exchange of prisoners, opposition figures, and pro-rebel residents with loyalist Syrian forces and supporters. Syrian authorities kept a close eye on ‘reconciled areas’ and their residents through the use of previously imposed security checks, military conscription, checkpoints, and document validations. What this means is that the government is now reclaiming its reach over administrative and citizenship processes. It can define the rules of citizenship and civic life, and it is able to locate (its) people. Beside the use of reconciliation agreements to enforce demographic change, the Syrian state also ratified new laws to legalise changes in property and land rights. On 2 April 2018 Bashar al-Assad issued Law No. 10, which stipulates that any administrative body or local council has ‘the permission to determine which areas will be designated for reconstruction’. Under the guise of reconstructing areas destroyed in the war, the law essentially strips the majority of displaced people of property ownership, acting as a deterrent to those wanting to return. Any area in need of development can be transferred to a holding company which can start development projects. The law builds upon the text of Decree 66. This decree planned the redevelopment of two areas in the ring around the capital Damascus. In contrast, Law No. 10 assigns wide-reaching authority to the Syrian regime to redevelop all residential areas across the country, especially those recovered from the opposition. Law No. 10 received extensive media coverage and strong criticism from human rights groups and analysts to the point that, amid international pressure, the regime was forced to issue Law No. 42/2018 to amend it. The amendment extends the

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period for owners to submit their documents from thirty days to one year, though granting the regime power to employ other tactics to change the demographic makeup of the country.9 Scholar Fabrice Balanche argues that the war in Syria may lead to a reversal of the demographic balance in the Iranian corridor in favour of the Shi’as, i.e., the stretch of land connecting western Iran through Iraq to Syria and Lebanon.10 Similar concerns have been raised in Iraq, where demographic shifts have favoured the politically and economically powerful Shi’a groups to the detriment of the Sunni population. The city of Qusayr, located in the Homs governorate in Syria on the border with the north governorate in Lebanon, and the village of Qalat al-Hossein in Homs exemplify this socio-demographic re-engineering. In both villages, almost the entire Sunni population fled to Lebanon, allowing the Syrian regime to burn and loot residential areas to prevent people from coming back. Balanche describes the Arab Sunni working class as the quintessential ‘dangerous class’ for the social order (in an interplay with Marx’s definition of lumpenproletariat as reactionary and pre-political), identified as the group which initiated the rebellion in Syria, the one that established the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and the one with widespread unemployment and sustained high fertility rates. What we are witnessing is a process of ethnic and religious homogenisation, which leads minorities to regroup with their kincommunity to ensure survival and security and preserve imagined political belonging in a state emptied of people.

P o l it ic a l A c t ivi sm among R e f u g e e   C o mmuni ti es Politicians, policy makers, and members of the humanitarian aid system describe refugees and displaced people as passive recipients of humanitarian aid or collective subjects that lack something (access to education, health care, freedom, etc.). They are framed as homines sacri, living in a precarious legal and political limbo, unaware of their rights and unable to formally influence the policies that affect them. Didier Fassin wrote that practices of humanitarianism are often to blame for such conditions as they depoliticise the forcibly displaced by instilling this sense of suffering.11 While the conditions displaced people live under may disenable protests, strikes, boycotts, and petitions addressing collective grievances, refugees maintain transnational links with their home country,12 as well as carry the potential

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of being dual political actors within and without their host and home countries. Forced displacement is not only a site of abandonment, but it can also be a land for reconstructing politics.13 One study presented by Killian Clarke refutes refugees being passive and quiescent, showing frequent and tenacious patterns of contention in the Za’atari refugee camp. There, a high concentration of refugees is confined in a single space and in a poorly coordinated and rigid top-down coalition of humanitarian and governmental organisations. The Za’atari camp was opened on 28 July 2012 on a patch of empty land in the north of Jordan, hosting a population that has fluctuated throughout time but which is currently around 80,000 refugees. In 2022, Za’atari was the fourth-largest city in Jordan. While initially the Za’atari camp was run by the Jordanian Hashemite Charity Organization (j h c o ), the inexperience of this governmental aid organisation led the government to allow un agencies and ingos to take over management of the camp, while leaving its security to two branches of the Jordanian military with little experience in policing. The mismanagement of the camp stirred the refugee community to air frustration and establish an informal system of governance through leaders who had been authority figures in Syria (village elders or the leaders of large families and powerful clans). Within a short span of time, these leaders established an informal system of governance, overseeing specific streets (informally known as ‘street leaders’) or neighbourhoods. They served the community they represented and worked as intermediaries with the rest of the community as well as the humanitarian agencies. Refugees engaged through this informal network in numerous contentious events in 2014 (protesting, rioting, throwing stones, blocking roads, occupying buildings) targeting either humanitarian organisations or the Jordanian security forces over issues related to the delivery of services (electricity, water, or food provision) or security (regulation of the free movement of refugees entering and leaving the camp). Such informal activism brought about real changes in the management of the Za’atari camp. Over the course of nine months, u n h cr adopted a new approach to camp governance with a strong emphasis on incorporating the street leaders through regular meetings and the establishment of a new community police force, trained in conflict  mediation and policing, which replaced the heavy-handed Jordanian military troops. Service provision was also improved by allowing Syrian refugees to change the architecture of the camp into

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a refugee-friendly one, re-arranging the housing by allowing family and relatives to live in the same neighbourhood and making sure that every house had a private bathroom and kitchen, rather than using the common facilities that had first been set up. Kamel Doraï and Pauline Piraud-Fournet noticed how the refugees have reused the materials distributed by humanitarian agencies to recreate traditional forms of housing similar to those in southern Syria.14 In these houses, two spaces play an important role for the people who live there, the room where guests are welcomed (madhafeh in Arabic) and the courtyard, the outdoor living space between the home and the street. The high street of the camp, known as Sham-Elysees, a play on words with the Parisian commercial high street (Champs Elysée) and the word ‘Sham’ used to indicate Syria, has turned into a dynamic entrepreneurial space, with more than 1,400 retail enterprises, from a falafel shop to wedding dress stores. Za’atari camp is the story of Syrian displacement, but it also represents the agency of refugees who reuse, transform, and adapt humanitarian assistance to recreate spaces that are more in line with their lifestyle. The Lebanese context has also seen an interesting example of informal agency and resilience played by refugees. As previously mentioned, Lebanese authorities insisted on avoiding the establishment of refugee camps, though turning a blind eye to small informal settlements in rural and urban areas, built under the stipulation of a ‘crisis’ that the state is unable to manage. Conversely, a group of government agencies and local and international ngos were deployed to provide aid, while Syrian refugees, scattered in informal settlements in rural and agricultural areas, have rarely organised forms of activism. Finding themselves in distant locations and disconnected from the rest of their community, Syrian refugees displaced in urban areas like Beirut reclaimed spaces and visibility not through vocal public acts but through ‘quiet encroachment’, to use an expression coined by Asef Bayat and repurposed by Mona Fawaz in the context of Lebanon.15 Within spaces like Za’atari or the urban conglomerate of Beirut, refugees establish forms of belonging based on the shared experience of living together. Pre-conflict and pre-migration skills and strengths such as waste ­picking, seasonal land working, scooter delivery, entrepreneurial business practices, etc. have encouraged refugees to re-emerge in the landscape of the city as agents of transformation. Navigating Beirut’s neighbourhoods as well as transforming them through their modes of dwelling and socialising, their agency is back at the centre of politics.

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By negotiating their access to employment, shelter, work, and education they have demonstrated competence in securing livelihoods against all odds. Refugees have a transformative effect on cultural and social life (e.g., theatre, music, public spaces, food) as well as the economy (e.g., cheap labour in building, driving, delivering, cleaning, serving, cooking, and selling sectors), redefining everyday urban experiences and practices but also developing novel economic practices as well as boosting established models of capitalist exploitation. These are only two examples from the Syrian refugee crisis, although many states in the region harbour communities of refugees, as in the case of Afghans in Iran, a community that has had four decades of residence in the country. Regardless of the type of formal or informal settlement, Syrian – and other – refugees have transformed places of refuge into places of social production and identity formation, with their own set of interactions, tensions, and power dynamics. In this context of displacement, made of emergent life-forms rooted in the place of refuge (host) and resilient political imagination and links to the place of belonging (home), displaced people transform politics and polity in profound, multi-layered ways. Giorgio Agamben pointed out the absence of an autonomous space for refugees in the political order of modern nation-states. The Palestinian experience of political activism in Jordan and Lebanon demonstrates how protracted refugee crises, managed with short-term programmes while awaiting political solutions, will over the longer term affect political identity and mobilisation. This raises questions over whether the impossibility of return may give way to local political engagement, blurring the lines between refugee and citizen. Will transnational political organisations emerge with the aim of representing and mobilising displaced communities?16 Will there be a Syrian equivalent of the Palestine Liberation Organization, representing the interests and political demands of the Syrian diaspora? If so, what forms of activism will it perform considering that, meanwhile, Syrian state institutions are still active and recognised internationally? What is the future for refugee camps, like Za’atari, which is now Jordan’s fourth-largest city, inhabited and run by people who have a strong sense of belonging, and yet who are not legally recognised as citizens by the Jordanian government? Can states be sovereign when they rule over a large number of people with differing loyalties and political imaginary, some included in and others excluded from the legal framework of the nation-state?

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Age n c y in D isplacement? Where the power of the state fades away, as in the situation of conflict and disruption in the Great Civil War, agency among otherwise subaltern groups can emerge. Mahon has referred to this through the Deleuzian category of ‘war machine’.17 Agency, however, does not enable inclusivity; rather, it exacerbates the logic of belonging, its mythological machine. In the context of post-2003 Iraq, with widespread violence across major cities, urban dwellers took refuge in their own neighbourhoods and built up defences and barriers across the spatial borders of their quarters to protect themselves against the ­violence of radical jihadists or the parastate militias. Citizen militias were born out of this situation, buttressing the sectarian identities already exacerbated within the civil war. Toby Dodge argues that, by the end of 2006, ‘Baghdad had been transformed into a series of fortified ghettoes, where rising violence had reorganized the city’s population along sectarian lines’.18 A powerful example is that of the al-Mahdi Army. Exploiting multilatitude displacement, the al-Mahdi Army, led by the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, filled the vacuum left by the collapse of the Iraqi state and the Ba’ath Party. Sadr’s movement created its popular base in the slums of east Baghdad where impoverished peasants have settled following the disastrous wars and sanctions of the 1980s and 1990s. The mixing of religious nationalism embraced by Sadr appealed to the ibn al-balad, ‘the sons of the countryside’, up to 2003 in revolutionary terms against Saddam’s anti-poor and antiShi’a policies. Then, after 2006, the al-Mahdi Army turned against the new state established by the US occupation. With the outbreak of violence amidst the Great Civil War, the al-Mahdi Army turned towards sectarian framings against the nawasib, ‘those who do not accept the Shi’a imams and hate the family of the prophet’, i.e., the Iraqi Sunnis – while general respect and protection were shown to Christians and other minorities. This trajectory showed how Sadr’s movement – similar to the Popular Mobilisation Units later –through the work of the mythological machine of belonging in times of disruption, mobilised the agency of the displaced margins of Iraqi society, reclaiming a central place in the state/nation building process. This logic works also when we observe the mobilisation of displaced Iraqi Sunni citizens. One key event in the displacement of Iraqi Sunnis came with the US-led battle of Fallujah, which caused the dislocation of 300,000 people who fled into the Anbar hinterland,

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joined by many Sunnis expelled from Baghdad’s western areas following grassroots operations of population transfer against Sunni citizens. This displacement engendered a condition where the oikos and the polis, the family and the city, could no longer be imagined by part of the Iraqi population. Political exclusion provokes the logic of the ghetto, both of which are primary products of the mythological machine. As Giorgio Agamben argues, civil war confuses the limits between brother and enemy, within and without, house and city. The other is the enemy even when it is/was a neighbour. With escalating violence and with the logics of the Great Civil War turning into an uncontested sectarian struggle, Mahon argues that ‘the Islamic State projected itself as the custodian of an Islamist utopian society and the  vanguard of a fundamental Sunni Islamist movement’. 19 Discrimination and displacement produced by the new hostile state in Baghdad meant that many displaced Sunnis had little political choice but to sympathise or to join the ranks of radical Sunni groups fighting against the ‘Safavid–Persian–Shi’a Triad’. With a lack of legitimate political representation at home within the imagined community of Iraq, the mythological machine enabled a new sense of belonging which bypassed the vanishing borders of the new Iraq and embraced an international solidarity among (Sunni) Muslims. This new imaginary turned around the re-enactment of a bygone political reality (the Caliphate) and the promise of return to a purified state for all those displaced, by joining the Islamic State. The mythological machine makes it possible to integrate into new statist mythologies and, therefore, to form new bonds of belonging with the nation, even in the absence of widespread disruption. Let us take the example of the Iranian Afghans. Iran hosts one of the largest and longest-drawn-out refugee populations in the world: the Afghans, many of whom have been in the country since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The refugee population increased in numbers after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. unhcr holds that Iran is home to almost 1 million registered Afghan refugees, yet the government estimates that some 1.5 million to 2 million undocumented Afghans live in the country. Most of these individuals do not have the residency permit required to live, study, and work in Iran, yet many have lived and worked in Iran for their entire life, their children growing up in Iranian cities and knowing no other place than Iran. This large group of people have hitherto been excluded from becoming part of Iranian citizenry, despite the

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rhetorical pledge – popular among Islamist revolutionaries in the early 1980s – to welcome all Muslim friends. Instead, since the 1990s, public institutions have started adopting new definitions for ‘refugees’. They dropped the term mohājer (the Koranic word referring to the migration of the prophet in seek of sanctuary in Medina) and adopted that of āvargeran, ‘forced displaced population’, a word with no religious overtones and of Persian etymology describing human victims of disasters. Following the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan and the large movement of refugees from there into Iran, the government shifted semantics and referred to the Afghans as atebbāy-e bigāneh, meaning ‘alien citizens’. This is a juridical expression adopted by the Pahlavi state in the 1931 law on foreign nationals with the aim of pursuing the homogenisation of the Iranian nation in what later turned into the mythological machine of Persian Aryanism, which we discussed in previous chapters. Yet the mythological machine has also provided means for integration. Among the young male population of Afghans many were recruited to the Shi’a militias organised by the Basij Organization of the Islamic Revolution, a volunteer army connected to the Revolutionary Guards (i r g c ). Organised by then deputy commander of the Qods Forces General Esmail Qaani, who succeeded General Qasem Soleimani following his assassination on 3 January 2020, the battalion was called Fatimiyun after Fatimah al-Zahra, a sacred figure for Shi’as, daughter of the prophet Muhammad and wife of Imam Ali. They formed the Afghan Shi’a battalion in the Great Civil War against the Islamic State and, tactically, against Salafist rebel forces in Syria, while also maintaining connections to the anti-Taliban alliance inside Afghanistan. In response to this mobilisation, the Iranian authorities, allegedly, offered citizenship to all those young Afghans who would enrol in the Fatimiyun battalion. Their families would also become Iranian citizens once a member had joined the group. Mobilisation in the civil war embodied the proof of loyalty that the state – the Iranian nation one could say – required from the Afghan Shi’a, after decades of residence. The pledge to defend the shrines in Syria and Iraq, ­especially the Seyyedah Zeinab and Seyyedah Roqayyah shrines, represented the rite of passage into the new nation, into the mythological community of the Islamic Republic, itself a supranational idea entrusted in the mythological figure of Fatimah. Besides, long-term displaced Afghans have been themselves objects of persecution under the Taliban Emirate in Afghanistan, which regards them as apostates,

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objects of takfir. Their mobilisation in Shi’a militias is also a question of revenge and self-preservation. It is their entry into the Great Civil War through the experience of multi-latitude displacement. The civil war, again, represented the rite of passage, the liminal space and time through which one transits from being a displaced person with no right to the political order, to being part of the communitas. The case of Iranian Afghans is not unique. Within the context of the Libyan civil war and the deployment of Turkish forces in support of Fayez al-Sarraj, head of Tripoli’s government in January 2020, there have been reports of Turkish authorities granting citizenship to Syrian fighters willing to join the front in Libya. By establishing imagined, affective, and effective ties of belonging, which are enshrined in myths, the mythological machine produces an unquestionable and unrepentant image of the Other. Here the mythological machine deploys a mixture of militaristic nationalism, which is a founding trait of modern Turkish republicanism, with vague hints at the Islamic legacy of the Ottoman Sultanate’s influence in the southern and eastern Mediterranean. Only with proof of militant sacrifice – itself an essential trait of mythologies – comes the right to citizenship. From different angles, the Iranian Afghan and the Turkish Syrian cases confirm that displacement as experienced in the context of transnational civil war is not only a destituent experience but also formative of new political, civic bonds, for better or worse.

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7 States of Disruption: Dépaysement and Virtual Displacement

De la terre il ne satisfait plus. Au ciel, il ne peut plus accéder. (He was not satisfied with the earth. He could no longer access the sky [heaven].)1 Kabil proverb I am the one who has not been killed yet at war, by earthquake or street accident. Mohammad al-Maghouti, Syrian poet

T h e Abs e n c e - P r e sence of Li fe In 1964, Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad published a book under the title of Le Déracinement (Uprooting). It focused on the crisis affecting traditional agriculture in Algeria after the end of the settler colonial strategy of deterritorialising the Algerian peasantry. The authors showed how the objective of colonial powers was not only to take control of the land and appease the insurgent population, but to uproot the existing modes of economic production and cultural organisation in the territories they aimed to control. Burning the land, destroying traditional pottery and utensils, unroofing, and other such methods were aimed at eradicating the mechtas, the village system in North Africa, together with its lifeworld. Women became the object of this policy through the banning of spaces for gathering and socialising and their replacement, under the pretense of equality, with working men.2 Its overarching objective was emptying the land of the indigenous population, displacing them to urban conglomerates. The result

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was the displacement of around three million people from rural villages to the cities with the double objective of ‘provoking a general liquidation of the soil’ and ‘disorganizing the tribe’.3 The two sociologists explored this process, coming to the conclusion, among other radical discoveries, that those displaced are also ultimately uprooted from their ethical, cultural, and social grammar. They become virtual citizens, either because as new urban subjects they participate in city life but without being integrated into its cultural and political forms in meaningful ways (or formal recognition); or because they project their own cultural world into a virtual framework of unity and continuity, which in reality has been impossible to maintain.4 Ultimately, displacement substitutes the experience of the community with the community of experience (communauté d’experience). As captured in an example of the regroupé of Kerkera in Algeria, ‘Now, everyone is similar. There are no longer the people of here and the people of there [le gens d’ici et le gens de cela] …We are all in the same situation, we all live the same thing.’5 This condition of sameness among the displaced does not lead to shared political imaginary in terms of content – it is built upon a virtual projection of one’s place in the world, in between leaving, returning, and staying, t/here. Who is the displaced? Is it only the one who leaves, or does it affect also the one who stays but feels estranged from the space in which he exists? In our engagement with the aftermath of defeat and the escalation of civil war and physical dislocation, we are put in front of this existential as well as phenomenological question. It is a question that is borne out of the narratives and encounters with people who have left as well as with those who have stayed, whose existences – on both sides of this geo-ontological divide – come to terms with the experience of displacement. It is the essence of what we referred to, in the previous two chapters, as the multi-latitude displacement affecting people living in states of disruption. Take the example of Ammar Azzouz, a Syrian researcher and writer who, in 2023, published an intimate piece about his identity and that of Homs, the city he left behind after fleeing Syria. Based in London, he recounts of his daily interconnections, through memory, projections, and transfigurations, to the place of belonging. ‘When I pick up a coffee in a café in Kentish Town [in London]’, he writes, ‘I remember coffee time in Homs with my family and friends, my neighbours. The nostalgia for a lost life brings me to a stop in the street.’ He then moves on to telling of his constant projection of his everyday and everynight existences onto

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Syria. The bills he pays at restaurants in London are bills paid against the livelihood of people struggling for survival at home; his sleep is filled with ‘dead bodies and destroyed buildings … the geography of my unconscious is always Syria, is always my city’. He, still, after residing in the UK for over a dozen years, transplants ‘parts of London back onto Homs’.6 His language, he eventually confesses, was destroyed when his city was destroyed. This abandonment in the midst of ineffability is the condition of virtual displacement, a constant and ordinary struggle with the absence-presence of belonging. Azzouz’s account is reminiscent of that of another displaced, this time in his own country, Iraq. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad recalls feeling a stranger in his own city, Baghdad, during the megalomaniacal rule of President Saddam Hussein (d. 2006) as well as in the aftermath of the US-led military invasion which led to the downfall of the leader. A fugitive conscript, without a passport, Abdul-Ahad was displaced while being there, his lifeworld suspended beyond his physical presence. Yet, the fall of the Iraqi state, though releasing him from the constraints of state surveillance and militarism, does not bring back the effect of being there; he struggles to recognise the place he belongs to after the end of the war.7 We have already outlined that displacement takes form latitudinally. It is manifested in physical dislocation from the place of belonging, taking individuals and entire communities away from their cultural and built environment (external displacement) or by ejecting them from their land to other territories within the same polity (internal displacement). Abdelmalek Sayad’s thoughts on the double absence of migrants and immigrants inspire our own framing of the contemporary experience of the displaced: Continuing ‘to be present in spite of the absence’, and ‘to be present even absent and even where we are present’ – which goes back to ‘to be just partially absent there where one is absent’ – it is the paradox and the destiny of the migrant (­émigré) – and correspondingly ‘not to be totally present there where we are present, which goes back to being absent in spite of being p ­ resent’, to be ‘absent (partially) present and even when one is present’, that is the condition of the immigrant.8 The tension between being absent and being present is the tension in the life of those who leave their place of belonging, their communities.

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But Sayad wrote about this tension during the period from the 1960s to the 1990s, when distant communications relied on letters and sporadic international telephone calls. This projection of being there and being away has moved onto a novel dimension, that of permanent virtuality, based on internet and mobile communication. Now, what we aim to discuss is what happens to political life and imagination when communities live in conditions of the permanent virtuality of absence/presence. As we approach the final pages of this book, we narrow our focus to a crucial aspect in the lifeworld of people living in epochal disruption: their access to digital technologies and the internet. A reflection on how digital technologies transform the experience, well-being, and politics of being displaced is key to giving latitude to how displacement transforms politics. Can we rethink the question of ‘displacement’ in the light of the evolution and embeddedness of the internet and mobile technologies? Physical dislocation does not equal disconnection. As reported by the u n hc r , 3G coverage is available in most sites of displacement, making it possible to use social media ‘as a form of digital unification’ or ‘virtual zones of contact’.9 In some cases, the scholarship defines this condition of the displaced in words very much along the lines we reported above in Sayad’s discussion of the e/migrant almost thirty years ago, such as ‘mediated absent presence’.10 Smartphones enable the virtual presence of those who are physically distant. They are a means of managing the experience of displacement in states of disruption. But they are also instruments of displacement themselves, rendering the physically present (the world one lives in and the people that inhabit that space) distant, if not actually absent. In an influential study led by Shalini Misra and published in 2016, researchers demonstrated that the physical presence of smartphones in a room reduces empathy and human interaction, causing a less positive experience of the other. The researchers discussed the effect as producing ‘absent presence’ and a ‘state of poly-consciousness’ in which those interacting in the presence and – we could expand the scope – through digital technologies oriented their worlds and the perception of other people’s worlds ‘to other people and places outside the immediate spatial context’.11 In other words, digital technologies connect while displacing people. In conditions of epochal disruption – war, civil conflict, displacement – it overlaps with a virtual displacement of one’s place in the world, whether at home or in exile.

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If one understands displacement with a less normative definition, it compromises both the millions of people who find themselves physically detached from their ‘homes’ and the equally many others who feel that their ‘homes’ do not belong to them any longer. The latter phenomenon is not a material condition but an emotional and affective one. It is the feeling of being displaced in the place where one lives. Earlier in the twentieth century, Tzvetan Todorov (d. 2017) – one displaced among the many of his era – referred to this condition using the French term dépaysement, ‘changing country or being without one’.12 If understood as such, the experience of displacement is not only that of those fleeing their country because of fear for their lives or in pursuit of a better existence. It is also the condition of those generations of migrants – and the diasporic experience at large – who feel ‘displaced’ within the country they were born into. Equally, dépaysement applies to those who have decided to remain – or have no other option than to stay – amidst political violence and in the aftermath of defeat of revolts. In all these circumstances, the everyday use of technologies projects the individual into virtual communities, which nonetheless have their own materiality. This virtual dimension is one that affects people’s political and ideological projections and their sense of belonging, thus having material effects on life and politics. But it also shapes people’s health and well-being as well as the practice of care, either because of the now well-known psychological implications of the overuse of digital technologies or because of the way these technologies shape access to health in conditions of disruption. While the displaced connect to their wider (virtual) social networks through the internet, they are also at risk of being exposed to the adverse health effects of excessive use, in particular for mental health. That is the rationale behind the use of the category of ‘displacement’ sensu lato, encompassing the physical, the political, and the virtual dimensions of disruption in people’s everyday lives. We are cognisant of the rising scholarly interest in the nexus between media and ­migration, and the vitality of digital ethnographies in the study of related phenomena. In this final chapter we want to stress the importance of formulating displacement as a multi-latitude phenomenon. Transnational belonging, connections across physical distances ­mediated through the digital, and the formation and refoundation of diasporic communities are vital elements for the remaking of the political imaginary. Since the outbreak of covid-19 digital

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technologies have become a central pillar in the life and livelihoods of people, including displaced populations. Lockdown measures restrained access to health while the closure of borders posed an overwhelming challenge to those seeking refuge. This has meant that the point we raise in reference to the multi-latitude effect of displacement since the outbreak of popular revolts in the 2010s has gained further momentum with the pandemic and its alienating effect on everyday life and connections. ‘Virtual’ is a category and word not to be taken lightly. It derives from the Latin virtus, the same as ‘virtue’, but its meaning is something with the capacity to effect reality (even though it may not seem real, as in a myth). With this definition in mind, we want to think of the capacity to produce real-world change through the virtuality of messages amidst the experience of multi-latitude displacement.13 Through discussion of the Islamic State, we aim to highlight the meaning of virtual displacement and its effects. Then we contextualise our discussion with other cases coming from Iran, Israel, Lebanon, and Egypt, bearing in mind that displacement is a condition that projects indi­ viduals and community into the virtuality of politics.

Dépaysement o r o f V irtual Belongi ng Tzvetan Todorov helps with understanding the multifaceted expe­ rience of displacement – cultural, virtual/imaginary, and physical event – in the opening of his book The Displaced Man by providing this dictionary definition: ‘Dépayser (v. tr.): 1. Faire changer de pays, de milieu, de cadre. 2. Troubler, déconcerter, désorienter en changeant les habitudes [To displace: 1. To change country, field, frame. 2. Disrupting, disconcerting, disorienting by changing habits]. Le Petit Larousse’.14 A historical case of how virtual displacement produces novel political imaginations comes from the Balkans in the midst of the 1990s civil war. Bosniak identity, referring to Muslims living in the former Yugoslavia, was embryonic in the conflict that emerged between Serbs, Croatians, and Bosnian nationalists. With the fall of the multiethnic state after the death of Colonel Tito (d. 1980), Serb and Croatian nationalist propaganda identified Muslims living in the nascent Serbian and Croatian nation-states as Bosniak. Prior to the conflict, Bosniak identity had no homogeneous referent frame: through the conflict it had to amalgamate and consolidate the religious commonality over

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other forms of shared sociocultural elements as a survival strategy against the ethnocentrism of more powerful armed forces. The grand mufti of Bosnia-Herzegovina pointed towards this virtual displacement, saying, ‘We are Muslims now because they did not allow us to be Bosnians.’15 The embracement of Islam as the main identifier of community brought its own challenges as explored in the work of Darry Li, The Universal Enemy.16 Feeling foreign at home (in the West) and at home, foreign (in the country of origin) becomes the norm. As Todorov states, ‘The displaced man, snatched from his/her setting, from his/her milieu, from his/her country, suffers in the initial stage: it is more comfortable to live among his/her people [vivre parmi les siens].’17 Distance, in time (nostalgia) as much as in space (diaspora), activates the mythological machine: myths of one’s past, or the past(s) of one’s family, or the past of one’s nation. Basileus Zeno, a Syrian researcher who has looked into the phenomenon of displacement among Syrians, reports that feelings of humiliation and dignity surface in the transformation of national identity among those displaced. When asked the question ‘What does it mean for you to be a Syrian?’, his interlocutors refer to emotions such as ‘guilt’, ‘shame’, and loss as well as rejection of the category of ‘refugee’.18 These lead to a feeling of dislocation where Syrians do not feel they belong to their country or to the country hosting them but also a pervading alienation from the question of identity and political subjectivity. This aspect reconfigures the understanding of refugeedom as not exclusively being directed towards movement to Europe or North America but as more nuanced in its negotiated settling with the homeland left and the refuge-land found.19 Technology plays a key role in shaping the experience of displacement: communication with family members in conflict zones; gathering of information about the conflict itself; forming ideas and shaping prospects and futures; acquiring knowledge about the space of ­displacement; solidifying ideas about the Other while acquiring draft concepts about how the Other sees and deals with the presence of the displaced. Technology puts the mythological machine on steroids because what previously required word of mouth, lost and apocryphal books (e.g., The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; secret plans of ­geopolitical management as in the ‘Shi’a Crescent’ plan; behind-closeddoors plots as in G RT ), accusations with no facts, and the time to circulate and sediment now gains rapid traction and finds stratagems

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to gain support on the world wide web (e.g., relentless Twitter/X feeds; websites reproducing variations of similar discourses). In this way, most of the experiences of the displaced vis à vis their once-held place of origin remain mediated through virtuality  – via technology. Technology bears upon displacement in ambivalent ways. It is a means to engage with the world for people who have fled their communities, a form of linking with what is lost, and a place where the agency of the displaced can be projected at long distances, for instance in speaking, advising, and the transferring of information and knowledge to those who have stayed. This is the virtual lifeworld of displacement, which is a space and a skill for those left far from their homes. However, technological devices in the form of social media generate virtual displacement. This is the capacity to project one’s imaginary and political imagination towards places and times that are disconnected from the lifeworld in which one exists. For those who have left, virtual displacement is the incapacity to reconfigure their existence in the place of arrival because of the constant projection through technology to their (abandoned and displaced) homes. The potential to connect with what was left is a hindrance to the process of rooting in new places. For those who stayed amid violence, virtual displacement is the condition through which they no longer recognise the world where they live, rejecting the material reality of life around them in favour of virtual worlds perceived through the internet. As a form of escapism amidst systemic disruption, virtual displacement shapes the making of political identity and imagination. One outstanding example of this ambivalent process is the emergence of the Islamic State. The Islamic State gathered support among communities far away from territories under its influence in the Levant. This affected the targeting of specific groups/interests that are seen as embodying the insoluble Other: disenfranchised communities in Belgium, France, Germany, and the UK, where second- and thirdgeneration migrants from the Arab and Islamic world remained subject to discriminatory practices and ideological hostility by the public authority (e.g., the French government’s overt hostility to Arab and Muslim communities). Punished through the policing and prison system and excluded from avenues of public opportunities, these socio-economic groups represented one of the lifelines of support for jihadist groups in the Levant, when looking at diasporic experiences. Inside the Arab world, in countries like Tunisia, large numbers of young people subjected to the lack of economic opportunities and

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excluded from the horizon of political change – even after the relative success of the popular revolt – mobilised en masse to join the Islamic State project. Their localised virtual displacement bought into the message of opportunity granted by the virtual jihadist tech-driven propaganda. In this, the mythological machine resembles modern advertisement techniques more than classical state propaganda, the latter having turned to the former anyway. The internet, thus, provides a virtual bridge for those displaced within and without their place of origin. The cultures of the right – of nation versus polis, of family versus communitas – do not reside in books or public speeches; they flourish in publicity.20 The highest per capita participation of recruits from the Western hemisphere joining the rank and file of isis is in the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago. The two islands having become a main traffic route for illicit drugs (mostly cocaine) and guns, many young Black people have taken up arms and joined gangs, fighting over the spoils of the profits of that trade. Muslims, counting about 5 per cent of the overall population, have been marginalised and live in townships where radicalised gangs operate through violent racketeering means. One such group calls itself ‘Unruly isis’ in reference to the methods of the Islamic State. The flow of Trinidadian Muslims joining is in the Levant staggered observers, but in the words of the local leader of the main Muslim political party Jamaat al Muslimeen, ‘people feel that there is no hope in changing the political system that exists here … some of these individuals say “maybe we will make more of a difference there”’.21 Leaving one’s land because of the impossibility of change projects one’s displacement (in the form of sociopolitical dislocation) onto the utopian thinking of the elsewhere as the place of salvation. Pictures and videos sent ‘of schools with kids and gardens and a society that is operating by Islamic laws’22 become attractive avenues for projecting one’s displacement towards new lands of belonging. It is, in the end, a virtual displacement abetting a physical displacement. The historical antecedent to this movement of people in search of land that could give a material consistency to their security needs and ideational expectations is that of European Jewry. State-sponsored antisemitism in the 1930s and 1940s in Europe displaced millions of Jews, many of whom relocated elsewhere, in North America or in Palestine, the promised land. Feeling extraneous at home, or persecuted, produced an alienation that was conducive to the pursuit of relocation to a place of belonging, in that instance to the nascent land

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of the Jews, Israel. In his personal diaries, Theodor Herzl predicted the force of displacement as the engine behind the creation of a Jewish state. He confessed that ‘the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies’.23

Ima g in a r y Places a n d A c t u a l E x is ti ng S tates What did the Islamic State represent for the population it related to? Its political project rests upon fundamentally unpolitical claims: the re-establishment of the Islamic Caliphate as a sovereign authority for all those aligned with Sunni Islam. The political content of this is unattainable and diluted, as no reference to what this new political entity entails is generally made. The Islamic State presents itself, to use François Burghat’s words, as a free Sunnistan, a promised land which would act as state guarantor of beleaguered and victimised Sunni, first in the Arab territories and, ultimately, globally. It is the creation of a state against Shi’a-ruled states, i.e. Syria, Iraq, and Iran. More than a political project, it is the promise of a (new) nation, the Sunni nation. In this way the Islamic State pledges to find land for the virtual nation of Muslims. ‘I don’t think there’s anything better than living in the land of khilafah. We don’t need any democracy, we don’t need any communism or anything like that, all we need is sharia.’24 This is the statement of a British fighter who joined isis campaigns. The anachronistic reference to the indigenous paradigm of the caliphate (khilafah) is not unusual among those believing in the political project of the Islamic State, especially those brought up in the West. Second- and thirdgeneration men and female supporters from Europe and North America often had sketchy and superficial knowledge of Arabic language and traditions,25 but they claimed that the caliphate was the highest expression of the political project for Muslims in the world. The journalist Bennett-Jones reported that during his travels in Afghanistan at the end of the 1990s, he had the chance to encounter many British Muslims who had joined the Taliban. That historical process has matured, and by the 2010s there were more British Muslims fighting for isis and other jihadi organisations than for the British Army.26 The creation of an imagery based on a vision of Islam as enunciated through mostly online networks has had an instrumental and

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radicalising effect on those culturally displaced individuals and groups seeking original models of Islamic polity. The insistence, at a largely revanchist – and theological – level, on the prominence and inescapability of the caliphate for Muslims engendered a virtual attachment to this paradigm, even when its substance and content remained symptomatically void.27 The virtuality of the caliphate also ignored long-term trajectories in history, society, and political thought of Islamic communities worldwide, where thinking about the state has moved beyond the caliphate in terms of both historical study and political thinking. In its own way, the caliphate syndrome instantiated a topos of nationalist quests of ‘going back to the ancient roots’, which is a cornerstone of the culture of the right, as we discussed in earlier chapters. A category that helps us understand the influence of this diasporic thinking and affection towards the Islamic State is what Benedict Anderson calls ‘distant nationalism’. For Anderson, the distant nationalist ‘rarely pays taxes in the country in which he does his politics; he is not answerable to its judicial system; he probably does not cast even an absentee ballot in its elections because he is a citizen in a different place’. The distant nationalist is a facilitator of means and ideas, fostered by a safe and sheltered place in the ‘First World’, from where ‘he can send money and guns, circulate propaganda, and build intercontinental computer information circuits’. These means made the distant nationalist a crucial player in virtuality and displacement, as Anderson adds that the distant nationalist ‘can have incalculable consequences in the zones of their ultimate destinations’. It is in this link that Anderson captures, without naming it, the productive force of virtual displacement: ‘That same metropole which marginalizes and stigmatizes him simultaneously enables him to play, in a flash, on the other side of the planet, national hero.’28 Ould Mohammedou speaks of a Hollywoodised staging of violence designed to appeal to the alienated youth networks in postcolonial Europe, their experience of ‘loss and disenchantment’.29 The internet has provided a means of transfiguration, a bridge, between those categories who do not recognise their existence as pertinent and pertaining to the places they live in (be it Russia, Western Europe and North America, North Africa, Jordan or Pakistan) compared to the virtual political imagery of the Islamic State. Broadcasting in multiple languages (Arabic, English, French, German, Turkish, Urdu, Farsi, Chinese, and many others) and via a plurality of platforms and means (including online gaming platforms), the strategy is informed by a

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granular understanding of the audiences it aims to relate to. For instance, researchers found out that propaganda videos by isis mimicked well-known games such as Call of Duty and other ‘first-person shooters’. This includes editing, features, and sequencing of videos as well as drone footage, titles, and soundtrack.30 More broadly, the gamification of violence brings the work of isis into the mainstream, to something that, virtually, has quantitatively large appeal across the globe. Variety is disappearing from within the world, wrote Tocqueville.31 Less than a century later, Herzl had hopes for Darwinian mimicry in making the Jews the same as the rest of the white race and forming a bulwark against Asia and the advance of post-civilisation against barbarism.32 isis fighters, too, embrace methods and tech from (and in good time we may find out, with the help of) the West – at times supported covertly by it – not out of hadith but out of imitation and the use of those they pledge they are fighting against. Through this virtual connection, which in the past could never have had such detailed and substantiated semantics and federation (indeed it would only have been possible through oral narratives), the Islamic State became the ‘promised land’, a material place from where to start a (new) ancient project, the caliphate of all Muslims. In other words, it enabled a movement towards ‘going back home’, towards a lost and found nation.

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Epilogue States without People If despair is treason, what about hope? At least despair speaks frankly. Hope is treacherous and tricky. Is there any treason uglier than the one committed in the name of a hope you held? Alaa abd El-Fattah and Ahmed Douma, 2014

E v e r y d a y S t a t es of Defeat We have now reached the epilogue of this book and stop to look back and reflect on its conceptual journey; on how it could have been done otherwise and what criticism we, as the authors, can level at our work and what arguments we can mobilise in response. And, perhaps more importantly, what is to be done and from where could we start to build politics elsewise? The book dealt with the aftermath of defeat. Not a failure, but a defeat. This defeat exacerbated frustration through three salient moments: being a revolt, not a revolution; a counterrevolution regardless of there being a revolutionary process; and the ascendance of the culture of the right amidst a civil war which caused a multi-latitude displacement across the region and beyond. This motion indicated both an epistemic shift in the understanding of citizen–state relations as well as a phenomenological change in the category of the ‘people’. We identify the culture of the right as a centre of gravity in the processes animating the aftermath of defeat. The culture of the right did not emerge out of nowhere. Equally, it was not the mere revamping of the ideological past informed by fascism and other nationalist ­ideologies. It is the expression of a global and transnational cultural

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phenomenon which illuminates the transformation of state–citizen relations in times of disruption. It occurs in the intermingling of offline and online platforms and in the everyday.1 More ostensibly, for the phenomenological observer, it manifests itself in what are usually considered non-political and apolitical avenues: consumption, fashion, social interaction, recreation, and language. But it also has a material effect and bearing upon politics. And as we argued in the final chapters of the book, it finds momentum in the existential experience of displacement, in its latitudinal reach. The physical dislocation of people is a contemporary exodus in its own way. It moves parallel with the virtual displacement of those who stayed and those who cannot prefigure the nature of their belonging and their relation to the polities they must come to terms with.2 It is the disorientation that one feels when no longer recognising the place one inhabits as home, and it prefigures a defeat of politics in that displaced people abandon engagement in political matters in favour of questioning who belongs to the nation and who doesn’t. In reference to his own journey as an errant Jew in the aftermath of World War II, Todorov named this dépaysement. From revolt to displacement, we coasted along on a phenomenological ferryboat. We kept the everyday realities of conflict in sight, while the interlocutors in our respective field sites (Israel/Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Iran) guided us from the shore – and indeed through virtual digital connections. Throughout our analysis, we saw statemaking and nation-making – and the nexus of the two – as producing a condition that emptied the notional and imaginal category of the ‘people’ from government and polity, from the state. In a way, we moved from the concern of peoples without a state to the urgency of dealing with states that can do without people. The wake left by our shaky ferryboat reached that of a condition and a concept, states without people. But what exactly do we mean when we say that states no longer need people? Here, we are dealing with matters of language and matters of existence, with epistemological experiments and ontologies. In this, we have argued that what has come to power in the counterrevolutionary period is an assertive notion of the state that does not leave legitimate space, cultural as well as participatory, for the people within its unrestrainable format. In their varying and even conflictual forms, states across the region – and indeed globally – are rejecting an idea of ‘the people’, sustained by pragmatic and discursive measures, as all-­ inclusive and avant-gardist. No longer do these states see a need to

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create ambivalence and dissonance between ideology and praxis when it comes to the idea of what constitutes the people, citizenry, and nation. This shift in state theory has happened parallel with a depopulation/repopulation process through displacement, mass migration, and wall-building as well as war-making. Those who leave and those who stay remain disoriented in relation to the emerging polity. Their opposition to the regime in power no longer takes the form of opposition to a form of government and the pursuit of change; it becomes the fight of the estranged (or strangers) against the state. And those who support the state are no longer perceived – and no longer perceive themselves – as citizens but as partisans of the state. In such conditions, there is no meaningful place for the ‘people’ in the making of states. We expect states without people to be a transitory condition towards a redefinition of a new polity, emergent from the depoliticisation process that inhabits civil war. For us, it seems that we are moving beyond the demise of the nation-state. This demise has not given way to unleashed forces of people beyond the nation, but rather it is moving towards the state-nation, as becoming the centre of political life. Yes, the long-awaited discharge of the nation-state comes with the coming of age of the state-nation – not with the announcement of a state without nation, a commonwealth or a multitude of humans or the permanent assembly of the living – as somehow prophetically imagined by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their theoretical iterations of the 2000s. Alain Badiou captured the fluidity of ‘people’ in its relation to the state when writing that ‘the people’ is a political category – that is to say a category defining the polis – which has a positive meaning only with regard to the possible non-existence of the state, either the forbidden state whose creation is desired or the official state whose disappearance is desired.3 In conceiving ‘states without people’ we had to grapple with a question. We pose this question to ourselves in the hope that others could articulate further or differently. Is the ‘state without people’ just another formulation of the totali­tarian state? Is a state that leaves no space for the agency of people in their cultural, political form a reproduction of the already seen (and old) schemata of totalitarianism? Scholars of the Middle East have tackled the totalitarian nature of the state over the past century or so: Syrian Ba’athism, Khomeinism in Iran, and other minor keynotes in Ghaddafism in Libya and Saddamism in Iraq. These accusations often built upon the arguments of scholars in close association with Western governments, who

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applied the bugbear of totalitarianism to the enemies of the United States and Israel, often claiming they were new Nazis and fascists. The accusations of ‘Nazi’, ‘tyrannical’, or ‘totalitarian’ were more recently waged against Hamas in Gaza and its sponsors in Iran amidst Israel’s escalatory bombing of Palestinians in Gaza and the killing spree in the West Bank. Regardless of the merit of this application (little merit is there to be seen), the use of the term ‘totalitarianism’ was strictly tied to the ideological nature of the state under investigation. There could not be a totalitarian system without there being a concerted ideology, be it secular Arabism in the Ba’ath Party, Islamist republicanism in Iran, or Arab Africanism in Libya. On a more substantial and phenomenological note, the category of ‘totalitarianism’ comes with a denial of the agency of those becoming the object or mere performers of the ideology in place of the leadership. The examples of Nazism and fascism in Germany and Italy, in the historiographical tradition, well illustrate this point. But, as ­outlined in the work of historians such as Alf Lüdtke and the Alltagsgeschichte school, the everyday is an avenue of agency (either in productive or in destructive ways) in the most ideological and hegemonic conditions. We believe that the category of states without people is a category that captures a different mode of life and politics to those generally conceived under totalitarianism, conscious of the phenomenological and everyday fluidity of life. In this way, the concept of states without people does not preclude the possibility of agency nor does it argue that states are becoming all-powerful in their penetration of the social, cultural, and political fabric. Quite the contrary, states across the Middle East are often, though by no means always, depleted machines of control and repression, expression of a waning sovereignty. The building of walls, separation barriers, checkpoints, fences across borders or in urban areas, as in the case of Baghdad or Damascus, is the expression of the crumbling of the Westphalian nation-state dream, as also argued by Wendy Brown. After years of internal and external conflicts, the pressures of financial and economic obligations make them less than vigorous. They are also very different in their capacity of power projection, their geopolitical standing, their short-term and long-term plans of evolution. What brings them together is the redefinition of the ‘people’ into a category of use, a means without end, through a process that has been under way over the past two decades and at play over longer historical flows connected to the journey of the nation-state. States’ existence is akin to a journey on a cruise ship

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on a long sea voyage. If a passenger, or a group of passengers, misbehaves or threatens the safety of the vessel or ticket-holding passengers, at the first available dock or wharf the captain or crew will invite them to disembark, and if they resist they will be thrown overboard with no remorse. The ship will move on, to sail again. There is no clear destination, though the preservation of the vessel with its commanding leadership remains the principle to which crew and, unconsciously, the boarding passengers must abide. Perhaps a nautical metaphor is unimportant in times of interplanetary hype. The latter is left for the ultra-rich and their futuristic techno-solutions. The states in the region are more analogous with ships adrift in an ocean of rising waters: not totalitarian states or societies but states without people. So far, we have outlined the scope and meaning of states without people. It is a descriptor, a paradigm of intent for the phenomenological transformation that the region is undergoing as part of a global ecology of disruption. Now, we want to use this epilogue to grab the bull of critique by its two horns: on the left, with prolepsis, to selfreflect on each section and advance criticism while advancing responses to these shortcomings; and on the right horn, to give our own version of Что делать? – wha t ne e ds t o b e d o n e ?

W o r d s w it h out Ideas The first accusation that can be levelled at our work is that we have concerned ourselves more with words and language than with actual sociological thinking. In brief, we dealt with cosmetic issues. Does it matter whether a popular protest is a revolt or a revolution? Whether intercommunal and societal violence is a civil war or part of identity politics? Does the category of mythological machine have an interpretative power? Or is the culture of the right not a paraphrasing of the déjà vu category of authoritarianism? And, finally, what is there to be added to the multi-latitudinal understanding of displacement when the categories of ‘exile’ and ‘migration’ can provide ample room for reflection? The long-winded response to these worthwhile objections is in the discussions provided in each section of the book. The succinct response is that what we provide builds upon the intimate link between the way we think of the world and the way we see the world. ‘A name is an ontological attribute of the thing being named’, writes Giorgio Agamben in the edited collection Ontologia e politica, adding, ‘not an

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external label’.4 In keeping in mind the politics of names and words, which we consistently treat throughout the book, our lines of thought engage in a granular way with the question of what happens to the things of the world because of the existence of names.5 In situating our thinking across linguistic territories in English, French, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and other idioms, we remained conscious of the gregarious nature of powerful words such as revolution and inqilab, civil war and harb ahliyyah across these political ecologies. We took note of Barad’s warning that ‘languages have been granted too much power’ in the interpretation of social and political phenomena, but we have also been aware that some languages (such as French and English) have been granted more power than others. Ours is a strike at remedying this epistemic injustice by means of a phenomenological positioning of words – and the ideas behind them – in the lifeworld of politics. In this experimentation we have not substituted one word with another. Our intention was to clear the field of words without ideas such as ‘authoritarianism’, ‘Islamist’, ‘democratisation’, and ‘awakening’ when it comes to the so-called Middle East. In their place, we introduced paradigms, words with ideas. What we are ultimately interested in are the ideas and practices behind words, their phenomenology, not their linguistics. We focus our analysis on connections and commonalities, careless of geographical divides between East and West, South and North, though our point of departure was the Middle East as a political laboratory for understanding global political change (see the prologue). This is a step that we hope helped us wash away the ideas of Arab and Muslim exceptionalism and the resilient application of the authoritarian frame as its distinct mode. The use of the culture of the right as an analytical category was critical in representing the way political culture travels and shares commonalities across the world. This is confirmed as we write this epilogue, with a new nadir in the embracing of militaristic, xenophobic, genocidal language and measures in Israel’s war on Gaza and against Palestinians in the West Bank. But it is also widespread across the region. In March 2023, the Tunisian president Kais Saied claimed: There is a criminal arrangement that has been prepared since the beginning of this century to change the demographic ­composition of Tunisia … there are parties that received huge sums of money after 2011 in order to settle irregular migrants from sub-Saharan Africa in Tunisia.

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This statement was echoed by high-profile cabinet members and the president’s political entourage, broadcast on the news channels, and turned viral on social media. It was a tour de force of anti-Black ­racism on several fronts. More specifically, the declarations had the imprimatur of the Great Replacement Theory (grt), outlined by the French novelist Renaud Camus and popularised by the Israeli Swiss writer Baat Ye’or, that we discussed in chapter 3. ‘[They] want to make Tunisia an African country’, said Saied, adding, ‘not belonging to the Arab and Islamic nations’. 6 This was the head of an African and Arab state, not a European far-right leader. Saied’s ideological move occurred in the footprint of a broader counterrevolution against the post-2011 political movements, which took place by means of arrests, detentions, and political repression of opposition members and antagonistic social groups. Considering this type of event, categories such as ‘authoritarianism’ do not do justice as analytical tools for the phenomena at play. The complex of political reaction – embodied in muscular repression and promotion of national identity – is part and parcel of a transnational process which is best captured by the paradigm of the culture of the right. Here is another example, this time from the Islamic Republic of Iran: In 2017, ahead of the presidential elections, the then head of one of the largest Islamic endowments and future president of Iran, cleric Ebrahim Raisi, met the rapper Amir Hossein Maghsoudlou, aka Tataloo. In the mind of the cleric’s strategist, it was a move intended to bolster the politician’s image and show that he was in touch and in tune with the life of the youth. The rapper’s motives for such a public association remain inscrutable. His music banned, preaching a syncretic vegan life philosophy, and his public profile very much at odds with the sombre and orthodox outlook of the former head of judiciary Raisi, Tataloo had 4 million followers (named ‘tatalees’) on Instagram. He held the record for livestream participants on the platform and was a global phenomenon on social media. Ahead of the rapper’s endorsement of Raisi’s electoral campaign, he had released a song, ‘Enerji-ye haste-’ (‘Nuclear Energy’), in support of the country’s nuclear programme. The text had strong nationalistic undertones and the music video was filmed on the navy ship Damavand in a political manoeuvring around the j c p o a negotiations. What could be described as an artist’s idiosyncrasy or with the much-repeated metaphor of the paradox of Iranian society is actually an outstanding representation of the inner workings of the culture of the right.

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Ideas without words were central to the rapper’s public interface. Homeland, justice, tradition were also tactical in the electoral manoeuvring of Iran’s conservative and reactionary groups. Not incidentally, later, Tataloo became the object of a public controversy and was banned from Instagram after he published a post calling for underage girls to join his harem. In a post on his hugely popular account (now banned) he wrote: ‘Girls between 15 to 20 [years] of age who live in Türkiye [where he resides], in the city of Istanbul, can write on direct [private message] to enter the Sultan’s harem.’ In an audio file circulated on Telegram following his ban from Instagram, Tataloo is heard commenting on the controversy. His words are testament to the organic fluidity of the culture of the right: What I discussed was legitimate by the laws of our country and our religion. It is in our religion that you can have four ­concubines and forty … no … four wives and forty concubines. Also, marriage above the age of nine is allowed in Islam. But I said fifteen to sixteen years of age. Then I said with the consent of the parents, so that there would be no controversy … Why? Because today’s fifteen-year-olds are much more intelligent and, God bless them, more ladylike, and have gained every kind of maturity. They tell me that I am a child abuser. A fifteen-year-old is a child? This is ugly. This is an insult to our teenagers.7 Is Tataloo a novel type of Islamist, given his endorsement of presumed sharia-mandated underage marriage? What is the rapper’s infatuation with conservative and reactionary clerical authorities? And, vice versa, what value could a conservative cleric – and judge – gain from being associated with a rapper who preaches veganism and new-age spirituality? The answer to these questions cannot be derived from relying on paradoxes and incongruities and less so on the notion of authoritarianism. Instead, what brings together such a divergent political manifestation is the culture of the right, a culture characterised by its lack of content.8

T h e L o g ic o f t he Gang The logic of the gang is the one animating societies in the Americas in the aftermath of the defeats of popular movements in the 1970s and 1980s. Gangs emerged out of the abandonment of informal,

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criminal governance in the Meso-American states of El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras or through the forced repatriation (displacement) of US-based individuals to their country of origin, as in the case of ms 13’s spread from Los Angeles to El Salvador.9 The defeat of popular fronts against reactionary political orders supported by the United States and the socioeconomic range of violence that resulted (gendered, capitalist, political, and cultural) left space for the organisation of local groups aimed at self-defence against perceived others – be it the state, other contending armed and organised groups, foreigners, or internal outsiders. The perceived impossibility of achieving political change, of agency in transforming politico-economic and national structures, turns into the logic of groups of exclusionary mutual help, i.e., groups that support their members in a mutualistic, brotherly way by excluding all those who do not belong to the group. This is quite different from the mutualism of anarchist and socialist groups which are based on inclusivity and openness to the possibilities of the world and life. The logic of the gang works through means that are flexible but with tight organisation, wary of the state and external entities, setting up forms of auto-government (autarchy) and sustenance in the midst of crises, and solidarity and defence against those threatening the autonomy of the mutualistic group. The logic of the gang is exclusionary and reproduces the idea of the enemy as the definer of who belongs to the gang and who is to be fought. From a phenomenological point of view, the logic of the gang develops after the defeat of the logic of the partisan and the fallout of the social and political order. In fact, it maintains the ethos of the partisan group as discussed in chapter 4, its inclination towards grassroots means of public authority beyond the state – but not necessarily antagonistic to it. But at the same time, it moves towards zones of absolute autonomy from the state order and its economy of capital, violence, and redistribution. The gang, therefore, is a useful paradigm to consider when viewing the horizon of politics and state–citizen relations in states of disruption. The logic of the gang sweeps across the Middle East in the wake of political defeat and hopelessness. In Iraq, criminal organisations have expanded their reach in spectacular ways since the US-led invasion in 2003. Human smuggling and trafficking, the illegal trade of human organs and body parts, a huge spike in the illicit drug economy and the diversion of legal pharmaceutical precursors, sex trafficking, and racketeering provide ample grounds for the rooting and expansion

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of gangs and criminal syndicates. Citizens, in the absence of viable political mobilisation, incapable of sustaining livelihoods through legal employment, turn to the more lucrative illegal economy managed by various gangs. This economy is an equal employment provider in the context of structural disruption.10 It gives access to those who would find it hard or impossible to obtain legal employment, and it offers relatively meritocratic opportunities to advance. The gangs, hence, also become the main means of conveying political grievance through what Jenny Pearce defined as ‘violences’.11 The consolidation of paramilitarism and the expansion of gangsterism become linked to the formal politico-economic networks of support and clientele, within and without Iraq. Libya struggles with a similar scenario with the rise of militia-­­cumcriminal groups operating in different areas of the country under the patronage of competing geopolitical organisations and their local agents. But Iraq and Libya are not exceptional settings and, with different intensity, the logic of the gangs is a horizon not so distant for more stable countries. In Israel, Jewish gangs operate in squadron-like fashion throughout Israeli and West Bank cities to smash and loot Arab-owned businesses. Their actions diverge from those of Jewish settler groups in that the former cover their faces and adopt urban control tactics typical of street gangs. The Israeli gangs attack Palestinian individuals and communities to assert control over the public space and to eventually take advantage of that control for socioeconomic benefit. The creation of Itamar Ben-Gvir’s National Guard as a concession for his support of Netanyahu moves the discussion we advanced in chapters 3 and 4 on the culture of the right to the level of public institutions, a matter further confirmed by the escalation of ­settler and army violence and calls for ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Gaza since 7 October. Though different in its institutional outlook, Syria’s National Defence Guard, popularly known as shabiha, seems to follow similar statist rationales. Elsewhere, such as in Lebanon, curfews against Syrian refugees were enforced by militias or citizen-led groups, showing forms of grassroots authoritarianism. Unlike American gangs, they do not demand and extort racket money, so far. But they do use their control of public space to position themselves in a superior state vis à vis competitors. Religious faith and social bonds shape their mythologies in formats not unlike those of gangs in other contexts, such as the previously mentioned ms13 gang which embraces a strong Christian revivalism and devotion to the Virgin Mary.

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The violence that the logic of the gang perpetrates bolsters a novel citizen–state pact. The state tacitly relies upon gang violence to destroy its enemies when needed. This configuration of power is not unheard of for those acquainted with the history of gangs in the Americas, a step beyond what Michel Foucault termed ‘the useful delinquent’ in his book Discipline and Punish.12 And in the absence of viable avenues for political transformation among those victimised, it might well be the gang that becomes the mode of politics among them too. The logic of the gang subsumes those spearheading violence. Ours is a line of thought on the processes at play, not an inflexible claim over the direction of the future. So, we will not pursue the case with other examples. But this enables us to highlight how the formation and transformation of state–citizen relations in disruptive conditions may have to deal with the question of human (in)security and violence. Here comes the right horn of the bull: where is hope and what needs to be done?

B e y o n d t h e Hope o f A n o t h e r Multi tude There is a shortage of hope around the world. In the everyday lives of Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians, and Afghans, as much as Egyptians and Libyans, hope has become a vain horizon. Vainer when its pursuit is by means of institutional politics and diplomacy. This condition is at the same time consonant with and dissonant from that of the rest of the world. Israelis were ranked fourth in the world for happiness (before the 7 October attacks), which makes one wonder how happiness could flourish when faced with the helplessness of people living in that same land. In Europe and North America, it is the looming climate catastrophe and the inability to take decisive action that has projected political life into a state of helplessness: whatever reforms are put in place for the improvement of our societies and polities, the prospect of ever more acute living conditions on the planet will make such efforts ineffective, eventually meaningless. Concerns over the liveability of the biosphere are not the order of the day for the great majority of people in the Middle East. Basic biological needs connected to personal and community safety, the capacity to procure decent economic resources to sustain oneself and the family, and the pursuit of a future (often through the dream of migration) take precedence. The environment is surely part of this despairing picture, but

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in the background. More than any other region, the Middle East is experiencing the devastating side effects of global warming. Destabilising water resources exacerbate the fragile ecosystem based, in most areas, on sedentary agriculture and hydrocarbon industries or their by-products. In this scenario the violence of exclusionary politics and predatory economics combine with the environmental violence to which the populace is increasingly subjected. Concerns over the everyday trump the wider horizon of environmental politics. Here, the use of hope can become an instrument ‘to neutralize the legitimate resentment of the dominated’.13 In chats on the sidelines of fieldwork across the region, we regularly heard statements such as there is nothing for me here to do, I need to leave, I cannot find hope when I wake up, God is the money, there is no God, Hope? Where, here? Confronting such despair makes thinking about theory sound like detachment, a critique, a pastime; books seem like fetishes to mask the blinding darkness emanating from the condition of fellow humans. In this sombre condition, it is easy to fall for the power of mythologies and utopistic imaginaries. After fifteen years of research on/in the region, a great number of our interlocutors – some of whom have become friends – have left the region, or worse. Are we in need of progressive myths to sustain our hopes for a world different from the one we live in? In other words, can we make good use of mythological machines for the purpose of social justice, equity, and political participation? Where are the mythologies of progressive politics to sustain our will to live? Alaa abd El-Fattah and Ahmed Douma write about hope and despair in cognisant terms: ‘If despair is treason, what about hope? At least despair speaks frankly. Hope is treacherous and tricky. Is there any treason uglier than the one committed in the name of a hope you held? … Hope, like despair, is treason. But also, like despair, it’s a normal human weakness. Here in my cell, I wrestle with my dreams and my nightmares, and I don’t know which hurts most. Despair and hope pull at me – but I am never a traitor.’14 Or, in the words of the Syrian dramatist Saadallah Wannous, ‘We are doomed by hope, and come what may, today cannot be the end of history.’ We think that there has been a trend towards projecting our political hopes into mythological thinking. Here we provide some examples of this mode of intellectual hopefulness: Donatella Di Cesare is a philosopher whose work deals with political violence, identity, and the Holocaust. Her work has touched upon themes of contemporary

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relevance, from a dissertation on Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (his favourable writings on Nazism) to reflections upon the nature of Islamist terrorism and the place of the Holocaust in the present. In a book published in 2014 titled Israele: Terra, ritorno, anarchia (Israel: land, return, anarchy), she envisions the future of the world as shaped by the rethinking of Israel as a paradigm of the state to come. ‘The time has come for that people [Jews]’, she writes, ‘which defines itself for its doctrine of justice, to apply that justice … Israel appears more than ever to be the political laboratory of globalization.’15 In her ­messianic projection of Israel as the state of the future, Di Cesare criticises the Zionist state along Martin Buber’s ideas. But she equally embraces the self-projection of the Zionist state as the ‘start-up nation’, a publicity message that has gained wide resonance across the world through the idea that mandatory military service and Jewish immigration to Israel are the key to the success of entrepreneurship. Di Cesare represents Israel as a place where Herzl’s dreams have become reality: ‘to live in a state like any other, where Judaism [ebraismo] is a private affair, and to obtain a new identity, the Israeli, which refutes any Jewish [ebraico] specificity’. The return to Zion, instead, should be not an end in itself, in her view, but a new world order inhabited by a Hebrew humanism; Israel as a state where the gherim – the ‘foreign resident’ that in the lexicon we use in chapter 7 we may well call the displaced – can live an open-ended citizenship unlinked to territorial meaning. No one is indigenous in such a world; everyone is migrant, and exile is a perpetual condition.16 Di Cesare’s pursuit of Israel as becoming the utopia for a world different from the one we live in illuminates the risks of pursuing hope at all costs and where there might be none, a fact all the more blatant – if there was any need for it – in the midst of the military onslaught against Palestinians. To put it differently, can we find this hope by pursuing a mythology that is not embedded in the culture of the right? The eagerness to find positive mythologies (for the left) ends up in an intellectual quagmire. Where is hope then? There is little as we know it. So, we look for ours in the human capacity to generate, or germinate, a new emotional state – an affective reaction – to form a new religion out of the residue of affect and desire that we have. Without the hierarchy of a church, but with its organisational power and its solidarity, such is the power that we need if we want to bypass and move beyond – perhaps even without violent erasure – the current world.

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Though never formulated as such, there is a mythology of the left. Take Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s groundbreaking book Empire, conceived in the post–Cold War 1990s and published in 2000 just before the world-changing events of 9/11. In the latter pages of that book the two authors report an apocryphal quote from either Hegel, Holderin, or Schelling: ‘The great masses need a material religion of the senses. Not only the great masses but also the philosopher needs it … [W]e must have a new mythology, but this mythology must be at the service of ideas. It must be a mythology of reason.’17 They make use of this predicament to envision the world as it comes to be beyond the contemporary. The figure that will inhabit this world in their secularised eschatology is the militant. ‘In the postmodern era, as the figure of the people dissolves’, they conclude, ‘the militant is the one who best expresses the life of the multitude: the agent of biopolitical production and resistance against Empire.’ The authors are eager to say this novel figure, the militant, is not the tired myth of the ‘sad, ascetic agent of the Third International whose soul was deeply permeated by Soviet state reason’, a Jesuit of that age. Instead, the myth to which they address their vision is Francis of Assisi (­ 1181–1226), ‘posing against the misery of power the joy of being’.18 The founder of the Franciscan Order was an itinerant preacher who lived and praised poverty as a form of life after having been a libertine young man in love with richness and sensual pleasures. After his revelation, he pursued peace and attempted to stop the Fifth Crusade; he was known for his universal love of animal and plant life and was one of the first to compose text in a proto-version of the Italian language in his Canticus Frater Solis (Canticle of Brother Sun), an ode to the environment and Mother Nature. If you need a myth of progressive politics that can establish a transversal and intersectional front, there are few as good as Saint Francis. We feel the emotion of this thought. Hardt and Negri’s mythology for/from the left is powerful. Yet, it is like kicking the ball so far ahead and in a direction where you are not even sure if there is anyone who will run for it. It is a magic football pass to no player. Projecting our hope on the indeterminate or the earthly saint is beautiful, but those in most need of it will not find it relieving, let alone useful. Hope, unlike Bloch’s cosmic understanding of it, is not like uranium or lithium: a good search will not necessarily locate it.19 All myth merges into the mythological machine. The working of the machine is always beyond human control and its truth unknowable. Hope, like myths,

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is hard to know. Sometimes we are better left without them. In such instances, protests and confrontation with a violent and unjust world can only take the form of a biological reaction. It becomes an expression of unlivability – of the impossibility of life in the present ruins of the world. Frantz Fanon identified this condition as the ultimate force among the colonised. In 1952, about the Vietnamese resistance against the French occupying army he wrote, ‘It is not because the IndoChinese discovered a culture of their own that they revolted. Quite simply this was because it became impossible for them to breathe, in more than one sense of the word.’20 Breathing, this is the same breathing as in the Black ghettos of the US; as in France’s banlieues; as for women and men in Iran, Afghanistan, and Egypt; Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories; Syrians, Libyans, and Iraqis across the spaces of refuge; Yemenis under relentless foreign bombardment and siege; the Lebanese amidst the crumbling of their socio-economic lifeworld. This biological condition elapses into a condition of existence upon which we must pause, reflect, and construct our thoughts for the future. It compels us to imagine how a revolt out of biological need could fertilise the seeds of another world. To do so, the most immediate need for people is the care for security, but security beyond the statist mindset and warmongering drivers. We need to humanise security.21

H u m a n e S e curi ty For too long, discussion and thinking about ‘security’ has been left to the right and to proponents and agents of the state, to those claiming the grip on public authority. This has led to a combination of state-led securitisation and grassroots-led securitisation. Yet, security is a matter of everyday life, of care and safety beyond social control. It shapes the experience of people across all walks of society; it influences, directly and indirectly, the making of citizenship, its political trajectories. Not engaging with the question of security means leaving it at the mercy of the ever-lasting push for more (statist) control, more disenfranchisement, more exclusion. There is place for a ‘security from below’ and a thinking about security that is transformative of the idea of state–citizen relations. In the Latin American context, some scholars and practitioners have started undertaking participant action-research as a way forward to rethink and retrain the way of security. What they have found is the increasing capacity of people ‘to think about their security and to define collectively the values and norms that

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should inform state provision’.22 This is the principal way, they argue, to foster participatory principles as the basis of the transformation of state and societal practices. The aim is to reduce violence, of the state and of those citizens reproducing statist violence, in the void of judicial and security responses. Amniyat (in Farsi) and amn (in Arabic) are terms, just like securidad humana (in Spanish), that resonate in the everyday lifeworld of people living in the context of war, violence, and displacement. They relate to a shared feeling and desire for safety. They enable constructive dialogue with the practical purpose to ‘search for solutions’, to move the order of things towards an order that is humane and that leaves space for accommodation, arrangement, ambiguity, and sharedness. The experience of communities in Latin America coming out of decades of civil war and imperialist meddling, and state–citizenship conflict, shows its potential for world-making. But what would this human(e) security look like? We are unsure as to whether a response is out there for us to convey. However, it is out of people’s experiences in the ruins left by war and displacement and their everyday insecurities that any thinking of rebuilding and rekindling political life should start. There are some examples, though hard to grasp as paradigms for the time being. In north and east Syria, in the region known as Rojava by Kurdish militants, a system alternative to hierarchical power and patriarchal structures is being experimented with, in dissonance (though not overt antagonism) with capitalism. Here, too, the state is held together by partisans, though they claim to fight for a state beyond the nationstate, rooted in the idea of ‘democratic confederalism’, outlined by Kurdish intellectual and dissident Abdullah Ocalan. With a population of 4.6 million people, the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria stands out for its political project in terms of vision and political culture. But it also exists in a space guaranteed by US imperial support and other regional geostrategic calculations such as Israel’s historical endorsement of Kurdish separatism.23 This leaves the experiment always at the mercy of dramatic geopolitical shifts, the likes of which have occurred in the past. The pathway ahead will be marked in the sand and rubble of war and repression, but it is generative of possibilities. There is no space or force for grand projects and theories along the historical experiences of the past, nor can the mythologies of past glories build liveable futures. Other than the tiring, hands-on encounters over a more

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human(e) security, there is no ground for another possible world. So, we should relinquish our hopes for a new or reformed religious sentiment bringing about peace, be it in the form of Saint Francis of our saeculum as suggested by Hardt and Negri or of an Israel as the stateof-the-future as proselytised by liberal-oriented Zionists or an Islamic cosmopolitanism of the contemporary as dreamt by nostalgists of the age of Muslim empires. For once, if there is any hope, it is relinquished from under the rubble of the present ruins in Gaza and beyond whereby the mere testament to living may see it emerge otherwise, liberating us all from shame and guilt and impatient inaction.

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Notes

A c k n o w l e d gments 1 Billie Jeanne Brownlee and Maziyar Ghiabi, ‘The Mythological Machine in the Great Civil War (2001–2021): Oikos and Polis in Nation-Making’, Middle East Critique 30, no. 2 (2021); Billie Jeanne Brownlee and Maziyar Ghiabi, ‘Passive, Silent and Revolutionary: The “Arab Spring” revisited’, Middle East Critique 25, no. 3 (2016). 2 Salvatore Prinzi, Sul Buon Uso Dell’impazienza: Crisi, Movimenti, Organizzazione (Napoli: Liguori, 2012).

P o s t s c r i pt   1 Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation around the World (London and New York: Verso Books, 2023). See also Sagi Cohen, ‘Gaza Becomes Israel’s Testing Ground for Military Robots’, Haaretz, 3 March 2024 https://www. haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-03-03/ty-article-magazine/.premium/gazabecomes-israels-testing-ground-for-remote-control-military-robots/ 0000018e-03ed-def2-a98e-cfff1e640000.   2 David Vine, Cala Coffman, Katalina Khoury, Madison Lovasz, Helen Bush, Rachael Leduc, and Jennifer Walkup, ‘Creating Refugees: Displacement Caused by the United States’ Post-9/11 Wars’ (Costs of War Project, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, 21 September 2020).   3 Costs of War website, ‘Summary of Findings’, 2024, https://watson. brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/summary, accessed 12 April 2024.   4 Carlo Levi, Paura Della Libertà (Venice: Neri Pozza Editore, 2018).

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Notes to pages xix–xxiii

Prologue   1 Ignazio Silone, La Scuola Dei Dittatori (Milan: Edizioni Mondadori, 2018).   2 Valeria Bonacci, ‘Prefazione’, in Giorgio Agamben: Ontologia E Politica, ed. Valeria Bonacci (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2019), 15. It is also reminiscent of the opera lyrics of Gaetano Donizetti, che interminabile andarivieni, ‘What endless comings and goings’, which to us is nothing but the mode of history.   3 Giorgio Agamben, Stasis: La Guerra Civile Come Paradigma Politico; Homo Sacer, II/2, vol. 250 (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2015).   4 See, for instance, Simon Mabon, Houses Built on Sand: Violence, Sectarianism and Revolution in the Middle East (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020); Paola Rivetti and Francesco Cavatorta, ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa: Global Politics, Protesting and Knowledge Production in the Region and Beyond’, Partecipazione e Conflitto 14, no. 2 (2021); Simon Mabon, ‘Sectarian Games: Sovereign Power, War Machines and Regional Order in the Middle East’, Middle East Law and Governance 12, no. 1 (2020); Jeffrey G. Karam and Rima Majed, The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022); Matteo Capasso, Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2023); Zia Ebrahimi’s work on ‘dislocation and nationalism’ and his follow-up research on Islamophobia and the Great Replacement theory, The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism: Race and the Politics of Dislocation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).   5 See the merip issue on this question: Fanar Haddad, “Perpetual Protest and the Failure of the Post-2003 Iraqi State,” in “The State of Iraq – 20 Years After the Invasion,” special issue, Middle East Research and Information Project, no. 306, https://merip.org/2023/03/perpetual-protestand-the-failure-of-the-post-2003-iraqi-state/, accessed 27 March 2024.   6 See the original publication: Furio Jesi, Spartakus: Simbologia Della Rivolta (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000).   7 Brownlee and Ghiabi, ‘The Mythological Machine’; Brownlee and Ghiabi, ‘Passive, Silent and Revolutionary’.   8 See the recent revival of Gramscian thought in Middle Eastern studies as brought forward in John Chalcraft and Allessandra Marchi, ‘Guest Editors’ Introduction: Gramsci in the Arab World’, Middle East Critique 30, no. 1 (2021): 1–8.

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Notes to pages xxiii–xxxi

177

  9 Michael Hardt, ‘Introduction: Laboratory Italy’, in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 10 Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (London: Macmillan, 2017), 228. 11 Ibid. 12 Michele Giorgio, ‘Meloni: il passato non turba Israele, conta l’alleanza con la destra italiana’, Il Manifesto, 28 September 2022, https://­ ilmanifesto.it/meloni-il-passato-non-turba-israele-conta-lalleanza-conla-destra-italiana. 13 Dylan Riley, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe (London: Verso Books, 2019), 4–6. 14 Ibid., 17. 15 Davide Tarizzo, Political Grammars: The Unconscious Foundations of Modern Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021), 14. 16 Ibid. 17 Kareem Fahm, ‘Have a Nice Country’, The Village Voice, 22 June 2004, https://www.villagevoice.com/2004/06/22/have-a-nice-country/. 18 Edward Said, Al-Ahram Weekly Online 22, no. 639 (28 May 2023), http://www.mafhoum.com/press5/147P10.htm. 19 See Michael R. Pompeo, ‘On the Passing of Bernard Lewis’, Department of State website, 20 May 2018, https://www.state.gov/on-the-passingof-bernard-lewis/. 20 Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, Psycho-Nationalism: Global Thought, Iranian Imaginations (London: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 136. 21 Bridge, ‘Factsheet: Daniel Pipes’, 14 August 2018, https://bridge.georgetown.edu/research/factsheet-daniel-pipes/. 22 Thomas Friedman, ‘Tell Me How This Will End Well’, New York Times, 1 April 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/opinion/thomas-­ friedman-tell-me-how-this-ends-well.html. 23 For a critique endorsing our argument see Ussama Makdisi, ‘Pensee 4: Moving Beyond Orientalist Fantasy, Sectarian Polemic, and Nationalist Denial’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 40, no. 4 (2008); Isa Blumi, Chaos in Yemen: Societal Collapse and the New Authoritarianism, vol. 19 (London: Routledge, 2010). 24 Enzo Traverso, À feu et à sang: De la guerre civile européenne 1914–1945 (Paris: Stock, 2007). 25 Nazih N. Ayubi, Over-Stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1996).

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Notes to pages 7–11

C h a p t e r O ne   1 Sarah H. Awad, ‘Documenting a Contested Memory: Symbols in the Changing City Space of Cairo’, Culture & Psychology 23, no. 2 (2017).   2 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Penguin, 2001), 35.   3 We revisited some of the debates on the ‘Arab Spring’ in a previous article. See Brownlee and Ghiabi, ‘Passive, Silent and Revolutionary’.   4 See Bernard Lewis, ‘The Question of Orientalism’, The New York Review of Books, 24 June 1982, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1982/ jun/24/the-question-of-orientalism/.   5 Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Aurora Sottomano, ‘Ideology and Discourse in the Era of Ba’thist Reforms: Towards an Analysis of Authoritarian Governmentality’, Syria Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 3–40.   6 Magid Shihade, Cristina Flesher Fominaya, and Laurence Cox, ‘The Season of Revolution: The Arab Spring and European Mobilizations’, Interface: A Journal for and About Social Movements 4, no. 1 (2012).   7 As we publish this book, Vincent Bevins is publishing his book on the global counterrevolution of the 2010s. Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (New York: PublicAffairs, Hachette Book Group, 2023).   8 Jasmine K. Gani, ‘From Discourse to Practice: Orientalism, Western Policy and the Arab Uprisings’, International Affairs 98, no. 1 (2022).   9 Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). 10 Gregory Gause III, ‘Why Middle East Studies Missed the Arab Spring: The Myth of Authoritarian Stability’, Foreign Affairs 90, no. 4 (2011). 11 Michael C. Hudson, ‘Arab Politics after the Uprisings: Still Searching for Legitimacy’, in Routledge Handbook of the Arab Spring (London: Routledge, 2014), 18. 12 Fred Halliday, Revolution and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power (Durham, n c: Duke University Press), 25. 13 William A. Gamson and Gadi Wolfsfeld, ‘Movements and Media as Interacting Systems’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 528, no. 1 (1993): 114–25. 14 Walter Benjamin, Early Writings (1910–1917), ed. and trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2011).

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Notes to pages 11–17

179

15 Hannah Arendt, ‘Lying in Politics’, in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 15. 16 Ibid., 206. 17 Gilbert Achcar, The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 13–18. 18 And, incidentally, the term ‘Arab’ confuses the formation and evolution of the protests and the revolt. Many taking part in the ‘Arab Spring’ were not Arabs as such: Armenians, Kurds, Turkmens, and other groups joined the call for action, and somehow the term ‘Arab’ disregards the links between Iranian protestors and Arab ones. 19 Among the Arabic terms that gained resonance in the Western imaginary, intifada is probably unique. Translated with the English word ‘uprising’, it usually refers to the context of Palestinian mobilisation against the Israeli occupation, with the objective of ‘shaking off’ the occupation. Because of the historical use of the term, Arab observers have avoided using this term in the context of the Arab Spring. 20 See also Achcar, The People Want, 14–15. 21 See John Chalcraft, ‘The Arab Uprisings of 2011 in Historical Perspective’, in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle-Eastern and North African History, eds. A. Ghazal and J. Hannssen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 22 Rajesh Tandon and L. David Brown, ‘Civil Societies at Crossroads: Eruptions, Initiatives, and Evolution in Citizen Activis’, Development in Practice 23, no. 5–6 (2013). 23 See, for instance, Ross Porter, ‘Freedom, Power and the Crisis of Politics in Revolutionary Yemen’, Middle East Critique 26, no. 3 (2017). 24 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1958), quoted in Fadi Bardawil, ‘Critical Theory in a Minor Key to Take Stock of the Syrian Revolution’, in A Time for Critique, ed. Didier Fassin and Bernard E. Harcourt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 185. 25 Mussolini quoted in Ignazio Silone, La Scuola Dei Dittatori (Milan: Edizioni Mondadori, 2018), 103. 26 Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2013), 14. 27 Asef Bayat, ‘Plebeians of the Arab Spring’, Current Anthropology 56, no. 11 (2015); see also Asef Bayat, Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2021). 28 As it appeared on T-shirts sold in Cairo. 29 Furio, Spartakus, 19.

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Notes to pages 18–25

30 Ibid. 31 Once again, translations are problematic, as the English translation of this term is ‘ruling class’ while Gramsci intended the hegemonic power which also set the direction of politics, inherent in the classe dirigente. 32 Antonio Gramsci, An Antonio Gramsci Reader, ed. David Forgacs (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988), 247. 33 Mohamed Ben Moussa, ‘From Arab Street to Social Movements: Re-Theorizing Collective Action and the Role of Social Media in the Arab Spring’, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 9, no. 2 (2017). 34 See the website ‘Occupy Wall Street’, http://www.occupywallst.org/, accessed 20 March 2024. 35 Giorgio Pittas, ‘Crisis and Turmoil across Europe: How Can the 99% Win’, YouTube, 24 May 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgwPSdxLAis. 36 Billie Jeanne Brownlee, ‘The Revolution “from Below” and Its Misinterpretations “from Above”: The Case of Syria’s Neglected Civil Society’, Syria Studies 7, no. 1 (2015). 37 Asʿad Abu Khalil, ‘How to Start a Revolution: Or the Delusions of Gene Sharp’, Frontlines of Revolutionary Struggle, 12 February 2011, https:// revolutionaryfrontlines.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/how-to-start-a-revolutionor-the-delusions-of-gene-sharp/. 38 Sherif Mohy Eldeen, ‘Egypt Back Under Emergency Law’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 5 May 2017, https://carnegieen dowment.org/sada/69886. 39 Shihade, Flesher Fominaya, and Cox, ‘The Season of Revolution’, 8. 40 Ashifa Kassam, ‘Spanish Government Drafts Strict Anti-Protest Laws’, The Guardian, 21 November 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/ world/2013/nov/21/spain-government-strict-anti-protest-laws. 41 R. Mason, ‘Lobbying Bill Passes through Houses of Lords’, The Guardian, 28 January 2014. 42 Maziyar Ghiabi, ‘The Pedagogy of the Virus: Solidarity and Mutual Aid in the Post-Epidemic Futures’, Partecipazione e Conflitto 14, no. 2 (2021). Nadia Naser-Najjab, Covid-19 in Palestine: The Settler Colonial Context (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024). 43 Budour Hassan, ‘Omar Aziz: Rest in Power’, Random Shelling Blog, 20 March 2013, http://budourhassan.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/omar-aziz/. 44 David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (London: Random House, 2013), 18–19 and 106. 45 Ibid., 178.

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Notes to pages 29–36

181

C h a p t e r Two   1 Juan Cole, ‘Brahimi Warns Iraqis of Civil War’, Informed Consent, 17 February 2004, https://www.juancole.com/2004/02/brahimi-warns-iraqisof-civil-war-un.html.   2 Ghassan Abu Sitta and Rupa Marya, ‘The Deep Medicine of Rehumanising Palestinians’, Yes! Solutions Journalism, 1 November 2023, https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2023/11/01/ medicine-palestine-israel-hospital.   3 Jacob Mundy, ‘The Middle East Is Violence: On the Limits of Comparative Approaches to the Study of Armed Conflict’, Civil Wars 21, no. 4 (2019).   4 Enzo Traverso, À feu et à sang: De la guerre civile européenne 1914–1945 (Paris: Stock, 2007).   5 The list of recent scholarship on ‘sectarianism’ is immense. See Google Scholar, ‘Sectarianism in the Middle East’, https://scholar.google.co.uk/ scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=sectarianism%2C+middle+ east&btnG=, accessed 28 August 2024.   6 Simon Mabon, ‘Sectarian Games: Sovereign Power, War Machines and Regional Order in the Middle East’, Middle East Law and Governance 12, no. 1 (2020).   7 Nader Hashemi, and Danny Postel, ‘Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East’, The Review of Faith & International Affairs 15, no. 3 (2017).   8 Fanar Haddad, Understanding ‘sectarianism’: Sunni-Shi’a Relationsin the Modern Arab World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).   9 Marco Belpoliti, Furio Jesi, ed. Enrico Manera (Milan: Marcos y Marcos, 2010), 205. For an overview of Jesi’s work on the mythological machine, see Furio Jesi, Mito (Ostiglia: Mondadori, 1989); Furio Jesi, Lettura del ‘Bateau Ivre’ di Rimbaud (Reading Rimbaud’s ‘Bateau Ivre’], vol. 14 (Macerata: Quodlibet, 1996); Furio Jesi, L’accusa del sangue: Mitologie dell’antisemitismo (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1993). 10 It is worth noting how ‘mythology’ is itself an inherently paradoxical ­category as it is a coexistence of ‘myths’, i.e., stories that are not true, and ‘logos’, i.e., stories that can be understood. 11 Hassan Hassan, The Sectarianism of the Islamic State: Ideological Roots and Political Context (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 2016), 56–7. 12 Ibid.

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Notes to pages 36–42

13 Human Rights Watch, ‘They Are Not Our Brothers: Hate Speech by Saudi Officials’, Human Right Watch, 26 September 2017, https://www.hrw.org/ sites/default/files/report_pdf/saudi0917_web.pdf. 14 Ibid. 15 US Department of State 2001–09 Archive, ‘Zarqawi Letter’, https://20012009.state.gov/p/nea/rls/31694.htm, accessed 30 July 2020. 16 bbc , ‘Syria Conflict: Qaradawi Urges Sunnis to Join Rebels’, 1 June 2003, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22741588. 17 Hassan, The Sectarianism, 41–2. 18 nb c News, ‘King Abdullah of Jordan’, 12 September 2004, http://www. nbcnews.com/id/6679774/ns/msnbc-hardball_with_chris_matthews/t/kingabdullah-ii-jordan/#.X0S86cgzY2x. 19 Fanar Haddad, ‘Shia-Centric State-Building and Sunni Rejection in ­Post-2003 Iraq’, in Beyond Sunni and Shia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 118–19. 20 Haddad, ‘Shia-Centric State-Building’, 130. Emphasis added. 21 Our gratitude to Sanaa Sanaei, who explored the performative nature of nowheh in contemporary Iran in her outstanding MPhil dissertation at the University of Oxford. 22 s h i a p r o ud, ‘Karbalai Hussein Taheri Muharram 2018–6’, YouTube video, 3:21 minutes, 16 September 2018, 23 As opposed to the modern term which is jang-e dakheli, ‘domestic war’. 24 Also in reference to Iranians as the word means ‘very stingy’, an ancient racist accusation against the Persians by the Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula. 25 On apathy in the Israeli context, see Katherine Natanel, Sustaining Conflict: Apathy and Domination in Israel–Palestine (Berkley: University of California Press, 2016). 26 See Furio Jesi, Cultura di destra (Milan: Garzanti, 1979). 27 Reported in Jesi, L’accusa del sangue. 28 See Leila Tarazi Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1994). 29 Jesi, L’accusa del sangue. 30 William Gallois, ‘The Destruction of the Islamic State of Being, Its Replacement in the Being of the State: Algeria, 1830–1847’, Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 2 (2018). 31 Ussama Makdisi, ‘Cosmopolitan Ottomans and the Myth of the Sectarian Middle East’, aeon , 17 October 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/ ottoman-cosmopolitanism-and-the-myth-of-the-sectarian-middle-east. 32 Will McCants, ‘Satan’s Slaves: Why Isis Wants to Enslave a Religious Minority in Iraq’, Brookings Institution, 14 October 2014, https://www.

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Notes to pages 42–5

183

brookings.edu/articles/satans-slaves-why-isis-wants-to-enslave-a-religiousminority-in-iraq/. 33 Giorgio Agamben, Stato di eccezione: Homo Sacer, II/1, vol. 130 (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003). 34 This is how the Nazi ideologues intended to build a new state cleansed of others including Roma, homosexuals, Jews, and communists. See Belpoliti and Manera, Furio Jesi, 132–3. 35 This vision is espoused by one particular group within the Islamic State known as the Hazmiyyah. See Hassan, The Sectarianism, 49. 36 Hassan, The Sectarianism. 37 Ilan Pappé, ‘Shtetl Colonialism: First and Last Impressions of Indigeneity by Colonised Colonisers’, Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012). 38 Ibid., 53. 39 This section was written years before the radical developments at the end of 2023 which saw the Israeli political elite adopt an overtly extreme stance of denial and erasure towards Palestinians. 40 A rise of neo-settler colonialism and right-wing nativism has emerged across the Global South, for example in Bolivia after the coup against Evo Morales, in Brazil with the election of Jair Bolsonaro, and in India with Narendra Modi. 41 See, for instance, Yohai Hakak, ‘“Undesirable Relationships” between Jewish Women and Arab Men: Representation and Discourse in Contemporary Israel’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 39, no. 6 (2016). 42 Sharon Pulwer, ‘Jewish Extremists’ Leader: “Christians Are Blood-Sucking Vampires Who Should Be Expelled from Israel”’, Haaretz, 10 April 2018, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-jewish-extremist-groupwants-to-ban-christmas-in-israel-1.5380284?fbclid=IwAR1Px5PEfmZILX u36wsmCWL1JlPytO0-XGuBbUGImCUK7Hk38T_ttbl3C7M. Yardena Schwartz, ‘Israel’s Alt-Right Movement Is Now Mainstream’, Newsweek, 3 July 2018, https://www.newsweek.com/2018/03/16/israel-alt-right-­ mainstream-lawmakers-stop-it-832386.html. 43 Bel Trew, ‘Fury After Israeli Minister Likens Intermarriage among Diaspora Jews to a “Second Holocaust”’, The Independent, 10 July 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-ministerintermarriage-diaspora-jews-holocaust-rafi-peretz-a8998421.html. 44 Ido David Cohen and Rachel Fink, ‘Education Ministry Withdraws Funding of Jewish Event over Arab Israeli Host’, Haaretz, 16 January 2024, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-01-16/ ty-articleisraeli-education-ministry-withdraws-funding-of-jewish-eventover-arab-israeli-host/0000018d-1216-d94e-abcf-3bf65cd70000.

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Notes to pages 45–53

45 Aaron Rabinowitz, ‘Israeli High Court Allows dna Testing to Prove Judaism’, Haaretz, 24 January 2020, https://www.haaretz.com/israelnews/.premium-israeli-high-court-allows-dna-testing-to-provejudaism-1.8439615. 46 Ilan Lior, ‘Netanyahu: “I Won’t Accept Lawless State within Israel”’, Haaretz, 2 January 2016, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/. premium-netanyahu-i-won-t-accept-lawless-state-within-israel-1.5384968. 47 Tal Shalev, X/Twitter post, 5 July 2019, 9:42 a.m., https://twitter.com/­ talshalev1/status/1147063152418414592.

C h a p t e r T h ree   1 In Furio Jesi, Cultura di destra (Milan: Garzanti, 1979).   2 Across Europe and North America, the overlapping of left and right in their public standing on issues of economy, foreign policy, and even the historical past is a cursory confirmation of how the culture of the right is not the turf of classical right-wing parties. For this reason, we do not indulge in a taxonomy of what are the right-wing political parties in the Middle East as we believe it is far more important to consider political practice than affiliation.  3 Jesi, Cultura di destra, 7.   4 Theodor Adorno spoke of a similar fact when referring to the right as existing in a ‘poor ideology’ and of fascism, the most elaborated ­expression of right-wing politics, as not having a theory. This ideological poverty should not be reason to dismiss the reach and power of the right, especially as the right has come to master with extraordinary potential the means of propaganda. See Theodor W. Adorno, Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism (Hoboken, n j: John Wiley & Sons, 2020), 13 and 29.   5 Ali Mirsepassi, Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought: The Life and Times of Ahmad Fardid, vol. 1 (London: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Fardid was the first to formulate the expression gharbzadegi, ‘Westoxification’. The term itself, however, was popularised by Jalal Al-e Ahmad in the 1960s and 1970s, with a more anti-colonial, anti-imperialist meaning, with which Fardid may not have necessarily agreed.   6 On Coca-Cola’s anti-worker strategy, see hr Grapevine, ‘Trade Union Slams Coca-Cola Company for Violating Worker Rights’, 2 July 2018, https://www.hrgrapevine.com/content/article/2018-07-02-trade-union-slamscoca-cola-company-for-violating-worker-rights.  7 Jesi, Cultura di destra, 88.

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Notes to pages 54–8

185

  8 Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 226.   9 Wael Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 92. 10 We are grateful to William Gallois for elucidating these aspects. 11 Maziyar Ghiabi, Drugs Politics: Managing Disorder in the Islamic Republic of Iran (London: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 12 Islamic Republic News Agency (i rn a), ‘Hejab, a cornerstone for guarding the blood of the martyrs [hejab, sangari baray-e pasdari-e khun-e shohada]’, 6 July 2014, irna.ir/news/81226816/ ‫شهيدان‬-‫خون‬-‫از‬-‫پاسداري‬-‫براي‬-‫سنگري‬-‫حجاب‬. 13 See, for instance, Rabbi Debie Young-Somers, ‘Kedoshim – Holiness and the Holocaust’, Edgware & Hednon Reform Synagogue website, 30 April 2022, https://www.ehrs.uk/kedoshim-holiness-and-the-holocaust/. 14 Hagai El-Ad, ‘Netanyahu exploits the Holocaust to brutalise the Palestinians’, Haaretz, 24 July 2020, https://www.haaretz.com/israelnews/2020-01-23/ty-article-opinion/.premium/netanyahu-exploits-theholocaust-to-brutalize-the-palestinians/0000017f-e0b3-d804-ad7ff1fb6fc40000. 15 Eldad Ben Aharon, ‘Why Won’t Israel Recognise the Armenian Genocide? It’s Not Just about Turkey’, Haaretz, 22 April 2021, https://www.haaretz. com/middle-east-news/2021-04-22/ty-article-opinion/.premium/why-­ wont-israel-recognize-the-armenian-genocide-its-not-just-about-turkey/ 0000017f-ee24-ddba-a37f-ee6ea70e0000; Mershida Gadzo, ‘Israeli Academic Denounced for Report Denying Srebrenica Genocide’, Al-Jazeera, 3 December 2021, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/israelihistorian-denounced-for-srebrenica-genocide-denial. 16 Interview with ssn p member in Beirut, 4 May 2022. 17 Raffaello Pantucci, “We Love Death as You Love Life”: Britain’s Suburban Terrorists (London: Oxford University Press, 2015). 18 bbc News, ‘Islamic State: “We Love Death as You Love Life” – bb c ne ws ’, YouTube, 23 May 2015, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zlfagPS6490; Associated Press, ‘“You Love Life and We Love Death”’, 14 March 2004, http://archive.boston.com/news/world/europe/ articles/2004/03/14/you_love_life_and_we_love_death/. 19 Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar, ‘“They Love Death as We Love Life”: The “Muslim Question” and the Biopolitics of Replacement’, The British Journal of Sociology 71, no. 4 (2020). 20 Akshat Tyagi, ‘Brothers in Arms: The Sangh and the Kibbutz’, Newslaundry, 7 July 2021, https://www.newslaundry.com/2017/07/07/

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Notes to pages 59–65

brothers-in-arms-the-sangh-and-the-kibbutz; Michele Giorgio, ‘Il passato non turba Israele, conta l’alleanza con la destra italiana’, Il Manifesto, 28 September 2022, https://ilmanifesto.it/meloni-il-passato-non-turbaisraele-conta-lalleanza-con-la-destra-italiana. 21 Sina Toossi, ‘Analysis: Why Are Iranian Monarchists Backing Israel over Its Gaza War?,’ Al-Jazeera, 9 March 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/­ features/2024/3/9/the-strange-alliance-between-iranian-monarchistsand-israel. 22 Cited in Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (London: Macmillan, 2017), 147. 23 Jim Lobe and Daniel Luban, ‘The Messianic, Apocalyptic Bibi Netanyahu’, LobeLog, 8 October 2013, https://lobelog.com/the-messianicapocalyptic-bibi-netanyahu/; Middle East Eye, ‘Netanyahu Faces Backlash for Evoking Biblical Amalek Amid Heavy Civilian Casualties in Gaza’, YouTube, 29 October 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= pMVs7akyMh0. 24 Jair Bolsonaro made similar claims; Matteo Salvini from the far-right Italian party claimed a special connection to the Madonna, Holy Mary. 25 Graeme Wood, ‘What i si s Really Wants’, The Atlantic 315, no. 2 (2015). 26 Richard Spencer, ‘Messianic Strongman Sisi Drags Egypt Deeper into Its Past’, The Times, 26 January 2019, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ messianic-strongman-drags-country-deeper-into-its-past-zclkrb2dc. 27 See its website at https://www.neom.com/en-us/regions/theline. 28 Vivian Nereim, ‘mbs ’s $500 Billion Desert Dream Just Keeps Getting Weirder’, Bloomberg, 14 July 2022, https://www.bloomberg.com/ features/2022-mbs-neom-saudi-arabia. 29 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 19. 30 Ibid., 24. 31 Narzanin Massoumi, Tom Mills, and David Miller, What Is Islamophobia? Racism, Social Movements and the State (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 203. 32 Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (London: Verso Books, 2008), 28. 33 Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, ‘When the Elders of Zion Relocated to Eurabia: Conspiratorial Racialization in Antisemitism and Islamophobia’, Patterns of Prejudice 52, no. 4 (2018). 34 Chloe Kattar, ‘The Genealogy of Right-Wing Discourse: What Western Conservatives Took from Middle Eastern Debates (1970s–2020)’, Third Euro-Arab Conversation Lecture, 25 April 2022.

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Notes to pages 65–74

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35 Antoine Najm, ‘I cried for a future I saw coming [bakayt ‘ala mustaqbal ra’ayt-hu qadiman]’, Lebanese Forces website, 13 September 2022, https:// www.lebanese-forces.com/2022/09/13/bachir-gemayel-69/. 36 Ibid. 37 arZan, ‘The Islamization of Europe’, ParsiKhabar, 5 April 2007, https:// parsikhabar.net/date/2007/04/. 38 Negin Nabavi, Iran: From Theocracy to the Green Movement (New York: Springer, 2012), 83. 39 Kyle J. Anderson, ‘How Egypt’s Grandiose Neo-Pharaonism Lends Legitimacy to Its Strongman’, The New Arab, 23 November 2021, https://www.newarab.com/opinion/egypts-grandiose-neo-pharaonismand-strongman-politics. 40 Michael Wood, ‘The Use of the Pharaonic Past in Modern Egyptian Nationalism’, Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 35 (1998). 41 Marc Espanol, ‘Threat of Demolition Looms over Cairo’s Historic Necropolis,’ Al-Monitor, 7 April 2022, https://www.al-monitor.com/­ originals/2022/03/threat-demolition-looms-over-cairos-historic-necropolis. 42 Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 6. 43 Giovanni Gentile, Che cosa é il fascismo (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1925). 44 Benito Mussolini, La dottrina del fascismo (Roma: Hoepli, 1936). 45 Mona El-Ghobashy, Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021), 57. 46 Ibid., 209. 47 Hallaq, The Impossible State, 92. 48 Piterberg, The Returns, 98. 49 Ibid., 100. 50 Ghiabi, Drugs Politics, 139. 51 Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, A Theory of Isis: Political Violence and the Transformation of the Global Order (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 91. 52 Ibid., 129. 53 Ibid., 136. 54 Schmitt, The Concept, 42. 55 Ali Akbar, ‘Political Theology in Iran: Critiques of the Guardianship of Jurist in Light of Reformist Iranian Scholarship’, Political Theology, 2022; Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, ‘From Etelāʿāti to Eslāhtalabi: Saʿid Hajjarian, Political Theology and the Politics of Reform in ­Post-Revolutionary Iran’, Iranian Studies 47, no. 6 (2014).

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Notes to pages 74–83

56 El-Ghobashy, Bread and Freedom, 241. 57 A very different take about being devoted to the state is presented in Mona Oraby, Devotion to the Administrative State: Religion and Social Order in Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024). 58 El-Ghobashy, Bread and Freedom.

C h a p t e r F o ur   1 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 52.   2 Ehud Olmert and Yair Lapid, who never gained prominence in the idf, served as war correspondents, and later Olmert, while an mp, enrolled on an officer course. See Ehud Olmert, Searching for Peace: A Memoir of Israel (New York: Brookings Institution Press, 2022).   3 That doesn’t mean that military rule didn’t face challenges but that the challenges it faced were not informed by a culture critical of the militarism.   4 See website: https://egyptrevolution2011.ac.uk/items/show/173. El-Ghobashy, Bread and Freedom, 206–7.   5 Peyman Eshaghi, ‘Mourners in Common: Qassem Soleimani, Mohammad Reza Shajarian, and the “Pattern” of Iranian culture’, Jadaliyya, 22 November 2020, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/42047.   6 Haim Bresheeth-Zabner, An Army Like No Other: How the Israel Defense Forces Made a Nation (London: Verso Books, 2020), 33.   7 Christians and Druze citizens of Israel can also join the army on a ­volunteer basis. Those who accept to do so are celebrated as loyal citizens and put in opposition to the non-abiding Palestinians who refuse to join the i d f .   8 Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (London: Verso Books, 2008), 201.   9 Patrick Tyler, ‘Is Israel a Modern Sparta?’, Tablet, 24 September 2012, https://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/vox-tablet/is-israel-a-modern-sparta. In Switzerland, where military conscription is mandatory for all male ­citizens and is supported by more than 75 per cent of the population, there is not an equivalent public culture – indeed infatuation – with the army. 10 Naftali Bennett, X/Twitter post, 9 April 2024, 1:53 a.m., https://twitter. com/naftalibennett/status/1777500022457745696. 11 Giovanni Cecini, I soldati ebrei di Mussolini (Milano: Mursia Editore, 2008). 12 Furio Jesi, Cultura di destra (Milan: Garzanti, 1979), 188. 13 Ibid., 258.

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189

14 An example of how fascism in its early days had non-conflictual relations with Jews is the case of Attilio Terruzzi, war-time governor of the Italian colonies in Africa (Cyrenaica and Ethiopia), who married Liliana Weinman, a Jewish opera singer. Theirs became the most publicised and iconic fascist wedding attended by Mussolini himself. See Victoria De Grazia, The Perfect Fascist (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2020). 15 Richard Wagner, Judaism in Music and Other Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). Herzl was not alone in his proto-fascistic infatuation with Wagner. Both Tommaso Marinetti, the Futurist avantgardist leader and early follower of Italian fascism, and Adolf Hitler confessed that the early project of revanche and conquest started with Wagner. See Mishra, Age of Anger, 214. 16 Mishra, Age of Anger, 213. 17 See Amnon Rubinstein, ‘From Herzl to Rabin’, The New York Times, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/r/rubinsteinherzl.html, accessed 28 August 2024; see also Liora R. Halperin, The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021), 131. 18 The other side of the coin is that of kibbutzim, the model of social ­organisation built around mutual aid. It is worth noting that kibbutzim have provided strategic contributions to the foundations of Israel and to the fighting force of the i df. See Judy Malz, ‘Bastions of the Left, Kibbutzim Are on Front Lines of War’, Haaretz, 30 July 2014, https:// www.haaretz.com/2014-07-30/ty-article/.premium/kibbutzim-on-frontlines-of-war/0000017f-e47d-d568-ad7f-f77f99430000. 19 Middle East Eye, ‘Egyptian President el-Sisi Mocked on Social Media after Saying “We’re Not a Real Country”’, YouTube, 13 March 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUh9flHa3cA. 20 Sky News, ‘Bare-Chested Egyptian Police Recruits Put On Macho Display’, 19 October 2020, https://news.sky.com/video/bare-chestedegyptian-police-recruits-put-on-macho-display-12108568. 21 Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, ‘Egypt’s Sisi Calls for Protecting Youth from “Radical Ideologies”’, 29 May 2022, https://english.aawsat.com/home/ article/3672201/egypts-sisi-calls-protecting-youth-radical-ideologies. 22 Piterberg, The Returns, 34–5. 23 Ibid. 24 Belen Fernandez, ‘Sexualising Occupation: The Uses and Abuses of Israel’s Female Soldiers’, Middle East Eye, 12 September 2016, https://www. middleeasteye.net/opinion/sexualising-occupation-uses-and-abuses-israelsfemale-soldiers.

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Notes to pages 88–93

25 At the same time, English-language coverage of women in the idf has been oblivious to recurrent and widespread accusations of sexual ­harassment and rape within the i df. 26 Al-Jaysh al-Lubnani, X/Twitter post, 8 March 2023, 8:56 a.m., https:// twitter.com/LebarmyOfficial/status/1633391283900239872?s=20. 27 Elsa Dorlin, Se défendre: Une philosophie de la violence (Paris: La Découverte, 2019). 28 Recherche le, ‘Leipzig “Lateral Thinking 711” – Armed Attacks by ­Well-Known Neo-Nazi Martial Artists and Trainers’, Runtervondermatte, 13 November 2020, 29 Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 93. 30 Ibid., 95. 31 Kurt Hollander, ‘Martial Arts in the Age of Trump’, Jacobin, 19 January 2021, https://jacobin.com/2021/01/martial-arts-ufc-trumpfar-right-police-military. 32 Karim Zidan, ‘Chechnya’s Fight Club Joins Putin’s War’, New Lines Magazine, 23 March 2022, https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/ chechnyas-fight-club-joins-putins-war/. 33 Bernd Debusmann Jr, ‘Is mma Fighting a Losing Battle in the Middle East?’, Arabian Business, 19 September 2019, https://www.arabianbusiness. com/gcc/saudi-arabia/saudi-arabia-sport/428411-mma-losingn-game. 34 See for instance the case of Yemeni protestors taking ‘security’ into their own hands against the state: Ross Porter, ‘Security against the State in Revolutionary Yemen’, Cultural Anthropology 35, no. 2 (2020). 35 Maziyar Ghiabi, ‘Maintaining Disorder: The Micropolitics of Drugs Policy in Iran’, Third World Quarterly 39, no. 2 (2018): 294. 36 Jeremy Sharon, ‘Ben Gvir Says 10,000 Assault Rifles Purchased for Civilian Security Teams’, The Times of Israel, 10 October 2023, https:// www.timesofisrael.com/ben-gvir-says-10000-assault-rifles-purchased-forcivilian-security-teams/. 37 On gender norms in the West Bank’s Jewish settlements, consider that the Yesha Council, made up of local heads of all Jewish settlements in the West Bank, has been an all-male governing body for several decades. Jacob Magid, ‘In the Land of the Forefathers, Some Female Settlers Challenge the Patriarchy’, The Times of Israel, 19 October 2018, https://www.timesofisrael. com/in-the-land-of-the-forefathers-female-settlers-challenge-the-patriarchy/. 38 Ran Shimoni, ‘Ben-Gvir’s Party Members Trying to Form Armed Militia in Tel Aviv Suburb’, Haaretz, 26 October 2022, https://www.haaretz. com/israel-news/2022-10-26/ty-article/.premium/ben-gvirs-party-

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members-trying-to-form-armed-militia-in-tel-aviv-suburb/0000018414e4-db1c-a5a7-fefd926c0000. 39 Caroline Hayek, ‘Qui sont les “Soldats de Dieu” d’Achrafiyeh?’, L’Orient du Jour, 30 June 2022, https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1304252/ qui-sont-les-soldats-de-dieu-dachrafieh-.html. 40 Fuad Musallam, ‘The Dissensual Everyday: Between Daily Life and Exceptional Acts in Beirut, Lebanon’, City & Society 32, no. 3 (2020). 41 Reliefweb, ‘Iraq: In Absence of Police, Vigilantes Take the Streets’, 19 February 2007, https://reliefweb.int/report/iraq/iraq-absence-police-­ vigilantes-take-streets; and Preventing War Shaping Peace, ‘Iraq’s Paramilitary Groups: The Challenge of Rebuilding a Functioning State’, Middle East Report 30, no. 188 (2018). 42 Maziyar Ghiabi, Drugs Politics: Managing Disorder in the Islamic Republic of Iran (London: Cambridge University Press, 2019), chapters 7 and 8; see also Maziyar Ghiabi, ‘Maintaining Disorder: The Micropolitics of Drugs Policy in Iran’, Third World Quarterly 39, no. 2 (2018). 43 Béatrice Hibou, La bureaucratisation du monde à l’ère néolibérale (Paris: La Découvérte Paris, 2012); Béatrice Hibou, ‘Retrait ou ­redéploiement de l’état?’, Critique internationale, no. 1 (1998). 44 Billie Jeanne Brownlee, New Media and Revolution: Resistance and Dissent in Pre-uprising Syria (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020). 45 Schmitt, The Concept, 69. 46 Ibid., 76. 47 Thomas Zeitzoff, ‘How Social Media Is Changing Conflict’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 61, no. 9 (2017). 48 Marc Owen Jones, Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Deception, Disinformation and Social Media (London: Hurst Publishers, 2022), 91. See also Amro Ali, ‘Re-envisioning Civil Society and Social Movements in the Mediterranean in an Era of Techno-Fundamentalism’, European Institute of the Mediterranean 25 (2020), https://www.iemed. org/publicacions-en/historic-de-publicacions/papersiemed/25.-re-envisioning-civil-society-and-social-movements-in-the-mediterranean-in-an-era-oftechno-fundamental/, accessed 28 May 2024. 49 Jones, Digital Authoritarianism, 102. 50 Dina Mansour-Ille, ‘Cash for Citizenship’, odi, https://odi.org/en/insights/ cash-for-citizenship-rich-arab-countries-may-pay-poor-islands-to-takestateless-bidoons/. See also Claire Beaugrand, Stateless in the Gulf: Migration, Nationality and Society in Kuwait (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017).

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V ig n e t t e T hree   1 Tirana Hassan, ‘The Gangs of Iraq’, Human Rights Watch, 4 November 2015, https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/11/04/gangs-iraq.   2 Giorgio Agamben, Stasis: La guerra civile come paradigma politico; Homo Sacer, II/2, vol. 250 (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2015), 56.   3 Ibid., 58.

C h a p t e r F ive   1 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 133.   2 Roberto Esposito, Communitas: Origine e destino della comunità, vol. 58 (Milan: Einaudi, 1998); Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (London: Routledge, 1969).   3 International Organisation of Migration, Iraq, ‘iom Iraq: Review of Displacement and Return in Iraq’, August 2010, https://www.iom.int/ jahia/webdav/shared/shared/mainsite/activities/countries/docs/Iraq/IOM_ Iraq_Review_of_Displacement_and_Return_in_Iraq_August_2010.pdf, accessed 23 August 2020.  4 unh c r , ‘Syria Emergency’, 2008, https://www.unhcr.org/uk/syria-­ emergency.html.   5 Human Rights Watch, ‘Q&A: Syria’s New Property Law’, 29 May 2018, https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/05/29/qa-syrias-new-property-law.   6 Louise Fawcett, ‘States and Sovereignty in the Middle East: Myths and Realities’, International Affairs 93, no. 4 (2017): 795.   7 Maja Janmyr, ‘Precarity in Exile: The Legal Status of Syrian Refugees in Lebanon’, Refugee Survey Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2016).   8 Charles Simpson, ‘Competing Security and Humanitarian Imperatives in the Berm’, Forced Migration Review, no. 57 (2018).   9 Armenak Tokmajyan and Kheder Khaddour, ‘Border Nation: The Reshaping of the Syrian-Turkish Borderlands’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 30 March 2022, https://carnegieendowment.org/ research/2022/08/border-nation-the-reshaping-of-the-syrian-turkishborderlands, accessed 20 May 2024. 10 Adam Ramadan and Sara Fregonese, ‘Hybrid Sovereignty and the State of Exception in the Palestinian Refugee Camps in Lebanon’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers 107, no. 4 (2017). 11 Habib Battah, ‘Beirut and the Birth of the Fortress Embassy’, merip , 10 April 2024, https://merip.org/2024/04/beirut-and-the-birth-of-thefortress-embassy/.

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12 Ainhoa Ruiz Benedicto and Pere Brunet, Building Walls: Fear and Securitization in the European Union (Barcelona: Centre Delàs d’Estudis per la Pau, 2018). 13 Marwan Bishara, ‘Joseph Borrell as Europe’s Racist Gardener’, Al-Jazeera, 17 October 2022, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/10/17/josepborrell-eu-racist-gardener. 14 In fact, a large number of pilgrims move regularly between Iran and Iraq. It has also become common knowledge that ir gc -affiliated groups can operate freely across the borders together with their Iraqi counterparts, the pmus, a fact that bolsters our point about the partisan nature of ­modern citizen-making. 15 Afolake Oyinloye, ‘More Israeli Tourists Are Choosing to Holiday in Sinai’, Africanews, 27 June 2022, https://www.africanews.com/2022 /06/27/more-israeli-tourists-are-choosing-to-holiday-in-sinai/. 16 See Brown, Walled States, 133. 17 Ibid. 18 Peter Andreas, ‘Redrawing the Line: Borders and Security in the TwentyFirst Century’, International Security 28, no. 2 (2003); Mike Davis, ‘The Great Wall of Capital’, Socialist Worker, 5 February 2004, https://­ socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/great-wall-capital/. 19 Brown, Walled States, 145. 20 Ibid., 130. 21 Ibid., 131. 22 Helen Delfeld, The Nation (London: Routledge, 2014). 23 Antonio Giustozzi, Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field (London: Hurst, 2009). See also Adam Baczko and Gilles Dorronsoro, ‘Thinking About Civil Wars With and Beyond Bourdieu: State, Capital and Habitus in Critical Contexts’, Journal of Classical Sociology 22, no. 2 (2022). 24 Amy Slaughter and Jeff Crisp, ‘A Surrogate State? The Role of unhc r in Protracted Refugee Situations’, New Issues in Refugee Research, no. 168 (January 2009). 25 Ghada Hashem Talhami, ‘The Conundrum of the Palestinian Two-State, One-State Solution’, Arab Studies Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2016): 147. 26 Michel Agier, Managing the Undesirables (London: Polity, 2011). 27 Ibid. 28 The word for ‘displaced’ in Arabic comes from the root na-za-ha, which among other things means ‘to drain’, ‘to empty’ something. 29 Juline Beaujouan and Amjed Rasheed, Syrian Crisis, Syrian Refugees: Voices from Jordan and Lebanon (London: Springer Nature, 2019). 30 With a total amount of US$11 billion pledged for 2016–17, the February 2016 Supporting Syria and the Region conference was

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the largest in the history of the United Nations. The former record was hit by the January 2014 appeal during the Kuwait II conference with US$2.4 billion. By May 2014, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates ­fulfilled their pledges of US$300 million and US$60 million respectively (plus US$11.6 million outside the appeal); Qatar gave US$11.2 million and Saudi Arabia US$17.9 million. 31 Sarah Hasselbarth, ‘Islamic Charities in the Syrian Context in Jordan and Lebanon’, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2014, https://library.fes.de/pdffiles/bueros/beirut/10620.pdf, accessed 20 May 2024.

Chapter Six   1 The proverb means that when someone comes to your house they should be welcomed as a prince; if they decide to stay, they must not move freely around the house, just like prisoners; and when they leave the house, they should be telling only good and flattering things about your house, like poets.   2 Jenny Pearce, Politics without Violence? Towards a Post-Weberian Enlightenment (London: Springer Nature, 2019).   3 See Oroub El-Abed, ‘The Invisible Citizens of Jorda’, in Minorities and State-Building in the Middle East: The Case of Jordan (London: Springer, 2020).   4 Michael M.R. Izady, ‘Urban Unplanning: How Violence, Walls, and Segregation Destroyed the Urban Fabric of Baghdad’, Journal of Planning History 19, no. 1 (2020).   5 Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, Exiled at Home, June 2021, https://euromedmonitor.org/uploads/reports/IraqReportEN.pdf.   6 ‘The New Urban Renewal Law in Syria’, Syrian Law Journal, 15 May 2018, https://www.syria.law/index.php/new-urban-renewal-law-syria/.   7 Amnesty, ‘Syria: “We Leave or We Die”: Forced Displacement under Syria’s Reconciliation Agreements’, Amnesty, 13 November 2017, https:// www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde24/7309/2017/en/.   8 Human Rights Watch, ‘Razed to the Ground’, Human Rights Watch, 2014, http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/syria0114webwcover. pdf, accessed 24 March 2024.   9 Pax for Peace, ‘Violations of Housing, Land and Property Rights: An Obstacle to Peace in Syria’, Pax for Peace, https://paxforpeace.nl/­ publications/violations-of-housing-land-and-property-rights-an-obstacleto-peace-in-syria/, accessed 24 March 2024.

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10 Fabrice Balanche, ‘From the Iranian Corridor to the Shia Crescent’, Hoover Institution, 17 August 2018, https://www.hoover.org/research/ iranian-corridor-shia-crescent. 11 Didier Fassin, A Companion to Moral Anthropology (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 21. 12 Armend Bekaj and Lina Antara, Political Participation of Refugees: Bridging the Gaps, International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, 2018, https://www.idea.int/sites/default/files/publications/­ political-participation-of-refugees-bridging-the-gaps.pdf. 13 Dawn Chatty, Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East (London: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 14 Kamel Doraï and Pauline Piraud-Fournet, ‘From Tent to Makeshift Housing: A Case Study of a Syrian Refugee in Zaatari Camp (Jordan)’, in Refugees as City-Makers, eds. M. Fawaz, A. Gharbieh, M. Harb, and D. Salamé (American University of Beirut and Issam Fares Institute, Social Justice and the City Program, 2018); Fawaz, Gharbieh, Harb, and Salamé. Refugees as City-Makers, 136–9. 15 Mona Fawaz, ‘Beirut: The City as a Body Politic’, isim Review 20, no. 1 (2007); Mona Fawaz, ‘Neoliberal Urbanity and the Right to the City: A View from Beirut’s Periphery’, Development and Change 40, no. 5 (2009); Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2013). 16 Marc Lynch, ‘The Political and Institutional Impact of Syria’s Displacement Crisis: Introduction’, Middle East Law and Governance 9, no. 3 (2017). 17 Simon Mabon, ‘Sectarian Games: Sovereign Power, War Machines and Regional Order in the Middle East’, Middle East Law and Governance 12, no. 1 (2020). 18 Toby Dodge, ‘Iraq: The Contradictions of Exogenous State-Building in Historical Perspective’, Third World Quarterly 27, no. 1 (2006). 19 Simon Mabon, ‘The World Is a Garden: Nomos, Sovereignty, and the (Contested) Ordering of Life’, Review of International studies 45, no. 5 (2019).

C h a p t e r S e ven   1 Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad, Le déracinement: La crise de l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie (Paris: Minuit, 1964).   2 Ibid., 133–4.   3 Ibid., 16.

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Notes to pages 146–51

  4 Ibid., 120–1.   5 Ibid., 136.   6 Ammar Azzouz, ‘Go See What Happened to My City, Then You’ll Know How I Am’, New York Times, 2 February 2023.   7 Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War (London: Books on Tape, 2023).   8 Abdelmalek Sayad, La double absence: Des illusions de l’émigré aux ­souffrances de l’immigré (Paris: Média Diffusion, 2016), 184.   9 Jay Marlowe and Rachel Bruns, ‘Renegotiating Family: Social Media and Forced Migration’, Migration Studies 9, no. 3 (2021); Luisa Veronis, Zac Tabler, and Rukhsana Ahmed, ‘Syrian Refugee Youth Use Social Media: Building Transcultural Spaces and Connections for Resettlement in Ottawa, Canada’, Canadian Ethnic Studies 50, no. 2 (2018). 10 Mirjam A. Twigt, ‘Mediated Absent Presence in Forced Displacement’, Popular Communication 17, no. 2 (2019); Saskia Witteborn, ‘Becoming (Im)Perceptible: Forced Migrants and Virtual Practice’, Journal of Refugee Studies 28, no. 3 (2015); Marie Gillespie, Souad Osseiran, and Margie Cheesman, ‘Syrian Refugees and the Digital Passage to Europe: Smartphone Infrastructures and Affordances’, Social Media + Society 4, no. 1 (2018); Silvia Almenara-Niebla and Carmen AscanioSánchez, ‘Connected Sahrawi Refugee Diaspora in Spain: Gender, Social Media and Digital Transnational Gossip’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 23, no. 5 (2020); Donya Alinejad, ‘Careful Co-Presence: The Transnational Mediation of Emotional Intimacy’, Social Media + Society 5, no. 2 (2019). 11 Shalini Misra et al., ‘The iPhone Effect: The Quality of In-Person Social Interactions in the Presence of Mobile Devices’, Environment and Behavior 48, no. 2 (2016), 281. 12 Tzvetan Todorov, L’homme dépaysé (Paris: Média Diffusion, 2013). 13 This discussion reconnects with Chiara Bottici’s use of the term ‘imaginal’ as a third perspective between the real and the imaginary, that is to say between the material reality of what exists and the alienation of unreality. Chiara Bottici, ‘Imaginal Politics’, Thesis Eleven 106, no. 1 (2011), 9–10. 14 Todorov, L’Homme. 15 Francine Friedman, The Bosnian Muslims: Denial of a Nation (London: Routledge, 2018). 16 Darryl Li, The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019). 17 Todorov, L’Homme.

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18 Basileus Zeno, ‘Dignity and Humiliation: Identity Formation among Syrian Refugees’, Middle East Law and Governance 9, no. 3 (2017). 19 Susan Rottmann and Ayhan Kaya, ‘“We Can’t Integrate in Europe. We Will Pay a High Price If We Go There”: Culture, Time and Migration Aspirations for Syrian Refugees in Istanbul’, Journal of Refugee Studies 34, no. 1 (2021). 20 Enrico Manera, ‘Mitologie del quotidiano’, in Furio Jesi, by Marco Belpoliti, ed. Enrico Manera (Milan: Marcos y Marcos, 2010), 244–6. 21 Juliana Ruhfus, ‘i si l in the Caribbean: Why Trinidadians Fight in Syria and Iraq’, Al-Jazeera, 19 May 2017, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/ 2017/5/19/isil-in-the-caribbean-why-trinidadians-fight-in-syria-and-iraq. 22 Ibid. 23 See Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, edited by Raphael Patai, Vol. 1 (London: Herzl Press and Thomas Yoselfoof), https://archive.org/details/the-complete-diaries-of-theodor-herzl/page/n3/ mode/2up. 24 Vikram Dodd, ‘British Jihadi Reportedly Killed in Syria Fighting for Isis’, The Guardian, 15 November 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/ world/2014/nov/21/british-jihadi-killed-syria-kobani-islamic-state-isis. 25 Caner K. Dagli, ‘The Phony Islam of Isis’, The Atlantic, 27 February 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/ what-muslims-really-want-isis-atlantic/386156/. 26 See Owen Bennett-Jones, ‘“We” and “You”’, London Review of Books, 27 August 2015, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n16/owen-bennettjones/we-and-you; Mary Anne Weaver, ‘Her Majesty’s Jihadists’, New York Times, 14 April 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/­ magazine/her-majestys-jihadists.html. 27 See Reza Pankhurst, The Inevitable Caliphate? A History of the Struggle for Global Islamic Union, 1924 to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 28 Benedict Anderson, ‘Exodus’, Critical Inquiry 20, no. 2 (Winter, 1994). 29 Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, A Theory of Isis: Political Violence and the Transformation of the Global Order (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 125–6. 30 Cori E. Dauber et al., ‘Call of Duty’, Perspectives on Terrorism 13, no. 3 (2019). 31 Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, (London: Macmillan, 2017), 79. 32 Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat (Liepzig: Jüdischer Verlag, 1934).

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Epil o g u e   1 Alberto Toscano addresses this point in his excellent volume where he refers to the capacious force of fascism beyond its European past as ‘late fascism’. See Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (London: Verso Books, 2023).   2 Marx writes, ‘“The workers have no country” and this is even more true today, since people need to uproot themselves and move from country to city to survive’, in Alain Badiou et al., What Is a People?, vol. 50 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 6.   3 Badiou et al., What Is a People?, 31.   4 Valeria Bonacci, ‘Prefazione’, Giorgio Agamben: Ontologia e politica, ed. Valeria Bonacci (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2019).   5 Maziyar Ghiabi, ‘Ontological Journeys: The Lifeworld of Opium across the Afghan–Iranian Border in/out of the Pharmacy’, International Journal of Drug Policy 89 (2021).   6 Erie Claire Brown, ‘Tunisia’s President Embraces “Great Replacement Theory”’, New Lines Magazine, 27 February 2023, https://newlinesmag. com/spotlight/tunisias-president-embraces-the-great-replacement-theory/.   7 Aida Ghajar, ‘Notorious Rapper Defends Child Grooming and Mobilised Fans on Instagram’, Iranwire, 8 May 2020, https://iranwire.com/en/ features/67027/.   8 Furio Jesi, Cultura di destra (Milan: Garzanti, 1979).   9 Samuel Logan, This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha: Inside the Ms-13, America’s Most Violent Gang (London: Hachette UK, 2009); David C. Brotherton and Rafael Jose Gude, Routledge International Handbook of Critical Gang Studies (London: Routledge, 2021). 10 Philippe Bourgois, ‘Understanding Inner-City Poverty: Resistance and ­Self-Destruction under US Apartheid’, in Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Front Lines 3, ed. Jeremy MacClanscy (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002). 11 Jenny Pearce, Politics without Violence? Towards a Post-Weberian Enlightenment (London: Springer Nature, 2019). 12 Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). 13 Didier Fassin, and Bernard Harcourt, eds., A Time for Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 5. 14 Alaa Abd El-Fattah and Ahmed Douma, Egyptian revolutionaries, wrote these words in 2014 in the Egyptian online newspaper Mada Masr: ‘Graffiti for two … Alaa and Douma’. Also, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, You

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Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011–2021 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2022). 15 Donatella Di Cesare, Israele: Terra, ritorno, anarchia (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2014), 38. 16 Ibid., 12. 17 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, ma : Harvard University Press, 2001), 393. 18 Ibid., 413. 19 Terry Eagleton, Hope without Optimism (New Yaven: Yale University Press, 2019); Ghassan Hage, ‘Waiting Out the Crisis: On Stuckedness and Governmentality’, Anthropological Theory 5, no. 1 (2009); David Graeber, ‘Hope in Common’, The Anarchist Library 2008, http://­ theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-hope-in-common, accessed 22 April 2022. 20 See Pedro Lebrón Ortiz, ‘Against the Mythological Machine, Towards Decolonial Revolt’, Theory & Event 24, no. 3 (2021). 21 Jenny Pearce and Alexandra Abello Colak, ‘Humanizing Security through Action-Oriented Research in Latin America’, Development and Change 52, no. 6 (2021). 22 Pearce and Abello Colak, ‘Humanizing Security’, 17. Angelina Snodgrass Godoy, Popular Injustice: Violence, Community, and Law in Latin America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). 23 Jeffrey Heller, ‘Israel Endorses Independent Kurdish State’, Reuters, 13 September 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1BO0QW/.

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Index

7 October attacks on Israel, ­­ xv–xvii, xx, 81–2, 92–3, 169, 183n39; border failure during, 119, 121; and ethnic cleansing, 166. See also Gaza 9/11, xvi, 30, 170 Abdallah, King of Jordan, 36 Abdul-Ahad, Ghaith, 147 Achaemenids, 6, 65, 67–8 activists, xix–xxx; digital, 21; ­­ east–west connections of, 22, 24–5; policing of, 86; refugees as, 138–9. See also protesters addiction, 96 Adelson, Sheldon, 63 ademia, xx, xxiii, 108. See also states without people Adorno, Theodor, 184n4 affect, 79, 115, 144, 149, 169 Afghanistan, xvi, 68, 74, 116, ­122–3; border of, 119; people of, 171; refugees from, 131, 140, 142–4 Aflaq, Michel, 52 Africa, xxi, 119, 120, 162–3 African Americans, 42

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Agamben, Giorgio, xx, xxii, 42, 108–9, 140; on civil war, 142; on ontology, 161 Ahl al-Kahaf, 95 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, xxvii, 39, 48, 52, 69; messianism of, 59–60 Ahrar al-Sham, 135 Ajami, Fouad, 20 Akhmat mm a , 90 Akhunzadeh, Mirza Farthali, 67 Al-Aqsa Mosque, 57 Alawites, 128 Albania, 100 Aleppo, 25, 46, 134, 135 Algeria, 5, 8–9, 42, 76, 102; civil war in, 71; settler colonialism in, 145–6 Ali, Ben, 19 Alinejad, Masih, 100 al-Kitab wal-Sunna, 125 Allawi, Ali, 37 al-Mahdi Army, 141 al-Markaz al-Islam, 125 Al-Qaeda, 36, 57, 61, 132 al-Qarafa, 70 Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), 58

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202 Index

Amalek, 59 American Revolution, 11, 12 Amini, Mahsa Jîna, 97. See also ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ protest (Iran, 2022) anarchism, 3, 24, 165 Annunzio, Gabriele D’, 83 anti-colonialism, 13–14, 42, 184n5 antisemitism, xxv, 37–8, 41, 63, 86; and displacement, 153–4 Antonius, George, 12 apartheid, 93 apocalypse, 57, 59–62 apostasy, 42. See also takfir Arab Africanism, 160 ‘Arab Awakening’, 12–13 Arabic language, 13, 131 ‘Arabisation’, 128 Arabism, 49, 160 Arab–Israeli War (1967), 129, 130 Arab League, 29 Arabs, 21, 44–5, 182n24; ­exceptionalism of, 162; ­protesters, 13, 20 ‘Arab Spring’, xxx, 7–9, 179n18; interpretations of, 10–12, 15; as model for protesters in the West, 20–2; outcomes of, 32; response to, 163; as a revolt, 17–19; ­tactics of, 24 ‘Arab Spring 2.0’, 9 ‘Arab Winter’, 19 Arendt, Hannah, 11–12, 15 artificial intelligence (ai ), xv. See also digital technologies Aryanism, 35, 63, 67–8, 143 Ashrafiyyeh2020, 94 Assad, Bashar al-, xxv, 77, 112–13, 131, 134, 136 Assad, Hafez al-, 14, 77, 128

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Assyrians, 128 austerity, 20 Austria, 118 authoritarianism, xvi, xxi, xxx, 161, 162–4; Middle Eastern, 10; myth of, 7–8; transnationalism of, 23–4 Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, 117, 172 Aziz, Omar, 24 Azzouz, Ammar, 146–7 Ba’ath Party, 52, 128, 132, 141, 159–60 Bab al-Amr, Syria, 135 Baghdad, Iraq, 120, 132–3, ­141–2, 147, 160 Baghdadi, Abu Bakr al- (Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri), 73 Bahrain, 30, 58, 90, 102 Balkans, 118, 150 Barak, Ehud, 77 Bashir, Omar al-, 9 basij-e mosta‘zafin (The Organisation for the Mobilisation of the Oppressed), 96, 143 Bat Ye’or. See Littman, Gisèle (Bat Ye’or) Bayada, Syria, 135 Begin, Menachem, 77 Beirut, 7, 65, 93–5, 139 Belfast, 133 Ben-Gurion, David, 72–3, 81 Ben-Gvir, Itamar, xx, 46, 92, 93, 166 Benjamin, Walter, 11 Bennett, Naftali, 81 Berlusconi, Silvio, xxv, 48 Bethlehem, 120

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Bible, the, 61, 81, 94 bidun jinsiya, 102 bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Khalid, 90 bin Salman, Mohammad (mbs ), xx, 61–2, 70 bin Zayed, Mohamed (MbZ), xx, 90 bjp (India), 58 ‘blood accusation/libel’, 41–2, 45. See also takfir body, the, 85–8, 90–1, 92 Bolivia, 58, 183n40 Bolsonaro, Jair, 57–8, 183n40, 186n24 Bolton, John, 100 borders, xxxi, 31, 52; imposition of, 127; porousness of, 122, 193n14; protection of, 76, 79, 116–21, 131–2, 150, 160; ­transformation of, 73, 111–13, 142; urban, 141 Borrell, Joseph, 118 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 150–1 bots. See digital technologies Bourdieu, Pierre, 145 Bouteflika, Abdelaziz, 9, 76 Brazil, 57–8, 183n40 Bremer, Paul, xxvi British Empire, 14, 42, 128, 130. See also United Kingdom Buber, Martin, 169 Camus, Renaud, 163 capitalism, xxi, xxii, 51–2, 140; primacy of, xxv; protest against, 3, 20; reshaping of, 172. See also liberalism care, ethic of, 149, 171. See also humane security Catholicism, xxiv–xxv, xxvi, 54

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censorship, 24, 101, 103 Central America, 92, 95. See also Latin America Cesare, Donatella Di, 168–9 Chilcot Inquiry, 64 China, People’s Republic of (pr c ), 12, 63 Christian communities, 39, 41–2; defence of, 86; displacement of, 43, 115; in Iraq, 133, 141; in Israel, 45, 188n7; in Lebanon, 94, 129; status of, 64–5; in Syria, 112 Christianity, 41, 54, 71, 83, 166. See also Catholicism c ia , 68 citizenship, xxix, xxx, 47; ­authoritarian, 96; depoliticisation of, 40; emptying of, 102–3, 104, 108–9, 113, 114, 159; in Iran, 142–3; in Israel, 81, 84, 169, 188n7; in Jordan, 130; in Lebanon, 88, 129; and militarism, 89; and nation, 54, 62, 136; opening of, 169; policing of, 101; and refugees, 123, 140, 143; and revolution, 12; and security, 171; virtual, 146. See also ‘othering’; partisans; ‘­people, the’; state–citizen ­relations; states without people City of the Dead (al-Qarafa), 70 civil society, xxv, xxx, 23 civil war, xxix, xxx, 26, 29, 34; and citizenship, 108–9, 144; ­definition of, 161–2; and displacement, 110–11, 115, 132, 146; the enemy in, 71, 142; in the former Yugoslavia, 150; logic of, 39, 41, 43, 45; outcome of,

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159; participation in, 91; politics of, 35; and revolt, 32–3, 62, 157. See also ‘Great Civil War’; ­sectarianism; Syrian civil war class, 22, 31, 70 climate change protests, 24 climate crisis, 167–8 colonialism, xxi, xxvi, 29, 43, 54; geography of, 112, 128; violence of, 42, 145. See also anti-­ colonialism; settler colonialism communism, xxv, 77 communitas, 110–11, 144, 153. See also citizenship Comoran Island, 102 Coran, 55, 143 counterrevolution, xxii, 9, 157, 158, 163, 178n7. See also ­reactionary politics coup d’état, 11, 13–14 c o v i d -19 pandemic, xx, 24, 108, 149–50 Cuba, 12 culture of the left, 52, 75, 170. See also left politics culture of the right, xvi, xx–xxi, xxviii–xxxi, 10, 26; ­apocalypticism of, 56–7, 60–2; authoritarianism of, 97, 99; ­definition of, 46, 50–3, 157–8, 161, 184n2; and ideology, 184n4; in Iran, 68; in Israel, 58–9, 92; in Lebanon, 94; ­militarism in, 76, 79, 81–2, 84; and the muscular body, 85–90; and mythology, 33–5, 40, 54–5, 155; and national membership, 62–3, 70, 110–11, 114–15, 130; partisan support for, 100–1; in postwar Europe, xxii–xxiii;

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reach of, 49, 103, 118, 153, 162–4; and refugees, 131; and the state, 71, 166 Cyrus the Great, 68–9 Daesh. See Islamic State (is) Damascus, 41–2, 47–8, 134–6, 160 Dar al-Fatwa, 125 death cult, 41, 55–7, 59 deep fake images, 22 defeat, xxii–xxiii, xxviii–xxix, 6, 157–8; aftermath of, 32, 40, 109, 114–15, 146, 164–5; and displacement, 149; and failure, 26; phenomenology of, 10; ­recognition of, 29; and the return to the right, 50–1. See also revolt democracy, 10, 20, 24, 51, 162; and the culture of the right, 52, 120; and fascism, xxv–xxvi; and Islam, xxvii, 154; in Israel, 77; and the state, 71, 172 Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, 117, 172 demographic engineering, 127, 132, 133–7. See also displacement; ethnic cleansing demos, xx, 103. See also ademia dépaysement, xxix, xxxii, 41, 149, 150, 158. See also displacement; multi-latitude displacement deterritorialisation, 112, 116, 145 dhimmitude, 64–6 diasporas, xxvi, xxxii; calls for the end of, 73; communities of, 149; and Islamophobia, 65; and mythologies, 151; online, 101, 152; political life of, 140, 155; and protest support, 25. See also migrants; refugees

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digital technologies, xv, 75, 99–103; and the experience of displacement, 148–50, ­151–3, 154–6; safeguards of, 121. See also internet; social media; ­techno-futurism; virtual displacement displacement, xxxii, 63, 161, 193n28; and agency, 141–2; and digital technologies, 148–50, 151–3, 155; experience of, ­145–7; forced, 127–8, 132–3, 136; geographies of, 121; and host, 140, 144; and ­humanitarianism, 137; and Israel, 154; phenomenon of, 114–15, 122, 158–9; as a result of conflict, 31, 110–13, 134; and state sovereignty, ­125–6. See also demographic ­engineering; ­dépaysement; ­multi-latitude ­displacement; ­virtual displacement ‘distant nationalism’, 155 Dowlatabadi, Mahmud, 79 drug trade, 153, 165 Druze, 188n7 economic crisis, 114, 152, 168; in Lebanon, 88, 95, 171; and protest, 17, 20; and resentment of refugees, 131 economy: and the culture of the right, 51, 70, 96, 184n2; and ­displacement, 112, 134; and human security, 167–8; ­inequality in, xxvi, 127, 137; political control of, 19, 145; and politics, xxiii, 103, 160; ­refugees in, 111, 140;

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­technology-based, 102. See also class Egypt, xxi, 14, 15, 30, 61; anti-­ protest laws of, 23; ‘Arab Spring’ in, 17, 18–19; border of, 118; ethnic ancestralism in, 69–70; governance of, 85–6; military coup in, 71; military of, 76–8; population of, 111, 114, 171. See also Sisi, Abdel-Fatah al-; Tahrir Square, Cairo El Salvador, 165 English Defence League (edf), 58 environment, 167–8 Erbil, Iraq, 107 Erdoǧan, Recep T., 30 ethnic cleansing, xv, 30, 42, 183n34; of Palestinians, 63, 166; in Syria, 132, 137. See also genocide ethnicity: divisions of, 132–3; of minorities, 85, 103, 131; of national populations, 111–13, 116, 120, 122, 127–8; and the state, 66, 115–16. See also identity ethno-nationalism, 35, 45, 67, 69. See also identity eugenics, 42 Eurabia, 64 Europe, xv–xvi; antisemitism in, 153; and the culture of the right, xix–xx, xxii, 51–2, 54, 184n2; Islamophobia in, 63–6; Jewish community in, 84, 87–8; migrant communities in, xxx, 117–18; mythology and, 33, 41, 155; nationalism in, 82; political life in, 167; protest and revolts in, 12, 17, 20–2, 98; right-wing

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politics in, 100; securitisation of, 103; support for i s in, 154–5 European Union, 117–18, 120 eu-topia, 43, 45 Evangelicalism, 57 exceptionalism, 19–20, 162 Extinction Rebellion, 24 Facebook, 21 fake publics, 101–3 Fardid, Ahamd, 52, 184n5 fascism, xvi, xix, xxii; ideology of, 71, 157, 184n4; Italian, ­ xxiv–xxv, 15, 83, 189n14, 189n15; ‘late’, 198n1; in the Middle East, xx, 160; and myth, 33. See also Aryanism; Nazism Fassihi, Farnaz, 98 Fatimid caliphate, 61 Fatimiyun battalion, 143 Feldman, Noah, xxvi–xxvii feminism, 3, 100 Fergusson, Niall, 64 fetneh/fitnah, 39–40 fitness movement, 85–6, 89 France, 42, 58, 102, 171; colonial authority of, 128; Islamophobia in, 65, 152; refugees in, 118; social movements in, 3 Francis of Assisi, 170, 173 Fratelli d’Italia, xxv, 58 French Revolution, 4–6, 11, 12, 18 Friedman, Thomas, xxviii gangs, 95, 164–7 Gantz, Benny, 77 Garda de Fier, 54 Gay Pride, 53, 86 Gaza, xv–xvi, 103, 160; border of, 118; Israel’s war with, xx, 58,

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113, 162, 166; revival of, 173. See also 7 October attacks on Israel; Palestine Geagea, Samir, 94 Gemayel, Nadim, 94 gender, 12, 41; and advertising, 53; and digital abuse, 98; and equality, 49; hierarchies of, 92, 94, 190n37; and leadership, 82; and militarism, 80, 87–8; and violence, 165. See also ­masculinity; women Geneva Refugee Convention, 124 genocide, 30, 31, 56, 59, 162. See also ethnic cleansing Gentile, Giovanni, xxv, 71 Germany, 68, 82, 88 Gezi Park protest, 5, 21 ghettos, 88, 120, 141–2, 171 Gilbert, Sir Martin, 64 globalisation, 116, 169 Global South, xxiv, xxx, 21, 122, 183n40. See also Latin America governance: of Afghanistan, 123; by aid workers, 122; ­failure of, 23, 80, 94–5, 165; groups ­outside of, 85; in Iran, 36; of Iraq, 132; in Israel, 93; of Lebanon, 129; ­outsourcing of, 97; of refugee camps, 138; of Syria, 136. See also ‘­grassroots ­authoritarianism’; state, the; state–citizen relations Graeber, David, 25 Gramsci, Antonio, xxiii, xxv, 18–19, 176n8, 180n31 ‘grassroots authoritarianism’, xxx, xxxi, 9–10, 75, 91–7; actions of, 142, 165, 166, 171; digital, 97,

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207

99–103. See also citizenship; partisans Great Arab Revolt (1916–18), 13 Great Civil War, xxix, xxx, 30–2, 109; blood accusation of, 42–3; and citizenship, 103, 143–4; and population displacement, 111, 141; role of myth in, 34, 39, 45; sectarianism of, 40, 142 Great Palestinian Revolt (1936), 13 Great Replacement Theory (grt), xx, 64–6, 163 Great Syrian Revolt (1925), 13 Greece, xxi, 21, 23, 117–18 Green Movement (Iran, 2009), 39 Guevara, Che, 48–9

Hitler, Adolf, 48, 82, 189n15 Holocaust, 48, 56, 59, 168–9 homosexuality, 87, 94 Homs, Syria, 128, 134–5, 137, 146–7 horizontalism, 24–5 house-nation, 43, 110 humane security, 171–3. See also care, ethic of humanitarianism, 125, 137–8, 169 humanitarian organizations. See international aid system; ngos Human Rights Watch, 107 human trafficking, 165 Hussein (Imam, d. 680), 37–8 Hussein, Saddam, 37, 77, 128

hadith, xxvi, 35–6, 156 Hama, Syria, 128, 134–6 Hamas, 121, 160 harb ahliyyah, 39, 162 Hardt, Michael, xxiii, 16–17, 159, 170 Hashd al-Sha’abi. See Popular Mobilisation Units (pmu s) Hay’at al-Shams (hts), 135 haybat al-dawla, 71, 74 Hazmiyyah, 183n35 health, xx, 15, 24, 137, 149–50. See also body, the; covi d-19 pandemic; fitness movement; international aid system hegemony, 52, 160, 180n31 Heidegger, Martin, 120, 169 Herzl, Theodor, 83–4, 86, 154, 156, 169, 189n15. See also Zionism Hezbollah, 93, 135 Hindutva, 35 Hirak movement, Algeria, 102

ibn Baz, Abdal Aziz, 36 identity: cultural, 91; and ­displacement, 115, 140, 150–1; and myth, 34, 132; national, 37, 66, 112–13, 121, 128–30, 163; politics of, 161; and ­sectarianism, 31, 133; and ­technology, 152 ideology: of the body, 85; and civil war, 30, 75; of defence, 89; enclaves of, 113; fascist, 71; and myth, 33–4, 43; of protest, 16, 22, 25; of the right, 184n4; of states, xxxi, 31, 91, 160; ­techno-futurist, 62; vacuum of, 52 Idlib, Syria, 135 immigrants, 64, 73, 120, 147, 148. See also migrants; refugees imperialism, xxvi, 15, 30, 172; ­discourse of, xxvii–xxviii, 32; Iranian resistance to, 38, 79. See also colonialism

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India, 42, 58, 82, 183n40; and Iran, 68; Islamophobia in, 63 indigenous populations, 44, 145, 169 Indignados, 9, 20, 23, 25 inqilab, 13–14, 15, 162 Instagram, 163–4 insurrection, 13, 17–18 internally displaced persons (i dps), 113, 116, 147. See also refugees international aid system, 122–5, 137–9. See also Islamic charities; ng o s; United Nations International Displaced Monitoring Center (i dmc), 113 internet, 21, 85, 100, 148–9, ­152–3, 155 intifada, 15, 179n19. See also uprisings Iran, Islamic Republic of, xxi, xxvii, xxxi, 12, 182n24; activist networks in, 24–5; border of, 119, 193n14; culture of the right in, 163–4; demonizing of, ­159–60; grassroots authority in, 96, 97, 103; and Iraq, 132; i s  accusations against, 42; ­militarism in, 79–80; mma in, 90; mythologizing of, 37–8, 39, 55, 60, 68–9; political power in, 19, 48–9, 131; population of, 65–8, 111, 114, 171; protests against, 97–9; proxy forces of, 107–8; refugees in, 140, 142–4; sacralising of, 72–4; and social media, 100; and Syria, 134–5. See also ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ protest (Iran, 2022) Iran, pre-revolutionary, 65, 67–9, 80

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Iraq, xvi, xxi, 40, 77; border of, 119, 120, 193n14; constitution of, xxvi–xxvii; gangsterism in, 165–6; grassroots authority in, 95, 97, 103; political upheaval in, 14, 147; and ­population displacement, 107–8, 112, 115–16, 127–8, 132–3, 137; refugees from, 124; and Saddamism, 159; sectarianism in, 37, 141 ‘Iraqi Revolt of 1920’, 13, 14 Iraq War (2003), 64, 111, 115, 132 i sis. See Islamic State (is) Islam: and democracy, xxvii–xxviii; history of, 39; as identity marker, 150–1; and Iran, 69; mythology and, 35–6; political, 31, 65–7, 69–70, 173; profession of, 43; virtual, 154–5. See also Islamophobia; Shi’a Islam; Sunni Islam Islamic Caliphate, 39, 61, 142, 154–6. See also Islamic State (is) Islamic charities, 125–6 Islamic Revolution (Iran), 12, 55, 65, 96 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (ir gc ), 37, 55, 60, 96, 193n14; Basij Organization in, 79, 143 Islamic State (is): aims of, 43–5; apocalypticism of, 60–1; ­borders with, 119, 120; diasporic appeal of, 152–3, 154–6; in Iraq, 1 ­ 32–3; and mythology, 35–6, 40, 42–3, 57, 183n35; and ­displacement, 111, 115; ­statehood of, 73–4, 137, 142; war against, 95, 107, 117, 143

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Islamism, 65–6, 142, 143, 160, 162; and aid, 125 ‘Islamist Winter’, 19 Islamophobia, 58, 63–5, 94 Israel, xv–xvi, 45, 160, 167, 183n39; Arab rapprochement with, 38; and the far right, 58–9, 100; fascism in, xx; gangs in, 166; and Jewish settlers, 92, 93, 103, 120; in Latin America, 57–8; militarism in, 77, 80–2, 188n3, 188n7, 188n9; ­mythology of, 44, 49, 54, 56, 189n18; occupation of Palestinian territories by, 129, 130, 179n19; people of, 63, 154; potential of, 168–9, 173; sacrality of, 72–4; separation wall of, 116, 118; strongman cult and, 83–4, 86–8, 188n2. See also 7 October attacks on Israel; Gaza; Jewish settlers; Palestinians; West Bank; Zionism Israeli Defence Force (i df), xv, 77, 80–1, 84, 119; membership in, 87–9, 188n7, 189n18; and ­settlers, 92; sexual abuse in, 190n25 Italy, xxiii–xxv, 12, 58; anti-protest laws of, 23; fascist, 72, 82–3, 189n14; postwar, xxvi; refugees in, 118 Jabotinsky, Ze’ev (Vladimir), xxiv, 52, 84–5, 88 Jamkaran Shrine, 60 Japan, 82 Jesi, Furio, xxi–xxiii, xxx, xxxi; on citizenship, 104; on myth,

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33, 41; on revolt and revolution, 17–19. See also culture of the right; ‘mythological machine’ Jewish settlers, 91–3, 103, 120, 166, 190n37 Jewish Temple, 57 Jews, 41, 156; in Europe, 153; exclusion of, 63; and fascism, 189n14; and Israelis, 72; ­mythologies of, 46; and the strongman, 82–4; in the United States, 45 jihadists, 43, 45, 118, 141, 152–3 Jnoud al-Rab, 94 Jordan, 36, 111–12; aid ­organizations in, 125–6; border of, 117, 118–19; refugees in, 123–4, 128–9, 130, 138, 140 Jordanian Hashemite Charity Organization (jhc o), 138 Judaism, 45, 72–3, 83–4, 92, 169 Kadivar, Mohsen, 80 Kadyrov, Ramzan, 90 Kafi, Ali, 71 karamah, 17, 25 Karam Al-Zeitoun, Syria, 135 Kata’ib Ahl al-Haq, 95 Kata’ib Hezbollah, 95 Kerenyi, Karol, xxi, 33 Khaldiyeh, Syria, 135 Khalidi, Ruhi al-, 14 Khamenei, Ali, 52, 68, 72, 74 khaneh jangi, 39 Khomeini, Ruhollah (Ayatollah), 5, 38, 72, 79, 159 kibbutzim, 189n18 Koran, 55, 143 Krav Maga, 87–90 Kurdish peshmerga, 107

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Kurdish Workers Party (pkk), 97, 132 Kurds, 30, 117, 119, 128, 172; in Iraq, 133; and Türkiye, 132 Kuwait, 102, 119, 193n30 Lahhoud, Abdo, 94 language, 11, 13–16, 158; of dissent, 20; and reality, 34, 161–2; slippages in, 179n18, 180n31 Lapid, Yair, 188n2 Latin America, 10, 57, 96, 165, 171–2 ‘Lavender’ (ai ), xv Lebanese Civil War, 65, 95 Lebanese Forces, 94 ‘Lebanese Revolution’ (2019), 9, 12, 93 Lebanon, 56, 65, 88; aid ­organizations from, 125–6; grassroots authority in, 93–5, 97; militias in, 166; population of, 111–12, 171; refugees in, 114, 116–18, 123–4, 128–30, 139–40 ‘left cultural hegemony’, 53 left politics, 63, 165, 184n2; defaming of, xxv; right-wing ­culture in, 75, 118 Lehava, 45 Le Pen, Marine, 58 Levi, Carlo, xvi Lewis, Bernard, xxvii, 64 l gb t q +, 53, 86, 94 liberalism, 51, 97, 103, 173. See also capitalism liberation movements, 52, 54, 83 Libya, 30, 40, 76, 159–60; civil war in, 144; gangs in, 166; ­population of, 111–12, 171

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Lichtensfeld, Imi, 88 Liebknecht, Karl, 17 Likud, xxv, 58 Littman, Gisèle (Bat Ye’or), 64, 65, 163 Luxemburg, Rosa, xxii, 17 Macron, Emanuel, xxvi Mahdi (twelfth imam), 59–61, 73 Mandaeans, 115, 133 Marinetti, Tommaso, 189n15 Maronite Christians, 65, 94 martyrdom, 41, 55–7, 72, 78, 108 masculinity, 86–8, 89, 92. See also gender Mazzini, Giuseppe, xxiv McCain, John, 100 media, xxx, 136; and the ‘Arab Spring’, 10, 19–22; and ­migration, 149; soft censorship of, 24; state-based, 100. See also social media medievalist scholars, 32 Meir, Golda, 77 Meloni, Giorgia, xxv, xxvi, 58 mental health, 149. See also health messianism, 59–62 Middle East: border walls of, ­118–19, 120; civil war in, xxxi, 29–33, 109; displaced ­populations of, 113–14; ­gangsterism in, 165; gr t in, 64–5; humanitarian aid ­organizations from, 125; life in, 167–8; militarism in, 76, 82; mm a in, 90; political divisions of, 116; as a political laboratory, xxvi, xxvii–xxviii, xxix, xxxii, 162; political unrest in, 12; ­right-wing culture of, 50–3,

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58–9; theorizing of, xxiii; Western-style fascism in, xx Middle East and North Africa (m e na ), 22, 30, 113 Middle East Forum, xxviii migrants, 42, 82, 119, 169; double displacement of, 147–9; perceived threat of, 118, 120–1, 131, 162. See also displacement; immigrants; multi-latitude ­displacement; refugees migration, 118–19, 159, 161, 167. See also displacement; immigrants; multi-latitude ­displacement; refugees Mikati, Najib, 124 militarism, xvi, xx, xxxi, 75, 76–82; and the body, 87–8; of grassroots groups, 95; and identity, 133, 144, 147; in Israeli right-wing culture, 92; language of, 162. See also strongman cult militias, 92–5, 97, 103, 108, 166; in Iraq, 141; Shi’a, 143–4. See also ‘grassroots authoritarianism’; paramilitaries; partisans Mixed Martial Arts (mma), 89–90 Modi, Narendra, xxvi, 183n40 Mohammad Reza (Pahlavi) Shah, 67–8, 69, 80 Mojahedin-e Khalq (mek), 100 Morocco, 8, 74 Morris, Benny, 63 Morsi, Mohamed, 15, 23, 71, 77 Mortazavi, Negar, 98 Mossad, 77 ms 13 (gang), 165, 166 Mubarak, Hosni, 15, 77; fall of, 18–19, 21, 77; funeral of, 74

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Mulla Omar, 74 multi-latitude displacement, xxix, 41, 110, 114–15, 157; and belonging, 144, 146; ­experience of, 149–50; and state ­sovereignty, 122, 126. See also d ­ épaysement; displacement; ­virtual displacement Multi-National Force in Iraq, 133 Musk, Elon, 100 Muslim Brotherhood, 30, 86, 125, 128 Mussolini, Benito, xxiv, xxv, 15, 71–2, 82–3 Myanmar, 63 myth, xxii, xxix, xxx–xxxi; as foundational, 40, 43, 70, 144, 151; national, 49, 121; ­progressive, 168–70; and ­revolution, xxiv; and ­sectarianism, 31–2, 38–9; ­theorising of, 33–5 mytho-futurism, 68 ‘mythological machine’, xxxi, 32–5, 38–9, 41–3, 161; and civic belonging, 110–12, ­141–3, 144, 151; neutrality of, 170; ‘othering’ by, 44–5; of ­progressive politics, 168; and propaganda, 153; of ­sectarianism, 132 mythology, 34–5, 181n10; appeal of, 168; of belonging, 110–11, 166; of the body, 86; and ­conflict, 36, 40–1, 45; historical, 63; as political organization, 43, 75, 104; positive, 169–70; and right-wing culture, 54–5, 92; and sectarian division, 37–8, 142

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Nahda, 6, 12, 15 nation, 12, 47; belonging to, 36, 40–1, 62–3, 136, 142, 156; ­governing of, 30; historical claims of, 53–4; Jewish, 44–5; and myth, 42, 151; and the state, 66, 71–2, 159; Sunni, 43, 154. See also citizenship; ­dépaysement; house-nation; nation-­making; nation-state National Defence Guard (Syria), 166 National Guard (Israel), 166 National Iranian American Council (ni a c ), 98–9 nationalism, xxiv, 52, 157; Arab, 13; and the body, 85; and death, 41; Jewish, 45; and the military, 76, 79–80, 144; and myth, 35, 36, 155; religious, 31–2, 141; and the strongman, 82 Nationalist Movement Party (m h p , Türkiye), 131 National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, 69 nation-making, 54, 63, 78, 158; and demographics, 127–8; in Israel, 58, 88. See also ­demographic engineering; ­displacement; state-making nation-state, xxiv, 44, 172–3; and the body, 85–6; borders of, ­120–1; and the culture of the right, 75; demise of, 159–60; demographics of, 63, 114, ­127–8; mythological, 42–3, 112; and political Islam, 31–2; and refugees, 140; security of, 76; theological origins of, 74. See

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also nation; ‘people, the’; state, the; state-nation nativism, 183n40 n a to, 122 Nazism, xxii, 33, 82, 160, 183n34; in Iran, 68 Negri, Antonio, 16–17, 159, 170 Nejm, Antoine, 65 neo-fascism, xx, 58 neoliberalism, 97 neo-Nazism, 58, 88 Netanyahu, Benjamin, xx, ­ xxv–xxvi, 45, 56, 166; ­supremacism of, 59 Netanyahu, Yair, 45 nezam (political order), 73 n gos, 115, 122, 124–5, 136, ­138–9. See also international aid system; Islamic charities; United Nations Nimr, Shaykh Nimr Baqir al-, 102 nonmovement, 16–18 North America, xix; culture of the right in, 54, 184n2; diasporic communities in, 25, 98, 153; Islamophobia in, 63; political life in, 167; support for is in, 154, 155 nowheh, 37–8, 182n21 nuclear weapons, xxvii Nuit Debut, 3 Ocalan, Abdullah, 97, 172 Occupy Wall Street, 21, 25 oil industry, 168 Olmert, Ehud, 188n2 Oman, 118–19 Orientalism, 20 Ortagus, Morgan, 100

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‘othering’, 34, 36, 151; by digital technologies, 148; of the enemy, 41–2, 44–5, 70, 142, 144; and governance, 85; of insiders, 82; of refugees and migrants, 130–1, 152; and violence, 40 Ottoman Empire, 12, 13–14, 120, 144 Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), 59, 93 Ovazza, Ettore, 83 Ozdag, Umit, 131 Pakistan, 60, 68, 119, 155 Palestine, xvi, 47; Jewish migration to, 44, 86–7, 153; left support for, 58; settler occupation of, 81. See also Gaza; West Bank Palestine Liberation Organization, 140 Palestinians, xv–xvi, 87, 171, 179n19; as ‘aliens’ in Palestine, 44–5, 183n39, 188n7; attacks on, 59, 81, 160, 166; ­displacement of, 63, 103; genocide of, 56; Israel’s war on, xx, 162; as refugees, 94, 112, 117, 123–4, 129, 140 paramilitaries, 92, 97, 103, 134, 166 Paris, xxii, 3, 17, 19 Parsis, 66 partisans, xxx, 75, 103, 104, 165; digital, 99–101; in place of citizens, 108, 159; ­revolutionary, 41; of the state, 111, 114, 172, 193n14. See also militias; paramilitaries patriarchy, 87

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Pegasus spyware, 22 Pence, Mike, 100 Pentecostalism, 57 ‘people, the’, 5, 15, 16–17, 19; ­conceptualizing of, 53, 62–3, 70–1, 75, 91; dissolving of, 103, 170; of Egypt, 78; of Iran, 55, 67, 69, 73; making of, 114, 146; and the state, 71–2, 158–60. See also citizenship; ‘othering’; states without people Peretz, Rafi, 45 performance, 16–17, 52, 68–9, 80; correction of, 91; of policing, 121 Persians, 67, 68–9, 182n24 Pharaonism, 63, 69 phenomenology, xxiii, xxviii–xxix, 158, 160; of civil war, 29; of defeat, 33; of displacement, ­114–15, 116, 146, 149, 151; of gangs, 165; of language, 162; of the ‘people’, 157; of revolt, 9–10; of the right, 50–1 Phoenicianism, 63 Pipes, Daniel, xxviii police, xx, 5, 108; citizen stand-­ ins for, 93, 95–6; citizen support for, 80, 88; deterrence of, 25; governance by, 85; and migrants, 152; performance of, 121; and protest, 20; in refugee camps, 138; violence of, 3 Pompeo, Michael, xxvii, 100 Popular Mobilisation Units (pmus), 95, 107, 141, 193n14 propaganda, 34, 99, 128, 184n4; tech-based, 153, 156 protesters, 20; as citizens, 62; ­control of, 80; co-option of

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right-wing culture by, 99; ­refugees as, 137–8 Putin, Vladimir, 90 Qaani, Esmail, 143 Qajar dynasty, 67 Qaradawi, Yusuf al-, 36 Qatar, 102, 119, 193n30 Qods Forces, 143 ‘quiet encroachment’, 139 Qur’an, 55, 143 Quwwat Lubnaniyah, 94 race, 45, 156 racism, 82, 118, 130, 131, 182n24 Raisi, Ebrahim, 163 Rajavi, Maryam, 100 reactionary politics, xxi, xxx, 9, 63; of the grassroots, 91–2, 137, 163–4, 165; of the Islamic State, 60; as mythological, 33; and nation-making, 54; to pandemic measures, 24. See also counterrevolution rebellion, 11, 112, 137 refugee camps, 47, 123–4, 129–30, 138–40 refugees, 82, 94, 111–13, 114–15; and aid organizations, 122–6; containment of, 121; and host countries, 129–31, 142–3, 151; Iraqi, 116; movement of, ­116–17, 120; political agency of, 137–40. See also displacement; internally displaced persons (i d p s); migrants; multi-latitude displacement Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan (3r p), 124

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religion, xxvi; and aid, 125; and conflict, xxxi, 30; and ­governance, 85; and identity, 31, 104, 166; of the left, 169–70; and myth, 35, 45; in politics, 48–9, 103; and population, ­111–12, 120, 122, 127–8, 137; and right-wing culture, 54–7, 75. See also Christianity; Islam; Judaism; sectarianism Religious Zionism, 93 Republican Party (US), 58 revolt, xxii–xxiii, xxviii–xxxi, 5, 157; aftermath of, 50–1, 110–11; cause of, 171; to civil war, 29–30, 40, 71; claims of, 9–10; definition of, 13–14, 16–19, 161; for dignity, 25–6; and ­displacement, 150. See also defeat; uprisings revolution, xxii, xxviii, xxix, 157; claims of, 9–10; definition of, 10–16, 161–2; and myth, 5; ­partisans of, 111; passive, 18–19; from revolt to, 26 right politics, 49, 50, 88, 184n2; and the military, 76; in Türkiye, 131 rivoluzione fascista, 15, 72. See also fascism Robespierre, Maximilien, 4–5 Rojava, 117, 172 Romania, 54 rss (India), 58 Russia, 44, 90, 100, 134–5, 155 Rwanda, 102 Saadeh, Antoun, 48, 52, 56 Sadr, Moqtada al-, 141

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Index

Safavid dynasty, 67, 142 Said, Edward, xxvii, 20, 120 Saied, Kais, xx, 162–3 Salafism, 35, 43, 125 Saleh, Ali Abdullah, 15, 77 Salvini, Matteo, 186n24 Samaan, Abu Asaad al-, 35 Sambo, 90 Saraya al-Khorasani Brigade (Saraya Karrar), 107–8 Saudi Arabia, xx, 36, 58, 193n30; border of, 118–19; ­citizenship of, 102; and the ­culture of the right, 100; ­futurism of, 61–2, 68; Iranian conflict with, 37–8; nationalism in, 63, 70 s a v a k , 68 Savarkar, Veer, xxiv Sayad, Abdelmalek, 145, 147–8 Schengen agreement, 118 sectarianism, xxvii, xxviii, 31–2; and civil war, xxxi, 30, 39, 40; and communities, 120, 133, 141; and myth, 34, 132; as opposed to civic belonging, ­111–12, ­115–16; and political division, 37. See also ‘­mythological machine’; Shi’a Islam; Sunni Islam security apparatus, xx, 25, 171. See also surveillance separation barrier (West Bank), 116, 118 separation walls (‘Jersey barriers’), 119–20, 133 settler colonialism, 58, 81, 103, 145, 183n40. See also colonialism

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215

sexuality, 87. See also gender; masculinity Shabaks, 115, 133 Shammas, Anton, 72 Sharia law, 154, 164 Sharon, Ariel, 77 Sharp, Gene, 22 Shi’a Islam, 31, 35–8, 60; in Iran, 67; is accusations against, 42; sites of, 40 Shi’as (Shiites), xxviii, 35–6; ­communities of, 112; in Iraq, 133, 141; in Lebanon, 129; in Syria, 134–5, 137; targeting of, 43, 115 Sisi, Abdel-Fatah al-, xxv, 15, 61, 77; coup of, 18, 71; cult of, 85–6; Pharaonism of, 69–70 smuggling, 119, 120, 165 socialism, 165 social media, 21–2, 99–101, 148, 152, 163. See also digital technologies; Instagram; Telegram; Twitter/X; virtual ­displacement; ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ protest (Iran, 2022) social sciences, 8, 10, 15–16 Soleimani, Qasem, 55, 79–80, 143 Sorel, George, xxiv Sorush, Abdol-Karim, 80 South Africa, 93 sovereignty, 115, 116, 120–1; and humanitarian intervention, 122–3, 125–6; and refugees, 140; weakness of, 160. See also state, the Soviet Union, 11, 12, 99 Spain, xxi, 21, 58, 120; anti-protest laws of, 23; right-wing culture in, 54

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216 Index

Spanish Civil War, 54 Spanish Legion (El Tercio de Marruecos), 54–5 Spartakist revolt, xxii, 17, 19 Starlink, 100 stasiology, 108 state, the, xxx–xxxi; borders of, 116; fracturing of, 141; and international aid, 122–3, ­125–6; and the military, 76–8; mythological origins of, 62–3; partisans of, 91, 97, 165, 167; people of, 66, 69, 71–2, 75; ­protection of, 76, 87; relations with society of, 53; revolt against, 18; as sacred, 72–4; security of, 171; successful example of, 49; violence of, 172. See also citizenship; governance; nation-state; state-citizen ­relations; state-making; states without people; statolatry state–citizen relations, xxiii, ­ xxix–xxx, xxxii, 8, 157–8; breakdown of, 18; and the ­culture of the right, 51, 53; determining of, 103, 113; and gangs, 165, 167; and security, 171. See also citizenship state-making, xxxii, 8, 113, ­158–9; agency in, 141; ­demographics of, 127–8; in Israel, 88; military in, 77–8; and mythology, 63; and people-­ making, 72, 86; and political Islam, 31; and population ­movements, 115. See also nation-making state-nation, 159

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states without people, xx, xxiii, 158–61; as an outcome of civil war, 109; and displacement, 114, 137; and partisanship, 103–4; and statolatry, 71. See also ­citizenship; partisans; ‘people, the’; state, the statolatry, xxxi, 70–2, 74, 75 statopraxis, xxxi, 75, 89. See also ‘grassroots authoritarianism’; partisans strongman cult, 75, 80, 82–3, 85; and women, 88 Sudan, 8, 9 Sufism, 40 Sunni Islam, 31, 36, 43, 154 Sunnis, 37; communities of, 133; in Iraq, 141–2; refugees, 112–13, 129, 132; in Syria, 134, 137; ­targeting of, 43, 128 supremacism, 58–9 Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (sc a f, Egypt), 77–8, 85 surveillance, xxxi, 25, 119, 136, 147. See also security apparatus Switzerland, 188n9 Sykes-Picot agreement, 120, 127. See also borders Syria, 8, 14, 40; ‘Arab Spring’ in, 17, 24, 95; belonging to, 62, 112–13; border of, 120; and ­displacement, 127–8, 133–7, 146–7, 151; military leadership of, 77; militias in, 166; people of, 171; politics in, 47–9, 56, ­159–60; proxy forces in, 108, 143; refugees from, 94, 111, 116–18, 123–5, 129–32, ­138–40, 193n30

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Index

Syrian civil war, 29–30, 36; ­population displacement caused by, 112–13, 116, 133–4, 137 Syrian Democratic Forces (sdf), 132 Syrian National Army (sn a), 132 Syrian Social Nationalist Party (ssnp ), 48–9, 50, 56–7, 94–5 Taheri, Hossein, 37 Tahrir Square, Cairo, 3, 15, 21–2, 25, 69 takfir, 37, 41–3, 144 Taksim Square, 5 Taliban, 122, 143, 154 Taqizadeh, Hasan, 67 Tataloo (Amir Hossein Maghsoudlou), 163–4 techno-futurism, 61–2, 68, 81–2, 102, 161 terrorism, 30, 55, 57, 64, 169; and citizenship, 103; defence against, 89; state ­struggles against, 121, 132, 133 Terruzzi, Attilio, 189n14 thawra, 13–16 The Line, 61–2 Todorov, Tzvetan, xxxii, 149, ­150–1, 158 totalitarianism, 159–61 trade unions, 3, 23, 25 Trinidad and Tobago, 153 Trump, Donald J., xxv, 89, 100 Tunisia, xx, xxi, 12, 152; ‘Arab Spring’ in, 17, 19; culture of the right in, 162–3 Türkiye, xxi, 111–12; border of, 119; civil conflict in, 30; and Syrian refugees, 117–18, 128–9, 131–2, 144

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Turkmens, 115, 133, 179n18 Twitter/X, 21, 97–8, 152 Ultimate Fighting Championship (ufc ), 89–90 ummah, 40 unhc r , 116, 123, 125, 142, 148; refugee camp governance by, 138. See also international aid system United Arab Emirates (ua e), xx, 58, 78, 102, 193n30; border of, 118–19; mm a in, 90 United Kingdom, 42, 58, 64, 74; anti-protest laws of, 23; colonial authority of, 128, 130; refugee life in, 146–7; refugee policy of, 102, 118; right-wing politics in, 100; support for is in, 154. See also British Empire United Nations, 122–6, 135, 193n30. See also unhc r United Nations Security Council, xvi United States, xv–xvi, 42; far right in, 58; ideology and, 160; imperialism of, 172; and Iran, 37; Islamophobia in, 63, 65; Jewish community in, 45; and Latin America, 165; Middle East policy of, xxvi–xxviii, 117–18; neo-conservatism in, 100; race in, 170; support for partisans by, 99 unr wa , 123 uprisings, xxii, 7, 9, 10–11, 12–14, 19. See also intifada; revolt uss r . See Soviet Union Valls, Manuel, 4–5

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Velvet Revolution (1989), 12 video games, 156 vigilantism, xxxi, 95–6, 97, 103 violence: of citizen militias, 95–6; and displacement, 110–11, 116, 149, 152; environmental, 168; gamification of, 155–6; and gangs, 165–7; genocidal, 56; ­justification for, 36, 43; against the Other, 40, 142; of police, 3; preparation for, 88–9; prevention of, 119–20; reduction of, 172; and revolution, 4–5; and social media, 22, 101; as ‘violences’, 128, 166; of war, xv–xvi, 30–1, 134, 161 virtual displacement, 150, 151–3, 155–6, 158, 196n13. See also digital technologies; ­displacement; multilatitude displacement Von Storch, Beatrix, 58 Vox Party (Spain), 58 Wagner, Richard, 84, 189n15 ‘War on Terror’, xvi, 30 West Bank, xvi, 92, 118, 166, 190n37; Israeli settlements in, 120; Israel’s war on, 162; ­separation barrier in, 116, 121. See also Palestine ‘Westoxification’, 52, 184n5 ‘Where’s Daddy’, xv white supremacism, 35, 64 ‘woke culture’, 53

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women, 49, 171; control of, 93; in the idf, 87–8, 190n25; in Jewish settler communities, 92; as targets of settler colonialism, 145. See also gender ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ protest (Iran, 2022), 9, 12, 16–18, 80; social media and, 22, 97–100; tactics of, 24–5 World War II, xxvi xenophobia, 59, 67, 162 Yazidis, 43, 115, 128, 133 Yehoshua, Avraham Gabriel, 72 Yemen, xxviii, 15, 30, 40, 77; population of, 111–12, 171; ­protesters in, 190n33; war in, 78, 116 Yesha Council, 190n37 Young Turks, xxiv, 13–14 YouTube, 21 Za’atari refugee camp, 138–9, 140 Zahedi, Ardeshir, 80 Zaydan, Jurji, 13 Zionism, xxiv, 35, 44–5, 48–9, 63; and the making of the Jewish people, 72, 86; militarism in, 81; potential of, 169, 173; religious, 59, 93; Revisionist, 52; right-wing support for, 57–8. See also Herzl, Theodor; Jabotinsky, Ze’ev (Vladimir) Zoroastrians, 39, 40, 64, 66–7

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