MERIP’s blog aims to complement our time-honored long-form analysis in Middle East Report and Middle East Report Online with a more spontaneous, ongoing conversation. MERIP’s blog is produced by our staff (Chris Toensing and Amanda Ufheil-Somers) with help from rotating teams drawn from our editorial committee. So, in addition to other contributors, you will see more from three of our editors in particular over the next few months:

Sheila Carapico teaches at the University of Richmond and also spent four semesters at the American University in Cairo before, during and after the January 25, 2011 popular uprising. Her interests focus on intersections between social justice activism and international politics. Sheila’s first monograph looked at Yemen’s public civic sphere, especially at the grassroots level. Her more recent book examines how activists in various Arab countries react to political aid projects initiated by international experts in democratic transitions. For MERIP she has written about Yemen (see here, here, here and here), US policy in the Gulf (see here and here), and discourses of democracy promotion (here). She will blog mostly on these topics and the aftermath of the revolutionary uprisings of 2011.

Shira Robinson is a historian at The George Washington University who teaches about the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Middle East and writes on Palestine-Israel. Her first book, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel's Liberal Settler State, examines Israel's imposition of military rule on the Palestinian Arabs who remained within Israeli borders after 1948 -- the colonial continuities from the pre-1948 period and the social, legal and cultural legacies that military rule left behind. She will blog on these topics, as well as the ongoing failure of the Labor Zionist movement to reckon with the truth of Israel’s post-1948 past.

Darryl Li (@abubanda) is an anthropologist and attorney, currently a post-doctoral research scholar at Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought. He is writing a book about transnational jihad movements in Bosnia-Herzegovina and conducting research on military migrant labor in the greater Indian Ocean. Darryl has also worked on litigation related to the “global war on terror” on behalf of Guantánamo detainees and survivors of the CIA’s rendition and secret detention programs. He will blog mostly about these topics, but with an eye to placing them in a transregional historical frame linking the Middle East and South Asia.