Dear Friends and Comrades,

Today we are releasing our Winter 2025 issue of Middle East Report, “Reconstruction and Ruin.” This issue includes essays, dispatches and interviews that offer a grounded examination of the impact of war and reconstruction efforts (or lack thereof) on everyday people across the region. From Gaza to Mosul to Khartoum and Damascus, reconstruction projects have become the central focus of state-led efforts to resolve conflicts. In truth, these projects often risk paving over the political, social and material issues at the heart of civil and imperial conflict—trading guns, bombs and drones for bulldozers, cranes and concrete to continue rather than rectify the dispossession and division inherent in urban warfare.

Reconstruction projects demand critical attention at this moment for the region because the scale of the tasks at hand are enormous. As Craig Larkin points out in his reporting from Damascus, a year after the fall of the Asad regime, more than half of the Syrian population remains displaced and the estimated costs of reconstruction after 14 years of civil war exceed $216 billion. The political scales of reconstruction projects have grown similarly. In comparing the task of reconstruction in Lebanon’s Dahiya after Israel’s 2024 war with that of 2006, Iman Ali demonstrates that the weakened political weight of Hizballah, and with it Lebanon’s Shi’i community, has opened the entire community up to a continued dispossession of its property.

Taken together, “Reconstruction and Ruin” demonstrates how the intensification of war in the region over the last decade and a half has fed a dynamic whereby war does not end—bombings continue in Gaza and Lebanon, despite ceasefire agreements and peace is contingent on the continued dispossession of ordinary people across the region. 

We’ll be talking more about this issue in the coming weeks. We hope you take the time to read, share and send us your thoughts. As always, we are grateful for your support, which helps us bring this publication to the world without paywalls. 

In Solidarity,

James Ryan
Executive Director