MER Article The Politics of Paper Trails States often hide their accountability in plain sight: in redacted documents, incomplete flight manifests, encrypted data, shredded memos and reclassified archives. They also go to great lengths to keep their internal affairs private: banning oppositional media, jailing investigative journalists and disappearing dissenters. Economic and political elites also obscure accountability in The Editors • 6 min read
MER Article Border Regimes and the New Global Apartheid Catherine Besteman analyzes the new form of global intervention that is taking shape in the rise of militarized borders, interdictions at sea, detention centers, indefinite custody and the generalized criminalization of mobility around the world. The Global North—the United States, Canada, the Europ Catherine Besteman • 14 min read
MER Article Israel’s Permanent Siege of Gaza The devastating human and health consequences of intervention by deprivation are noted in Ron Smith’s account of Israel’s decade-long siege of Gaza, whose dynamics are similar to the catastrophic sanctions regime imposed by the United States on Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War and the siege warfare util Ron Smith • 15 min read
MER Article The UAE and the Infrastructure of Intervention Rafeef Ziadah investigates the rise of humanitarian logistics hubs such as Dubai International Humanitarian City, which, although ostensibly humanitarian, have become a key mechanism of intervention and increasingly a central element in the projection of power for the Gulf regimes such as the United Rafeef Ziadah • 9 min read
MER Article Humanitarian Crisis Research as Intervention Sarah Parkinson describes the growing popularity of extreme research—scholarly research conducted in crises zones amongst conflict-affected populations in the Middle East and North Africa—and shows how this research is a mode of intervention that can impose serious harm on individuals, communities, Sarah Parkinson • 15 min read
