Middle East Research and Information Project

Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971

Sign In Sign Up

MER Article

The Palestinian McCity in the Neoliberal Era

Sami Tayeb examines how a multitude of privately financed urban development projects in the Israeli-Occupied West Bank are creating a form of colonization that parallels that of Israel. Unlike Israel’s settler-colonial urbanism, however, this form of urban colonization is driven by global, and parti

Sami Tayeb • 14 min read

MER Article

Urban Interventions for the Wars Yet to Come

In a wide-ranging interview, Hiba Bou Akar shows how urban planning is being used to turn some neighborhoods and urban peripheries in the Middle East into militarized frontier zones between competing political, military and sectarian organizations guided by the dystopian logic of a war yet to come.

Hiba Bou Akar • 11 min read

MER Article

The Shifting Contours of US Power and Intervention in Palestine

Lisa Bhungalia Jeannette Greven and Tahani Mustafa argue that the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign against the Palestinians—which gives Israel free reign to violently dispossess Palestinians while simultaneously withdrawing US aid for food, schools and hospitals—has both worsened Pal

Lisa Bhungalia, Jeannette Greven, Tahani Mustafa • 18 min read

Iraqibacter and the Pathologies of Intervention — Men sweep debris from a damaged pharmacy, located near the site of a car bomb attack, in the city of Hilla, 2014. Alaa Al-Marjani/Reuters

MER Article

Iraqibacter and the Pathologies of Intervention

Omar Dewachi traces the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria in war-related wounds—which US military doctors labelled Iraqibacter—to the biological legacy of decades of sanctions, war and intervention in Iraq.

Omar Dewachi • 14 min read

MER Article

The Globalized Unmaking of the Libyan State

The current disorder in Libya is not merely the result of a failed humanitarian intervention, which allegedly collapsed the state. Global currents and processes have also combined with local forces to unmake the Libyan state. Like the other cases of globalized state unmaking in the region, a new pha

Jacob Mundy • 14 min read

MER Article

The New Landscape of Intervention

Even as the 2000’s saw the return of traditional forms of imperial intervention—with the US deployment of military forces in Afghanistan and Iraq in pursuit of a quixotic and unwinnable War on Terror—there are increasingly new forms of intervention that must be understood, assessed and mapped.

The Editors • 5 min read

MER Article

Roger Owen

Roger Owen, a former contributing editor of Middle East Report who taught at Oxford University and Harvard University for over half a century, died on December 22, 2018 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 83. A specialist in the economic, political and social history of the modern Middle

Arbella Bet-Shlimon • 4 min read