Middle East Research and Information Project

Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971

Darryl Li

Darryl Li is assistant professor of anthropology and associate member of the law school at the University of Chicago and author of The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity. He was an editor of Middle East Report from 2011

MER Article

Refusing Imperial Amnesia in the War on Terror

In a Winter 2001 editorial, MERIP editors Chris Toensing and Elliott Colla insisted, “The hijackings and mass murders of September 11 were horrible and momentous, but the world did not suddenly change on that crystal-clear morning.” MERIP presciently argued that the horrific spectacle of the world’s richest country bombing

Darryl Li • 4 min read

Current Analysis

Refusing Imperial Amnesia in the War on Terror

Twenty years after the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the US invasion of Afghanistan, Darryl Li surveys how MERIP's deep and insightful coverage of the resulting War on Terror countered the "willful amnesia of American nationalism with a rigorous insistence on illuminating the historical continui

Darryl Li • 4 min read

MER Article

A Jihadism Anti-Primer

The US national security state has for the past quarter-century been preoccupied with something it has called “jihadism.” From the aftermath of the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan through the September 11, 2001 attacks to the rise of the self-declared Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, or ISIS, the spect

Darryl Li • 15 min read

MER Article

Migrant Workers and the US Military in the Middle East

Over the past 15 years, the United States has waged two major land wars in the greater Middle East with hundreds of thousands of ground troops. Shadowing these armies and rivaling them in size has been a labor force of private contractors. The security company once called Blackwater has played an ou

Darryl Li • 14 min read

MER Article

Lies, Damned Lies and Plagiarizing "Experts"

The 9/11 Commission Report is the closest thing in print to an official narrative of the events that gave rise to the “war on terror.” In American political culture, the Commission embodied a trans-partisan act of knowledge creation, handing down a narrative meant to establish treasured national con

Darryl Li • 3 min read

MER Article

"Afghan Arabs," Real and Imagined

During the holiday season of Ramadan 1425/October 2004, The Road to Kabul was one of the more popular television miniseries broadcast throughout the Arab world. The program traced recent Afghan history from one superpower invasion to another through a budding romance at Cambridge University between Tariq, a Palestinian pursuing

Darryl Li • 13 min read