MER Article
Issue 312 (Fall 2024) Masthead
Middle East Report, “Carceral Realities & Freedom Dreams,” Fall 2024, No. 312, Vol. 53 No. 3 Executive Director James Ryan jamesryan@merip.org Executive Editor Katie Natanel katienatanel@merip.org Managing Editor Marya Hannun maryahannun@merip.org Photo Editor Michelle Woodward mwoodward@merip.org Staff Editors Alyssa Bivins bivins@gwu.
A Note on the Cover Image
The cover art for MER issue 312, “Carceral Realities and Freedom Dreams,” is titled “Suspended Souls,” by Egyptian artist Yassin Mohamed. It depicts a scene from the third and fourth floors of Ward B in Egypt’s maximum security Tora prison in 2017, where the artist was imprisoned. Serving twoSpeculative Climate Futures in Arab Literature
There is a fixity to the boundaries of genre fiction in English, enforced within publishing as within scholarship, that is largely absent in Arabic. While Anglophone publishing is intensely concerned with comparative titles and where a novel fits into the landscape, contemporary Arabic publishing largely is not. As such, there
Energy Politics and Africanfuturism—A Conversation with Nnedi Okorafor
Nnedi Okorafor is an award-winning writer of science fiction and fantasy for adults and youth. Her latest work is Akata Woman (Penguin, 2023), an Africanfuturist novel that follows her previous work, Noor (Penguin, 2022). Noor features the protagonist AO, whose experience of disability, bio-tech and trauma shapes her trajectory in
Kurdish Decolonial Ecologies
On my return to Diyarbakır in the Kurdish region of Turkey, also known as Amed (Northern Kurdistan) in the winter of 2024, I found a post-siege city, in which the conversion of the old Christian district of Sur into an open-air shopping mall was partially complete. Neighborhoods I had been
Routes to Disruption—Supply Chain Sabotage and Israel's War on Gaza
Since October 7, at least three shipments of military-grade jet fuel (JP-8) have reached Israel from the United States, powering the fighter jets and Apache helicopters that have, for more than nine months now, continued to decimate Gaza. Each shipment carried 30,000 barrels of fuel—enough to refuel a
Extractive Agribusinesses—Guaranteeing Food Security in the Gulf
The 2022 Food and Agriculture Organization report on food security and nutrition in the Arab region makes for bleak reading. Between 2014 and 2021, the total number of Arabs suffering from moderate to severe food insecurity increased from 120 million to 154 million.[1] This insecurity, however, was not distributed