Middle East Research and Information Project

Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971

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Middle East Studies

Fighting the Campus Crackdown — Ramya Krishnan, a lawyer with the Knight First Amendment Institute, speaks to reporters outside the federal courthouse in Boston after the first day of a trial in a lawsuit filed against the Trump administration by the American Association of University Professors and MESA, July 7, 2025. Nate Raymond/Reuters

issue 318

Fighting the Campus Crackdown

Why the Middle East Studies Association Took the Trump Administration to Court

Aslı Bâli • 12 min read

Gender, Politics and Scholarship—A Roundtable — A demonstration at the Third World Conference on Women, in Nairobi, Kenya, July 1985. (William F. Campbell/Getty Images)

MER Article

Gender, Politics and Scholarship—A Roundtable

On March 3, 2025, MERIP and the University of Exeter's Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies partnered with Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies to host a roundtable on the past, present and future of feminist approaches to Middle East and North African Studies. The event

Deniz Kandiyoti, Judith Tucker, Mounira Charrad, Suad Joseph, Maya Mikdashi, Nadje Al-Ali • 23 min read

Settler Colonialism in the Middle East and North Africa: A Protracted History — An 1837 watercolor depicts French forces advancing across cliffs and through a breach in the wall of the fortified city of Constantine in Algeria. Artist possibly Jean-Louis Gaspard of the 31st Regiment of Infantry. Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection at the Brown University Library/Library of CongressThe governor of Italian Libya, Italo Balbo, welcomes arriving Italian colonists in Tripoli in 1938. Courtesy of State Treasury of Poland, image in the public domain.

MER Article

Settler Colonialism in the Middle East and North Africa: A Protracted History

Settler colonial studies developed as a distinct field of research to address the particular circumstances of settler societies. Since its advent in the 1990s, this field has only marginally considered the Middle East and North Africa, focusing instead on the Anglophone settler societies of North Am

Lorenzo Veracini • 13 min read

MER Article

Reflections on MERIP’s First 25 Years

I was among a small group of activists who started the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) in early 1971 and was chief editor of its monthly flagship publication, MERIP Reports (later Middle East Report) until 1995. Some of us had served in the Peace Corps or other volunteer organiz

Joe Stork • 5 min read

Thinking Critically About Regional Uprisings

In order to broaden our frameworks for thinking critically about the new round of uprisings, MERIP editorial committee member Jillian Schwedler asked a number of critical scholars for their perspectives on how we should be thinking about regional protests and what is often overlooked or misunderstoo

Jillian Schwedler • 20 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

Current Analysis

Title VI and Middle East Studies

In the past few years, pro-Israel groups have mounted an escalating and concerted effort to set the contours of scholarly debate about Israel on American campuses. This fall, two such organizations, the AMCHA Initiative and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, are lobbying Congre

Bekah Wolf • 9 min read

MER Article

Bringing the Peninsula In from the Periphery

Research on the political and economic development of the contemporary Arabian Peninsula is often relegated to the fringes of general comparative and Middle Eastern scholarship, isolated from larger theoretical debates and narrowly defined in terms of threat typologies, regional security alliances a

Gwenn Okruhlik • 7 min read