Middle East Research and Information Project

Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971

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Urbanization

Power Struggles—Energy as a Weapon of War, Domination and Resistance in Palestine — Palestinians living with limited electricity in Nuseirat Refugee Camp in the central Gaza Strip, December 24, 2024. Hassan Jedi/Anadolu via Getty ImagesOffice of the Quartet Energy Infrastructure Map, from Office of the Quartet Report to the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee, November 17, 2021.A Palestinian man charges phones at a station fed by a solar panel in a refugee camp in Rafah, January 2024. Due to worsening economic conditions and the lack of electricity, some young men who have solar panels are using them to run small businesses. Mohammed Talatene/dpa via Getty Images

MER Article

Power Struggles—Energy as a Weapon of War, Domination and Resistance in Palestine

The role of the grid in Israel's colonial domination.

Zachary Cuyler • 17 min read

Cairo's Incarcerated Geographies — A general view on April 29, 2018 of a government-demolished slum that existed behind the state television and radio headquarters (R) in the Maspero Triangle area in the center of Cairo. Khaled Desouki/AFP via Getty ImagesMaspero Triangle, before and after destruction. Source: Google Earth.Map by the author and published on May 8th, 2024.

MER Article

Cairo's Incarcerated Geographies

In 2015, the Egyptian government announced a series of urban development plans, a schema that included having a city free of slums. As part of this plan, the state implemented a policy to relocate residents of so-called unsafe areas to new neighborhoods and redevelop existing neighborhoods using a combination

Omnia Khalil • 5 min read

Kurdish Decolonial Ecologies — The Tigris river passing through the Hevsel gardens of the World Cultural Heritage site in Diyarbakir. Mehmet Masum Suer/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty ImagesA destroyed mansion in the Dabanoğlu neighborhood in 2024, courtesy of the author.

MER Article

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

Umut Yıldırım • 11 min read

Orhan Veli's Poetry and the Struggle to Preserve Istanbul's Green Spaces — Turkish men supplement their income by fishing off Istanbul’s Galata Bridge, which spans the Golden Horn waterway, with the 16th-century Ottoman Suleymaniye Mosque in the background. March 2023. David Silverman/Getty Images

Current Analysis

Orhan Veli's Poetry and the Struggle to Preserve Istanbul's Green Spaces

On the Republic's one hundred year anniversary, how does the poet's work speak to the Istanbul's urban transformation?

Niels Lee • 13 min read

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

Sur

Operation Sur cannot be reduced to the destruction of an old walled city. Beyond the deaths, destroyed buildings and compensation payments, what has been lost are the potentialities—the wish-images—that Kurds imbued in Sur and with which they defended it.

Serra Hakyemez • 13 min read

MER Article

"Mosul Will Never Be the Same"

In June 2014, the self-declared Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) launched an assault on the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Within days, the Iraqi army collapsed and ISIS proclaimed its sovereignty over the city. An anonymous blog named Mosul Eyebegan reporting on life under ISIS rule. With de

Omar Mohammed • 13 min read

MER Article

Jerusalem's Colonial Landscapes of Loss

Israel’s settler-colonial project has been premised on a set of racial and spatial assumptions that require the dispossession—even the elimination—of the native Palestinians. Over the seven decades of Israeli rule in Jerusalem and throughout historic Palestine, the state has produced abiding landsca

Thomas Abowd • 7 min read

MER Article

Generational Dislocations

Since 2011, violence in Syria has worsened the widespread displacement of people in the Middle East and destroyed several cities. The images of displaced Syrian families fleeing to Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon broadcast around the world had a haunting resonance. Archival photographs of Armenian refuge

Joanne Randa Nucho • 9 min read

MER Article

Abadan

In fall 1978, Abadan’s oil refinery workers played a decisive role in the Iranian Revolution by joining the national mass strikes. Just two years later, Abadan and the adjoining port city of Khorramshahr were shelled by the invading Iraqi army and effectively destroyed during the Iran–Iraq war (1980

Rasmus Christian Elling, Kaveh Ehsani • 10 min read

MER Article

The Destructive Dreams of AKP Urbanism

The Gezi Park protests were the first time that the AKP faced significant public resistance from below to their urban transformation project. The term “below” is important because the AKP’s legitimacy rests on the claim that it enjoys widespread support from below. The protests, however, revealed an

Ayse Çavdar • 11 min read