This article approaches Al-Khiam Detention Center as a site of individual and collective injury, one whose distinct histories have been strategically appropriated by multiple political entities. It argues that the visual, as practiced by artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, brings to the surface traces of personal and individualized experiences of incarceration which would have otherwise remained buried. This article first provides a historical overview of the birth of Al-Khiam, identifies the role multiple political actors have played in the construction and reconstruction of its material, symbolic, and ideological significance, and then examines the implications of Hezbollah’s museification of it, a process premised primarily upon homogenized notions of resistance. This article finally contends that the visual intervention enables a political contestation of the symbolic re-mediation of the Al-Khiam, while producing a genealogical-archaeological understanding of its many temporalities, and a palimpsestic discovery of its accumulating pasts.

This special issue argues that the ‘Middle East’ is best understood not as a bounded region but as a historically produced field of relations shaped by circulation, displacement, imperial intervention, and uneven integration into global political–economic orders. Rather than treating contemporary mobility as rupture or unprecedented acceleration, it situates current dynamics within longer transregional entanglements linking the region to Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas through labor, refuge, trade, pilgrimage, and exile. The key analytical problem today is less movement itself than the fact that cross-border connections increasingly operate across multiple political, institutional, and normative arenas simultaneously, exposing the limits of approaches that separate ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, region and diaspora, origin and destination. Building on and reorienting transnational and diaspora scholarship, the issue advances transregionalism as an analytical lens to capture connections that precede, exceed, or bypass the nation-state, and to foreground multi-nodal, decentered configurations shaped by overlapping regimes of power. It expands the field beyond migrants and diasporas to include states, security institutions, international organizations, humanitarian infrastructures, finance, and digital technologies, emphasizing the infrastructures that enable, constrain, and regulate circulation.

The Global Human Rights Sanctions (GHRS) regime was established by the US in response to the death of Sergei Magnitsky in 2016. It empowered governments to impose sanctions on foreign individuals and entities that committed serious human rights abuses, such as torture. Since then, the regime has gained widespread acceptance in First World countries, particularly in the UK, the EU, Canada, and Australia. However, whilst the regime was aimed at human rights violators in general, in practice, it demonstrated a particular bias against state actors from the Third World. This article critically examines the GHRS regime through the lens of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). It contends that the regime is built on a colonial ontological premise, designed to perpetuate systemic bias against the Third World. To visualize this systemic bias, the article uses electric circuit diagrams that demonstrate the biased architecture of the GHRS regime. The article also highlights how the regime operates on a racial binary that dehumanizes the Third World by using human rights as a form of weapon. In so doing, it moves beyond descriptive critique to provide an innovative way of imagining how human rights discourse can serve as an instrument of subordination.

The term ‘Middle East’ has been contested ever since its emergence in 1902. Although it has acquired a fairly mainstream delimitation, this conception of the region has largely been shaped by outside (Western) powers. This is problematic because the area thus defined comes with three theoretical flaws that influence our understanding of the region until today: (1) Orientalist sentiments that homogenize or ignore diverse histories; (2) lopsided power relations in regard to knowing and defining the region; and (3) rigid methodological practices that prevent more nuanced and interconnected understandings of both the ‘Middle East’ and the ‘West’. This text expands on these flaws by identifying and, to some extent, countering them on both theoretical and empirical grounds. It does so by unpacking maps of Syrian–Turkish borderlands, especially focusing on cross-border dynamics between 2010 and 2025 in Türkiye’s Hatay province, known as liwā’ Iskandarūn in Syria. It finds that conflicting claims to this territory highlight the contentious and fluid processes of defining and border-drawing in, and of, the ‘Middle East’. Through this examination, the article contributes to a more nuanced and transregional understanding of one key part of the MENA region.

This article analyzes Saudi Arabia's regreening efforts through Neom, a conglomeration of urban development currently being built in the northwestern corner of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. As one of several subsidiary organizations under Neom, Neom Nature aims to regreen and rewild an area roughly the size of Belgium. The project will serve as both a recreational space for Neom's estimated population of several millions and part of a wider regreening strategy under the Saudi Green Initiative launched by in 2021, comprising environmental protection, energy transition and sustainability programs. Drawing on publicly available plans and public relations material from Neom Nature, as well as interviews with members, this article analyzes the sociotechnical imaginaries of man, nature, climate change and technology that underpin the project. In the context of Saudi reforms, climate change, and green technological transformation globally, the article's inquiry is twofold. First, it investigates how Saudi public/private environmental institutions interpret environmental history; and second, what role the past plays for their imaginaries of the environmental future in Saudi Arabia and globally.

This article investigates Turkey’s strategic positioning within the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) region by introducing the concept of ‘intermittent transregionalism’ through a case study of Turkish–Lebanese relations. While existing literature predominantly frames Turkey’s role as a neo-Ottoman leadership or regional Islamic influence, this study challenges the notion of a stable and coherent regional identity that could lead to fixed positioning in a specific region. Instead, it argues that Turkey’s transregional engagement is characterized by fluctuation that is shaped by adhocratic governance. Building on a theoretical framework that links adhocracy to state-led cross-border kinship claims, the article conceptualizes Turkey’s oscillation in and out of the SWANA region through adhocratic practices, including developmental projects, humanitarian aid, sociocultural initiatives, and media framing. These measures function both as isolated interventions and a broader governmental technique, reflecting strategic state calculations. The article contributes by challenging rigid Global North–Global South dichotomies and offering the concept of intermittent transregionalism as a tool to understand the elasticity of state identities and governing practices. Using qualitative analysis of two decades of Turkish–Lebanese relations, it shows that Turkey’s transregionalism is a deliberate, strategic form of statecraft that redefines traditional spatial and identity-based understandings of regionalism.

This article examines the failure of the Baqa al-Gharbieh factory in the late 1950s, an industrial venture proposed under Israeli military rule, to show how ‘economic development’ operated as a tool of elimination through dependency. It argues that understanding the Palestinian economy in Israel requires integrating two frameworks: dependency theory, rooted in Marxist critiques of development, and the logic of elimination in settler-colonial studies. Modernization in Arab villages functioned as a discourse of collaboration with select Palestinian figures and local leaders, reinforcing dependency, while simultaneously undermining their authority – as in the case of Fares Hamdan – by restructuring Palestinian economic and social life. Drawing on archival documents, government reports, and community narratives, the study shows that the factory, promoted as a step toward modernization, was designed to dispossess land, dismantle peasant structures, and control surplus labor. The factory’s rapid collapse was not the product of poor planning but of the settler-colonial state’s policies toward Palestinian citizens. Its failure, shaped by the involvement of local Zionist actors and companies seeking to exploit Arab labor, highlights how development projects intersected with elimination. This case complicates conventional narratives of Israeli development and dependency by showing how military rule extended control beyond the state and how minor Zionist actors reinforced settler-colonial structures.

Within the context of intensifying US-China strategic rivalries, ‘New Infrastructure’ (NI)- a fusion of traditional physical systems with advanced technologies has emerged as a centerpiece for competition. The US has systematically constrained China’s global NI outreach through a dual strategy of coercive diplomacy and tech-economic containment, which have aggravated political risks for China’s NI collaboration globally. The Gulf region, which has become an epicenter of NI competition, faces acute dilemmas as GCC states navigate competing interests from Washington and Beijing. The study introduces the concept of ‘NI statecraft’ to probe the US-China competition in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, and compares the multidimensional differences and explores approaches to insulate NI projects from great power rivalries. The research finds that the US employs a security-first strategy, based on the geopolitical logic to recalibrate its NI programs, consolidating power competition and keeping its monopoly and primacy, a trajectory of ‘economic means for political ends’. China leverages economic statecraft and market-driven integration, based on developmental logic to carry out its NI statecraft, a model of ‘political means for economic ends’. The GCC countries have mixed responses towards the US-China NI rivalry: bandwagoning, hedging, or deviating to harvest geoeconomic interests while shelve geopolitical entanglements.

This article ethnographically explores labor migration from Lower Dir, Pakistan, to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, particularly Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), thereby showing how local underdevelopment interacts with international capitalism to create systematic exploitation. Based on in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observation, the article reveals how recruitment brokers, debt-driven migration, and the kafala sponsorships deepen vulnerability. Migrant workers endure chronic cultural isolation, passport confiscation, wage theft, and dangerous workplaces; extended family separation causes great psychological stress. The article demonstrates how migrant labor is commodified, rendered disposable, and denied rights and recognition by situating these lived experiences within Marxist political economy and critical migration discourses. Tracing the kafala system to British colonial labor restrictions shows its ongoing function in maintaining racialized hierarchies and economic dependency. Labor migration from Lower Dir emerges not as free mobility but as a precisely controlled circulation of cheap labor that supports Gulf accumulation while reinforcing peripheral poverty. The results call for the dismantling of abusive sponsorship systems, the enforcement of labor rights, and the recognition of migrants as rights-bearing contributors rather than disposable inputs. World labor governance should prioritize dignity, justice, and human security over profit.

This essay attempts to provide a personal account of the 12-Day War between Iran and Israel, whilst situating that experience within a postcolonial context. Fanon’s views on colonialism and Ayatollah Khamenei’s speeches are used to deduce a conceptual framework for analyzing this experience. Viewing decolonization as an ongoing struggle, the article argues that following decades of media activity directed at Iranians with the aim of recolonizing a society that had been decolonized by the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Israel and its US supporters expected to be viewed as liberators by the Iranian people. The war instead demonstrated the futility of the ‘liberation through bombing’ narrative and revitalized a sense of unity and national pride in Iranians. Finally, the essay stresses the necessity of both resistance – military as well as cultural – and unity, not just among the Iranian nation but across the region, to overcome the subjugating presence of imperialism and neocolonialism in West Asia.