Abstract In reflecting on what anthropologists can contribute to public education about the genocide in Gaza, the co-editors of this special issue recognize the limitations of our tools (facts, words, narratives), audiences (students and teachers of a humanities discipline), and impacts. But, along with the contributors to this issue, we assert the importance of continuing our efforts to witness and denounce, to analyze and explain, to encourage boycott and to unionize. Bringing together people from across lines of difference and ignorance into shared refusal of human destruction is a moral act in these immoral times. It is an act of solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians, and with each other, a means to enhancing our efforts at building a more just world, because none of us is free until Palestinians are free.

Abstract This article critically examines the portrayal of Arabs, particularly Palestinians, in German media and public discourse. It highlights the complicity of German media and the failure of Middle East studies in Germany to take a critical position amidst Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It discusses how Germany’s pro-Israeli policies and public positioning lead to the direct exclusion of Arabs and their histories and experiences from society. The article reflects on my own experience as an Arab-German, having grown up as a refugee from Israeli occupation of south Lebanon. It discusses the “toleration” (Duldung) status imposed on many Palestinians and Lebanese who arrived in Germany in the 1980s, exacerbating their marginalization. It addresses how Germany’s criminalization of protests and support for Israel’s crimes deepens Arab alienation. It furthermore reflects on my role as a scholar working on the Middle East and the moral obligation to speak out despite the lack of institutional support.

Abstract I analyze human-machine interactions onboard liquified natural gas (lng) carriers focusing on machines that are technologically advanced parts of automated systems. Such machines are initially designed and constructed by engineers on land where they are tested and where seafarers first interact with them through simulation training. These land-based interactions lead to challenges when the machines are first operated at sea. However, through situated practices of socialization carried out by the seafarers at sea supported by engineers on land, machines gradually mature and become integrated—socialized—into the ship’s context. This process is exemplified in the case of the Electronically Controlled Gas Injection Engine (me-gi) where safety and efficiency rely on different forms of testing, which must involve human sentiments like worry, care, and love. By focusing on these practices—aimed at maturing machines and involving staff both on land and at sea—the scope of institutional and corporate intentions aimed at problem-solving during design, production, and commissioning phases is broadened. The article emphasizes therefore the importance of human qualities—extracted from the making of machines—in ensuring safety and efficiency, rather than relying on design and legislation, as advanced automated machines, matured socio-technical systems, still conceal materiality and social interactions.

Abstract Experts in Open-Source Intelligence (osint) and “Development Security Operations” (Dev-Sec-Ops) increasingly use automated tools to monitor databases, survey “targets” and identify cybersecurity threats. While the information they seek is usually freely available online, finding and extracting it requires special expertise. The extractive power of automated machines accelerates in this way the ubiquity of synoptic surveillance, while raising new ethical considerations that often obscure heuristic definitions between benevolent and malicious monitoring practices. Based on ethnographic research with osint and DevSecOps practitioners in the UK I identify this process analytically as an “authoritarian conundrum.” I argue that reliance on automatic data extraction thus redefines power relations online and discuss its potentially despotic effects.

Abstract Drawing on the anthropological debates surrounding humanitarian borders, this article analyses the functioning of the humanitarian border in central Mexico. More specifically, it focuses on the state of Puebla as a case study that casts light on the ways in which the humanitarian border operates in states located far from geographic borders, which are frequently overlooked in discourse and action on migration and asylum in Mexico. Based on ethnographic research in Puebla between 2019 and 2022, we analyse how the state has been incorporated into the international humanitarian circuit by being made responsible for handling asylum seekers and refugees who have been relocated from the south of the country. Against this backdrop, a humanitarian border comprising two dimensions has emerged: a hard border governed by securitarian control measures and a soft border managed by humanitarian actors. In this article, we will analyse the soft humanitarian border.

Abstract This article explores frictions between state-led pandemic measures and public aspirations that sought religious-cultural continuity during covid-19 crisis. Through the case of annual festival at Data Saheb’s shrine (Lahore), it shows that devotees built an ephemeral city for three-day celebrations as a way of asserting their commitment to a centuries old tradition. It is argued that the cultural continuities of devotion to the city saint appeared to be flowing undeterred in the face of healthcare initiatives – making the shrine a microcosm that reflected flexibilities and lapses at the national level vis-à-vis pandemic governance. While elsewhere that might be seen as a case of (in)effective public health administration, at the shrine, it unearthed power equation between the religious actors and the state in Pakistan manifesting itself since Data Saheb’s demise in 12th century around political legitimation, public morality, patronage of shrines and control of religious actors in local politics.

Abstract While anthropologists have been cautious to avoid essentialism, the notion “informant” in anthropology’s promotion of scholar-informant solidarity has been surprisingly undifferentiated. Based on my experience of interlocutors’ heterogeneity during my fieldwork on Assam tea plantations, I illustrate the ambiguity, porosity and mutability of the category of the “informant.” I argue that the general imperative to support informants occludes that there are multiple interlocutors with different, at times conflicting, claims. Therefore, a (conscious or unconscious) decision about whom among the multiple interlocutors to support in the field of study seems inevitable. Inspired by the epistemological concept of recursivity, drawn from the recent framework of a recursive anthropology, I suggest ethical recursivity as one possible answer to the question on what ethical grounds anthropologists could base their decision about whom among the multiple (marginalized) interlocutors they show solidarity to, in order to reconcile ethical premises and actions within a publicly engaged anthropology.

Abstract The practice of witnessing holds particular power regarding the question of how best to assure children’s wellbeing. This is especially true for the field of internationally initiated attempts at child protection, often against corporal punishment, as I have explored them in Zanzibar, Tanzania. Acts of witnessing are imbued with a sense of commitment, with a variety of expectations, and with a certain obligation, or responsibility, to act upon what one comes to see or know. In order to understand witnessing as a relational and collaborative process first, rather than as an anthropological self-identification, I propose to think with witnessing as having a weight, and of potential ways to reconsider how this weight of witnessing may be distributed differently, in child protection ethnography specifically, and anthropology more generally.

Abstract The paper explores the interplay between religion, security, and gender. By employing a broad analytical security framework ranging from warfare violence against women to violence in the domestic sphere, the paper supports the view that countries with heightened rates of gender inequalities and violence are more insecure and prone to conflict. The paper also questions the role played by religions enforcing hierarchical gender constructs in preserving women’s security and protecting them from gender-based violence. Against this background, the paper maintains that deferring the realisation of women’s security until a comprehensive reform has taken place within the religious precinct must not be an option. Such an approach would signify the capitulation of the egalitarian human rights paradigm. Instead, women’s roles as agents of change within religious institutions should be supported, and the proactive engagement of states to encourage religious institutions to reform and embrace an egalitarian ethos should be promoted. Only in this way will the interplay of religion, security, and gender truly benefit the pursuit of women’s security.

Abstract As borders kill under the premises of saving lives and distributing order, border regimes emerge in everyday life as sites of uncertainty, fragility, and doubt. The paper explores the spaces of uncertainty that pervade everyday life at the borderlands of Europe with a particular focus on the island of Lampedusa (Italy), and it deploys doubt as an analytical tool to produce a reflexive turn in border studies. From an autoethnographic perspective, it calls for a re-evaluation of the directions we take as scholars when we think and write about borders. By exploring the potential of selfreflection as a path for knowledge of the "other", the paper suggests a shift in gaze which builds on judgment and self-dialogue as forms of responsibility.