Afleveringen
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“No man’s land” invokes stretches of barren landscape, twisted barbed wire, desolation, and the devastation of war. But this is not always the reality. According to Noam Leshem in Edges of Care: Living and Dying in No Man's Land (U Chicago Press, 2025), the term also reveals radical abandonment by the state. From the Northern Sahara to the Amazon rainforests, people around the world find themselves in places that have been stripped of sovereign care. Leshem is committed to defining these spaces and providing a more intimate understanding of this urgent political reality.
Based on nearly a decade of research in some of the world’s most challenging conflict zones, Edges of Care offers a profound account of abandoned lives and lands, and how they endure and sometimes thrive once left to fend for themselves. Leshem interrogates no man’s land as a site of radical uncaring: abandoned by a sovereign power in a relinquishment of responsibility for the space or anyone inside it. To understand the ramifications of such uncaring, Leshem takes readers through a diverse series of abandoned places, including areas in Palestine, Syria, Colombia, Sudan, and Cyprus. He shows that no man’s land is not empty of life, but almost always inhabited and, in fact, often generative of new modes of being.
Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org
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In this complete military history of Britain's pacification of the Arab revolt in Palestine, Britain's Pacification of Palestine (Cambridge UP, 2019), Matthew Hughes shows how the British Army was so devastatingly effective against colonial rebellion. The Army had a long tradition of pacification to draw upon to support operations, underpinned by the creation of an emergency colonial state in Palestine. After conquering Palestine in 1917, the British established a civil Government that ruled by proclamation and, without any local legislature, the colonial authorities codified in law norms of collective punishment that the Army used in 1936. The Army used 'lawfare', emergency legislation enabled by the colonial state, to grind out the rebellion. Soldiers with support from the RAF launched kinetic operations to search and destroy rebel bands, alongside which the villagers on whom the rebels depended were subjected to curfews, fines, detention, punitive searches, demolitions and reprisals. Rebels were disorganised and unable to withstand the power of such pacification measures.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Factual misinformation is spread in conflict zones around the world, often with dire consequences. But when is this misinformation actually believed, and when is it not?
Seeing is Disbelieving: Why People Believe Misinformation in War, and When They Know Better (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Daniel Silverman examines the appeal and limits of dangerous misinformation in war, and is the go-to text for understanding false beliefs and their impact in modern armed conflict. Dr. Silverman extends the burgeoning study of factual misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news in social and political life into a crucial new domain, while providing a powerful new argument about the limits of misinformation in high-stakes situations. Rich evidence from the US drone campaign in Pakistan, the counterinsurgency against ISIL in Iraq, and the Syrian civil war provide the backdrop for practical lessons in promoting peace, fighting wars, managing conflict, and countering misinformation more effectively.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Today, when we think about Gaza we think about the war, the destruction of the city and the constant movement of its population. In contemporary public discourse, Gaza tends to be characterized solely as a theatre of the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. However, little is known about Gaza's society, politics, economy, and culture during the Ottoman era. Drawing on a range of previously untapped local and imperial sources, Yuval Ben-Bassat and Johann Buessow explore the city's history from the mid-nineteenth century through WWI.
In Late Ottoman Gaza: An Eastern Mediterranean Hub in Transformation (Cambridge UP, 2024), they show that Gaza's historical importance extends far beyond the territory of the 'strip' since the city was an important hub for people, goods, and ideas in the Eastern Mediterranean from Antiquity until the twentieth century. Using new digital methodologies, Ben-Bassat and Buessow introduce readers to the world of Gazans from various walks of life, from the traditional Muslim elites to the commoners and minority communities of Christians and Jews. In so doing, they tell the lively story of this significant but frequently misunderstood city.
Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org
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Farida Benlyazid and Moroccan Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) unfolds and analyzes the work of Moroccan director, producer, and scriptwriter Farida Benlyazid, whose career extends from the beginning of cinema in independent Morocco to the present. This study of her work and career provides a unique perspective on an under-represented cinema, the gender politics of cinema in Morocco, and the contribution of Arab women directors to global cinema and to a gendered understanding of Muslim ethics and aesthetics in film.
A pioneer in Moroccan cinema, Farida Benlyazid has been successful at negotiating the sometimes abrupt turns of Morocco's rocky 20th century history: from Morocco under French occupation to the advent of Moroccan independence in 1956; the end of the international status of Tangier, her native city, in 1959; the "years of lead" under the reign of Hassan II; and finally Mohamed VI's current reign since 1999. As a result, she has a long view of Morocco's politics of self-representation as well as of the representation of Moroccan women on screen.
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Raised in the Judería or Jewish quarter of Tetouan, Morocco, at the turn of the 20th-century, sixteen-year-old Mazaltob finds herself betrothed to José, an uncouth man from her own community who has returned from Argentina to take a wife. Mazaltob, however, is in love with Jean, who is French, half-Jewish, and a free spirit. In this classic of North African Jewish fiction, Blanche Bendahan evokes the two compelling forces tearing Mazaltob apart in her body and soul: her loyalty to the Judería and her powerful desire to follow her own voice and find true love. Bendahan’s nuanced and moving novel is a masterly exploration of the language, religion, and quotidian customs constraining North African Jewish women on the cusp of emancipation and decolonization.
Yaëlle Azagury and Frances Malino provide the first English translation of this modern coming-of-age tale, awarded a prize by the Académie Française in 1930, and analyze the ways in which Mazaltob, with its disconcerting blend of ethnographic details and modernist experimentation, is the first of its genre—that of the feminist Sephardi novel. A historical introduction, a literary analysis, and annotations elucidate historical and cultural terms for readers, supplementing the author’s original notes.
Blanche Bendahan was born in Oran, Algeria on November 26, 1893, to a Jewish family of Moroccan-Spanish origin. Bendahan published her first collection of poetry, La voile sur l’eau, in 1926 and then her first novel, Mazaltob, in 1930.
Yaëlle Azagury is a writer, literary scholar, and critic. She was Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at Barnard College, and Lecturer in Discipline in the English and Comparative Literature Department at Columbia University. She is a native of Tangier, Morocco.
Frances Malino is the Sophia Moses Robison Professor of Jewish Studies and History Emerita at Wellesley College. Her current project is titled Teaching Freedom: Jewish Sisters in Muslim Lands. In 2012 she was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes académiques by the French Ministry of Education.
Azagury and Malino were finalists of the 74th National Jewish Book Awards in the category of Sephardic Culture.
Mentioned in the podcast:
• Blanche Bendahan,“Visages de Tétouan,” Les Cahiers de L’Alliance Israélite Universelle (Paix et Droit), no. 093 (November 1955): 5.
• Susan Gilson Miller, “Gender and the Poetics and Emancipation: The Alliance Israélite Universelle in Northern Morocco (1890-1912).” In Franco-Arab Encounters, edited by L. Carl Brown and Matthew Gordon (1996)
• Susan Gilson Miller, “Moïse Nahon and the Invention of the Modern Maghribi Jew.” In
French Mediterraneans, edited by P. Lorcin and T. Shepard (2016)
• Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu published in seven volumes, previously translated as Remembrance of Things Past) (1913–1927)
• Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 25th anniversary edition (1994)
• Female teachers of the Alliance israélite universelle
• Jewish figures in the literature of The Tharaud Brothers
• Archives of the Alliance israélite universelle (AIU)
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Dr. Simkovich taught in a Catholic University and now is at JPS and YU. She continues her interfaith dialogue throughout. But here we spoke, among other things, about the concept of diaspora and exile - what is a Judean, a Judahite, and an Israelite. These are terms that are often thrown around interchangeably, but understanding the meaning and etymology of each helps us understand the spatial and temporal elements of being Jewish, of Judean roots, and in the context of today.
Letters from Home: The Creation of Diaspora in Jewish Antiquity (Eisenbrauns, 2024) is an analysis of letters from Jewish Antiquity and spans the Persian and Babylonian Empires in space and time and touches upon the Greek and Roman Empires. Is diaspora curse? If a main prohibition was for Israelites to return to Egypt, how is one of the most ancient Jewish communities found in Egypt? How and why did they get there? Was it a negative or positive evolution of the exile?
As the conversation evolved Dr. Simkovich let out a call for suggested readings on the term and concept of "golah" as opposed to "galut", diaspora and exile. Please reach out if you want to share your thoughts on this and the significance of the diaspora as a phenomenon.
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A New Orient: From German Scholarship to Middle Eastern Studies in Israel (Brandeis UP, 2024) explores the fascinating history of Zionist and Israeli "Oriental Studies" (mizrahanut), particularly the study of Islam, Arabic, and the Middle East, as a field deeply rooted in the academic traditions of early 20th-century German universities. Drawing on rich archival documentation in German, Arabic, English, and Hebrew, it traces the migration of Orientalist knowledge from Germany to Mandatory Palestine. The book examines how research – and researchers – were transformed as their encounter with the Orient shifted from a textual-philological exercise to a direct, physical engagement, marked by contradictions and tensions against the backdrop of the intensifying Jewish-Arab conflict.
Among its key themes, the book reveals how prominent Orientalist scholars extended their work beyond study rooms and libraries, engaging in efforts to foster Jewish-Arab understanding or collaborating with diplomatic and security institutions.
By shedding new light on the development of academic research in Mandatory Palestine and the early years of Israel, the book offers a compelling case study of the intricate relationship between "pure" scholarship and the political, social, and cultural challenges of the time. It also provides a fresh perspective on the roots of the Jewish-Arab conflict and the influential role of knowledge in shaping it.
Amit Levy is a Spinoza postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Israel Studies, School of Regional and Historical Studies, University of Haifa. His research focuses on the history of knowledge and migration and their impact on cross-cultural encounters. He earned his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2021, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Oxford, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the Open University of Israel. His book A New Orient received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award, administered by the Association for Jewish Studies.
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Arab nationalism has been one of the dominant ideologies in the Middle East and North Africa since the early twentieth century. However, a clear definition of Arab nationalism, even as a subject of scholarly inquiry, does not yet exist.
Peter Wien’s Arab Nationalism: The Politics of History and Culture in the Modern Middle East (Routledge, 2017) sheds light on cultural expressions of Arab nationalism and the sometimes contradictory meanings attached to it in the process of identity formation in the modern world. It presents nationalism as an experienceable set of identity markers – in stories, visual culture, narratives of memory, and struggles with ideology, sometimes in culturally sophisticated forms, sometimes in utterly vulgar forms of expression. Utilizing various case studies, the present work transcends a conventional history that reduces nationalism in the Arab lands to a pattern of political rise and decline. It offers a glimpse at ways in which Arabs have constructed an identifiable shared national culture, and it critically dissects conceptions about Arab nationalism as an easily graspable secular and authoritarian ideology modeled on Western ideas and visions of modernity.
This book offers an entirely new portrayal of nationalism and a crucial update to the field, and as such, is indispensable reading for students, scholars and policymakers looking to gain a deeper understanding of nationalism in the Arab world.
Peter Wien is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Saman Nasser holds an M.A. in World History from James Madison University, where he currently works as an educational staff.
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Historian Emine Ö. Evered’s Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity (University of Texas Press, 2024) investigates the history of alcohol, its consumption, and its proscription as a means to better understand events and agendas of the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican eras. Through a comprehensive examination of archival, literary, popular culture, media, and other sources, it unveils a traditionally overlooked—and even excluded—aspect of human history in a region that many do not associate with intoxicants, inebriation, addiction, and vigorous wet-dry debates.
Evered's account uniquely chronicles how the Turko-Islamic Ottoman Empire developed strategies for managing its heterogeneous communities and their varied rights to produce, market, and consume alcohol, or to simply abstain. The first author to reveal this experience’s connections with American Prohibition, she demonstrates how—amid modernization, sectarianism, and imperial decline—drinking practices reflected, shifted, and even prompted many of the changes that were underway and that hastened the empire’s collapse. Ultimately, Evered’s book reveals how Turkey’s alcohol question never went away but repeatedly returns in the present, in matters of popular memory, public space, and political contestation.
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The period from the Mamlūk reconquest of Acre (1291) to the Ottoman siege of Constantinople (1453) witnessed the production of a substantial corpus of Middle English crusade romances. In English Literature and the Crusades: Anxieties of Holy War, 1291–1453 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Dr. Marcel Elias places these romances in dialogue with multifarious European writings to offer a novel account of late medieval crusade culture: as ambivalent and self-critical, animated by tensions and debates, and fraught with anxiety. These romances uphold ideals of holy war while expressing anxieties about issues as diverse as God's endorsement of the crusading enterprise, the conversion of Christians to Islam, the sinfulness of crusaders, and the morality of violence.
Reinvigorating debates in medieval postcolonialism, drawing on emotion studies, and excavating a rich multilingual archive, this book is a major contribution to the cultural history of the crusades. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available open access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Palestine's Christians and the Nationalist Cause: The Late Ottoman and Mandatory Periods (Routledge, 2024) provides an historical overview of Palestine's Christian communities and their role in the Palestinian nationalist movement during the late Ottoman and British mandatory periods. More than being a history of Palestine's Christian Arabs, the book focuses on Palestine's Christians during the formative period of Palestinian Arab national identity, attentive to the broader topic of the relationship between nationalism and religion--in this case, between Arab identity and Islam. Whereas until recently historians have tended to assume that national and religious identities are distinct and mostly mutually exclusive things, more recent scholarship has addressed the fact that often there exists considerable overlap between the two, though it should be noted, often in ways that are not by any means inherently exclusive of those not belonging to the majority faith, as is the case here. The relationship is also an ever-changing one, hence the final chapter of the book, which functions as something of an epilogue regarding the current status of Palestine's Christians vis-à-vis their place in the nationalist cause and relationship with the broader Muslim population. The book will be of interest to historians and scholars focused on the modern Middle East, Palestinian history, Muslim-Christian inter-communal relations, and the relationship between nationalism and religion.
Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org
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Dr. David Graves is a philosopher, artist, musician and author. He helped found the Academic College of Tel Aviv, where he is Senior Lecturer in Art and Philosophy. In this exciting interview, he talks about his recent book New Realism in Contemporary Israeli Painting (Austin Macauley, 2023), and shares insight on what is true and real about the world we live in, the stories we tell, and the worlds we create.
About the book: Art today can be whatever one wants it to be: a rotting cadaver, a photograph of someone else's photograph, a banana... In this post-modern age of post-truth, of social media and the selfie, when everyone has a high-resolution digital camera at their fingertips, one wonders what would possess a talented artist to sit for days, weeks, often months, to paint a portrait of a friend or a landscape of home. Today, a group of 20 or so remarkable painters have revived a fascinating style of realistic painting, and in Israel of all places, where realistic art has never played any significant role. Their brand of realism is not mundane photographic realism, but rather it is an intensified sort of realism, a kind of hyper-realism. This book offers an initial explanation as to what these artists are doing, and how they are doing it.
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From the East African and Red Sea coasts to the Persian Gulf ports of Bushihr, Kish, and Hurmuz, sailing and caravan networks supplied Iran and the surrounding regions with African slave labor from antiquity to the nineteenth century. This book reveals how Iranian cinema preserves the legacy of this vast and yet long-overlooked history that has come to be known as Indian Ocean slavery.
How does a focus on blackness complicate traditional understandings of history and culture? Parisa Vaziri addresses this question by looking at residues of the Indian Ocean slave trade in Iranian films from the second half of the twentieth century. Revealing the politicized clash between commercial cinema (fīlmfārsii) and alternative filmmaking (the Iranian New Wave), she pays particular attention to the healing ritual zar which is both an African slave descendent practice and a constitutive element of Iranian culture, as well as to cinematic sīyāh bāzī (Persian black play). Moving beyond other studies on Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan slavery, Vaziri highlights the crystallization of a singular mode of historicity within these cinematic examples—one of “absence” that reflects the relative dearth of archival information on the facts surrounding Indian Ocean slavery.
Bringing together cinema studies, Middle East studies, Black studies, and postcolonial theory, Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran's Cinematic Archive (U Minnesota Press, 2023) explores African enslavement in the Indian Ocean through the revelatory and little-known history of Iranian cinema. It shows that Iranian film reveals a resistance to facticity representative of the history of African enslavement in the Indian Ocean and preserves the legacy of African slavery’s longue durée in ways that resist its overpowering erasure in the popular and historical imagination.
Parisa Vaziri is associate professor of comparative literature and Near Eastern studies at Cornell University.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
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William Gallois joins the podcast to discuss his latest book, Qayrawān: The Amuletic City, published by The Pennsylvania State University Press in 2024.
Qayrawān: The Amuletic City investigates the fascinating history of the Tunisian city of Qayrawān, which in the last years of the nineteenth century found itself covered in murals. Concentrated on and around the city’s Great Mosque, these monumental artworks were only visible for about fifty years, from the 1880s through the 1930s. This book investigates the fascinating history of who created these outdoor paintings and why.
Using visual archaeological methods, Qayrawān highlights the ‘unknown artist’ as an actor of ‘unnoticed agency’ and a practitioner of living traditional arts. Locating pictorial records of the murals from the backdrops of photographs, postcards, and other forms of European ephemera, Gallois identifies a form of religious painting that transposed traditional aesthetic forms such as house decoration, embroidery, and tattooing―which lay exclusively within the domains of women―onto the body of a conquered city. Gallois argues that these works were created by women as a form of “emergency art,” intended to offer amuletic protection for the community, and demonstrates how they differ markedly from “classical” Islamic antecedents and modern modes of Arab cultural production in the Middle East and North Africa.
The book challenges tacit assumptions of foreign categories and standards of aesthetics imposed upon Islamic and African art. It contributes to further explorations of the exploration of the ways in which Islam was interwoven with preexisting cultures and forms of expression, particularly in calling for a continued reimagining of the study of “Islamic art.” The book makes welcome contributions to Islamic, African, and Middle Eastern studies, particularly in relation to colonial and art histories. It will be welcomed by scholars of Islamic Studies, African Studies, and Art History.
William Gallois is Professor of the Islamic Mediterranean in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, in England. In addition to Qayrawān: The Amuletic City, Prof Gallois is the author of A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony (2013) and The Administration of Sickness (2008), among other works.
Yaseen Christian Andrewsen is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, specialising in Islamic intellectual history in West Africa focusing on issues in Sufism, theology, renewal, and authority. Yaseen is a co-host for the New Books in Islamic Studies podcast.
He can be reached by email at: [email protected]
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Political anthropologists Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen are back to continue RTB's Violent Majorities series with a set of three episodes on long-distance ethno-nationalism. Today, they speak with Peter Beinart (an editor at Jewish Currents and Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York) about his just-released book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025). It aims to mobilize Jewish religious ethics and teachings to reach a Jewish-American audience shaped by Zionism. Beinart seeks to debunk myths that prevent many from realizing that the moral abominations committed against Palestinians are part of the Israeli settler-colonial-nation-state project.
Peter is haunted by the fact that some of the most ardent opposition to apartheid in his parents’ country of South Africa came from secular Jewish people, and is troubled by the nationalistic tendency of religiously observant Jews there in the apartheid era. The three also discuss questions of solidarity against and among authoritarians, Israel’s threat to international law, the dangers of minority alliances with majoritarian politics, campus politics, and the importance of seeing Gaza and Palestine as connected to us all.
Peter’s Recallable Book is Accepting the Yoke of Heaven: Commentary on the Weekly Torah Portion, by Orthodox scientist, philosopher, and Judaica scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994), who emphasized the idolatry of investing the state with anything more than a supportive role in Jewish life.
Mentioned in the Episode:
119 Violent Majorities, Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 2: Natasha Roth-Rowland with Ajantha and Lori
Aparna Gopalan, "The Hindu Nationalists Using the Pro-Israel Playbook," Jewish Currents.
Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative.
Martin Luther King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message.
The Beinart Notebook podcast
Listen and Read Here.
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The Ethics of Karbala: Myths, Modernity, and Virtues of Nobility (Routledge, 2024) investigates the relationship between sacred narratives and the development of character. Focusing on the warrior ethos expressed in accounts of the Battle of Karbala, Zargar searches for the place of the martial virtues in modern life and warfare.
This book is the first of its kind in taking a virtue ethics approach to the study of Islamic history. It offers an ethical analysis of arguably the most pivotal moment in Islamic history. To do so, it makes use of interdisciplinary methods, especially global philosophy and religious studies, and draws on philosophical concepts spanning from Nietzsche to Iqbal. The book’s clear and engaging prose makes it accessible to readers seeking a profound understanding of intersections between practical philosophy and religious myths.
This book targets upper-level undergraduate readers seeking to discover Islamic ethics. It will serve nonspecialists, specialists in Shiʿi Islamic studies, and all those interested in Islamic ethics, virtue ethics, cross-cultural philosophy, Nietzsche studies, military science, and religious studies.
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Goodbye, Tahrir Square: Coming of Age as a Jew of the Nile (Cherry Orchard Books, 2025) is a first-person memoir written from the standpoint of a Jewish boy growing up in Egypt during the watershed years that shaped the Middle East into the powder keg it is today.
Described as the “Holden Caulfield of the Nile” for his rebellious attitude, the boy witnessed—between the ages of seven to fourteen—the 1952 revolution that overthrew King Farouk and gave rise to the dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser; the 1956 Suez war that marked the end of the British empire; and in its wake the destruction of the Jewish community that had lived in Egypt since Biblical times.
Though set in times of revolution and war, Goodbye, Tahrir Square is not a political book. It is the story of a boy whose close-knit extended Sephardic family, full of rich traditions and colorful characters, is suddenly torn asunder by the forces of revolution and war. A man-child coming of age like a wild cactus in the rubble of the past, overcoming a hostile environment, forging friendships that transcend ethnic and religious animus, and finding his own identity as he awakens to literature, history, art, archaeology, and the magic of love and sex.
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This volume utilises the personal papers of Sir Ronald Storrs, as well as other archival materials, to make a microhistorical investigation of his period as Governor of Jerusalem between 1917 and 1926.
It builds upon Edward Said’s work on the Orientalist ‘determining imprint’ by arguing that Storrs took a deeply personal approach to governing the city; one determined by his upbringing, his education in the English private school system and his service as a British official in Colonial Egypt. Burnham recognises the influence of these experiences on Storrs’ perceptions of and attitudes towards Jerusalem, identifying how these formative years manifested themselves on the city and in the Governor’s interactions with Jerusalemites of all backgrounds and religious beliefs. It also highlights the restrictions placed on Storrs’ approach by his British superiors, Palestinians and the Zionist movement, alongside the limitations imposed by his own attitudes and worldview. Placing Storrs’ personality at the centre of discussion on early Mandate Jerusalem exposes a nuanced and complex picture of how personality and politics collided to influence its everyday life and built environment.
Sir Ronald Storrs: Personality and Policy in Mandate Palestine, 1917-1926 (Routledge, 2024) is aimed at historians and students of the late-Ottoman Empire and British Mandate in Palestine, colonialism and imperialism, and indeed microhistory.
Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org
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From the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, recurrent and extreme climate disruptions became an underlying yet unacknowledged component of escalating conflict between Christian Armenian peasants and Muslim Kurdish pastoralists in Ottoman Kurdistan. By the eve of the First World War, the Ottoman state's shifting responses to these mounting tensions transformed the conflict into organized and state-sponsored violence.
In her book The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century (University of Cambridge Press, 2024), Dr. Zozan Pehlivan examines the impact of climate on local communities, their responses and resilience strategies, arguing that nineteenth-century ecological change had a transformative and antagonistic impact on economy, state, and society.
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