Around the year 2015, new tidings began to be heard across the Lebanese coastline as local marine biologists—receiving reports from divers and fishermen—became aware of a new phenomenon in the coastal waters. Pterois miles, the lionfish, samakat al-asad, a species not usually found in the waters, were being encountered in rapidly increasing numbers. Over the following years, as other Mediterranean countries started reporting similar occurrences, a sense of alert slowly built. Dina, one of my interlocutors and a shining young marine ecologist, had been at work setting up a new NGO to conduct marine pedagogy and environmental awareness campaigns. As the invasion proceeded apace, she and her group reacted to the invading fish swarming the Lebanese coastal waters, putting together a counter-campaign. Meetings were called, ideas pitched, and plans convened. The invasion had to be confronted, just as Elias, another interlocutor from Dina's group, a hobbyist diver in his late 20s and active participant in civil society campaigns, told me during an interview in late 2018:

At the climax of Egyptian author Out el Kouloub's novel, Zanouba, the reader is witness to a crime. We find ourselves in Matariyya, a village north of Cairo, in a somber bedchamber with a blind shaykh. It is the room where only a week before Zanouba, the novel's titular character, suffered a forced miscarriage in the final month of her pregnancy and lost her long-coveted male child. The women of the household are lined up in front of the shaykh—all except for Zanouba, who is still bedridden, and her co-wife, Mashallah, who is exempt from participating because she is menstruating. They prepare to swear on the Qurʾan their innocence in the matter of the miscarriage, as Zanouba's husband, Abdel Meguid, and her mother-in-law suspect foul play.

The relative ignorance of Armenian narratives in the analysis of current affairs in the Middle East raised by several authors in this roundtable is symptomatic of a larger problem facing ethno-religious minorities in the region. Until the 1990s, Western exposure to Middle Eastern Christianity in both academic and popular contexts was minimal at best. Outside specific studies of notable groups, scholars largely ignored non-Muslim religious sects. At the level of popular discourse, political Islam had illuminated the majoritarian religious impulses of the region, contributing to common Orientalist stereotypes of Arab and Muslim political culture.1 The presence of several million indigenous Christians, the vast majority of whom represented ancient indigenous communities, was largely ignored among academics and journalists. The notable exception was Lebanon, where Christian participation in the drama of the civil conflict of the 1980s was often noted in the press and occasionally scrutinized in academia.

Standing inside a t-wall factory in Erbil in the summer of 2021, I was struck by the fact that, nearly twenty years after the US invasion of Iraq, these military walls were still in production. T-walls are six-ton steel-reinforced, blast-proof concrete wall segments named for their upside-down t-shape (Fig. 1). They were introduced to Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s. Derivative of the Berlin wall's design, they are recognizable to those who have witnessed the Israeli separation wall, which is composed of thousands of t-walls lined up.

For a long time, women's crime has been quite a no-go area for feminist thinkers. With the lesser frequency of female crime seemingly encouraging quantitative-minded criminologists to dismiss a gendered approach as altogether irrelevant, theories of crime, in fact, have been mostly written by and tested on men. The emergence of a feminist perspective in criminology pluralized and decentered the disciplinary epistemology with important outcomes. On one side, it paved the way for the investigation of the distinctive ways in which individuals socialized as women commit crimes, deconstructing the die-hard stereotype of female criminals’ abnormality, that is, the idea that female offenders deviate from a female standard of nondelinquency. On the other, quoting Loraine Gelsthorpe, feminist criminology “has not only developed a critique of accumulated wisdom about female offenders and victims, but has illuminated institutionalized sexism within criminological theory, policy and practice.” Feminism has stimulated the production of criminological knowledge both empirically and theoretically. As far as empirical studies are concerned, historian Philippa Levine, in a seminal piece on prostitution, crime, and empire, remarked that prostitution, erroneously conceived as a quintessentially female crime, constituted an important exception to the unquestioned association of crime and masculinity, resulting in the neglect of serious gendered analysis of crime. Here the criminalization of commercial sex can be explained by the fact that prostitution is considered to defy the very norm at the core of the power gender system, that female sexuality has to be kept monogamous, reproductive, and conjugal to service the patriarchal social order. As Levine argues, prostitution “offers the prospect not only of women defined by their sexual nature but also of a more threatening vision of women actively putting that sexuality to work for their own benefit.” As a consequence, the agency of women exchanging sex for money promiscuously outside of wedlock has been conceptualized in two different apparently paradoxical ways: women prostitute themselves either because they are abnormal, so they act out of their deviancy, or because they are forced to do so, so they act under coercion. Completely lost to these split understandings, juxtaposing blame and compassion, was obviously the meaning of women's agency and rationality, especially when these were inscribed within a logic of survival and subsistence.

In the fall of 2021, I taught a graduate seminar entitled Women and Gender in the Arab World at Georgetown University. It had been two decades since 9/11 and the start of the “War on Terror,” events that most of my students were not old enough to recall, but which still had, in one way or another, profoundly shaped their interest or experience in the region. In planning the course, I received a syllabus that had been used in past years. The first week was an introduction to the course, and it consisted of two essays intended to frame the state of the field of Middle East women's studies: Lila Abu-Lughod's “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” and Mounira Charrad's “Gender in the Middle East: Islam, State, and Agency.”

On June 24, 2015, a huge swarm of jellyfish clogged the cooling system of an Israeli coal-fueled power plants located on the Mediterranean shoreline, almost forcing a shutdown. Images from the event displayed tons of pale blue, translucent jellies, lumped together in a container and spread over the factory floor after being removed from the cooling system filter. The spectacular incident prompted speculation that the jellyfish were foreign agents sent from Egypt to sabotage Israeli security. It may seem laughable, but this is not the first time that non-humans have figured as agents and national security threats in geopolitical dramas in the Middle East. In 2010, following repeated shark attacks on tourists in one of Egypt's Red Sea resorts, Sharm El-Sheikh, the governor of South Sinai told the media he could not rule out the possibility of the attacking shark being remotely controlled by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. In this context, foreign, underwater jellyfish armies are nothing out of the ordinary.

This roundtable focuses on the marginalization of ethnicities or religious denominations within Middle East studies, and in the larger realm of history writing. Without a nation–state of their own to preserve their language and history, the Assyrian people and the Church of the East denomination of Christianity fell subject to repression in Turkey, only recently finding a voice. Marginalization in history books and educational curricula is one symptom of broken treaty commitments and lack of equal access to state institutions and funds. In our century, marginalization has given way to something perhaps even worse: vilification and expulsion even from countries outside of Turkey where the Assyrians reside, during a neo-Ottoman period in which parts of Iraq and Syria came to more closely resemble Turkey, a resemblance that included the presence of Turkish arms.

Modern carcerality in Iran, with its attendant systems of surveillance, policing, and mass imprisonment, was a gendered project from the outset. In turn, the new modern prisons of the Pahlavi era (1925–79) provoked gendered anxieties about seemingly rising rates of female and child criminality, the deteriorating family unit, and the inherent sin and vice of life in a modern city. In general, it is difficult to overstate the wholesale changes that the modern carceral system has brought to Iran. The establishment of modern prisons, an effort begun in the first decades of the 20th century, has led to an enduring transformation in social worlds for Iranians of all genders. For much of Iran's pre-20th-century history, forced confinement of any kind was a relative rarity, legal practices and norms were diffuse and diverse, and long periods of incarceration were virtually nonexistent. The conceit of prisoner reform central to the modern penitentiary model—wherein centralized modern governments imagine prisons as rehabilitative spaces in which socially undesirable “criminals” can be reformed into good “citizens”— is nowhere found in the archive of Iran's pre-20th-century punishments.

On 29 April 2022, the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson published “In Support of Boycott, Divest, Sanction and a Free Palestine” in support of divestment from Israel.1 In it, the editorial board cited the importance of global solidarity and charges leveled by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch against Israel, of “crimes against humanity.”2 The Crimson clearly had changed its position from 2002, when its staff had published “Do Not Divest from Israel,” regarding the comparison between Israel and “Apartheid-era South Africa so fundamentally flawed as to be offensive.” In twenty years, the conversation on college campuses has indeed changed.3

At the dawn of the 21st century the “War on Terror” ushered in an era in which some were besieged by wars and others by war-related imagery. For the fortunate who live outside of war zones, mostly in the Global North and West, the experience of war has been primarily a mediated one. With the advent of digital imagery and its many evolving and developing technological transmutations, the possibilities of reproduction, representation, manipulation, and circulation have grown exponentially in the past twenty years. Yet in the grand scheme of human communication history, the “pictorial turn” is a relatively recent phenomenon that requires further analysis. In this article, I unpack and analyze some of the key media moments from the vast visual lexicon and iconography of the “War on Terror” to reveal its scaffolding and machinations and offer counterstrategies of resistance. I argue that the “War on Terror” is the orchestrated sum of literal and figurative imagery, a coordinated public relations disinformation media campaign designed to hide real wars and their true destruction and costs.

When the television drama series The Women's Prison (Sijin al-Nisā’) was aired in Egypt during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan in 2014 (covering thirty episodes, each around 30 to 40 minutes), it became a hit and attracted a huge audience (Fig. 1). This was partly due to the popularity of its major theme, which focused on women and crime through characters inhabiting the famous al-Qanatir al-Khayriyya women's prison, located on the outskirts of Cairo. Another reason for its success was the group of creative women who produced it: director Kamla Abu-Zikri, scriptwriter Maryam Naʿum, art director Shirin Farghal, costume designer Rim al-ʿAdil, and director of photography Nancy ʿAbd al-Fattah. Abu-Zikri and Naʿum had collaborated on earlier works, most notably for their 2009 acclaimed film One-Zero (Wahid-Sifr) and the drama series Zaat, adapted from a famous novel of the same name by the veteran Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim, which aired during Ramadan in 2013. Moreover, the key female role in both Zaat and The Women's Prison was played by the popular star actress Nelly Karim, guaranteeing high viewing rates.

On October 16, 2020, the Los Angeles Review of Books published a powerful letter about the war on Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabagh) that was signed by scholars who are considered to be among those most actively engaged in postcolonial theory and political activism, including Tariq Ali, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Noam Chomsky, Amitav Ghosh, and Cornel West. This letter read:

I came of age in the early years of the “War on Terror.” As a young student activist, my initial arguments against the wars in 2001 and 2003 followed a common logic, responding to disinformation, ahistorical narratives, and false claims about Iraq, Afghanistan, and Muslims. Like many who work in the fields of Middle Eastern studies, this work was driven by the belief that exposing the narratives of the target nations to be wrong would in turn expose the false premises behind the wars. I have by now spent my entire adult life researching, writing, and teaching about the “War on Terror” with a specific focus on the war on Iraq. My hope was that “humanizing” and providing more insight into the views of the people “over there” would alter popular ideas in the United States and steer American state actions in a different direction than intervention.

One late morning in June 2019 I sought refuge from the blazing sun within the magnificent structure of the 10th-century Church of the Holy Mother of God, better known as the cathedral of the medieval Armenian capital of Ani.1 The cathedral, the masterpiece of the celebrated architect Trdat, is located inside the walled city, today a sprawling site of ruins perched at the extreme edge of the modern Republic of Turkey on its still-closed border with neighboring Armenia. Despite having lost its dome to the ravages of time and to earthquakes, its edifice still stands monumental, with exterior and interior walls marked with hundreds of crosses and inscriptions in the distinct Armenian script, a history carved in stone. In its shade, I had stumbled into a group of two dozen Turkish tourists, who, visibly in awe of their surroundings, were attentively listening to their guide attribute the building to, and praise the splendors of, Seljuk architecture. The surreal experience took me right back to the travel writer Jeremy Seal's recollections of his visit, some twenty-five years prior, to the then-ruined (now renovated) Church of the Holy Cross on the island of Aghtamar (renamed Akdamar) near Van. Perplexed at the structure being described as Seljuk, Seal had confronted his companion-guide as to why the Seljuks, of Muslim faith, would have built themselves a church in that place, centuries before their arrival to the region. He recognized having been “taught a lesson in forgetting,” on how to airbrush “the awkward realities enshrined in this building.” “How had it come to this,” Seal wondered, “that decent Turks . . . could refashion the evidence of bricks and mortar so that their absolving view of national history might prevail?”2

At the intersection of multipolar, multi-scalar sites of mutual exchange and tension, Afghanistan and Iraq conjure imaginaries of shadowy and risky geographies wired up to dispersed terrorist cells around the globe. These spaces constitute the sites where the “civilizing process” of the “War on Terror” takes place, “laboratories of globalization” where global hegemonic neoliberal projects of free market democratization and development get stranded. At the same time, they are spaces where global interconnections are accelerated, and where multiple mobilities, often contingent upon expectations about the successes and failures of reconstruction, are interwoven, producing networks that extend well beyond national borders.