The Middle East represents today the central stage of violent conflicts in which the global connects with the local directly through military intervention and occupation and remotely through complex political entanglements.
Members of the cluster are engaged in cross-disciplinary research projects related to violent conflict in the modern Middle East in its historical framework and contemporary unfolding. We are concered with the ethical, political and discursive dimensions of violence. Be it in the form of state-violence, foreign military occupation, protracted civil wars, and alternatively as it manifests in modes of resistance, uprisings and struggles for liberation. We take particular attention to how, in this conflict-laden context, the political is struggled over in everyday cultural materializations and in representations of violent pasts. By that we attempt to understand the articulations of political identities in and through conflicts of the Middle East and across its different geopolitical scales and solidarities - sectarian, national and transnational.
Zeina Maasri | z.maasri@brighton.ac.uk |
Graham Dawson | g.dawson@brighton.ac.uk |