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Thinking about Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2013

Laleh Khalili
Laleh Khalili*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics and International Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, London; e-mail: lk4@soas.ac.uk
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Extract

Colleagues with whom I spoke about this piece had one of two responses: “Why do you want to feed the flames of cliché and prejudice about violence in the Middle East?” and “Surely, there has been no theorization of violence in the Middle East.” Regarding the first response, I agree that thinking about violence in the Middle East can be a fraught enterprise. This is because a hysterical mainstream narrative locates the sources of violence in or emanating from the region in Islam(ism) or attributes it to some half-baked but remarkably persistent cultural explanations (tribalism, ancient hatreds, cycles of violence, etc.) which uncomfortably echo the racism of an earlier scholarly era. But enough innovative works have emerged on violence that we can move—at least in our scholarly conversations—beyond this terrain of prejudice and paranoia.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 4 , November 2013 , pp. 791 - 794
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

NOTES

Author's note: I am grateful to Lara Deeb, Toby Craig Jones, and Darryl Li for carefully and critically reading this piece, commenting on it, and arguing with me about it.

1 See, among many others, Abdel-Malek, Anouar, Egypt: Military Society (New York: Random House, 1968)Google Scholar; Kandil, Hazem, Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen: Egypt's Road to Revolt (London: Verso, 2012)Google Scholar; Fahmy, Khaled, All the Pasha's Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; and Heydemann, Steven, ed., War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

2 See, inter alia, Pearlman, Wendy, Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Neep, Daniel, Occupying Syria under the French Mandate: Insurgency, Space and State Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Thénault, Sylvie, Violence ordinaire dans l'Algérie coloniale: Camps, internements, assignations à résidence (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2012)Google Scholar.

3 Among many others, see Rejali, Darius, Torture and Modernity: Self, Society, and State in Modern Iran (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Branche, Raphaëlle, La Torture et l'Armée: Pendant la Guerre d'Algérie, 1954–1962 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001)Google Scholar. Darryl Li points out a major gap in research on torture in postcolonial Arab regimes.

4 See, for example, Haugbolle, Sune, War and Memory in Lebanon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Volk, Lucia, Memorials and Martyrs in Modern Lebanon (Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, 2010)Google Scholar; and Makdisi, Ussama and Silverstein, Paul, Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa (Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

5 Peteet, Julie, “Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian Intifada,” American Ethnologist 21 (1994): 31–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera, Militarization and Violence against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case-Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hasso, Frances, “Discursive and Political Deployments by/of the 2002 Palestinian Female Suicide Bombers/Martyrs,” Feminist Review 81 (2005): 23–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Khalili, Laleh, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013).

7 Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); The Sources of Social Power, vol. 3, Global Empires and Revolution, 1890–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Tilly, Charles, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1992 (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993)Google Scholar.

8 In the vein of Pearlman, Violence, Nonviolence.

9 On this point, I am grateful to Toby Craig Jones, who has been an innovative and critically astute interlocutor on all things war-related.