The issue “Pluralisms in Emergenc(i)es” is a result of a two-conference series that took place in Amman and Tunis, in December 2017 and October 2018, respectively. Taking these two locations as historical epicenters of human, commodity, and capital mobility, in two connected regions, these conferences set out to interrogate the historical, social, and religious underpinnings of the migrant and refugee crisis in order to position this moment as a state of emergence, rather than a state of emergency. The focus of the essays included here explores pluralism as it has emerged in response to contemporary global crises, and asks a number of questions: What are the variations in how “pluralism” is understood, and how does it function in a time of crisis? What are the material and immaterial modes through which pluralism takes shape? Moreover, how does it change through the circulation of people - as migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers – and capital – whether under the auspices of international development funds, religious aid, or new labor markets? By crossing disciplinary boundaries, this special issue enters into a fundamental discussion about how “pluralism” is conceived across sites and offers new vistas for its conceptualization in North Africa and the Middle East.

In early 2020 Behrouz Boochani and Omid Tofighian conducted a speaking tour of the United States, Canada, UK, and Europe (including Ireland). They presented at numerous universities, including the University of Cambridge. In their Cambridge talk they focused on the transformative potential of storytelling and the importance of creating new intellectual frameworks for resistance. Key themes and issues in their discussion included features of Manus Prison Theory, analysis of the book No Friend but the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison, Australia's detention industry, and colonialism. The three parts of this article involve: the context to Boochani's incarceration and the creation and success of his award-winning book; a dialogue between Boochani and Tofighian; and a series of analytical remarks by Tofighian in response to audience questions.

Pluralism is deployed to govern migration across the Global North and Global South in contradictory ways. Fearing the arrival of migrants on its own shores – a threat to its biopolitical constitution – Europe deploys discourses of pluralism in the Global South to encourage migrants en route to Europe to sedentarize in “transit” countries like Sudan. Neoliberal development projects propagate the virtues of pluralism to host communities in Sudan, who are exhorted to view migrants as potential economic assets. Yet, in the context of Europe those same migrants continue to be seen as an economic and racial threat. While a lack of skills and entrepreneurialism are framed as the “root cause” of migration to Europe, migrants are paradoxically presented as trainable and therefore economically productive in the Global South. This article offers a critical examination of consolidating migration management practices in Sudan, their imbrication with development projects, and the racial anxieties they evoke in both Europe and in “transit” countries. It homes in on not only populations headed towards Europe, but those intending to remain in Sudan, notably Syrians, and explores the lessons and aporias of Sudan's hitherto open-door policy towards the latter.

Literature in Human Geography has given much attention to “encounters” and their impact on negotiating difference in everyday life. These studies, however, have focused solely on cities, while “other” spaces like refugee camps have received little attention to date. In this paper, I highlight the significance of “encounters” in camps by exposing three main types: the “refugee-refugee,” the “refugee-humanitarian,” and the “refugee-more-than-human” encounters. Using empirical examples from Zaatari camp in Jordan, I show that the “refugee-refugee” encounters cannot be fully understood without taking refugees’ culture, background, and urban identities into consideration. I also explain how the “refugee-humanitarian” encounters result in new types of behaviors and might harden the boundaries between both groups. And lastly, I demonstrate how the “refugee-more-than-human” encounters can inform us about refugees’ unique experiences with shelters, space, and materiality. Building on the examples given for each type, this article suggests that “encounters” have the ability to generate knowledge and learnings, which contributes to shaping the space of the camp by either enforcing boundaries between different groups and/or by allowing new and hybrid spatialities to emerge. This not only confirms that “encounters” are an important entry point in understanding the socio-spatial and material composition of refugee camps, but also that further studies in this regard are direly needed. It also suggests that architects and planners need to allow for the “new” to emerge as a result of these encounters and, therefore, to enable flexibility and adaptability within camps’ design and planning.

Palestinian camps in Lebanon have turned once more into “transitional zones of emplacement” for thousands of people recently fleeing the Syrian conflict. In this context, the plural subjectivities emerging within the camps highlight a further connection between spatial marginalization and precarious legal statuses. My research hinges on the interconnectivities evolving around the Palestinian Bourj el Barajneh camp and Hezbollah-controlled Beirut southern suburbs moving from an ethnographic insight of the Palestinian football society. Inside the “Refugee Football Leagues,” Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese players find a space in leagues whose matches are mostly disputed within the numerous refugee camps scattered throughout the national territory. Moving from newcomers’ strategies for protection, the essay investigates how refugees living in camps experience different scales of mobility and develop a wide range of practices that extend beyond the camp's boundaries, exploring how imperceptible and hyper-mobile tactics of existence re-elaborate Palestinian refugee camps into meaningful places of elusive contestation.

One of the striking features of the literary culture of the modern Maghreb is the profusion of works that undertake to identify the essential features of the region – exercises in definition that almost always emphasize plurality. Philosophers, social scientists, and literary writers have highlighted the Maghreb's multilingualism – the coexistence of different forms of Arabic, Tamazight, French, and Spanish – the varied and hybrid cultural legacies of conquest and colonialism, and the effects of the region's geographical proximity to other parts of Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. It would be hard to find a more ubiquitous theme of francophone Maghrebi literature than cultural diversity, and the subject is by no means absent from Arabic-language literature. This preoccupation with plurality can be seen as a response to a history of colonization and decolonization with particular ideological features. In their efforts to build “l'Algérie française,” the French colonial authorities suppressed Arabic as a language of culture and government. In response, anticolonial nationalists called for the replacement of French with Arabic. “Islam is my religion, Arabic is my language, Algeria is my nation” – the catchphrase of Abdelhamid Ben Badis's Jam'iyat al-'Ulama [Association of Muslim Ulema], an Islamic reform movement of the 1930s and 1940s – later became a slogan of the nationalist movement, the Front de libération nationale (FLN) [National Liberation Front]. Since the 1980s, a similar call to restore Arabic and eliminate French has been issued by the Islamist opposition to the corrupt and undemocratic FLN government and at times by officials in that same government seeking to restore their legitimacy. In emphasizing linguistic and cultural diversity, writers and scholars have tried to tender an alternative to these recurrent efforts to delimit the region's identity.

This essay argues that the usages of the divide between Berbers and Arabs by the Algerian government and Berber activists alike should be analyzed in light of the transformation of the Imazighen into a cultural minority by the nation-state. The nation-state's definition of the majority as Arab, as well as the very concept of a minority, has shaped both the status and the grammar of the Arab-Berber divide in ways that are irreducible to how this binary functioned under French colonialism. In order to understand the distinct modes by which these categories function in Algeria today, one needs to analyze how the language of the nation-state determines their grammar, namely how they are deployed within this political context. Hence, by focusing primarily on French colonial representations of race such as the Kabyle Myth and by asserting simplified colonial continuities, the literature fails to make sense of the political centrality of the nation-state in the construction of the Amazigh question.

This essay is a reflection on the very notion of “pluralism” examined in a philosophical and theological approach. It evokes Quranic verses on pluralism and then examines the thoughts of different Muslim thinkers on the question, such as al-Farabi (d. 950), al-Ghazali (1058–1111) in the tenth and twelfth centuries, and Tierno Bokar Salif Tall (1875–1939), from Mali, in the twentieth.

A workshop entitled “Ottoman Ego-Documents” was held at Istanbul Medeniyet University on March 11–13, 2020. The workshop was organized by Istanbul Medeniyet University's Faculty of Letters in collaboration with the Center for Ego-Document Studies and supported by the Turkish Historical Society and the Foundation for Science, Art, History and Literature (İSTEV). It was attended by specialists in history, literature, law, and theology. This event marked the first time in Turkey that this topic was discussed with a large scope. The only previous organized discussion in Turkey on “ego-documents” seems to have been “Autobiographical Themes in Turkish Literature: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives,” held jointly by Boğaziçi University and the Orient-Institut der DMG in 2003. This discussion was mostly theoretical and the material covered belonged mainly to the post-Tanzimat era. A volume edited by Olcay Akyıldız, Halim Kara, and Börte Sagaster, the organizers of that event, was subsequently published by Ergon.

Palestinian student filmmakers based in the West Bank and Gaza tell stories of daily life in a collected set of short films which provide valuable insights for classes on the Middle East.

Teaching the history of the modern Middle East and North Africa at a small liberal arts university offered an opportunity to address student demands to “decolonize the curriculum.” As the survey course comes under increasing scrutiny, we asked where exactly is the Middle East located in our political imagination today? This essay focuses on the role of maps in rethinking geographic frameworks by using a seaborne perspective, that of the Mediterranean, Arabian and Red Seas (MARS) in contrast to the familiar Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Global Academy is an initiative that sustains research collaborations and knowledge production among regionally-focused scholars from the Middle East and North Africa and their counterparts outside the region. Spearheaded by MESA, the project is an expression of the scholarly field's commitment to scholarship in and from the region. By awarding scholarships to displaced scholars from the MENA region currently located in North America, and thereby enabling them to attend meetings, workshops, and conferences, the project supports individuals whose academic trajectory has been adversely affected by developments in their home countries.

What can film studies bring to the study of Arab culture, politics, and history? The past ten years have seen an increase in historical, theoretical, and methodological exchanges between Middle East studies and film and media studies. The sub-field of “Arab film studies” (Ginsberg and Lippard 2020, viii) has emerged as one possible intersection of these two fields of inquiry. This is illustrated by two recent book series, the Cinema and Media Cultures in the Middle East series at Peter Lang Publishing (edited by Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard) and the Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema series at Palgrave Macmillan (edited by Nezar Andary and Samirah Alkassim). Waleed Mahdi's Arab Americans in Film (2020) and Peter Limbrick's Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi (2020) consolidate these exchanges across ethnic studies, area studies, political sciences, (art) history, and film and media studies. While Mahdi primarily positions himself from within ethnic studies and Limbrick is first a film scholar, both have published in reference journals in film studies, Middle East studies, and cultural studies.

The study of modern and contemporary art from Islamic lands, and particularly the Arab world, is a developing field. Over the past few decades, a variety of publications on modern and contemporary art from the Arab world and its diasporas has appeared in art magazines, journals, and exhibition and auction catalogues. There is, however, still a lack of scholarly literature and reliable resources on the subject. Many such existing sources have focused on productions that are largely in line with certain interests or agendas pursued by the particular magazine/journal, exhibition, or art market in question. Therefore, although recent scholarly output has played a crucial role in introducing modern art in the Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa, these publications have not sufficiently filled the gap of discussion regarding certain aspects of the subject. Modern Art in the Arab World, a collection of critical writings by Arab intellectuals and artists, offers an unparalleled source for the study of modernism in the Arab world. Mapping the primary documents with additional entries written by the editors and other scholars, this book addresses the major historical, conceptual, theoretical, and aesthetic issues that inform the modern art paradigm in the Arab world. Arranged largely in a chronological order, it explores the art of the Arab world by tracing the main discourses that have shaped artistic practices and transformations in the region from the mid-nineteenth century until the late 1980s.