This short article explores trans mothering as an embodied practice of popular sovereignty in the context of the Syrian state army. Moving beyond traditional state-centered and militarized masculinities that shape scholarly notions of sovereignty, I demonstrate how trans mothering—embodied through listening, care, and affirmation of fellow soldiers—became a mode of antiwar world-making amid Assad’s counterrevolutionary war. The article centers on the story of Duaa, a trans woman whose gender identity was denied by the Syrian state. Forcibly conscripted and sent to the frontlines in the Damascus suburbs, Duaa developed everyday practices of trans care and support toward fellow soldiers, reorienting military service around mutual support rather than state control. Building on ethnographic research and life history interviews in Lebanon, I engage with Syrian–Palestinian writer Naya Rajab’s approach to trans mothering and Amahl Bishara’s theorization of popular sovereignty as a disruptive force against authoritarian rule. Through this framework, the article illustrates how Duaa’s trans mothering temporarily shifts the army’s hierarchy into acts that nurture mutual care rather than sovereign obedience. Her trans care reimagines sovereignty not necessarily through resistance, but through the everyday reconstitution of state power on state military bases. Finally, the article argues for a reconsideration of popular sovereignty in post-Assad Syria, where massacres and displacement continue to serve as technologies of sovereign rule under Ahmad al-Sharaa.

The idea of decentering the human from our understanding of the world is under discussion across the globe. Behind this lies the question of anthropocentrism and the social sciences formed around it. In what follows, I outline what is involved in decentering humans and how this process is linked to materiality. This is not a new issue: an extensive tradition of materialist critiques of anthropocentrism stretches from eleventh-century Iran to sixteenth-century Rome, post-war Germany, and Indigenous knowledges passed down across generations. We need to access these histories and understand how they have interacted with, pushed back against, and been reconfigured by colonialism and empire. Dealing with such matters raises conceptual problems about power and agency, structure and change, and nature and the social. But this work also leads to questions about global knowledge production, including who gets to theorize, who is theorized, and how different regions—such as Iran—are rendered intelligible. While there is no single blueprint for change, there is scope for invention and experiment. In this article, I contribute to the nexus of new materialism, postcolonialism, and Iranian studies by exploring these questions and providing an overview of the special issue: “Materiality in Iran.”

Between December 2018 and August 2019, political activities in Sudan resulted in the overthrow of the incumbent regime. Despite efforts by the security apparatus to retain control, continued mobilization of Sudanese working peoples ensured civilian participation in the transitional government. How did the organization of Sudanese working peoples lead to the overthrow of the regime and challenge the state? Drawing on the work of Global African thinkers, and analyzing organizational documents, systematically collected media reports on the uprising (2018–2019), and insights from ethnographic fieldwork in Khartoum (2022), I argue that the nonhierarchical coordination of autonomous, self-organized groups - such as the Neighborhood Resistance Committees and Tea Sellers Association - representing different sections of the working poeples was central to the movement’s success. These findings enrich our understanding of the Sudanese revolutionary process by showing how coordinated self-organization served as an asset for political change.

This contribution includes an original poem, “Benediction” in tribute of Valentin-Yves Mudimbe and the first translation in English of selections from Les Fuseaux, parfois (1974). Mudimbe authored several collections in the 1970s, and this translation is intended to draw more scholarly attention to his poetic output.

This article reconsiders V.Y. Mudimbe’s contribution to “decolonial” impulses that are central to current preoccupations in fields such as postcolonial studies. It argues that key concepts developed by Mudimbe, such as the “colonial library,” have been overlooked in these discussions. Further, the article provides insight into important aspects of Mudimbe’s thought on the colonial library by reminding readers of the genealogy he excavates in describing the contours of the colonial library and its continued influence (likened by Mudimbe to a lingering odor) that is still to be dismantled.

This paper explores the lesser-known World War I memorials across the United States, hidden in cemeteries and behind closed doors, which were built by and for immigrant communities during the interwar years. These memorials tell a story of the cataclysmic loss World War I brought to a generation of new Americans. Proclaiming some aspects of their history and concealing other aspects, immigrant communities brought a nuanced response to World War I, a war that destroyed four empires, empires from which many of them had only recently come. They strove to honor both their homelands and their new lives in the United States. But by being concealed far from the larger American public, these memorials also revealed a distrust in popular interpretations of the war and what it had meant, interpretations which excluded immigrants from the national narrative and revealed a shaky grasp on international affairs when they did attempt to include foreign nationals. These memorials represent a cautious but determined effort by immigrant communities to claim a place in the United States.

For decades, the Democratic Party has commanded the overwhelming support of racial and ethnic minority voters in the United States. While a majority of Black, Latino, and Asian American voters continue to vote for the Democrats, recent elections and polls have suggested that Republicans are making inroads. The 2024 Democratic electorate was whiter than it had been in 2012, even though the US has become more racially diverse in that same period. There has been much speculation in the media over Donald Trump’s apparent appeal to some racial and ethnic minority voters, but not enough attention has been given to differences between and within racial and ethnic minority groups. This article emphasizes key differences. African Americans have remained more loyal to the Democratic Party than Latino and Asian American electorates. The article then examines class and ideological differences within racial and ethnic groups. It finds that while working-class and conservative Latinos and Asian Americans have joined the Republican fold, the same cannot be said to the same extent for working-class or conservative African Americans. Intergenerational partisan socialization is identified as a key difference.