On October 5, 2023, Ubisoft Entertainment SA (Ubisoft) released Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the thirteenth installment in its video-game series launched in 2007. Since its inception, the Assassin’s Creed franchise has engaged hundreds of millions of players around the world; the most recent estimates indicate that Mirage players number in the millions.1 Set in 9th-century Baghdad, the game centers on Basim Ibn Ishaq, a character introduced in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (2020). The authors of this article served as consultants and collaborators for the game, under the auspices of the Digital Lab for Islamic Culture and Collections (DLIVCC), based at the University of Edinburgh. As such, we were among the external historians and institutions who helped create and contribute to the game’s educational feature.2 This article offers reflections on our collective experiences working on Assassin’s Creed Mirage, reviews historical representation of Islamicate cultures in video games, discusses the remit of the DLIVCC consultancy, and identifies some structural challenges to diversifying and decolonizing video games and game-development processes.3 Lastly, we propose steps for scholars and institutions wishing to broaden the impact of their research through decolonization work across the academic, video games, and GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) sectors.

During the Second World War, Germans, Austrians and Italians living in Great Britain were designated as ‘enemy aliens’ and consequently interned. The worsening situation on the continent in May and June 1940 stirred up hysteria that spies and saboteurs could be amongst the Germans and Austrians. Mass arrests started in May 1940, and Italians were soon caught up in the detentions when Mussolini declared war on 10 June, thus filling internment camps to capacity. Canada and Australia agreed to take some of the ‘most dangerous characters’, facilitating the most controversial aspect of internment – deportation – which led to the ultimate tragedy when the SS Arandora Star was torpedoed and sunk on 2 July 1940. Building on previous scholarship that focuses on either German or Italian internment, this article examines both government policy towards and the internee experience of these two groups on an equal footing, thus furthering integration of the Italian narrative within internment historiography.

This article examines the Wadi Salib protest that erupted in Haifa in the summer of 1959 against the background of the history of the children in the neighborhood during the 1950s. One of the main causes of the protest, which was led by Jewish migrants from Morocco, was the educational and social condition of the children in Wadi Salib. During the Mandate period, Wadi Salib and the surrounding areas had already emerged as a focus of poverty and deprivation. Among other aspects, the article examines the changes that occurred in the character of the neighborhood after 1948 and the essence of Wadi Salib, with its street steps, as a liminal space between downtown Haifa and the Hadar HaCarmel neighborhood. The liminal character of Wadi Salib was manifested in its status as an impoverished migrant area, in the participation of children in the protest of the summer of 1959, and in the educational, social, and health problems that faced the children. This character was also manifested in the manner in which the children of Wadi Salib challenged the physical and symbolic boundaries that enclosed the neighborhood.

This paper critically reviews and examines the available data concerning Italians embarked on the SS Arandora Star on 30 June 1940. It encompasses their fate on 2 July when the ship was sunk, their subsequent journeys and the sources used to verify the conclusions. The principal aim is to establish, as far as is possible, the precise number, correct names and other details of those who were embarked on the ship. A fully validated ‘Embarkation Listing’ is published here for the first time.

On May 15, 1972, the Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Algeria’s President Houari Boumedienne arrived in the workers’ town of El Hadjar, near Annaba, to celebrate what appeared to be postcolonial Algeria’s most important economic achievement. In a festive atmosphere, Castro cut the ribbon inaugurating a powerful blast furnace constructed by the Soviet Union and a rolling mill made by the Italian firm Innocenti in the steel plant of El Hadjar.1 Promised by the French colonial state, but built step by step after Algeria’s independence by the government of the Algerian Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale; FLN), the El Hadjar steel plant was the heavy industry the country hoped would spur its industrialization, much like the heavy industry that once constituted the cornerstone of industrialization in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a major source of inspiration for Algeria; it also was a key provider of technology, training, and further technical assistance. Reporting on El Hadjar’s opening ceremony, the French newspaper, Le Monde, did not fail to observe that, “The Algerian government entrusted the USSR to expand the plant, increasing its production capacity [from 400,000] to nearly 1.5 million tons [per year] in 1977.”2

From the early years of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, observers predicted that their de facto annexation might occur. Fifty-seven years later, it has happened. Although governed differently than other zones within the Israeli state, neither territory can be separated from Israel. Yet, the territories’ official status is that they are not part of the state. We offer four reinforcing analyses—legal, historical, discursive, and political—of this sustained discrepancy between what is and what is officially said to be. By analyzing Israel’s juridical techniques for regularizing the incorporation of territories occupied beginning in 1948, we show that de facto annexation has been Israel’s predominant form of territorial expansion. This helps account for the failure to implement de jure annexation, the intensity of conflict over attempts to overhaul the Israeli judiciary, and debates over the future of postwar Gaza.

Using the concept of the carceral state, this article articulates how Israel’s control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip has shifted to a nondemocratic one-state paradigm. While, initially, Israel operated a separate military carceral system for these areas, between 2000 and 2006 it dismantled the military system, transferred most Palestinian prisoners into Israel, and rebranded its civilian prison service as the National Prison Authority, making it the sole agency responsible for the incarceration of Palestinians. This reorganization consolidated a single carceral system inside Israeli territory—the one carceral state— which serves as crucial evidence of the de facto one-state paradigm and forms a centerpiece of this new regime in Israel/Palestine. By analyzing a broad range of archival and administrative documents and 168 Supreme Court decisions on the management of prisons and Palestinian prisoners, this study reveals how the massive “exclusionary inclusion” of the Palestinian prisoner population in Israeli state law and its administrative mechanisms changes the entire landscape of the Israeli settler-colonial citizenship regime. Palestinian prisoners become “carceral citizens” of the “one state” and are subject to a parallel, alternate legality, in which they expand their repertoire of resistance against the wider racialized and repressive regime across Palestine/Israel.

This article progresses Second World War historiography of ‘enemy alien’ internment, especially of the SS Arandora Star, sunk in 1940 with a high loss of Italian civilian lives. Employing a new paradigm, that of the deathscape, defined as a topography of death and the practices that surround it, this investigation recontextualises Arandora Star remembrance in Scotland. Ambiguous loss, complicated grieving, disenfranchisements in mourning and absences in multiple layers of the deathscape form overarching themes that are explored in parallel to emotional-affective memory. The previously neglected study of individual memorialisation, both private and ‘official’, provides an important primary source in the fragmented materiality of the deathscape, allowing fresh insight on both cultural manifestations and political context. As the material and cultural apex of the deathscape, the Italian Cloister Garden and Arandora Star Memorial in Glasgow, created by Archbishop Mario Conti in 2011, are evaluated through the lenses of leadership, identity and heritage activism.

The roots of the Arab world’s current Russian entanglements reach deep into the tsarist and Soviet periods. However, this shared history has fallen through the cracks of academic structures that approach the two regions separately. This roundtable, part of a growing scholarly effort to heal the area studies divide, expands and reflects on the recently published book Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History, which we co-edited with historian Eileen Kane.1

Within British-Italian history of the Second World War, there are several questions surrounding the sinking of the SS Arandora Star, on 2 July 1940, which still remain problematic. Nevertheless, this tragedy continues to play a prominent role in the heritage and memories of the Anglo-Italian communities in the UK. This article focuses on the experiences and memories of the Arandora Star from the perspective of members of the Italian community in the North-East of England. Oral histories of Italian civilian internees who were embarked onto the ocean liner were collected via qualitative interviews with descendants of victims and survivors. This article contributes to raising awareness of Arandora scholarship by articulating how memories were interpreted retrospectively and transmitted down generations. Informing the debate on the purpose of misremembering in oral history, this article sheds light on the events and their imaginary reconstruction.