As I sit down to write the introduction to this IJMES roundtable on threats to academic freedom in the Middle East and the multiple consequences of these threats for scholars from and of the region, I also am reading news about proliferating restrictions in the United States. In Florida, professors are changing their courses due to prohibitions on teaching about race issued by the state's governor and legislature, and under threat of losing their jobs and livelihood if they run afoul of these restrictions. In Minnesota an adjunct art history professor was denied future teaching opportunities and called Islamophobic by her employer for exposing her students to the range of Muslim perspectives on creating images of the Prophet Muhammad. At Harvard the former head of Human Rights Watch was initially denied a fellowship, seemingly due to the organization's reporting on Israeli human rights violations. And these instances are just a small sample of the anti–academic freedom news. They serve as a reminder that threats to academic freedom are global.

The fear of the malingering soldier or veteran has existed in Australia since its first nationwide military venture in South Africa. The establishment of the Repatriation Department in 1917 saw the medical, military and political fields work collectively, to some extent, to support hundreds of thousands of men who returned from their military service wounded or ill. Over the next decades the medical profession occasionally criticised the Repatriation Department’s alleged laxness towards soldier recipients of military pensions, particularly those with less visible war-related psychiatric conditions. In 1963 this reached a crescendo when a group of Australian doctors drew battle lines in the correspondence pages of the Medical Journal of Australia, accusing the Repatriation Department of directing a ‘national scandal’, and provoking responses by both the Minister for Repatriation and the Chairman of the War Pensions Assessment Appeal Tribunal. Although this controversy and its aftermath does allow for closer investigation of the inner workings of the Repatriation Department, the words of the doctors themselves about ‘phony cronies’, ‘deadbeats’ and ‘drongoes’ also reveal how the medical fear of the malingering soldier, and particularly the traumatised soldier-malingerer, lingered into the early 1960s and beyond. This paper will analyse the medical conceptualisation of the traumatised soldier in the 1960s in relation to historical conceptions of malingering, the increasingly tenuous position of psychiatry, as well as the socio-medical ‘sick role’, and will explore possible links with the current soldier and veteran suicide crisis in Australia.

This article explores early attempts to romanize the Arabic language in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Egypt and situates them within a global history of script reforms in the modern period. I focus on the models to write Arabic in the Latin script developed by the Cairo-based magazine al-Muqtataf between 1889 and 1897 (which, to the extent of my knowledge, have never been examined before), relating them to the responses they elicited from the magazine's readers and some of the romanization practices found in advertising, commercial displays in the streets, and governance at the time. I demonstrate that, in this period, romanized Arabic was envisioned as an original way to pursue financial profit and technological efficiency, confront European knowledge production, and redefine the standing of Arabic within transregional publishing networks that encompassed different languages and alphabets. This analysis thus offers an alternative geography of script reform that supersedes the national framework.

Anthropologists and historians have recently underscored the ways in which European colonialism created novel regimes of legality and record-keeping, associated with ambitious and exclusive state-centered claims to both truth and rights, while being inevitably and constantly sucked into eddies of forgery and corruption. However, attention so far has been focused on English/European-language records and the colonial institutions that produced, stored, and deployed them. This has communicated a monolithic sense of power and normativity that unwittingly replicates the aspirations of colonial states. Drawing on eight case studies from in and around South Asia from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, we propose instead that the law of empires was rooted in the highly localized, often multilingual, and fragmented bureaucracies that produced its records. Here, historians of pre-colonial Indian regimes join hands with historians of British, Dutch, and French colonialism in order to unearth the genealogies of records written in Bengali, Marathi, Persian, Sinhala, and Tamil, as well as in French, Dutch, and English. This special issue collectively excavates the many layers, regimes, and languages in which legally effective records were produced by imperial regimes in South Asia and its much larger watery penumbra, the Indian Ocean.

One summer afternoon in Tbilisi, my friends Elizbari and Malkhazi, both native Tbilisians, and I bought some beer from a local store near Malkhazi's home in the hillside residential Tbilisi neighborhood of K'rts’anisi. For various reasons I can no longer recall, it would not do for us to drink in his home, so we randomly chose a deserted spot nearby: a patch of gravel next to a decrepit building with a large fallen tree, which afforded us a place to sit. Malkhazi surveyed our abject drinking spot, raised his beer in a heroic pose, and proclaimed: “Ortach'alis baghshi mnakhe, vina var!” (In the gardens of Ortachala see me, who I am!).1 We laughed at the absurd poetic reference. It was a famous line from a Persian-style Georgian poem by the noble romantic poet Grigol Orbeliani. It was a mukhambazi, a genre of poetry emblematic of “Old Tbilisi” city poetry associated with a nostalgic Georgian mythology of the nineteenth-century colonial city, centering on the island gardens of Ortachala, the site of drunken feasting of typical Tbilisian street peddlers called kintos (Georgian k'int’o). The stanza goes as such:

In the gardens of Ortachala see me, who I am,
In a happy-go-lucky feast see me, who I am!
A toastmaster with a drinking bowl, see me, who I am!
Well in a fistfight see me, who I am!
Then you will fall in love with me, say, “You are precious!”

This article provides an ethnographic account of automated surveillance technologies' impact in the occupied West Bank, taking Blue Wolf—a biometric identification system deployed by the Israeli army—as a case study. Interviews with Palestinian residents of Hebron subjected to intensive surveillance, a senior Israeli general turned biometric start-up founder, and testimonies from veterans tasked with building up Blue Wolf's database provide a rare view into the uneven texture of life under algorithmic surveillance. Their narratives reveal how automated surveillance systems function as a form of state-sponsored terror. As a globalized information economy intersects with the eliminatory aims of Israeli settler colonialism in Hebron, new surveillance technologies erode Palestinian social life while allowing technocratic settlers to recast the violence of occupation as an opportunity for capital investment and growth. Attending to the texture of life under algorithmic surveillance in Hebron ultimately reorients theories of accumulation and dispossession in the digital age away from purely economistic framings. Instead, I foreground the violent political imperatives that drive innovations in surveillance, in Palestine and worldwide.

A third wave of autocratization is manifest today.1 Universities are no exception to the institutions that are affected by democratic backsliding in a given country: according to the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, academic freedom has declined by 13 percent in autocratizing countries in the 2010–20 period, whereas almost no change has been recorded in other countries.2

Despite the growth in scholarship on diverse religious communities in Turkey, little attention has been paid to Twelver Shiʿi Muslims. Since the founding of the Republic, the Turkish state's foundational secularist agenda has attempted to control and promote a single hegemonic form of Islam, and Shiʿa have faced continuous issues practicing their faith in public as a result. While the liberalization of the past three decades has allowed Shiʿism to enter the public sphere, the community has had to continue navigating limitations on their expression of religious difference. Based on fieldwork in Eastern Anatolia, this article deepens understandings of Islam in Turkey by showing how Shiʿa have negotiated their position vis-à-vis both secularist and Sunni-majority actors and policies across various religious and political currents. Rejecting categorization as either mezhep (sect) or minority, Shiʿa have demanded independence from state religious control while also asserting their allegiance to the Republic and nation as Turkish Muslims.

Guinea worm disease (dracunculiasis) is a debilitating waterborne disease. Once widespread, it is now on the brink of eradication. However, the Guinea Worm Eradication Programme (GWEP), like guinea worm itself, has been under-studied by historians. The GWEP demonstrates an unusual model of eradication, one focused on primary healthcare (PHC), community participation, health education and behavioural change (safe drinking). The PHC movement collided with a waterborne disease, which required rapid but straightforward treatment to prevent transmission, creating a historical space for the emergence of village-based volunteer health workers, as local actors realigned global health policy on a local level. These Village Volunteers placed eradication in the hands of residents of endemic areas, epitomising the participation-focused nature of the GWEP. This participatory mode of eradication highlights the agency of those in endemic areas, who, through volunteering, safe drinking and community self-help, have been the driving force behind dracunculiasis eradication. In the twenty-first century, guinea worm has become firstly a problem of human mobility, as global health has struggled to contain cases in refugees and nomads, and latterly a zoonotic disease, as guinea worm has shifted hosts to become primarily a parasite of dogs. This demonstrates both the potential of One Health approaches and the need for One Health to adopt from PHC and the GWEP a focus on the health of humans and animals in isolated and impoverished areas. Guinea worm demonstrates how the biological and the historical interact, with the GWEP and guinea worm shaping each other over the course of the eradication programme.

Over the past decade, there have been increasing numbers of displaced scholars from the Middle East and Africa who have come under sustained pressures and threats from their governments; only a few of them have been able to relocate to European and North American academia through scholarships and grants.1 Even these temporary solutions for displaced scholars rarely result in sustainable institutional solidarity in the form of permanent teaching or professorial positions. The lack of institutional support, coupled with discriminatory and racialized immigration policies, pushes these few fortunate scholars to either accept exploitative conditions perpetuated by the neoliberal economy or leave academia altogether to support their families. These challenges, along with draconian economic sanctions and restrictions imposed by the US Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on citizens of countries such as Syria, Sudan, Iran, and Cuba are only a snapshot of what displaced scholars endure on a daily basis while trying to do research, care for their families, and compete with scholars with privileged citizenship status for shrinking opportunities in the academic job market.