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.

Academic diversity has been an important consideration in hiring processes within academia since the late 2010s. The term diversity encompasses race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, geographical representation, and political beliefs. There are three significant considerations during the hiring process. To put it simply: “equity is the promotion of fairness and justice for each individual that considers historical, social, systemic, and structural issues that impact experience and individual needs; diversity is a measure of representation within a community or population that includes identity, background, lived experience, culture, and many more; and inclusion is the creation of an environment where everyone shares a sense of belonging, is treated with respect, and is able to fully participate.”1