In his 2019 critical study, Husayn Sarmak Hassan complained that not enough attention has been given to the production of Iraqi prison writing even after the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime and its censorship apparatus. He notes, for example, that during the 2017 Cairo book fair, he found thirty (presumably new) prison novels, none of which were written by Iraqis. The relative scarcity of prison novels from Iraq is most certainly not due to lack of content; since the collapse of the old regime, there has been a proliferation of personal accounts, both oral and written, detailing the horrors of Saddam's Ba'th and the extent of the human toll of its wars and oppression. The ensuing documentation projects that emerged out of this mass catharsis aimed to amplify voices that had hitherto been marginalized and silenced, including the experiences of political prisoners. Hassan's study on prison writing, published by the Iraqi Ministry of Culture, can be seen in this light: as part of a national effort to process the literary and psychological aspects of the Ba‘th's legacy. However, the author's interest in prison writing also stems from his professional background as a medical doctor and psychiatrist directly involved in the study and treatment of PTSD in military veterans of the Iran–Iraq War. His personal interest in the experiences of Iraqi political prisoners is also made clear by certain paratextual elements in his study; in the acknowledgements, for example, Hassan dedicates his text to a friend who spent twenty years in incarceration as a political prisoner, and to his brother, who he found unrecognizable due to starvation and torture on a visit to a Najaf prison in 1994.

This paper argues the Government in Exile (GIE), the first government of independent Bangladesh, played an important role in framing the founding moment in legal terms. The GIE's constitutional warfare through its adherence to legalism, and subsequent internationalization of the conflict significantly shaped the independence movement of 1971. The GIE was composed of leaders who were lawyers, economists and other intellectuals who sought refuge in neighboring India. The agency of the founders and their allegiance to constitutional principles catalyzed the founding moment, oversaw the transition to an independent state and ultimately led to a swift adoption of a constitution that endures despite much instability. This national struggle of 1971 also played out in the international arena. In the process, lawyers from the so-called Third World articulated, reshaped, and generated new debates about international legal principles such as sovereignty, territoriality, and self-determination (and criterion for legitimacy of exiled governments)—most of which were considered to be well-settled at the time.

During the brief ‘universal peace’ following the treaty of London in 1518, Surrey's expedition brought to Ireland as chief governor Henry VIII's best general, ostensibly leading a reconnaissance in force to discover how the king might reduce the land to order and obedience. Despite the expedition's protracted planning, as here outlined, the king's aims remained unclear, at least to Surrey. His army spent most of the time garrisoning the Pale and compelling submissions by neighbouring border chiefs. As suggested in a previously unnoticed cache of documents, King Henry hoped the Irish could be persuaded to use English law and the king's courts, restoring crown land since overrun, so that a recovery of the revenues would meet the expedition's costs. When Surrey insisted that Ireland's reform would entail a lengthy and costly military conquest, he soon lost interest. As renewed war threatened in continental Europe, Surrey was instructed to focus on the Pale's defence to reduce the king's costs, so conserving the monarch's treasure for other ‘higher enterprises’. Surrey's short-lived expedition and brief recall disrupted the political stability established by the earl of Kildare's defence of the Pale, with little achieved.

On August 31, 2020, a US military plane returned the archive of the Baʿth Party Regional Command, more commonly known as the Baʿth Party Archive, to Iraq from California, where it had been held by Stanford University's Hoover Institution Library and Archives since 2008. A leftover issue from the 2003 Iraq War, it had been static as a policy matter for years, but appeared on the agenda of the US–Iraq Strategic Dialogue in summer 2020. Mustafa al-Kadhimi's emergence as the compromise choice for prime minister by Iraq's competing factions that May facilitated this development. Kadhimi, a journalist and human rights activist by background, was one of the cofounders with Kanan Makiya of the Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF), a nongovernmental organization that followed in the wake of the US-led invasion in 2003 as a US Department of Defense contractor. The origins of this relationship dated to the aftermath of the 1990–91 Gulf War. Shortly after arriving in Iraq in 2003, and responding to the rumor that looters were headed toward the mausoleum and museum of Baʿth Party founder Michel ʿAflaq, Kadhimi and Makiya by chance discovered the Baʿth Party Archive underneath the structure, which was adjacent to the Baʿth Party's headquarters in Baghdad.

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, Iraqi society has experienced profound crises in its transition from a strong centralized state under secular Baʿth Party authoritarianism to a new weak but still authoritarian federal state that is dominated by Shiʿi Islamist parties and plagued by factionalism, open sectarian competition, and conflict. A comprehensive scrutiny of the country's recent historical ruptures and continuities that pertain to the relations between the state and religion in particular is still a desideratum in contemporary Iraq studies. The extent to which thirty-five years of Baʿthi dictatorship transformed and lastingly shaped Iraq's diverse religious landscape is still not yet fully understood. Following the US-led invasion, the former regime was well-remembered for its repression and atrocities against almost all segments of society, but its image and the long-held notion and memory of it as “atheist” and “antireligious” are increasingly being challenged. Moreover, sectarian conflicts and violence since 2005 reveal an ongoing conflict over the interpretive sovereignty and ownership of famous religious sites of memory, such as shrines and mosques, between the various factions in Iraq. Beginning with the Iran–Iraq War in 1980, the Baʿth regime lavishly sponsored Sunni and Shiʿi shrines and advertised them in its religious war propaganda all over the country as sites of memory for the Iraqi and Arab nation. Many of these religious sites were surrounded by a certain confessional ambiguity and constitute memorials and meeting places for Sunnis and Shiʿis equally. After the fall of the regime, this ambiguity sparked sectarian competition over these sites since both communities often associated with one and the same shrine quite different memories of the same saintly figure, or they disagreed about who was buried there. Radical jihadist Salafis, in turn, generally rejected them as un-Islamic and even associated them with the old regime from 2014 onward.

In this article, I use the 1969 Egyptian film Abi fawq al-Shagara and the motif of the kiss as a launch pad to explore broader cinematic experiences and cultures in 1960s Egypt and beyond. I argue that the deployment and debates around screen kisses not only represented wider conflicting and shifting impulses around questions of audience tastes, sexuality, and the role of the cinema, but became central motifs through which audiences experienced the movies. Inspired by a historical approach to the study of cinema, one in which media texts and audiences are central, this article shifts the gaze away from the screen to consider the public lens through which films were appreciated, the broader global media landscape in which they existed, and the tensions between audiences and critics. I bring popular magazines, audience reactions and memories, and wider international cultural trends into the frames of analysis not only to nuance our understanding of Egyptian cinematic cultures, but to shed light on an often-neglected component of Egyptian history of the 1960s; the fun, the pleasures, and the anxieties of a quickly changing cultural and leisure landscape, and the wider cultural mood that helped shape a generation's experiences of the cinema.

This article highlights some of the historiographical trends over the past one hundred years in how the Irish diaspora in early medieval Europe has been studied. The role of the peregrini, the Irish monastic exiles who left Ireland for Britain and continental Europe from the sixth century onwards, has to some extent been marginal and tangential to the historiography of this island. Forms of modern ‘Irophobia’ in some scholarship have also led to an obfuscation of the early medieval religious and ethnic landscape by seeking to minimise Irish cultural influence. The article argues that by contextualising the phenomenon of Irish clerical exile in Europe within broader theological and comparative frameworks, further research in this field has the potential to clarify the influence of the Irish and to show how the experience of exile contributed to the formation of both Irish and European identities in the middle ages.

The last fifty years have witnessed the production of a large body of scholarship exploring the political and social history of the Irish Civil War and its aftermath. Debate has focused principally on the administrative abilities and democratic credentials of the Free State government and the extent to which revolutionary ideals were expressed institutionally following the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. However, there has been strikingly little attempt to contextualise, rather than appraise, the lineage of the moral and ideological assumptions embedded in the executive council's public professions of political conviction, or to understand Treatyite policy-making on its own terms. In particular, historians have tended to weigh and measure the performance of the Cumann na nGaedheal government against anachronistic and moralising definitions of what the Irish revolution stood for at the expense of any systematic attempt to reconstruct the manner in which relevant historical actors understood this relationship. Focusing on the heterodox intellectual firmament of the Irish-Ireland movement, this paper demonstrates that the Cumann na nGaedheal government never abandoned the political languages of the revolution; rather, they constructed an ideology to support the new state rooted in their own interpretation of what they considered revolutionary ideals of Irish-Ireland nationalism.