This article argues that the late Ottoman Empire saw the rise of a novel concept of difference, the “millet,” that fundamentally reordered the lives of the empire’s many subjects. Rather than a term with clearly identifiable content—“religion,” “nation,” “ethnicity,” or otherwise—millet should be understood instead as auguring the emergence of history as the organizing principle of the late Ottoman politics of difference. Unlike the Islamic distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim that had previously structured Ottoman rule, the millet paradigm did not stipulate any predetermined set of terms through which difference had to be articulated. Instead, it issued an injunction to Ottoman subjects to merely say who they were, to declare the name they went by—to confess. This simple injunction, however, which appeared to require nothing other than assent to the reality of history itself, tended to misfire. When it did, Ottoman subjects confronted the anxious truth that history—the purported ground of the millet paradigm of difference—was no ground at all.

This paper explores the theoretical and analytic possibilities of the concept of gharīb to offer a new understanding of regional displacement in what we know as the modern Middle East. The concept of gharīb (pl. ghurabāʾ) has accrued a wide range of meanings across time and space, including stranger, outcast, and exile, as well as pauper. By occupying the space between estrangement and poverty, the gharīb allows for an intersectional understanding of inequality, experienced by a growing number of marginalized and displaced communities in the Middle East. This paper honors the gharīb while making an analytic shift away from the category of the “refugee,” which has long been the dominant framework for personhood in the study of displacement. Combining genealogical analysis of the word gharīb with ethnographic accounts of displaced and impoverished communities in post-2011 Lebanon, I argue that legal binaries such as refugee versus citizen, and internal versus external displacement, have been further blurred against the backdrop of ongoing and interlocking forms of structural violence, inequality, and lack of protection for marginalized groups. The right to belong, therefore, is less about citizenry and more about a mode of social and economic poverty. This is particularly the case in the margins, where the repercussions of the ongoing crises are first and foremost felt. The gharīb, in contrast to such legal binaries, can be an analytic tool that allows us to delve deeper into the complexities of belonging, futurity, and rights without falling into the traps of methodological nationalism and top-down regional demarcations.

The caryophyllidean tapeworm Khawia armeniaca has long been regarded as an exceptionally widespread species within its genus, notable for its significant morphological variability. However, with the accumulation of molecular data from different fish hosts, K. armeniaca was suspected to represent a species complex. To clarify the true identity of these parasites, a comprehensive morphological and molecular study (using 18S, 28S and ITS2 ribosomal regions) of K. armeniaca tapeworms from barbels (Barbinae) across the Iberian Peninsula and the Middle East has been conducted. The results revealed two genetically distinct lineages within the K. armeniaca complex. The first lineage, found in Arabibarbus grypus, Barbus lacerta, Capoeta birunii, Carassobarbus luteus, Luciobarbus barbulus, L. esocinus and L. kersin in Iraq and Iran, is genetically congruent with K. armeniaca (Cholodkovsky, 1915), originally described from the Sevan khramulya (Capoeta sevangi) in Armenia. The second lineage, identified in Luciobarbus bocagei (type host), L. comizo and L. guiraonis from Portugal and Spain, is described as Khawia iberica n. sp. In addition to clear molecular divergence, K. iberica can be distinguished from K. armeniaca by notable morphological differences, including variations in the shape, structure and size of the ovary, the anterior extension of the vitelline follicles, the testes and several morphometric parameters.

This article examines how authoritarian regimes use legislative institutions to coopt rival elites and induce policy cooperation. Theories of cooptation under authoritarianism emphasize two mechanisms: economic rents and policy concessions. Despite the persistence of these mechanisms in the literature, evidence of their effect on policy outcomes remains limited. In this paper, we develop a theory of legislative cooptation, or the intentional exchange of economic rents and policy concessions to legislators in exchange for policy cooperation. We test our theory using a novel dataset of 150,000 roll-call votes from the Kuwait National Assembly that spans the entirety of Kuwait’s legislative history. We leverage the regime’s participation in the legislature to establish a measure of legislative cooperation and use this measure to estimate the efficacy of mechanisms of cooptation in inducing conformity with its policy agenda. Both mechanisms effectively elicit cooperation: but they have different strategic and normative implications for our understanding of how representation emerges in non-democratic contexts.

Why do Islamists regularly win elections in the Middle East? Why, for instance, did Ennahda perform well in every election in Tunisia’s democratic era (2011–2021)? I argue that regular interactions in mosques allow Islamists to build deeper ties and greater trust with their supporters than secular parties can. Post-election, this trust also allows Islamists to better sell their performance and justify their compromises, contributing to re-election as well. I test this infrastructure advantage in Tunisia in two ways. First, an original survey shows that mosque attendance strongly correlates with voting for Ennahda in the 2019 elections and that this correlation is driven by greater trust in Ennahda. Second, a dataset of Tunisia’s 6,000 mosques shows that sub-nationally, mosque density strongly correlated with Islamist vote share in the 2011, 2014, and 2019 elections. Overall, these results help us understand the continued victories of Islamist political parties even in contexts of poor performance.

Understanding the development and use of musical instruments in prehistory is often hampered by poor preservation of perishable materials and the relative rarity of durable examples. Here, the authors present a pair of third-millennium BC copper cymbals, excavated at Dahwa, Oman. Although they are the only well-contextualised examples from Arabia, the Dahwa cymbals are paralleled by contemporaneous examples from the Indus Valley and images in Mesopotamian iconography. Not only do the cymbals add to the body of evidence interpreted in terms of Indus migrants in Early Bronze Age Oman, they also suggest shared musical and potentially ritual practices around the Arabian Gulf at that time.

The Eridu region in southern Mesopotamia was occupied from the sixth until the early first millennium BC, and its archaeological landscape remains well preserved. The present study has identified and mapped a vast, intensive, well-developed network of artificial irrigation canals in this region.

The earliest pottery vessels in the Arabian Gulf, appearing in the mid-sixth millennium BC, belong to two distinct traditions: Ubaid Ware was imported from Mesopotamia, but the origins of the Coarse Red Ware have remained obscure. Geochemical examination of pottery from Bahra 1, in modern-day Kuwait, and geological samples from the surrounding area reveal a regional origin for the clay. Further exploration of the Bahra 1 assemblage indicates that Coarse Red Ware was probably made at the site by low-skilled potters. This research provides insights into the organisation of pottery production and distribution in the Arabian Neolithic.

This article studies the rise and fall of commercial aviation in Iran, then known as Persia, between 1923 and 1932. Two airlines, the German Junkers Luftverkehr AG and Britain’s Imperial Airways, invested significant time and effort in developing air routes but eventually failed due to financial hardship and political intransigence. Exploring this erratic development, the article has two aims: first, to investigate the entangled history of two of the world’s oldest airlines and the challenges they navigated; and second, to assess the fraught relationship between state and business interests. The German and British airlines were rivals in Iran, but they became partly dependent on each other. Both airlines suffered from the global political dynamics of the interwar period while Junkers, in particular, also struggled financially. Meanwhile, the Iranian state had yet to decide whether to view the new technology with enthusiasm or concern. Its ambivalent and reluctant reaction had profound effects on the trajectories of Junkers and Imperial Airways. Assessing the capability of a nascent airline industry to develop viable business models outside of Europe, the article also serves as a case study revealing the headwinds airlines encountered in the earliest phase of commercial aviation.