By Dilek Çelebi

Dilek Çelebi is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester.

Editor’s note: Hamid Khalafallah was a young Sudanese academic and researcher who wrote passionately about Sudan—and also about the entire international humanitarian system that Sudan’s war has exposed. The news of his death last week, in South Africa, was a devastating shock.

I was fortunate to publish his writing several times in Democracy in Exile, DAWN's journal, where I was executive editor. A powerful dispatch from the early days of Sudan's war, before he was displaced, began starkly: "I am writing this piece in the dark in Khartoum." Hamid's writing was urgent and insightful, especially on the question of true solidarity. In his words, that meant respecting the agency and dignity of everyday people in Sudan—by including Sudanese civil society in international diplomacy, rather than sidelining them in favor of generals and warlords, and supporting grassroots mutual aid groups that showed such remarkable resilience in the face of war. Everything Hamid wrote was imbued with a sense of mission to build a better Sudan, and with it a better world.

His colleague Dilek Çelebi reflects here on his life and the message of his work.

Hamid Khalafallah was not asking for sympathy. He was demanding attention for his people. Most of the world chose the easier option.

He is gone now. And what makes that loss unbearable is not only grief—it is the specific anger of watching someone fight for visibility that never fully arrived. Hamid was a Sudanese academic who documented his country’s war not from a conference room but from his own garden, holding spent bullets in his hands. He was not analyzing catastrophe. He was living inside it, as one of millions displaced by a conflict that the world had already decided it could afford to monitor from a distance.

That decision was not arbitrary. It followed a logic we need to name directly.

When fighting erupted in Khartoum in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, a rival paramilitary, hundreds were killed within days. Hospitals collapsed. Civilians lost electricity, water, and safe passage. By early 2024, Sudan had surpassed all other countries to become the world’s largest displacement crisis, with more than eight million people forced from their homes. It produced almost no sustained global attention. No mass conferences. No mass meetings. No mass marches. No prominent resignations in protest. No social media tidal wave.

Compare that to other conflicts where mobilization was near-instant—where moral consensus solidified within days, where the enemy was already familiar and the narrative already legible. I am not making an argument about relative suffering. I am describing a structure.

We do not only choose which victims to care about. We choose our enemies. And we choose them carefully—according to what confirms our existing politics, which adversaries we are already primed to condemn, which situations allow outrage without demanding complexity. Some conflicts arrive pre-packaged with a clear villain and a recognizable frame. They require nothing from us except the willingness to be angry. Others have fragmented perpetrators, unfamiliar histories, no ready-made alliance of condemnation. They ask more. So they receive less.

This is not neutrality. It is preference with impunity.

What I find hardest to sit with is that Hamid’s own academic circle—my circle—was not exempt from this. We are trained to notice power, to interrogate narrative, to resist the path of least intellectual resistance. And still, many of us did not raise our voices. Not because we were unaware. Awareness was never the obstacle. The obstacle was a threshold we unconsciously maintain: we wait for sufficient deaths, for clearer perpetrators, for the kind of consensus that makes engagement feel safe rather than costly. Sudan did not cross that threshold for enough of us. Not in time.

That is what is meant by the quiet violence of intellectual distance. It is not ignorance. It is the capacity to witness suffering in real time and postpone response until it becomes politically convenient to respond. It is the ability to call ourselves informed while remaining strategically silent.

Hamid did not have that option. He was already past every threshold.

He kept speaking even when it felt like no one was listening—not because it was effective in the way he deserved, but because silence was not something he was willing to offer his people. That persistence now stands in sharp contrast to those of us who calculated the cost of solidarity and found it inconvenient.

The comfortable version of this argument would end here, with a call for more equal attention, more consistent outrage, better media coverage. But that framing lets individuals off too easily. Selective engagement is not only produced by states or algorithms or editorial boards. It is reproduced daily by people like me—through what we share, what we amplify, what we allow to pass in silence. Every time we speak loudly about one injustice while staying quiet about another, we participate in a hierarchy of suffering. We signal, whether we intend to or not, that some wars are urgent and others are tolerable.

Hamid refused that signal his entire life.

The only response to his death that would not be hollow is to refuse it, too—not as a tribute, but as a practice. To ask, when we next feel outrage, why this conflict and not that one. To apply that question to ourselves before we apply it to others. To resist the pull toward convenient enemies and familiar frames.

That discomfort is not a gesture of mourning. It is the minimum.

Long live Sudan. Long live Hamid’s legacy.

* This article was originally published by the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester.

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On a recent visit to Europe, Syria’s former rebel leader-turned-president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, had a pitch that would have been hard to imagine just a year and half ago. He told a packed audience at Chatham House in March that his government was trying to “transform Syria into an economic destination” for the entire Middle East. By investing in Syria’s reconstruction, Europe could tap into what Sharaa called the country’s “strategic geopolitical location in the region” while allowing millions of Syrian refugees to finally return home.

Sharaa has been busy making a version of this pitch ever since he toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024. Whether hosting foreign officials in Assad’s old presidential palace, or traveling abroad to meet heads of state such as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and U.S. President Donald Trump, Sharaa has honed an investor-friendly message for how his country might rebuild after decades of dictatorship and civil war.

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Indeed Sharaa’s foreign itinerary as president has often looked more like an investment tour. He has made four trips each to Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia; three to the United Arab Emirates; and two each to Russia and the United States. They correspond with early investment pledges for reconstruction, including a slew of projects unveiled last year that made headlines with their $14 billion price tag. In all, since coming to power, Sharaa’s government has touted tens of billions of dollars in investment deals to rebuild the country. These include major energy infrastructure such as power plants and oil and gas pipelines but also fanciful, speculative real estate schemes that you’d expect to see somewhere in the Gulf, not in one of Syria’s many war-ravaged cities.

The question now is, can Sharaa deliver on his lofty promises of a “new Syria” rising from the ruins? The answer may hinge on whom the real customer is for Sharaa’s rebuilding: ordinary Syrians or wealthy foreign investors.

Given the enormity of destruction across Syria, where many cities and towns still look as though the war only just ended, the government’s need for investment is easy to understand. Reconstruction is estimated to cost upwards of $400 billion ($80 billion just to rebuild housing, according to the United Nations), and that’s in a country with a GDP of some $20 billion (down from $60 billion before the war) and a decimated economy.

Strikingly, Sharaa’s government has publicly shunned international loans and aid, instead prioritizing foreign investment to fund reconstruction. “We chose the path of reconstruction through investment. We did not choose the path of rebuilding Syria through aid and assistance,” Sharaa told potential investors last October at a financial conference in Riyadh. He has said this approach is intended to make sure Syria is not a “burden for anyone.” But it is also true that loans and assistance, whether from foreign countries or the International Monetary Fund, would come with outside scrutiny and potential strings attached.

Whatever the motive, Sharaa continues to tell audiences that the opportunity in Syria is enormous and there’s room for everyone. It is an urgent pitch for a leader whose hold on power may ultimately rest on whether his government can bring in money to provide jobs and restore livelihoods for millions of Syrians impoverished by the war. “The economy is still the soft underbelly for this government, and tied to that is reconstruction,” said Amr al-Azm, a Syrian scholar and founder of The Day After project, an NGO that supports Syria’s democratic transition. As he explained, “If you’re not able to get people back to work, if you’re not able to provide for them, if you’re not able to rebuild their homes, then how’s that going to work out?”

But Sharaa the salesman can sometimes sound as if he is putting investment—some of it from shady business barons with ties to the Assad regime—over the dire needs of the many Syrians who lost their homes in the war. The conflict destroyed more than 60 percent of Syria’s infrastructure, while 90 percent of the population lives in poverty. A vast sea of rubble surrounds Damascus—what was, before the war, the capital’s densely populated suburbs—while the centers of cities such as Homs and Aleppo have been in ruins for years.

“You have 2 million people sitting in tents in Idlib. Why aren’t you trying to house them? Why are you focused on investment?” Azm said. “They’ll announce some big project that’s supposed to be part of the ‘recovery,’ but it is not going to rebuild a country that has suffered such catastrophic losses or turn the economy around.”

Read the rest of the piece in Foreign Policy.

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By Hagai El-Ad

Hagai El-Ad is an Israeli human rights activist and the former executive director of the human rights organization B’Tselem. He lives in Jerusalem.

The center of gravity of the recently released film, “Project Hail Mary,” is the scene where European bureaucrat Eva Stratt (played by Sandra Hüller) sings a melancholy, breathtaking karaoke rendition of “Sign of the Times”: “Just stop your crying, it’s a sign of the times / Welcome to the final show / I hope you’re wearing your best clothes / You can’t bribe the door on your way to the sky / You look pretty good down here / But you ain’t really good.”

And truly, it ain’t really good. It’s truly an end-of-the-world atmosphere. The sign of the times, and you can’t always stop your crying because you feel like everything is going to hell between the never-ending wars, AI algorithms manipulating our lives, local and global politics gone off the rails, and the global warming frying our brains.

Maybe the only certainty we really have waiting for us is unbearable heat waves that will only get longer and hotter. A single planet—the only one we have—that’s cooking itself into oblivion.

Amid this reality, “Project Hail Mary” is a supernova of global optimism. It’s optimism we need like air to breathe, and it moves us to tears. Because more than a scientific (well, sci-fi) utopia, the film is a political utopia: In the face of a global environmental calamity, humanity opts to come together, employ the best of our scientific abilities and jointly chart a future of hope, reason and human solidarity—exactly the opposite of the reality we live in, where, when faced with a real climate catastrophe, humanity rejects science, led by narcissistic, violent figures who are the opposite of that superstar European bureaucrat.

As a Star Trek nerd, all my life I’ve imagined a day when I would get to see a rocket launch into space. A little less than a year ago, it happened. On the Israel Trail, in the middle of the desert. Suddenly, thunder shook the air. It leapt out of nowhere, scorching the sky as it ascended at midday, mesmerizing the observer. My dream come true? Not quite. It was an Arrow 3 interceptor—technically a rocket launched beyond the atmosphere, into space, but not what I had hoped.

At its core, whether it’s ballistic missiles, exoatmospheric interceptors, or rockets that launch satellites—or astronauts—into space, the technology is the same. But it’s a world away. I thought about what had just happened, and how it couldn’t be undone: The first launch I ever got to see was not for peaceful purposes; it was part of a war. I wanted to sing some melancholy karaoke.

The second Iran war shuttered cinemas for several weeks. As a result, the release of “Project Hail Mary” was delayed, so when it finally came out in theaters, it coincided with the real journey of NASA’s Artemis II mission around the moon. These two cosmic events—one science, one science fiction—became intertwined: The Artemis astronauts were given a private screening of “Project Hail Mary” before blasting into space. NASA Mission Control Center responded to astronaut Reid Wiseman, 400,928 kilometers away from Earth with the most iconic expression from “Project Hail Mary”: “Amaze, amaze, amaze.”

Even amid a regional war with planet-wide consequences, the Artemis launch managed to capture a certain global moment infused with a glimmer of optimism. Not quite like 58 years ago, with Apollo 8 going around the moon on Christmas Eve in 1968, but still.

Also totally real is Artemis II as a utopia of sorts: American and Canadian astronauts, including the first woman and the first person of color to go beyond Low Earth Orbit, powered by the European Service Module on its way to the moon and back, courtesy of the European Space Agency.

Observe the surprising muscle of international technological cooperation for peaceful purposes. Even the nightmare that is Donald Trump had to swallow a most public cooperation with Canada and Europe, both of which he despises, and honor a team of astronauts who were, mercifully, not all white men. When one considers these aspects, you can’t help but smile and think of how Artemis II is the fulfillment of some of Trump’s worst nightmares—and how it was a resounding success.

There are human endeavors that started before Trump and will continue after him and his ilk. Endeavors bigger than small men, more significant than small-minded racism, lasting beyond the doomed efforts to suppress reality. There is space for optimism—for science, inspiring journeys, grand visions, and people who, contrary to the sign of these times, are characterized by altruism, modesty, and decency. Sometimes what it takes is combining a real trip to the moon with a sci-fi utopia and, above all, remembering Eva Stratt, seconds before she returns to orbit, singing that “everything will be all right.”

Editor’s note: A version of this article was originally published in Haaretz.

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You’re looking at three works from “To Save What Can Be Saved” by Ali Cherri, the renowned Lebanese-French artist. Cherri recently filed suit against Israel in the Paris Judicial Court’s Specialized Unit for Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes. On November 26, 2024, the Israeli army struck the apartment of Cherri’s parents in Barbour, a neighborhood in central Beirut, apparently mistaking it for the home of a Hezbollah official with the same last name. His parents and their housekeeper were killed in the strike, which occurred only hours before the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah took effect.

The watercolors adorn one of the walls of my sister’s house. I chose them here because they capture our eternal dilemma as we move helplessly from one war to another.

The Israelis must feel very proud. By any measure, their state has amassed an extraordinary tally of destruction across a region encompassing close to 130 million people. I am thinking only of the present moment, the last three years, and of those societies that have directly borne Israel’s fury: Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. In the Occupied Palestinian Territories, southern Syria, and southern Lebanon, Israel can also boast of its “defensive” conquests, or attempts thereof. I say attempts because it struggles still to capture the Lebanese south it has targeted for occupation.

Defensive conquest is my coinage. True, it is an oxymoron, but Israel has always had a unique talent for normalizing oxymorons—Jewish democracy, for example. So I simply bow to the obvious: for special countries, special exceptions, and special terms. Admittedly, this privileged status is not Israel’s handiwork alone. In fact, the West can claim much of the credit for manufacturing the international consensus that sustains it. But to the intrepid Jewish state goes the glory for strategically harnessing this acquiescence into a standing writ of violence in the name of survival.

From this vantage point, all Israel’s wars could only be defensive. How else can a state’s army defend its conquests and settlements against those conquered, occupied, or evicted, if not by further conquest and subjugation? We have heard Zionist and Israeli leaders echo it through the ages: if only the native would submit, then this endless bloodletting would not be necessary.

This is political Zionism’s rationale distilled to its doctrinal essence. It was therefore inevitable that what applied in Palestine would also apply in the Levant and beyond. Zionist ambition, left to its own imperatives, became a trap for its children, a self-fulfilling prophecy: dominion or annihilation. In this dark universe of false dichotomies, the stakes are existential—it is do or die, kill or be killed. But would that they were trapped alone. We have been ensnared in this mental cage, with roles designated and the script carved in stone on landscapes that refuse to be tamed. The civilized and the barbarian, the heroic warrior and the fanatic, the returning native and the squatter, the Jew in the lone bastion of enlightenment heroically fending off the savage Muslim hordes at the gate.

There is something so utterly twisted about this logic. But for the longest time, it struck all the right civilizational notes embedded in the Western colonial mindset—a mindset that, well into the 20th century, looked upon Jews in Europe with the same chauvinism it reserved for us in the brown colonies. That the West found common cause with Israeli Jews in the East even as it harbored antisemitic sentiments on the home front is no less mean an irony than Israel fashioning itself as the Western crusader in the East even as it bemoaned the West’s atavistic antisemitism on those shores.

Such vexing paradoxes, though, could easily be ignored. They were the details typically lost in epochal scripts. But as with all tightly wound constructs, Israel’s could not continue to rise to the demands of its own perfection. As scholar Jacqueline Rose wrote in The Question of Zion, “The story of Zionism is too coherent, too seamless, too perfect to be true. Like all such narratives, it has to ward off what it cannot accommodate.” Alas, it also has to withstand time and the messy facts that will not yield.

Facts like the genocide you boastfully broadcast, the apartheid system you erect in the territories you occupy, the ethnic cleansing you carry out against their inhabitants, the pogroms your settlers commit weekly against them, the torture you gleefully inflict on their prisoners, the detainee rapes you celebrate, the capital punishment you codify only for them, the illiterate zealots you choose as ministers. When you stand proudly on this register of run-of-the-mill brutality and war crimes, it is hard to juxtapose yourself favorably against your enemies, let alone draw from so sullied a storyline a lofty war cry. In mystified disbelief, we find ourselves listening to Israeli and American leaders invoking Armageddon, end-of-time combat, the Crusades, bombing the “bastards” into the Stone Age.

As I watch, truly bemused and aghast at the absurdities that suffuse today’s untold battles, I cannot but wonder: is this how primeval sagas unspool in modern times? Are we witnessing ours finally breathing its last?

There was always something distinctly outlandish about Israel’s pretensions. Such a small country with such outsize expectations of itself and of the world that indulges it; such a wild belief in its exceptionalism and contempt for the people in whose midst it insisted on setting up house and then forever expanding. It wants its enemies’ total surrender and subservience, its tribe’s and friends’ political obedience, and all of this without regard for internal cost or external consequence.

Woe to those who have such little heed for history’s humbling lessons. Woe to us caught in their grip.

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By Hagai El-Ad

Hagai El-Ad is an Israeli human rights activist and the former executive director of the human rights organization B’Tselem. He lives in Jerusalem.

Two and a half years ago, a certain tail named Yahya Sinwar tried to wag its owner, the Iranian dog. But the Iranians didn’t accede to their tail, and Sinwar was left alone facing Israel. After the October 7 massacre, Israel turned Gaza, Sinwar’s stronghold and the home of two million Palestinians, into a pile of rubble.

Just over a month ago, a certain tail named Benjamin Netanyahu tried to wag its owner, the American dog. Unlike the Iranians, the Americans acceded to their tail, and together dog and tail—roaring with epic fury—set out to crush Iran. Yet Iran persisted and stood its ground.

It turns out that Netanyahu the tail was more successful than Sinwar the tail at wagging his dog. We shouldn’t make light of that, since wagging the Iranian state isn’t the same as wagging the American superpower. Despite the magnitude of the challenge, Netanyahu, thanks to his extraordinary experience and capabilities, succeeded. But at the end of the day, neither tail achieved its desire: Tail Sinwar didn’t topple Israel, and tail Netanyahu didn’t topple Iran.

Israeli Jews like me, who see this place as their homeland and want to live a peaceful life here, should breathe a sigh of relief at the failure of both tails. If, God forbid, Sinwar’s violent and fanatical project had succeeded, we wouldn’t have been able to live here. And what if Netanyahu’s violent and fanatical project had succeeded?

Nobody knows how close Iran was to collapsing. But try to imagine not the cease-fire into which the Iranians succeeded in maneuvering Trump, but rather Netanyahu’s scenario of “total victory.” In such a scenario, we would be in a perilous situation in which the collapse of Iran would have led Israel to a dizzying power intoxication combined with a self-image as a regional hegemon.

Imagine Israel after a total victory over Iran: a dangerous recipe for further military adventures, territorial expansion and you name it. Where would Israel go from the present violent and fanatical posture, if bolstered by total victory over archenemy Iran, Messianic currents surging in Jerusalem, fantasies about our might and the strength of our hands, and even more tailwind from Washington?

Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa said six months ago that “Israel occupied the Golan in order to defend itself, and then southern Syria in order to defend the Golan. So after a few years, maybe they will occupy the center of Syria in order to protect the south of Syria. In a few more years Israel will reach Munich this way.” I don’t know if we would reach Munich, but does anyone really think that in the scenario of a dizzying victory over Tehran, Israel would have been content with just chewing up the southern parts of Lebanon (aka “the northern Galilee”) and Syria (the Hauran)?

In Washington, Tehran and Jerusalem, regimes that hate their own people are in power. Unfortunately, of the three, the most effective is the one in Tehran. That’s how, thanks to Iran’s determination, Trump’s superficiality and Netanyahu’s arrogance, the dangerous scenario of a dizzying Israeli victory was averted.

We can even be more ambitious and hope that not only was a disaster averted, but also a lesson was learned. That instead of more power going up Israelis’ heads, there will be some sobriety, maybe even a modicum of restraint and realism. A lesson in the limitations of power that every tail should internalize, of a country that isn’t—and shouldn’t be—a regional hegemon.

The price of the lesson is costly and painful: Israelis, my people, who were killed and wounded. People who are scarred, physically and emotionally, destroyed homes and economic damage. Terrible suffering for the Iranian people, which not only paid the price of the month of bombings, but also remains under the bayonets of a cruel regime. A competent leadership that doesn’t hate its people wouldn’t have taken this path in the first place. Alas, we don’t have such leadership.

What is left for those of us who are asking for a peaceful life here? To be thankful that we haven’t turned into a regional hegemon and to work every day for a different vision in which Jews can live here, in our homeland, together with the other peoples of the region, as part of the Middle East—not as its ruler. Not by dint of our power, the strength of our hands, the range of our fighter jets and the weight of their bombs, but because we are but one of the peoples of this place.

*

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in Haaretz.

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By Abd-el-Kader Cheref

Abd-el-Kader Cheref is an assistant professor of Africana Studies at Southern Illinois University. He has also taught at the University of Oran in Algeria. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and Africana Studies from the University of Exeter.

It was the hub of anti-colonial resistance that became a symbol of national identity, central to the collective memory of Algerians. A cluster of whitewashed buildings on a steep slope perched above the Mediterranean, the historic heart of Algiers is the archetype of the traditional walled city, or medina, in North Africa. But today, the Casbah is a museum in ruins.

For all its history and heritage, the Casbah has been neglected since Algeria won its independence from France in 1962, ending 132 years of colonial rule. The state’s absence is obvious in the Casbah’s crumbling and collapsed urban fabric; nearly a third of all Ottoman-era buildings “have fallen into ruin.” Vacant, rubble-strewn lots now break up many of the Casbah’s traditionally tight, meandering alleyways, which are also spanned by makeshift buttresses that hold up buildings and keep even more of them from falling down. Some 50,000, mostly poor residents still live precariously in the Casbah, some of them squatting in the ruins.

Various attempts to revitalize the Casbah have gone nowhere. UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site in 1992, but that didn’t lead to the kind of urban restoration and architectural preservation in the medinas of Fez and Marrakesh, in neighboring Morocco, which were largely driven by tourism. Algeria’s insular government, an opaque clique of military and security elites, has been perpetually cagey about attempts to “save the Casbah,” whether by Algerian architects and preservationists, or by groups from abroad, including UNESCO itself. A plan that the government finally unveiled in 2012 to restore the Casbah never materialized due to systemic corruption and mismanagement. In 2018, the Algerian authorities struck a deal with France, for a venture led by French architect Jean Nouvel, to “revitalize” the Casbah, but it also failed due to widespread opposition in both France and Algeria over the specter of neocolonialism.

Yet despite this long history of marginalization and failure to stem the Casbah’s decline, the medina is still the beating heart of Algiers, however battered and betrayed. It remains a place of subversion and resistance—“the Mecca of revolutionaries,” as Amilcar Cabral, the anti-colonial, Pan-Africanist, revolutionary intellectual from Guinea-Bissau, described it in the 1960s.

The Casbah embodies multiple cultural, historical, and ancestral legacies: Phoenician, Amazigh (Berber), Roman, Arab, and Ottoman. The urban masterplan that exists to this day was designed by the Imazighen, otherwise known as the Berbers, under the Zirid dynasty in the 10^th century. The medina was further developed and expanded by other Amazigh dynasties that ruled the central Maghreb.

The Casbah topped out during the Ottoman Regency of Algiers (1516-1830), functioning as its seat of political and military power. During the Ottoman era, it also became a city of tolerant cosmopolitanism, housing several bathhouses or hammams, such as Hammam Bouchlaghem, frequented by the city’s Jewish and Muslim communities alike. Instead of street names, every segment and alley of the Casbah bore the name of a notable family, inscribing them on the cityscape itself.

The Ottoman Regency ended with the brutal arrival of French colonialism, which remade Algiers at the expense of the Casbah. The nerve center of the city shifted to new European quarters developed along the waterfront on the Bay of Algiers, just below the Casbah. Some 2,000 houses were razed to make way for Haussmann-style buildings and residences, as a new colonial city expanded directly around the medina.

This was the urbanism of French colonial rule across North Africa. Colonial authorities and planners sought to create new “European cities,” which they saw as ordered and rational—built adjacent to and often encircling the existing medina, which they considered inherently chaotic, disorderly, and difficult to police and control.

In Morocco, General Hubert Lyautey, the head of the French colonial protectorate from 1912 to 1925, insisted that this “dual-city” would demarcate cultural separation between colonizer and colonized. “Touch the indigenous cities as little as possible,” Lyautey declared. “Instead, improve their surroundings where, on the vast terrain that is still free, the European city rises—following a plan that realizes the most modern conceptions of large boulevards, water and electrical supplies, squares and gardens, buses and tramways, and also foresees future extensions.”

The French applied that colonial logic to the Casbah over 132 years of colonialism in Algeria with a series of “interventions”—the most ambitious (and notorious) of all by the architect Le Corbusier in 1931, which he unveiled to mark Algeria’s 100^th anniversary as a French colony. His modernist fantasy would have imposed a monolithic megastructure “directly over the Casbah, with its elevated highway and bridges allowing high-speed travel over the prohibitively narrow and complex streets below.” It was, perhaps, the ultimate expression of colonial urbanism in all its disregard for local life and context.

During the War of Independence that finally ended French colonial rule, fought from 1954 to 1962, the Casbah was a stronghold of the Algerian resistance. It sheltered the mujahideen of the National Liberation Front, or FLN, who waged their guerrilla war from the Casbah’s labyrinthine streets, which hampered the French military’s “all-seeing” surveillance.

The fighting culminated in the pivotal Battle of Algiers in 1957, which was memorialized in film by Italian director Gilo Pontecorvo, who depicted the harsh urban warfare and French counterinsurgency tactics, as well as the moral complexities of the conflict between Algerian independence fighters and elite French paratroopers. On the ground, the French army achieved a tactical victory by dismantling the FLN networks in the Casbah, but only through torture, reprisals, and other brutal tactics that led to strategic defeat—by turning international public opinion against French colonialism and bolstering support for Algerian independence.

The Battle of Algiers made the Casbah into a powerful symbol of anti-colonial resistance, commemorated today in sites like the Ali La Pointe Museum, which opened in 2006. This modest museum in the center of the Casbah is the site of the hideout where, in 1957, Ali La Pointe and other resistance fighters—Hassiba Ben Bouali, Mahmoud Bouhamidi, and eight-year-old Petit Omar—were all killed in a bombing by French paratroopers when they refused to surrender.

Despite being the stage for Algeria’s independence struggle, the Casbah did not reclaim its central space within Algiers in 1962, when the French finally left. Under the FLN, which transformed from revolutionary movement to military regime, the Casbah remained neglected. It also saw an exodus that drained it of much of its livelihood. The beldiya, or native families, moved to more spacious European-style apartments in nearby districts such as Bab El Oued, on the waterfront north of the Casbah, or the posh suburb of El Biar—neighborhoods planned and built under the French. They were systematically replaced by “provincials”—rural migrants—as the Casbah became an overcrowded urban ghetto. Today, the Casbah’s population is made up of the marginalized echelons of Algerian society, while an acute housing crisis has exasperated the district’s overpopulation. Many original owners abandoned their properties, unable to pay to maintain or renovate them, leading to rampant but opaque property flipping, with houses continually leased and sub-leased, and squatters moving in.

Yet despite all this, with its narrow, stepped streets, much of the Casbah still operates like it did centuries ago. Cars cannot navigate the tight curves and tortuous alleyways, so donkeys are often used for delivering provisions and supplies, and even picking up trash. And the Casbah today still maintains its citadel, hammams, mausoleums, mosques, palaces, and wast al-dar—traditional houses with large central courtyards—though many are in desperate need of repair.

The overall preserved urban and architectural integrity of the Casbah is not on account of the Algerian authorities, what many Algerians call the shadowy pouvoir, or powers that be. It is because of the ingenuity and care of individual Algerians. The absent government has its attention elsewhere. No government buildings have been erected in the Casbah, and no Algerian officials or their clientele live there, preferring instead the leafy suburbs and European quarters, like the French colonial authorities before them.

While the Casbah has decayed throughout the post-independence era, it has still fostered popular movements and anti-government resistance, as it did under French colonialism, thanks to its urban topography. It was in the Casbah that the youth who took part in the riots of October 1988 sought refuge. Those riots, which were sparked by spiraling economic and social crises, were the first real challenge to the legitimacy of Algeria’s leaders since independence. During the ensuing “dark decade” of civil war in the 1990s, the Casbah’s layered network of narrow streets, tunnels, and terraces created a haven for Islamist insurgents that the regime’s counter-surveillance could not effectively monitor—also like the French colonial authorities before them.

The Casbah’s maze-like warren of ancient streets played a key role during the Hirak protest movement that began in 2019 and led to the resignation of Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the longtime president. Just as it had been during the war of independence, the Casbah was used as a safe haven by Hirak protesters, who despite their peaceful nature, were still targeted by Algerian authorities in a severe crackdown that included mass arrests and prosecutions, including for trumped-up “terrorism” charges.

As Issam Larkat, an Algerian photographer, has put it, “Preserving the Casbah is not just a matter of safeguarding historical architecture, but is also about protecting a living testament to Algeria’s struggle for independence and cultural identity.” For all its neglect, the Casbah still embodies the resilience of the Algerian people. In many ways, it is a symbol of all they have endured.

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I left my home in Maadi, the leafy Cairo suburb along the Nile, and ordered a taxi downtown. Destination: Felfela, the classic Egyptian restaurant, serving ful, ta’amiya, and other staples, that has been a fixture in downtown Cairo since 1959. The act itself felt ceremonial, as if I were returning to a site of pilgrimage. The car slid onto the Ring Road, skirting the ashwa’iyat—those dense informal settlements that have long framed Cairo’s uneasy modernity. I thought of my book Arab Modernism(s) and the persistent tension between vision and improvisation, between state ambition and everyday survival. From the elevated highway, the city looked like a palimpsest of failed promises and stubborn resilience.

We entered downtown through Qasr al-Aini Street, approaching Tahrir Square with a caution that felt less about traffic and more about memory. I was dropped off next to Hoda Sha’arawy Street, home to Felf…

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A defense secretary promises a war that won’t last more than a few weeks. A secretary of state insists on the imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction to justify a “preemptive” war. A president, in announcing the start of that war, vows to bring freedom to the people under ferocious American bombardment.

There are some clear differences between President Donald Trump’s war in Iran and President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq — most of all, the Bush administration’s long run-up to the invasion, selling Americans on the fiction that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a direct threat to the United States (and, for good measure, that Saddam had ties to al Qaeda). By contrast, the T…

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By Mira Al Hussein

Mira Al Hussein is a research fellow at the Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World at the University of Edinburgh.

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By Paul Kohlbry

Paul Kohlbry is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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By Adam Hanieh, Robert Knox, and Rafeef Ziadah

Adam Hanieh is Professor of Political Economy and Global Development at the University of Exeter and the author of Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market.

Robert Knox is Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Liverpool.

Rafeef Ziadah is a Palestinian organizer and Senior Lecturer in Politics at King’s College London. She is the co-editor, with Brenna Bhandar, of Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought.

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I was recently a guest on Order From Ashes, the podcast from Century International, where I’m a non-resident fellow. I spoke with Thanassis Cambanis, the director of Century International, about my recent essay on why reconstruction in Syria risks cutting out the Syrian people and leading to a new era of cronyism and authoritarianism in Damascus under Ahmed al-Sharaa. We also discussed recent events in Syria following the sudden collapse of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and its semi-autonomous statelet in northeast Syria, as Sharaa’s government consolidates its authority across the country, now with the backing of the United States under Donald Trump.

Listen below, or on Apple, Podbean, and Spotify.

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Kourosh Ziabari is an award-winning Iranian journalist based in the United States. He is a contributor to Foreign Policy and New Lines Magazine and has reported widely on Iran and the Middle East.

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Ahmed Abdul Majeed arrived in Saudi Arabia in 1981, a young Indian man joining the ranks of millions of migrant workers who, for all the kingdom’s vast oil wealth, are the other engine of the Saudi economy. He became a senior sales executive in Riyadh for the kingdom’s largest travel agency, Al Tayyar Travel—a busy job serving a demanding, elite clientele that included members of the Saudi royal family, diplomats and wealthy businessmen, some of whom he worked with for decades.

Forty years later, in his early 60s, Abdul Majeed tried to leave Saudi Arabia after he was abruptly fired at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, as his wife back in India was gravely ill. But like millions of other foreign and migrant workers in Saudi Arabia, he was at the mercy of the kafala—meaning “sponsorship”—system, which gives Saudi employers near-complete control over their …

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I have a new piece out this week for Century International, the Century Foundation’s center for international research, on the new Syrian government’s troubling approach so far to rebuilding a country in ruins:

Damascus’s battered fairgrounds, on the outskirts of the city, hosted a reconstruction fair this fall, billed as an international exhibition to rebuild the country. Like everything in Syria since the sudden fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024, it had an optimistic tagline, promising an “economic breakthrough” where “the future of the new Syria is written.”

Yet the reconstruction plans emerging from Syria’s new government are actually more reminiscent of Syria’s past: developments announced by decree, opaque and undemocratic decision-making, and cronyism.

The new president, former rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, has worked hard to hone messaging that emphasizes inclusion and radical cha…

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By Kamran Talattof

Kamran Talattof is a professor of Near Eastern studies at the University of Arizona

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By Sean Yom

Sean Yom is an associate professor of political science at Temple University. He studies regimes and governance in the Middle East, especially in Arab monarchies like Jordan, Kuwait, and Morocco. His new book, Jordan: Politics in an Accidental Crucible, from which this essay is adapted, was recently published by Oxford University Press. He is also the author of From Resilience to Revolution and a co-editor of The Political Science of the Middle East, with Marc Lynch and Jillian Schwedler.

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By Vaheed Ramazani

Vaheed Ramazani is Professor Emeritus of French Literature at Tulane University, where he held the Katherine B. Gore Chair in French Studies. He is the author of three books, most recently Rhetoric, Fantasy, and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2021).

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Two words stood out last week when Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman triumphantly visited Washington, where he was feted by President Donald Trump at the White House: “Things happen.” That was how Trump dismissed a question from a reporter about the crown prince’s involvement in the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi seven years ago, despite U.S. intelligence reports that MBS—as the crown prince is widely known—not only approved the assassination but dispatched the operatives who strangled and dismembered Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

Still, Trump probably hopes that the White House visit, which included a black-tie dinner with tech and business barons, is remembered instead for a number, however inflated and illusory: $1 trillion. That was how much money Trump boasted the crown prince would inv…

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By Yahya Al Masri

Yahya Al Masri is a Palestinian writer, linguist, and PhD candidate in applied linguistics at Mary Immaculate College in Ireland.

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