The following is an excerpt from my new piece in World Politics Review, published earlier this week. Read the full piece via this gift link.

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For days, the drones had been flying low over Beirut. On our calls, their buzzing was constant, a sound that never left the conversation.

My friend Ghida and I spoke through all of it. Every few hours, I would check on her, trying to measure the danger outside in small increments. Are the drones closer today? Did you get to sleep? What is the news saying now?

Then, a little after two in the afternoon on April 8, the strikes began. We switched to video. From Ghida’s balcony, I watched plumes of smoke rise in almost every direction. The time between explosions was about the length of a breath. A hundred strikes in ten minutes, they said. Black Wednesday.

Her mother called, and we hung up. When Ghida rang back, she told me she would be staying home. She had been planning to go to her parents’ that day, a twenty-minute walk from her apartment. We talked a little longer.

Eventually exhaustion of the day’s terror pulled me under. I woke late…

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In April, Dalia Ghanem, a scholar based at a think tank in Qatar, published an article with the German Marshall Fund on how the Iran war had abruptly ended what she called the Gulf’s “gilded age.” Barrages of Iranian missiles and drones, fired in retaliation for U.S. and Israeli bombardment, had shattered the Gulf’s image as a luxurious—and well-protected—island of stability in a region wracked by war. “For years, residents of the Gulf’s gleaming metropolises—Doha, Dubai, Riyadh—existed in a state of geopolitical disbelief,” she wrote.

A senior fellow and program director at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs in Doha, Ghanem had moved to Qatar, like so many expatriates in the Gulf, seeking the regional “exception,” that “rare corner of the Middle East where continuous conflict was a data point for a policy brief, not a vibration in one’s windows.”

So much f…

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Editor’s note: Adam Makary is an Egyptian-American writer based in Cairo. An Izzy Award nominee, he has reported across the Middle East as a journalist for Reuters, Al Jazeera, CNN, and other outlets. In an essay last year for The Markaz Review, he reflected on his years at Al Jazeera, where he covered every stage of Egypt’s revolution as few others have, and the shift that came with working for Western news desks. “Each edit taught me what kind of suffering was legible, what kind of death was allowed to matter,” he wrote. “The language of power had its own syntax and I was learning to write it. Objectivity was a disguise, a costume that power wore to be impartial.”

His poem “Style Guide,” published here in Hidden Cities for the first time, was shortlisted by the literary magazine A Public Space in its 2025 Open Call.

I first met Adam in Cairo in…

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Counterrevolutions are often assumed to restore the ancien régime, but Egypt’s trajectory under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who seized power in a coup in 2013, challenges this notion. While the counterrevolution triumphed, its leader set out to construct an entirely new order—what he called a “New Republic” or “Second Republic.” Figures from the era of Hosni Mubarak may still linger, but their influence has steadily waned as they adapt to new rules in an unfamiliar political landscape. Sisi—for the first time since 1952, when the Free Officers movement toppled King Farouk and ended Egypt’s monarchy—succeeded in unifying Egypt’s coercive apparatus and empowering it to dominate the state. The result is a republic without a social contract, devoid of hegemony, locked in an existential war against its own people, and operating more like a col…

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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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By Dilek Çelebi

Dilek Çelebi is an Honorary Research Fellow at 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 …

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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