The upheavals in the Middle East have reopened urgent questions of physical boundaries and national identities. Across the Middle East, insurgencies and civil wars have challenged national frontiers, embattled regimes have sought to redefine national narratives, and Islamist and sectarian movements have taken on new manifestations. Meanwhile, the massive refugee movements triggered by these processes have reconfigured landscapes and generated tension around existing notions of citizenship and identity. On February 6, 2015, a dozen scholars joined a POMEPS and University of Southern California workshop to explore questions related to these challenges to existing configurations of nation and nationalism in the region. The papers for the workshop will be published over the next several weeks here and/or on The Monkey Cage, and then released as a special issue of the POMEPS Studies series. 

“Different faces of Turkish Islamic nationalism,” by Senem Aslan, Bates College

“Redefining the Kurdish nation,” by Nicole F. Watts, San Francisco State University

“The identity politics of displacement in the Middle East,” by Adam G. Lichtenheld, University of California, Berkeley

“Kurds, state elites, and patterns of nationhood in Iraq and Turkey,” by Serhun Al, University of Utah

“Whose colonialism? The contested memory of the Sykes-Picot Agreement,” by Meghan Tinsley, Boston University

“Lebanon’s national politics in the face of a changing region,” by Christiana Parreira, Stanford University

“Iraqi nationalism and the Iran-Iraq War,” Lisa Blaydes, Stanford University

“From Jim Crow to ‘Gentlemen’s Agreement:’ The legal and soft barriers to equality and integration of citizen-Palestinians in Israel,” By Gershon Shafir, University of California, San Diego

“Turkey’s secularization in reverse?” by Kristin Fabbe, Claremont McKenna College

“Islam and Islamists in the 2014 Tunisian elections,” by Elizabeth L. Young, University of Michigan

“Remembering failed states in the Middle East,” by David Siddhartha Patel, Brandeis University

“Which borders will states fight for?” by Nadav Shelef, University of Wisconsin-Madison

“Do Jordan’s tribes challenge or strengthen the state?” by Kristen Kao, UCLA

“The Islamic State and the politics of official narratives,” Laurie Brand, University of Southern California