Thinking about Violence

Abstract

Colleagues with whom I spoke about this piece had one of two responses: “Why do you want to feed the flames of cliché and prejudice about violence in the Middle East?” and “Surely, there has been no theorization of violence in the Middle East.” Regarding the first response, I agree that thinking about violence in the Middle East can be a fraught enterprise. This is because a hysterical mainstream narrative locates the sources of violence in or emanating from the region in Islam(ism) or attributes it to some half-baked but remarkably persistent cultural explanations (tribalism, ancient hatreds, cycles of violence, etc.) which uncomfortably echo the racism of an earlier scholarly era. But enough innovative works have emerged on violence that we can move—at least in our scholarly conversations—beyond this terrain of prejudice and paranoia.