In 2011, the year of the Arab uprisings, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing hit the bookstands. The concept precariat describes the condition of life and labour among educated urbanized youth in the twenty-first century more lucidly and persuasively than the key policy literature on the region, as exemplified in The Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) 2016: Youth and the Prospects for Human Development in a Changing Reality. This paper argues that any meaningful conceptualization of youth in North Africa and West Asia going forward should incorporate the notion of precariat and the condition of precariousness.

<p>This paper reads the testimonies of Yazidi women who survived their slavery at the hands of ISIS (DAESH) to understand how this ‘minoritized’ body, a term coined by Arjun Appadurai, has become a worldwide signifier. Due to the circulation of images and technologies, the testimonies of those women who survived have become the only means that allows visibility; yet, the visibility of the violated minoritized body is a fact that still signifies power and instills worldwide horror. The paper attempts to  understand how the minoritized individual body has become a body politic, onto which power relations are played out and where several discourses intersect.</p>

<p class="western"><span style="font-family: Arial, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="en-US">This article surveys and analyzes the gendered symbols and imageries in the hegemonic nationalist discourse in Egypt, under Nasser and under Sisi. It advances that gender binaries are projected onto the relation between ruler and ruled, state and nation, military and civilian, as a means to demobilize and subordinate “the people” following </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="en-US"><em>coups d’état</em></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="en-US">. The article also analyzes the negative feminization of the Egyptian populace under Sisi, which serves to discredit demands for political participation and social justice and to legitimate their suppression, especially following the mass mobilizations of January 25, 2011.</span></span></span></p>

<p>This article draws on ethnographic research carried out with Marxist reading groups run by a Lebanese revolutionary socialist organization. I examine the labor that Marxist theoretical practice was doing in a political conjuncture widely viewed as post-Marxist , discussing the relationship between theory and affect, and the role that affective infrastructures play in maintaining and reproducing social movements and political organisations. Drawing on Moten and Harney, I frame this intellectual labor as a form of dissonant , disorganized study - a mode of preparing for revolution by being together in brokenness and routinely generating a commitment to a particular political horizon. This form of political praxis as study unfolded within a <br>Lebanese activist scene dominated by a pragmatic conception of politics, within which the critical labor of the radical and revolutionary left was largely considered sterile , mired in something akin to what Berlant calls cruel optimism. Drawing on Munoz, his conceptualisation of the politics of queer utopia, and his defence of utopian imaginativeness, I argue that for radical and revolutionary leftists in counter-revolutionary times, cultivating solidarity and camaraderie by maintaining a space of study that could enable technologies of both self and collective constituted a productive political act.</p>

During the eighteen days of the Egyptian revolution, some hundred police stations in popular quarters in Cairo were burned down. Official accounts reported this as the work of baltagiya (thugs). The question of who burned the police stations serves as an entry point to problematizing the identity of baltagiya. Thus, examining the gendered affective registers linked to the baltagi (thug) is essential in understanding the potential of the revolutionary moment and the urgency with which the state had to reinstate the narrative of the baltagi as a dangerous criminal to justify mass violence and speed urban transformation projects.

In 2002, Nablus City in Palestine had to face more than one siege. The first siege affected all Palestinian cities; the Israeli army invaded the Palestinian territories and imposed a curfew for around a month in April. Later the same year between June and October, the city of Nablus witnessed a siege that was characterized by immobility and destruction. No one was allowed to leave their home; to do so put their lives under threat. This paper will reflect upon the role of the neighborhood in the construction of a social safety network. This network supported the inhabitants in their struggle to confront the occupational apparatus and to practice their daily activities despite the three-month siege that was imposed by the Israeli army. This paper focuses on neighborhood relations: describing their distinctive influence on peoples’ lives and reflecting on the meaning of being a neighbor, the obligations of neighbors within the same district, and how these relations manifested during the siege in 2002 and afterwards.

This article will examine Ottoman and British diplomatic correspondence and the satirical press and argue that during the Eastern Crisis of 1875-78, representatives of the Great Powers conceived of a hierarchy of masculinities that became a major part of their diplomatic rhetoric. At the top of this order was the masculinity that European statesmen saw in themselves and legitimized their imperialist projects; they particularly emphasized honor, and a logic-based intelligence which enabled them to order their governments, economies, and households so that noble, white, Christian men controlled the people of presumed lesser classes, races, religions, and genders. Until the end of this crisis, Ottoman officials sought to convince their European counterparts that they should accept them as, if not equals, at least junior partners. Therefore, Ottomans did not challenge the European belief in a hierarchy of masculinities but sought instead to prove that the new Ottoman statesman was a modern and rational man both capable and in possession of the moral imperative to rule over the lesser peoples of the Ottoman Empire. In particular, Ottoman officials depicted Christian separatists as cruel, savage, and too ignorant for independence, mirroring the arguments that anti-Ottoman Europeans made about the Ottomans.

Tahrir Square was the critical event that prompted a new generation of Egyptian feminist and human rights activists to join citizens in the streets to claim a new social and gender contract. While female protestors were an essential part of the revolution, their bodies powerfully triggered the economy of shame to ostracize some activists and to underpin, as Williams explains structures of feeling that sidelined the need to address rape in the square. This paper argues that the female protestor is a focus of political violence whose experiences illuminate the matrix that sustains and normalizes sexual violence in a society. This allows us to connect female body politics with broader socio-economic and political conflicts and with processes of state reconfiguration in marginal/liminal spaces.

Since this is a book review, I don't think an abstract is required.

With an estimated 250,000 migrant domestic workers (MDW), migrant women perform household chores normally assigned to Lebanese women in their own households. Since labor laws do not apply to MDWs, MDW from the Global South in particular are affected by exploitative regulations under the Kafāla system. Due to gender-specific aspects of migration and asylum and gendered and racialized labor division, they inevitably become a focus of public interest. This paper conducts an overview of Lebanese gendered and racialized labor laws under Kafāla based on a materialist theory, analyzing a range of local NGOs that address MDW’s rights.