This article examines the Biden Administration’s 2024 sanctions on Israeli settlers in the West Bank, which were justified on the grounds that ‘extremist settler violence’ threatened peace and stability. While praised by some as a historic step toward accountability, these measures are best understood as part of a long US practice of using targeted financial sanctions to enforce the ‘peace process’ while legitimizing Israel’s colonization of Palestinian land. The article shows that, rather than being novel, the settler sanctions repeat the model of the Oslo Accords, when Washington used targeted financial sanctions against Palestinians, Arabs, and two Israeli organizations that it framed as threats to ‘peace’. The earlier Oslo sanctions were tools of a distinctly ‘economic peace’, in which Palestinians are expected to abandon the struggle for national liberation in favor of individual economic advancement. The more recent sanctions, introduced in the context of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, functioned not as accountability but as deflection – reframing state violence as individual misconduct, stigmatizing Palestinian resistance, and reinforcing the coercive economic order underpinning Israeli colonization. These coercive underpinnings came to the fore in the form of settlers’ sanctions, as the Israeli state engaged in economic warfare to further Palestinian dispossession and expropriate more Palestinian land.

The article argues that indeterminacy is wired into Iran’s foreign policy. It revisits the academic discussion on the topic from the vantage point of poststructuralist discourse theory. Specifically, it argues that the complexity observed in the foreign affairs of the Islamic Republic is due to the latter being a dividual actor. Its roles, interests, and policies are articulated in the framework of certain open-ended discursive regularities that are categorized here as the social logics of state sovereignty, resistance, and development. There is an incongruence between the key notions of these three social logics, leading to the emergence of potentially contradictory and inconsistent policies. In such a fragmented discursive terrain, there is a certain level of indeterminacy in how the three social logics are manifested in practice. The article also shows that this fragmentation is not disruptive for the discursive order of Iran’s foreign policy. The open-endedness of the social logics, their validation through repetition, and the sense of wholeness created by various nodal points help to perpetuate the existing discursive framework of Iran’s foreign policy.

This article ethnographically explores labor migration from Lower Dir, Pakistan, to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, particularly Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), thereby showing how local underdevelopment interacts with international capitalism to create systematic exploitation. Based on in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observation, the article reveals how recruitment brokers, debt-driven migration, and the kafala sponsorships deepen vulnerability. Migrant workers endure chronic cultural isolation, passport confiscation, wage theft, and dangerous workplaces; extended family separation causes great psychological stress. The article demonstrates how migrant labor is commodified, rendered disposable, and denied rights and recognition by situating these lived experiences within Marxist political economy and critical migration discourses. Tracing the kafala system to British colonial labor restrictions shows its ongoing function in maintaining racialized hierarchies and economic dependency. Labor migration from Lower Dir emerges not as free mobility but as a precisely controlled circulation of cheap labor that supports Gulf accumulation while reinforcing peripheral poverty. The results call for the dismantling of abusive sponsorship systems, the enforcement of labor rights, and the recognition of migrants as rights-bearing contributors rather than disposable inputs. World labor governance should prioritize dignity, justice, and human security over profit.

This article explores the intersection of settler colonialism, neoliberalism, and forced displacement through the lens of ‘domicide’ in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). It focuses on two case studies: Susiya, a rural village in the South Hebron Hills; and Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem. The article argues that Israeli eviction and expulsion practices are not only rooted in a legal framework but also in a broader settler-colonial practice that involves both territorial and cultural dispossession/appropriation. These processes manifest in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in home demolitions, village destruction, settlement expansion, and forced evictions. Through fieldwork conducted over five periods from 2016 to 2024, including interviews with residents, activists, and organizations, as well as participant observation at protests and demonstrations, the study examines how these policies are shaped by capitalist interests, such as tourism-driven gentrification in Jerusalem and land commodification in the West Bank. In this way, settler colonialism is intertwined with neoliberal forces that further Palestinian dispossession. The article examines how Israel practices 'domicide'—destroying both Palestinian homes and the historical memories they contain, which are central to Palestinian identity. The article situates these dynamics within the framework of ‘domicide’, highlighting the destruction not only of homes but also of historical memory linked to houses as an expression of Palestinian identity.

This article offers a comparative analysis of US imperialist strategies in Latin America and the Middle East from the nineteenth century to the post-Cold War era, drawing on a Gramscian understanding of hegemony. It examines how the US has attempted to establish and maintain hegemonic order in both regions, and how various regional sociopolitical formations have resisted these efforts. Although since the 1980s the war on drugs is used to justify coercive US actions in Latin America, the regional hegemony consolidated through early-twentieth-century military interventions have allowed US imperialism to operate primarily through economic dependence, sustained by the support of local elites. In contrast, the failure to consolidate long-term hegemony in the Middle East has led to a persistent reliance on military force and regime change, particularly in response to Islamic and Pan-Arab counterhegemonic movements and resistance to Israeli settler colonialism. The article highlights how imperialism adapts to regional conditions, shaping distinct forms of domination and resistance across the Global South. It concludes by introducing the various contributions to this Special Issue titled ‘US Imperialism After the Cold War in the Middle East and Latin America’.

This study offers an analytical reading of the Thawrat Tishrīn (TT) protest movement in Iraq through the innovative perspective of revolutionary politics, using an approach useful for both the study of the Iraqi protest movements and the broader topic of Arab protests. It argues that the TT protest movement is better understood as a revolutionary process, within which political movements attempt to achieve the political revolutionary goal of regime change. To do so, political actors strive to impose their hegemony. This reading of the dynamics of mobilization is particularly useful when looking at the Iraqi case in historical perspective, considering the mobilization’s cycles from 2010 until 2020. During this period, three key actors emerged – the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), the Sadrists, and the Tishrīnīs – each with its own ideology and strategic interests. Those actors strived to form a ‘historical bloc’. This expression, taken from a Leninist-Gramscian theoretical framework, refers to the political actors’ necessity to construct a political alliance within the revolutionary camp and the relations between political vanguard and the subaltern masses. Its success or failure ultimately determines the outcome of the revolutionary process.

The 2025 US–Israeli military intervention in Iran is an example of how hyperreal militarism and an Orientalist media framework produce apparent legitimacy for imperial aggression. Utilizing Baudrillard’s understanding of hyperreality and Said’s critique of Orientalism, this analysis critiques the disparity between the realities on the ground and the manipulative portrayals presented by Western media. Even though Iran’s resolve and strategic targeting of US–Israeli interests dismantled the myth of US–Israeli invincibility, corporate media only exacerbated faulty depictions of Iranian collapse and unfounded assumptions of Israeli superiority to support imperial and US hegemony. This essay critiques the epistemic violence of hyperreal war and identifies how selective framing of violence, historical erasure, and tropes of Islamophobia reinforce imperial discourses in support of invasion. By exposing these practices, the article seeks to break apart imperial language and advance a critical and mutual understanding of sovereignty in the West Asian region.

The military confrontation between Iran and the Zionist regime served as a test for pre-crisis deterrence and strategic adaptation. This essay argues that, despite starting with the failure of preventive deterrence, the event ultimately acted as a catalyst for Iran's strategic learning and adaptation at the national level, leading to an evolution of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s defense doctrine. Drawing on the concept of integrated deterrence, the essay analyzes Iran’s strategic learning process through three key logics: denial, cost imposition, and resilience. It demonstrates how a failure in prevention transformed into an opportunity to develop a more cohesive deterrence architecture. The central premise emphasizes the importance of strategic learning, the essay focuses on the strategic implications of the crisis on the policies and behavioral patterns of both parties. The core finding is that this crisis led to a fundamental cognitive shift at the national level, upgrading the perception of the Israeli threat from ‘ideological’ to ‘existential’, resulting in unprecedented national security consensus and cohesion. This cohesion elevated social resilience to a strategic variable in Iran’s defense doctrine, while redefining ‘denial’ from a tactical to a strategic level and advancing ‘cost imposition’ toward a logic of mutual assured destruction.

This essay considers the recent armed conflict between Iran and the US–Israel with respect to two issues. It first uses Iran to illuminate the current world system and how the former helps constitute the latter. It then considers the landscape of discussion around the Iranian state and society in contemporary US–EU academia, arguing that contemporary discourse manifests not a split within ‘the left’, but the existence of two lefts: one nationalist and anti-imperialist, defending the full range of mechanisms needed for national liberation and self-determination, and another which manifests opposition to war in name but facilitates its goals of the destruction of the Iranian state.