Due to the illegal movement of goods and people, the Khuzistan-Basra frontier, like many other borderlands in the region, represented a liminal space for border dwellers and the Iranian state. Although scholars have written about the migration that was endemic to the early nation-building period, the consequences of this movement in the latter half of the 20th century require further exploration. Well into the 1970s, Iranian migrants and border dwellers complicated citizenship, evinced by the Pahlavi monarchy's failure or refusal to offer them their rights. The Iranian archives prove that, decades into the nation-building project, local dynamics continued to exert tremendous influence on Iranians and even superseded national policies.

In the late 1930s, the first independent Arab banks in Palestine, the Arab Bank and the Arab Agricultural Bank, sued customers who had defaulted on loans in an attempt to maintain solvency. Their indebted customers, unable to pay, fought back to prevent their lands from being foreclosed and sold to Zionist buyers. Each party claimed that its position was consistent with, indeed essential to, the anti-Zionist nationalist cause. The story of these pioneering Arab banks and their legal battles with their customers in the wake of the 1936-1939 revolt provides insight into Arab financial life in Mandate Palestine. It reveals the banks’ struggles to survive; complicates notions of Arab-Palestinian landlessness and indebtedness; and argues that political and economic exigencies, not reductive notions of collaboration or patriotism, produced the banks’ antagonistic relationship with their customers, whereby the survival of one came at the expense of the other.

The tadhkira (biographical anthology) represents one of the most prolific and prevalent categories of texts produced in Islamicate societies, yet few studies have sought to understand the larger processes that governed their production and circulation on a transregional basis. This article examines and maps the production, circulation, and citation networks of tadhkiras of Persian poets in the 18th and 19th centuries. It understands tadhkiras of Persian poets as a transregional library that served as a repository of accessible and circulating texts meant to be incorporated, reworked, and repackaged by a cadre of authors separated by space and time. By relying on a macroanalytical approach, quantifiable data, and digital mapping, this article highlights the overall construction of the transregional library itself, the impact of state disintegration and formation on its constitution, and the different ways authors on opposite ends of the Persianate world came to view this library by the end of the 19th century.

This roundtable is an effort to challenge prevailing assumptions that have long dominated the general discourse about citizenship and belonging. We use the Arabian Peninsula as the site for our discussion. Our scope and purpose involve both theoretical innovation and empirical diversity. Participants are multidisciplinary and put forth ideas that move conversation on the politics of citizenship and belonging beyond the usual suspects: oil and arms, the rentier framework, social contracts that exchange welfare for loyalty, a simple state-centric lens, the primacy of tribal identities, the binary of local or foreign worker, and the binary of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) or Yemen.

This article explores how the Great Depression in 1929 led to the expansion of illicit circuits globally, and examines the ways in which the introduction of anti-smuggling campaigns came to consolidate the border regimes in Turkey and French Syria. The global economic downturn in the late 1920s led states to embrace protectionist measures such as heightened tariffs and import quotas, all designed to protect local industries and maintain a favorable trade balance. The introduction of such measures, however, often resulted in the emergence of highly profitable illicit circuits, including in the borderland between Turkey and Syria. Here, a sturdy coalition of producers, shop owners, smugglers, trackers, and peddlers began to smuggle into Turkey a range of goods from silk textiles to cigarette papers, while funneling out narcotics into Syria. By seeking the global trajectories of such commodity flows, this article examines the impact of these borderland mobilities on the making of Turkey's southern border by exploring the local and bureaucratic responses to a rapidly changing world economic order in the aftermath of the Great Depression.

One would think that, after years of fieldwork and writing, I would be able to answer a pretty simple and straightforward question about who exactly I interviewed for my study of citizenship boundaries in the UAE: “Do you have any notion of the proportions [of interlocuters] of the different ethnic or descent lines that you spoke to?” This essay is about why it is so difficult to answer this question and the insights into citizenship that unfolded as I searched for an empirical answer. Spoiler alert: Answers to questions about “national” or “ethnic” origin are entirely dependent upon how we count—and miscount—time.

In a tweet posted on 29 March 2018, a bidūn activist—who was later jailed from July 2019 to January 2020 for peacefully protesting against the inhumane conditions under which the bidūn are living—shared a video. The brief video zooms in closely on an ID card, recognizable as one of those issued to the bidūn, or long-term residents of Kuwait who are in contention with the state regarding their legal status. More precisely, the mobile phone camera focuses on the back of the ID card, on one line with a special mention added by the Central System (al-jihāz al-markazī), the administration in charge of bidūn affairs. Other magnetic strip cards hide the personal data written above and below it. A male voice can be heard saying that he will read this additional remark, but before even doing so he bursts into laughter. The faceless voice goes on to read out the label in an unrestrained laugh: “ladayh qarīb … ladayh qarīna … dālla ʿalā al-jinsiyya al-ʿIrāqiyya” (he has a relative … who has presumptive evidence … suggesting an Iraqi nationality). The video shakes as the result of a contagious laugh that grows in intensity. In the Kuwaiti dialect, the voice continues commenting: “Uqsim bil-Allāh, gaʿadt sāʿa ufakkir shinū maʿanāt hal-ḥatchī” (I swear by God, it took me an hour to figure out the meaning of this nonsense), before reading the sentence again, stopping and guffawing, and asking if he should “repeat it a third time,” expressing amazement at its absurdity. The tweet, addressed to the head of the Central System (mentioned in the hashtag #faḍīḥat Sāliḥ al-Faḍāla, or #scandal Salih al-Fadala), reads: In lam tastaḥī fa-'ktub mā shaʾt (Don't bother, write what you want).

Texas A&M, a public land grant university in College Station, Texas, has a long history of engagement with the Bush family. These ties highlight the university's entanglement with US imperial enterprises, which extend into the Persian Gulf. George H. W. Bush's own explanation of why he decided to place his presidential library at the campus despite not attending Texas A&M focused on these connections: “Over the years, Aggies have provided great service to the Armed Forces of our country. Patriotism abounds at A&M.” Meanwhile, Qatar hosts the largest concentration of US troops abroad. The US military's Central Command is at Al Udeid Air Base, not far from the Education City complex that hosts TAMUQ and several branch campuses of American and other foreign universities. The students at these institutions are Qatari citizens, South Asian and Arab immigrants, and international students, primarily from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.