HISD66H3

Documenting Conflict and Peacemaking in the Modern Middle East

This course explores the practices of documentation involved in investigating, explaining and containing the varieties of conflict that have shaped the history of the Middle East over the past two centuries. Wars, episodes of sectarian violence and political terrorism have all contributed centrally to the formation of states and subjects in the region. Drawing on key works by political historians, anthropologists of state violence and specialists in visual culture, the course examines such events and their many reverberations for Middle Eastern societies from 1798 to the present. Course readings draw on a range of primary source materials produced by witnesses, partisans to conflict, political activists, memoirists and investigators. Classroom discussions will engage theoretical texts that have brought to bear conflicts in the Middle East on larger questions concerning humanitarian intervention, democratic publics and liberal internationalism.