READ | Two new articles by Nathaniel George, IAL 2020-21

CPS congratulates our former Ibrahim Abu-Lughod fellow, Nathaniel George, on the publications of two new articles. Nate is Lecturer in Politics of the Middle East, Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London.

“Survival in an Age of Revolution”: Charles Malik, Philo-Colonialism, and Global Counterrevolution
The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 2, June 2025, Pages 600–637, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaf007

ABSTRACT While great effort has been invested in analyzing the role of revolutionary intellectuals in history, much less attention has been paid to the counterrevolution and its guides. This is especially the case in the former colonial world in the era of decolonization, where anticolonial politics are often portrayed as having been the default position. Lebanese philosopher and statesman Charles Malik was a candid opponent of what he theorized as the “great Asian and African revolution” against imperial rule. Instead, he advocated consciously counterrevolutionary politics that sought to purify the corruptions of “collectivism, materialism, and secularism” brought forward by an age of anticolonial and socialist revolutions. Primarily known as a principal author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it was in the Lebanese arena that his global political commitments were most directly expressed. This included his decisive role in securing US military intervention during Lebanon’s 1958 civil war, and more fundamentally in his founding role in the Front for Freedom and Man in Lebanon (FFML), the counterrevolutionary, Christian-supremacist alliance in Lebanon’s international civil war (1975–90). Malik’s praxis highlights an overlooked philo-colonial trend in the era of decolonization: native advocates for continued imperial sovereignty over a dependent and rigidly stratified nation-state without equal citizenship. Malik’s ideological and material entanglements on multiple scales foreground the defining part of counterrevolutionary networks in shaping the global history of twentieth century and its inheritance.

‘The Lebanese Front of the War for Palestine,’ a short piece contextualizing Israel’s most recent war on Lebanon in a Cultural Anthropology Hot Spot (2025)

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READ | Race and the Question of Palestine, Edited Volume by Lana Tatour and Ronit Lentin

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This book develops from the position that the colonization of Palestine—like other imperial and settler colonial projects—cannot be understood outside the grammar of race. Race and the Question of Palestine explores how race operates as a technology of power and colonial rule, a political and economic structure, a set of legal and discursive practices, and a classificatory system.

Offering a wide-ranging set of essays by historians, legal scholars, political scientists, sociologists, literary scholars, and race critical theorists, this collection illuminates how race should be understood in terms of its political work, and not as an identity category interchangeable with ethnicity, culture, or nationalism. Essays build on a long-standing tradition of theorizing race in Palestine studies and speak to four interconnected themes—the politics of racialization and regimes of race, racism and antiracism, race and capital accumulation, and Black–Palestinian solidarity. These engagements challenge the exceptionalism of the Palestinian case, and stress the importance of locating Palestine within global histories and present politics of imperialism, settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy.

Contributors: Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Seraj Assi, Abigail B. Bakan, Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Yinon Cohen, Noura Erakat, Michael R. Fischbach, Neve Gordon, Alana Lentin, David Palumbo-Liu, John Reynolds, Kieron Turner

The book is available for pre-order here 20% off with Discount Code: QUESTION20