Sami Hermez

This workshop will explore and critically unpack the micro relations embedded in questions of security and insecurity in the Middle East. Euro-American models dominate the security discourse in the Middle East, despite studies of regional security having proliferated in the past several decades. The field is also saturated with international relations and security studies scholarship focused on geopolitics. In contrast, we intend to privilege people’s everyday lives, taking their experiences, understandings, and terminologies as starting points for what it means to feel (in)secure, and to explore the strategies that people employ to live with insecurity. Bringing together an international group of scholars working on the Middle East, the workshop aims to contribute to a subfield around the Anthropology of Security that can offer a radical critique of dominant modes of understanding security. By focusing on everyday life in the Middle East, the workshop will also contribute to a regionally emergent critical security studies. We will investigate how fear, risk, precarity, and instability operate in people’s daily maneuverings, and how aspiration, hope, and well-being are achieved and sustained. Among some of our conceptual concerns are temporality, flows, emotion, and the body–all of which are fundamentally tied to questions of security.