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When millions of Syrians fled civil war after 2011, international donors and humanitarian organizations mobilized to provide assistance to neighboring countries. Focusing on Jordan—one of the world’s largest refugee hosting states—Disease and Diplomacy investigates how medical aid to refugees operates as an instrument of diplomacy and control within the global refugee system. It argues that health, far from being an apolitical humanitarian good, is a bargaining tool that states commodify to extract resources and concessions.

Drawing on years of field research, interviews, and policy analysis, the book shows how the Jordanian government, international donors, and humanitarian agencies turned healthcare for refugees into a tool for negotiating power, resources, and responsibility. In these cases, refugees, caught within these negotiations, often found their access to care determined not by medical need, but by political calculation. Developing the concept of the weaponization of medical aid, the book extends theories of migration diplomacy and refugee rentierism to show how global power dynamics shape who receives healthcare. The analysis identifies a self-reinforcing “crisis loop” that privileges short-term, highly visible responses while neglecting chronic and long-term needs. Disease and Diplomacy advances an interdisciplinary framework for understanding how humanitarian practices reinforce global inequalities and argues for more equitable approaches to refugee health and responsibility-sharing in the international system.

Why are some violent crises more likely to prompt humanitarian military interventions than others? Conventional wisdom says that humanitarian military interventions occur due to national interests, shared values and norms, or economic benefits for the interveners. Yet neither of these factors can fully explain the selectivity of such interventions. The international community continues to ignore the decades-long suffering in Darfur, often dismisses the genocidal policies within Myanmar, and even perpetuates the suffering in contemporary Yemen, while undertaking humanitarian-laden missions in Libya, Syria, and the Balkans.

Using in-depth case studies and new data on all post–Cold War internal armed conflicts matched to third-party responses, From Kosovo to Darfur offers the first regionally sensitive analysis of humanitarian military intervention since the end of the Cold War. It shows that international military interventions in the context of acute humanitarian crises are driven by different pathways within the Western versus the non-Western world and fueled by elite perceptions of the crisis, making interventions closer to the geographic and cultural West most probable and most intense. As our international community becomes increasingly interdependent and aware of human suffering across borders, From Kosovo to Darfur points to new pathways of conflict trajectories and reveals vital implications for leaders, scholars, and nongovernmental actors advocating for or against international military intervention as a policy choice.

Mediating the Uprising: Narratives of Gender and Marriage in Syrian Television Drama shows how gender and marriage metaphors inform post-uprising Syrian drama for various forms of cultural and political critique. These narratives have become complicated since the uprising due to the Syrian regime’s effort to control the revolutionary discourse. As Syria’s uprising spawned more terrorist groups, some drama creators became nostalgic for pre-war days.
 
While for some screenwriters a return to pre-2011 life would be welcome after so much bloodshed, others advocated profound cultural and social transformation, instead. They employed marriage and gender metaphors in the stories they wrote to engage in political critique, even at the risk of creating marketing difficulties for the shows or they created escapist stories such as transnational adaptations and Old Damascus tales. Serving as heritage preservation, Mediating the Uprising underscores that television drama creators in Syria have many ways of engaging in protest, with gender and marriage at the heart of the polemic. 
 

Ronya Othmann’s debut novel narrates the coming of age of Leyla, a Yazidi–Kurdish–German girl. She spends the school year in her mother’s home country of Germany but travels every summer to her father’s home village in Syria, near the Turkish border. She knows its smells and tastes. She knows its stories. She knows where the Yazidi villagers keep their suitcases hidden, should they need to escape again. And she watches from afar, horrified, as ISIS troops move on the village, threatening the lives of her grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends.

Leyla’s sexual awakening proves far less traumatic than her growing disenchantment with her German classmates and friends, who appear completely indifferent to the fate of her Yazidi community. Thoughtful and poignant, The Summers addresses issues of gender, sexuality, cultural difference, politics, and identity. Othmann draws readers into multiple worlds, ultimately revealing the hopes and dreams that bind us all together when forces threaten to tear us apart. 

Understanding the Syrian revolution is unthinkable without an in-depth analysis from below. Paying attention to the complex activities of the grassroots resistance, this book demands we rethink the revolution.

Having lived in Syria for over fifteen years, Yasser Munif is expert in exploring the micropolitics of revolutionary forces. He uncovers how cities are managed, how precious food is distributed and how underground resistance thrives in regions controlled by regime forces. In contrast, the macropolitics of the elite Syrian regime are undemocratic, destructive and counter-revolutionary. Regional powers, Western elites, as well as international institutions choose this macropolitical lens to apprehend the Syrian conflict. By doing so, they also choose to ignore the revolutionaries' struggles.

By looking at the interplay between the two sides, case studies of Aleppo and Manbij and numerous firsthand interviews, Yasser Munif shows us that this macro and geopolitical authoritarianism only brings death, and that by looking at the smaller picture - the local, the grassroots, the revolutionaries - we can see the politics of life emerge.

A wide-ranging examination of the causes of war in Syria and the Middle East.

In War in Syria and the Middle East, Federico Manfredi Firmian uses historical, political, and economic lenses to examine how Syria’s civil war is part of a broad pattern of social breakdown increasingly prevalent across the Arab and Islamic worlds. This expansive book argues that many conflicts across the Middle East today are rooted in fundamental ideological divides that originated with European imperialism. In Syria, the iniquities of French rule gave way to the radicalism of the Arab Socialist Baʿth Party, which promised to dismantle imperial legacies and capitalist logics through nationalizations, land redistribution, and central planning.

Baʿthist Syria, however, ultimately failed to provide a viable alternative to capitalism. In fact, its failures, and the failures of other revolutionary regimes of socialist inspiration, provided an opening for armed Islamist movements to challenge both secular authoritarian rule and US foreign policies—ultimately leading to civil war. Combining a multidisciplinary approach with fieldwork, War in Syria and the Middle East argues for a global perspective on a pressing, ongoing conflict.