“Memory, Archives, and Cultural Production in Contemporary Lebanon and Iraq,” University of Regensburg (January 26-27, 2024)
Historians of the post-colonial Middle East and Arabic-speaking countries in particular are often forced to write what Egyptian historian Ibrahim ʿAbduh has called a “history without documents” (tārīkh bilā wathā’iq). Many state archives in the region are either closed or exempt major state institutions from archiving, while civil war and conflict make other archives inaccessible. Even seemingly ‘open’ archives, like those of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq contain their own traps, too. Still other countries like Lebanon show how the problem of “history without documents” in other ways, especially if we conceive of “the archive” not only as a physical location, but also as “a strong metaphor for any corpus of selective forgettings and collections.” There, the destruction of state archives during the Lebanese Civil War (1976-1990) makes it difficult for victims of the war and thousands of Lebanese to clarify what really happened. In Lebanon and other countries, both the families of such victims as well as artists and intellectuals have turned to literary and artistic forms to grapple with history.
These memorial practices present historians with challenges and opportunities. Historians have made ingenious use of the Iraqi archives and the memoirs of the Lebanese Civil War to reinterpret these conflicts’ place in history. Yet, sources like literature, art, and music can prove invaluable sources for understanding the history of post-conflict societies, for these seldom produce cultural memory in unmediated fashion through archives or “objective” documents. Actors like the families of the Lebanese “disappeared” or Iraqis who have lost loved ones in the Iran-Iraq War produce literature and art that is interested in addressing not only the ‘true’ but also the “possible” and the “real.” So, a major challenge for scholars wanting to make sense of the Lebanese Civil War or Iraq’s wars is how to bridge the divide between history and other forms of cultural production.
To explore such issues that Prof. Dr. Timothy Nunan (Professor of Transregional Cultures of Knowledge, Department of Interdisciplinary and Multiscalar Area Studies) and Dr. Dani Nassif (Project Coordinator for DAAD University Cooperation Between Regensburg and Iraqi Universities) organized a workshop at the University of Regensburg (UR), bringing together historians and academics in conversation with filmmakers, novelists and artists to look at the dialogue between archives and memory in post-conflict societies. Among the highlights of the workshop were a screening of Lebanese filmmaker Carmen Abou Jaoude’s documentary on gravesites in Lebanon, The Soil and the Sea (2023), as well as a conversation with Iraqi novelist Najem Wali.
The workshop was generously sponsored by the University of Regensburg’s UR Fellows program, an initiative to encourage interdisciplinary work between professors and early career scholars. Participation in the workshop was also a required component of a course that Prof. Dr. Nunan and Dr. Nassif are teaching as part of their UR Fellows collaboration, “Trauma and Cultural Production in Post-Conflict Societies: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon.”
The dual projects of “reform and opening up” in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and perestroika in the Soviet Union (USSR) transformed Chinese and Soviet society. Deng Xiaoping and Zhao Ziyang transformed from a backward, agrarian society recovering from the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution to a country embedded in the global capitalist economy—if also one that would not hesitate to crush challenges to the Chinese Communist Party’s rule. In the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to revive the socialist dream led to more ambiguous results. Gorbachev’s economic reforms led to the disintegration of the Soviet economy, while attempts to introduce glasnost’, or openness, into the Soviet system, undermined Communist Party rule and opened a Pandora’s box of historical and nationalist resentments. In the last decade, historians have begun to write histories of the socialist 1980s that draw on archives, memoirs, and document markets in the former USSR and China.
We know far less, in contrast, about the global reverberations of the two projects of socialist reform that transformed the PRC and the USSR from 1978 to 1991. This is surprising, since Beijing and Moscow supported socialist parties and movements throughout the world. They had a direct hand in the making of communist regimes like the German Democratic Republic, North Korea, Albania, or Vietnam. Countries like India, Syria, or Tanzania may not have embraced communism, but they relied on aid from the socialist superpowers and were keen observers of domestic events in both countries. So, too, did national liberation movements like the Palestine Liberation Organization. Indeed, elites in the PRC and the USSR conceived of reform as an event with global implications: Mikhail Gorbachev’s book Perestroika, for instance, was subtitled New Thinking for Our Country and the World. So, actors from Managua to East Berlin understood that the transformation of the world’s two largest socialist states held major implications for them, and Soviet and Chinese leaders saw reform as a global project. Yet this story is scarcely reflected the historiography of the 1980s – to say nothing of teaching.
To that end, Prof. Dr. Timothy Nunan (University of Regensburg) is organizing, with the generous support of the Point Alpha Research Institute, a two-day workshop that will bring scholars of international history together to Geisa to explore how state and non-state actors around the world understood and adapted to the processes of reform in the USSR and the PRC from 1978 (the rise of Deng Xiaoping) to 1991 (the dissolution of the Soviet Union). This workshop breaks with convention in not being centered on workshop papers or an edited volume. Instead, our aim is to produce a small collection of translated primary source documents that can be used in future teaching on the 1980s. Invited scholars will be asked to prepare English-language translations of a primary source document that illustrates how actors from North Korea, South Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Tanzania, Brazil, and Hungary perceived Soviet and Chinese reform. Over the course of our time in Geisa, invited scholars will also draft a short blurb situating and contextualizing the document for readers. A series of intense conversations and feedback over a weekend will allow us to produce our ultimate “deliverable,” namely a collection of sources and a jointly authored introductory essay highlighting themes across the various sources. Over the autumn and winter, these resources will be uploaded to the Wilson Center Digital Archive, available for use by students and university educators.
More ambitiously, the networks formed over two days in Geisa may be used for future third-party funding applications. Indeed, given the small size of the workshop, it would be impossible to curate a selection of documents that reflects all of the global dimensions of reactions to Chinese and Soviet reform processes. It is our hope that our discussions in Geisa and the subsequent publication of the documentary collection will spur future initiatives exploring the complex international legacies of “reform and opening” and perestroika.
Ahmad Shah Massoud and the Past, Present, and Future of Afghanistan, Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge (September 22-23, 2022)
One year after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban on August 15, 2021, questions abide about the experience of state-building and nation-building in Afghanistan. The 2004 Constitution of Afghanistan drafted in the wake of the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 turned the country into one of the most centralized states in the world. This represented a continuation of the political and administrative system, the foundations of which were laid in 1920s, during King Amanullah, despite the fact that the limits of the system starkly emerged in 1980s and 1990s. The sine qua non of this mode was the denial of the diversity and pluralism of the peoples of Afghanistan. An impulse toward homogenizing the country drove the country’s institutional structure. Western statesmen took for granted the need to have a Durrani Pashtun—Hamid Karzai—lead this highly centralized system.
Over the next two decades, observers warned that this centralised system created a back door for Pashtun nationalist parties like Afghan Mellat to advance ideologies of ethnic supremacy that would sunder Afghanistan’s cultural mosaic and marginalize non-Pashtun communities. These warnings proved right. In other words, the highly centralised political and administrative system made the state-building and nation- building endeavour the locus of Afghan Mellat project. Perhaps for this reason, whereas the Soviet-backed regime Najibullah regime survived for three years following the departure of the Soviet Army, Ashraf Ghani’s technocratic dream palace collapsed before American forces left the country.
But what were the alternatives to centralization? During negotiations over the 2004 Constitution, experts worked on the assumption that federalization would inexorably accelerate the “fragmentation” or “Balkanization” of Afghanistan. Actors such as Zalmay Khalilzad, the United States’ top Afghanistan envoy, stoked these fears to forge the centralized Afghan state of 2004, one that allowed Karzai and Ghani to weaponize the state against their non-Pashtun rivals, most notably the Tajiks and other non-Pashtun ethnic communities. Although Tajiks dominated Afghanistan’s military and intelligence apparatus in the early years of the new government, events like the contested 2009, 2014 and 2019 Presidential elections, as well as the policies of Karzai’s successor, Ashraf Ghani, did little to expand the number of non-Pashtun stakeholders who had an interest in the government’s success.
Whether in 2004 or later, alternative models for governing Afghanistan were ignored. Among these was the political legacy of Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud (1953-2001), the most outstanding face of the anti-Communist resistance in the 1980s and the anti-Taliban resistance in the 1990s. For almost a decade until the early 1990s, he governed northeastern Afghanistan through the “Supervisory Council” (Shura-yi Nizar), itself a form of bottom-up decentralized governance. The council identified and reinforced the functions of informal village organisation and connected them to the district and province levels. The Council linked together scores of districts across the north and east, where each district was led by local notables. The Council and district leaders collected taxes, supplied administration and governance, and essential services like education for boys and girls. They convened courts of justice and equity. Before his assassination by al-Qaeda two days before 9/11, Massoud was the most prestigious non-Pashtun figure in the country and would have been a natural choice as the leader of a post-Taliban Afghanistan. His commitment to a national, nonethnic plural identity and his scepticism toward centralized systems of governance as well as his firm stance against extremist interpretations of Islam and Islamic extremist movements such as the Taliban and its partners like Al-Qa’ida or ETIM leaves open the question of ‘alternatives’ to the post-2001 settlement.
“Cold War Islamisms,” Freie Universität Berlin (March 15-16, 2019)
Ideas of pan-Islamism and calls for an “Islamic government” predated the Cold War, but the emergence of a global competition between the United States of America and the Soviet Union changed the terms on which Islamist intellectuals had to justify themselves. The nature of imperialist competition had shifted from one of territorial annexation by European empires to a Cold War marked by the competition of ideologies and the threat of nuclear war. More than that, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and decolonization created an international system in which ideas of Islamic unity had to contend with various nationalisms in Muslim-majority societies, “pan” movements like pan-Arabism and Ba’athism, and secular internationalisms like Non-Alignment or Afro-Asianism. Further, when Islamist actors did break through onto the international stage, they did so in countries like Shi’a-majority Iran or Afghanistan that were themselves objects of superpower interventions from the United States and the Soviet Union. The emergence of political Islam on the world stage in 1978-1979 (the Iranian Revolution, the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad, and indeed the seizure of the Great Mosque of Mecca by Saudi radicals) thus not only altered the battleground of the global Cold War but had also been shaped by it, too.
Despite the intuition among historians that the “career” of Islamism was both shaped by the Cold War and shaped its ending, however, few works engage in the empirical work to understand the relationship between the two. The last several years has seen an efflorescence of works on Islamism and pan-Islamism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Similarly, the last decade and a half has seen the publication of works in “new Cold War history” that decenter the conflict from Washington and Moscow and explore themes like Sino-Soviet or Sino-American competition. This workshop will draw on both of these communities of scholarship to reveal the interactions between Islamist actors and the international system of the Cold War from the 1950s to the late 1980s.
“Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development,” Freie Universität Berlin (November 15-16, 2018)
A small gathering of the new Editorial Collective of Humanity, this event offered a chance to discuss ongoing projects related to the themes of human rights, humanitarianism and development from historical and anthropological perspectives. Some of the papers discussed focused on conscientious objection and humanitarian aid; human rights and neoliberalism during the age of decolonization; and the transformation of European anti-colonial groups to humanitarian interventionists in the 1970s.
“Toward an International History of the Middle East in the 1980s,” Freie Universität Berlin (July 30, 2018)
How ought we to write the history of the Middle East in the 1980s? The decade began with such spectacular events as the Iranian Revolution, the seizure of the Grand Mosque of Mecca, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Yet whether a decadological approach even really applies to the region is debatable, and in some ways the region stood abreast from the dramatic events that ended the Cold War in Europe. Even as many new sources are available and transnational and “trans-regional” turns in scholarship allow for exciting new work, we still arguably lack for frameworks to make sense of the region and its place in the world since the 1970s onward. This event brought together leading early-career scholars of Middle Eastern history and international history to showcase and workshop their ongoing work related to these questions. Some topics covered included the reception of the Iranian Revolution in the Islamic world; Iranian and Iraqi war literature produced during the war between those two countries; and American reactions to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Timothy Nunan 