We are History: Historical Affect, radical cosmologies and militancy in the MENA region By way of anthropology of history or doing history in anthropology, I explain how the claim “we are history” is an attempt to become a community of individuals via history and social actors turn history into a world-making practice that informs political participation and justifies for armed actions as well as excessive violence. I ground my suggestions in ethnographic encounters among Shia militias in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to illustrate how social actors’ relationship with history facilitates militancy, justifies violence, Othering and legitimizes religious leadership. My fieldworks and interviews among Shia volunteer combatants show “We are history” is a declaration that traverses usual identity labels, symbols, rituals and nation building through history. I demonstrate that announcing “we are history” is a political-mystical practice, and living with the evocative historical affect permeated from radical cosmologies crafted by militants and revolutionaries in the MENA region. When militants and revolutionaries claim to be the ‘history’, the claim allows them to indulge in a type of transcendence that expands them into a cosmological scale that exceeds both state and everyday life.