As an American drone buzzed overhead during a walk with a friend in Kurram Agency, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, my friend, utterly unbothered, turned to me and grinned. “See, there is so much talk for nothing.” Over almost two decades of drone attacks on Pakistan’s Tribal Areas, several humanitarian reports have been published, each of them attesting to the traumatization of people in the region from encounters with weaponized drones as the they hover, surveil, and bomb. Multiple accounts testify that the buzzing sound of weaponized drones overhead instigates psychological distress and anxiety. Yet, expressions of drone audition vary far more radically than humanitarian reports, or the news media, can account for. This paper does not ask whether drones definitively do or don’t traumatize, but instead: How should one understand these conflicting descriptions of the phenomenology of drone audition? Specifically, this paper engages the material and social world of my interlocutor and friend, Imran, to show that his account of drones—as so much talk for nothing—embeds a thick understanding of his past experiences as well as a future orientation towards a world that he would like to provoke into being. On the one hand, phenomenologies of the everyday in the Tribal Areas have a spatial and temporal depth acquired against the backdrop of multiple wars and conflicts. On the other hand, the twin universalizing discourses of liberal humanitarianism and liberal interventionism have saturated the social and political field structuring the terms through which the disparate social worlds of the Tribal Areas can be apprehended and made legible to broader publics. These conditions structure the terms of Imran’s coping with drone bombardment.

Violence and Multiple Sovereignties in Kurdish Istanbul Throughout the 1990s, war brought about a sudden passage to urban life for millions of Kurds. Pursuing a policy of counterinsurgency, the Turkish state evacuated around 4,000 villages and displaced more than two million rural Kurds in this period. Istanbul was already host to a sizeable Kurdish population that had come to the city for its economic potential, making it one of the primary destinations for the displaced. Today, there are three million Kurds in Istanbul, around seventeen per cent of the total population. This makes Istanbul “the world’s largest Kurdish city.” Moreover, hundreds of thousands of Kurds move each year between the Kurdish region and Turkish metropoles in search of temporary jobs and daily wage-labor. In this paper, I draw on two years of ethnographic research to explore the multiple and contradictory ways Kurdish working-class men in Istanbul imagine, narrate, and conceptualize violence. How Kurdish workers remember and publicly speak of violence, self-defense, and retribution has notably changed in the context of the resurgence of the war between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). I came to understand this storytelling of violence, omnipresent in all the social infrastructures of male Kurdish life in Istanbul, as a form of communicative labor through which a distinct historical consciousness and shared understandings of violence are created, networks for survival and dignity engendered, and moral selves crafted. These narratives refuse interpretation of the ongoing Kurdish struggle as mere terrorism or victimhood and instead recuperate Kurdish agency and counterviolence in a field of contested multiple sovereignties. In these narratives, “defense of the community” not only asserts peoples’ right to exist but also charges just violence with moral significance, turning those who protect their community against state violence into aspirational figures.

On February 9th in 1963, Baghdad Television had one of its largest audiences. The previous day, on Friday the 8th, the transmission had come to an abrupt halt soon after Radio Baghdad had instructed listeners to stop looking at their television sets. By Saturday night, however, Radio Baghdad began to urge their listeners to return their gaze to the evening broadcast. First, they began with a fifteen-minute reading from the Quran accompanied by close-ups of texts and images of mosques. Next, they showed two episodes of the animated series “Felix the Cat.” These were followed by a short, pre-recorded film. The film showed a soldier swinging the head of General Abd-al Karim Qasim from side to side while spitting on his body. The camera then panned to show other bodies slumped on chairs, riddled with bullets. This film was broadcasted five times that evening with intermittent breaks of regular programming. An American diplomat commented that the broadcasting of this short film seemed to be “a substitute for the 1958 practice of dragging bodies through the street” of Prime Minister Nuri as-Said and King Faisal II. The following day, on Sunday, images of the poorest inhabitants of Baghdad were broadcasted in juxtaposition with shots of Qasim’s luxurious office at the Ministry of Defense. Between Friday and Sunday, the new regime had first seized the means of broadcasting, then transported the violence of the coup into the homes of its citizens, and lastly, projected propaganda intended to undermine Qasim’s populist following among underprivileged classes who his administration had patronized with social and economic programs during his tenure. This paper interrogates of how the technology of television broadcasting, which gained mass distribution and popularity in the 1950s, was employed in the service of two violent processes of social transformation: development and revolution.

This paper examines the condition of legal death experienced by a Syrian community originally from al-Qusayr and its Rif and displaced in a camp in Akkar, Northern Lebanon. Forged by the combination of political violence and warfare bureaucracy in contemporary Syria, the category of legal death defines a non-legal condition that lies ambiguously between illegality in Lebanon and statelessness in Syria. Legal death originates in the camp dwellers’ loss of Syrian official documents during their expulsion from their homes as the result of the military campaign raged by Hezbollah and the al-Assad regime forces in 2013 and their journey of death [rihlat al-mawt] to Lebanon across unofficial borders. The paper traces how this legal condition is reproduced in displacement through the impossibility of retrieving Syrian official documents due to the reconfiguration of the Syrian bureaucratic apparatus in times of war. While retrieving official papers from Syria through the formal face of the state becomes a political act, obtaining these documents through its informal face requires economic and social capital that Qusayris ‘lost’ in the journey of death. As physical violence morphs into bureaucratic violence and travels across the Syrian-Lebanese border, I argue that Qusayris’ legal death exceeds the dichotomy between legality/non-legality and citizenship/statelessness. Indeed, legal death is also symptomatic of a more intimate and ‘sentimental’ loss tied to the significance of these official papers that encompasses different temporalities – past, present and even future. The paper follows the vicissitudes of Qusayris in their quest for a documented form of life and records of family history through the creation of new non-legal and semi-legal material artefacts. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2014 and 2015, I capture two distinctive dynamics at work in the way Qusayris engage with this loss. While affective and material labour characterised the creation of an archive of civilian records within the perimeters of the camp, the community also forged new social relationships with Lebanese religious authorities to obtain semi-legal marriage, birth and death certificates. In the midst of legal death, these mundane papers become the infrastructure supporting (non-)legal personhood.

In 2008, it was reported that one domestic worker a week dies in Lebanon. This number has since doubled. The majority of these deaths occur by women falling off of balconies, in which case it is often unclear whether they are the result of failed attempts at escape, suicide, or murder. This paper considers how it has become possible that the Lebanese domestic space — the very condition of possibility for the presence of hundreds of thousands of African and Asian women who live and work in Lebanon — has become that which forecloses life itself. It analyzes the local operations of the regional migrant sponsorship system known as kafala, whereby an estimated 1 in 4 Lebanese families employ a migrant domestic worker on a full-time, live-in basis. By contrasting the experience of female domestic labor to that of male migrant labor in construction or similar industries, as in the Gulf countries, I argue that the definitive experience of the kafala system in Lebanon is that of a deeply intimate, embodied violence. Paradoxically, it is the intimate nature of domestic work itself that both enables and necessitates extremities of violence in order to consistently (re)draw the boundaries of gender, citizenship, and belonging in Lebanon. Drawing upon extended fieldwork conducted among current and former African and Asian domestic workers in Beirut, I demonstrate that the operations of the kafala system in Lebanon are structured around the dehumanizing isolation of these women such that they are reduced purely to a racialized, laboring body. When such a slave-like logic seeps into the domain of the private household, something about the society itself has surely shifted, and it is this question that we also have to think about when we think of Lebanon today.