How to govern and to secure Iran’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity? With the Anglo-Soviet invasion in August 1941, the forced abdication of Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1925-1941), and heightened political, ethnic, religious, linguistic, and ideological rivalries in the following years, these old questions became the most potent and contentious political riddles. At that historical moment of danger and an emerging international order, Iranian lawyers and diplomat aligned the 1907 constitutional equality before and equal protection of law articles (VIII and IX) with the 1941 “Atlantic Charter,” the 1942 “Declaration by United Nations,” and with the 1945 UN Charter. With the ratification of the 1948 “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Articles VIII and IX were increasingly constituted as fundamental constitutional principles for legal, social and political conduct in the Post-World War II Iran. To give national precedence to “equality rights” in the following decades, Iranian lawyers fused the equal rights and equal protection articles of the Constitution to the “Cyrus Cylinder,” a clay cylinder crafted after the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus the Great in 539 BC and rediscovered in 1879. With intensified scholarly and political attention, the Cyrus Cylinder was rebranded as the “Cyrus Declaration” (Manshur-i Kurush) and as “the first declaration of Human Rights.” To establish civilizational continuity between pre-Islamic and Islamic Iran, Iranian lawyers and academics linked “the Cyrucian ethos of equality” to the Perso-Islamic mystical humanism. Thus constitutional “equality rights” was grounded in a longue durée multi-ethnic and multi-confessional conduct of conduct that fused the pre-Islamic and Islamic cultures into a civilizational whole. It was this civilizational narrative that enabled Iran to host the first international UN conference on Human rights in 1968.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is often thought of as exceptional from the perspective of international law: with low participation in the core multilateral agreements that make up the fabric of the international legal order, no regional institution comparable to those in Europe, the Americas and Africa and limited penetration of international environmental and labor protections. Yet in truth the MENA has been profoundly marked by international law and is increasingly significant in reshaping the core attributes of the international legal order. In particular, in the post-Cold War era, the region has become a laboratory for new international law paradigms. Punitive multilateral sanctions regimes, imposed for arms control purposes, have generated a virtual modern-day siege system. Militarized conceptions of human rights have been applied to the region in ways that loosen the legal norm of non-intervention at the core of the United Nations sovereignty order. Unilateral strikes against non-state actors in the territory of MENA countries have given rise to novel rules of engagement under the laws of armed conflict. The remaking of the law of the international security order in the post-Cold War and post-September 11th eras has taken place largely through experimentation in the Middle East. In this paper, I examine three episodes—the 2003 Iraq war; the 2011 Libya intervention; and air strikes in Syria beginning in 2014 against the Islamic State—to explore the degree to which the region has come to serve as a zone of international legal innovation and exception. In the process, I examine the ways in which international law has structured processes of intervention that are shaping a "new" Middle East even as the encounter with the Middle East is also reshaping the character of the international security order.

Preambles to Arab constitutions serve multiple purposes. Like preambles elsewhere, they may be ceremonial, interpretive, or substantive, or a mix of the three. Preambles can help us comprehend the country’s historical and social roots, what the people’s or State’s aspira-tions are, or how the government will interact with other States. Rooted in comparative consti-tutional research, and building on the work of McKenna, et al, Ginsburg, et al, and Orgad, this paper examines and analyzes the constitutional preambles of ten Arab countries. That analysis makes clear that a number of factors influenced the ten preambles, and the constitutions themselves—decolonization, revolutionary ideals, and Islam, to name just three. While each preamble is, of course, unique, there are often similarities across the Arab world and themes that are shared globally, the presence of big ideas rather than focusing on minutiae, often-times setting a marker for a fresh start, and declaring an identity. This paper addresses a number of questions. First, what do the preambles tell us about the individual country—its history, culture, or society? Flowing from that question, does the preamble build on the historical roots and context, the ethnic, tribal, or other identities and at-tachments of the citizens? Are there religious or political/revolutionary ideals guiding the con-stitution and the State? Second, does the preamble give us insights into the nature of the State and government? And building on that, does the government purport to be a democracy, a the-ocracy, a monarchy? How important are civil and political, or economic, social, and cultural rights? Third, are the aspirations included within ultimately fulfilled? Thus, does the reality of the government and State measure up to the wording of the preamble? And, finally, is the pre-amble a substantively integral part of the constitution, i.e. are there legal obligations found in the preamble itself, such as would be found in the actual body/articles of the constitution? Preambles are not just afterthoughts or meaningless prefaces. They are an integral part of the constitution and tell us a great deal about a country. The ten preambles discussed herein and the answers to the questions above reinforce those assertions.

In addition to being one of the most recent entrants to the global club of liberal democracies, Tunisia also bears the distinction of being the largest exporter per capita of foreign combatants to transnational jihad in the Eastern Mediterranean. Today, following the recent collapse of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the issue of return for Tunisian ex-combatants and their family members has become a highly politicized affair. Despite pressure from human rights groups within Tunisia and abroad, the state has used security imperatives as a means of resisting responsibility for Tunisian citizens stranded in former Islamic State territories. The security situation in post-revolutionary Tunisia therefore presents a limit case of what is meant by liberal democracy. Can democratic institutions reconcile the most abjected subjects to its moral claims? Or must certain subjects, like the jihadi and returning ex-combatant, be included only as exceptions, who cannot be reconciled within the ambit of law, civil liberties and rights? In this paper, I reflect on the turn to kinship as the grounds of an affective politics of human rights, in an era when citizenship regimes are being eroded by security imperatives under the global War on Terror. My observations are based on participant-observation with the Rescue Association for Tunisians Trapped Abroad (RATTA), a Tunisian NGO that advocates for families whose kin-members have migrated to the Islamic State. Unlike strategies of “immediation” where the body is used to express a universal humanity for the suffering subject (Allen 2009), these families foreground spectacles of normatively gendered bonds, like that between mother and son, to show how the loss of kin leaves them exposed to immeasurable pain. Women’s—and particularly mothers’—performances are viewed by RATTA as especially efficacious, since they conform to normatively gendered scripts that appeal to the patriarchal state as masculine savior (Taylor 1997). I hone-in specifically on the place of motherhood in a kin-based strategy to defend human rights for perpetrators of non-state violence, and to secure the Tunisian homecoming of jihadists’ wives and their stateless children. These struggles highlight mounting frictions in Tunisia between state sovereignty (heibat addawla) and kinship’s “immoderate” nature, suffused with an excess of love and ever-adapting to changing relational forms (Lambek 2013). In exposing its arbitrary violence, kinship and motherhood bring about a crisis of legitimacy at the very heart of state sovereignty.