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Future Imperfect: Contemporary Art Practices and Cultural Institutions in the Middle East examines the role played by cultural institutions in producing present-day and future contexts for the production, dissemination, and reception of contemporary art in the Middle East and North Africa. It provides critical contexts for a discussion that has become increasingly urgent in recent years—the role of culture in a time of conflict and globalization—and critiques the historical state of cultural institutions in an age of political upheaval, social unrest, exuberant cultural activity, ascendant neoliberal forms of privatization, social activism, and regional uncertainty. Future Imperfect draws attention to the ongoing demands and antagonisms that have affected cultural production across the region, in both historical and recent post-revolutionary contexts. In doing so, the book offers an in-depth discussion of how cultural producers have developed alternative institutional models to negotiate the constraints placed on their practices. How cultural institutions operate within the conditions of a global cultural economy, and alongside the often conflicting demands they place on cultural production in the region, is likewise an overarching point of reference throughout this volume. While the politics of contemporary cultural production and institutional practices in the Middle East can tell us a great deal about local and regional concerns, one of the cornerstone ambitions of this volume is to inquire into what they can also impart about the politics of global cultural production. This involves exploring the multiple ways in which contemporary art practices are being reduced, willingly or otherwise, to the logic of global capital. What is needed in terms of infrastructure for cultural production today and how can we speculatively propose new infrastructures and institutions in the context of current realities?

The increasingly complex, algorithmically mediated operations of global capital have only deepened the gap between the social order as a whole and its lived experience. Yet, Fredric Jameson's notion of cognitive mapping, attentive to the conflicting tendencies of capitalist operations, is still helpful for addressing the local instantiations of capital's expanding frontiers of extraction. I am interested in tracing the historicity of those operations as well as the totality they are actively part of in the present from the vantage point of the Middle East, especially along with the entangled trajectories of oil, finance, and militarism. To this end, I examine countervisual practices in the realm of media arts that contest the aesthetic regime through which the state-capital nexus attempts to legitimize its imperial logic and violence. My reconfiguration of cognitive mapping as countervisuality in Nicholas Mirzoeff's terms demonstrates that there is no privileged position or method of cognitive mapping, which ultimately corresponds to an active negotiation of urban space across the Global North/ South divide.

The paper draws on a recent research collaboration with the London based women's organization MEWso (Middle Eastern Women society organization). It discusses the importance of storytelling and other creative and participatory approaches, such as the World Café, to co-produce knowledge on polygamy involving a different range of social actors such as third sector organizations, academics and women involved in polygamous familial relationships. The paper focuses specifically on one of the workshops where the researchers used body-map storytelling, which is particularly appropriate for helping participants share their story with the rest of the group. This approach has been called "visceral methods" because it draws on the sensory and affective experiences mobilised to reveal discursive, material and structural aspects of research participants' stories (Sweet and Ortiz Escalante, 2014). Body maps have also been understood as cognitive maps representing a mixture of spatial cognition, place representations and spatial imagination that can provide information not only about places themselves, but also about people's identities and behaviours in relation to them (Vacchelli 2018). Body maps, similarly to cognitive maps, have the potential to convey ideas and images of individuals' economic, political, cultural or social contexts with an emphasis on their emotions and feelings (Mendoza and Morén-Alegret, 2013).

The paper is an attempt to encompass the geo-political and geo-strategic fault lines which could put the region in a perpetual strategic dilemma leading to initiation of a strategic tug of war between the Middle Eastern Powers. The author has highlighted various pros and cons of establishment of an independent Kurdistan and its implications on the entire Middle Eastern Region. Moreover the author has analyzed various practical reasons behind the non-establishment of an independent state. Furthermore last part of paper focuses on the global and regional reactions on the establishment of new Kurd state followed by few policy options.

Abstract ; During the Great War, the Ottoman Empire fought on several major and minor fronts, both in the Middle East and in the Balkans. Although initially seen as a military liability by its allies and a weak enemy by its foes, Ottoman armies delivered some heavy blows to the Entente powers, mainly the British. Yet, by 1918, the military was battered beyond recognition. Ottoman civilians did not fare any better: they suffered and died by the millions due to war, deportation, massacre, disease, and famine. ; SeriesInformation ; 1914-1918-Online International Encyclopedia of the First World War ; SeriesInformation ; 1914-1918-Online International Encyclopedia of the First World War

Henry Siegman asks whether the next US President can rescue a two-state solution to the Israel–Palestine conflict; Lakhdar Brahimi discusses Iran – war or peace in the Middle East?; Eric Rouleau assesses the Iranian nuclear threat; Walid Khadduri looks at concerns over the future of Iraq and regional implications.