In the few months since its publication—and notwithstanding the emergence of a global pandemic that has irrevocably altered imaginations of…
The Universal Enemy—A reply
jihad
Texts, tales, transits: Archival method and the politics of listening
[Darryl] Li could not have set out a more difficult methodological task. To write an “ethnographic history from below–one that…
Bigging Bosnia up
As a book about the lives of “Arab” fighters in Bosnia this is a fascinating study. Its problems arise from…
Solid ground (“Idioms of the left”)
It has been fascinating to read Darryl Li’s The Universal Enemy at a time when national boundaries—not to mention political…
Decolonizing universalisms
Darryl Li’s book takes the experience of multiple projects of humanitarian interventions in Bosnia during the 1990s as a laboratory…
The Universal Enemy—An introduction
In the introductory essay to this forum on his book, Darryl Li describes how instead of positing jihad or Muslims…
The Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy (and what you need to read to understand it)
Graeme Wood’s “What ISIS Really Wants,” published in The Atlantic in February 2015, sparked a massive debate. The controversy concerns…
Contextualising Jihadi Thought
In the recent publication, Contextualising Jihadi Thought, editors Jeevan Deol and Zaheer Kazmi compile cross-disciplinary analysis on the concept of…
NYPD cops to showing inflammatory film
The New York City Police Department, and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly in particular, is in hot water over a…
Have the jihadis lost the moral high ground to the rebels?
It has been a season of earthquakes, and the political ones in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the Middle…