Humanity Journal 8, no. 2 (2017).
This special issue, co-edited by Dr Simon Jackson and Prof. A. Dirk Moses, deploys the concept of transformative occupation to reinterpret the history of state formation (and prevention) in the Middle East across the twentieth century, during and after imperial and colonial occupation. A series of socio-political histories of these occupations refine and extend the heuristic yield of the concept of transformative occupation, for use in other cases globally. The issue works with a set of sub-themes that inform our contributors' use of the concept: developmental ideologies, political spaces, political temporalities, and patterns of violence and resistance - especially as they generated humanitarian practices. Case studies include the Mandates in Palestine and Syria-Lebanon, Israel-Palestine since the 1970s, US occupied Iraq, NATO and Soviet occupations of Afghanistan, and the role of international law in the history of colonial occupation.