Undergraduate Module Descriptor

ARA3045: War, Violence and Revolution in the Modern Middle East

This module descriptor refers to the 2024/5 academic year.

Indicative Reading List

This reading list is indicative - i.e. it provides an idea of texts that may be useful to you on this module, but it is not considered to be a confirmed or compulsory reading list for this module.

Agamben, G. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Akçam, T. 2012. The Young Turks' crime against humanity: the Armenian Genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Ottoman Empire. Princeton University Press.


Allen, L. 2009. “Martyr bodes in the media: Human rights, aesthetics, and the politics of immediation in the Palestinian Intifada.” American ethnologist 36(1): 161-180.

Arendt, H. 1963. On Revolution. Penguin Books.

Balakian, P. 2013. “Raphael Lemkin, cultural destruction, and the Armenian genocide.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 27(1).

Bellamy, A.J. 2011. Libya and the Responsibility to Protect: The Exception and the Norm. Ethics and International Affairs 25(3): 263-269.

Fanon, F. 1961. The Wretched of the Earth. Penguin.

Finlay, C.J. 2006. “Violence and Revolutionary Subjectivity Marx to Zizek.”  European Journal of Political Theory 5(4):373 - 397.


 Galtung, J. 1969. “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace Research 6(3): 167-191.

Klose, F. 2013. Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence: The Wars of Independence in Kenya and Algeria. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Lemkin, R. 1947. “Genocide as a crime under international law.” American Journal of International Law 41(1): 145-151.

Lloyd, D. 2012. “Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel.” Settler Colonial Studies, 2:1, 59-80.

Mamdani, M. (2010) “Responsibility to Protect or Right to Punish?” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 4(1): 53-67

Mittermair, A. 2015. “Death and martyrdom in the Arab uprisings: an introduction.” Ethnos: journal of anthropology 80(5): 583-604.

Peteet. J. 1994. “Male gender and rituals of resistance in the Palestinian intifada: A cultural politics of violence’.” American Ethnologist 21(1): 31-49.

Scheper-Hughes, N. and P. Bourgois. 2004. “Introduction: Making Sense of Violence.” In N. Scheper-Hughes and P. Bourgois (eds.), Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology. Malden: Blackwell. pp. 1-31.

Srivastava, N. 2010. “Towards a critique of colonial violence: Fanon, Gandhi and the restoration of agency.” Journal of postcolonial writing 46(3-4): 303-319.

Wolfe, P. 2006. “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4): 387-409.â?¨

Young, R.J.C. 2005. “Fanon and the turn to armed struggle in Africa.” Wasafiri 20(44): 33-41.