On 11 June 2026, I had the privilege of participating in the symposium War and the Future of Social Research in the Middle East, organized by the Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP), University College London, in partnership with PROCOL Lebanon.
The symposium brought together scholars and practitioners working across the Middle East to reflect on one of the most pressing questions facing contemporary scholarship:
How can social research continue under conditions of war, instability, displacement, and institutional fragility?
The event was structured around three interconnected themes—Methods, Data, and Theory—and included contributions from researchers affiliated with SOAS, King’s College London, the University of Exeter, the University of Liverpool, the Institute for Global Prosperity, and other institutions.
The first panel, Methods, included myself, , Ali Omar Ali (Lebanese Spotlight), and was chaired by Mayssa Jallad.
My presentation, entitled “Fieldwork and Suspicion”, drew upon my doctoral and postdoctoral research on Iraqi Jews, memory, citizenship, identity, and belonging in post-2003 Iraq.
When I began this project, I thought the greatest challenge would be finding sources. I soon realized that the real challenge was something else: conducting research in a landscape shaped by fear, suspicion, political sensitivities, and fragile institutions.
The Iraqi Jewish community provides a unique lens through which to explore questions of memory, citizenship, minority histories, and national identity. Yet researching this community remains politically sensitive because Jews are often viewed through the lens of the Arab-Israeli conflict rather than as an integral part of Iraqi history.
To reconstruct these histories, I relied on oral history interviews, life-story narratives, family archives, community records, and fieldwork conducted both in Iraq and across the diaspora. In many cases, oral testimony became essential because documentary evidence was unavailable, inaccessible, or had disappeared altogether.
One of the most significant challenges I encountered was suspicion.
The first layer came from wider Iraqi society. Many people continue to associate Jews, Israel, and Zionism as a single category. As a result, research on Iraqi Jews can easily be misunderstood as a political project rather than a historical or scholarly one.
The second layer came from state institutions. Access to archives often involved bureaucratic obstacles, administrative delays, unclear regulations, and uncertainty about what records actually existed. In many cases, weak governance and lack of transparency made the research process far more difficult.
The third layer came from the community itself. Many of my interviewees carried memories of displacement, confiscation of property, exile, and political persecution. Naturally, they wanted to know who I was, why I was doing this research, and how their stories would be used.
One of the most important lessons I learned was that access depended less on formal permissions and more on trust. Trust-building became a methodology in itself.
Another challenge was the archive.
Before 2003, many archives were heavily restricted. After 2003, Iraq witnessed widespread looting, destruction, fragmentation, and loss of historical collections. In many ways, the archive itself became a casualty of war.
This led to one of the central findings of my research:
When archives disappear, people become archives.
Through oral histories, individuals preserved family memories, community histories, local knowledge, and social practices that could no longer be found in official records. In conflict-affected societies, memory often becomes a primary historical source rather than a supplementary one.
What lessons can we draw from this experience?
First, we need greater protection for archives and cultural heritage.
Second, we need more transparent institutions.
Third, we must recognize oral history as an essential form of evidence.
Fourth, researchers need cultural intelligence and flexible methodologies that can adapt to rapidly changing environments.
Finally, trust is not simply an ethical concern; it is a methodological necessity.
I would like to conclude with a simple observation:
Wars do not only destroy lives and buildings. They also destroy the infrastructure of knowledge.
If we want to secure the future of social research in the Middle East, we must preserve archives, protect memory, and create the conditions that allow knowledge to survive.
And perhaps the greatest lesson from my experience is this:
In post-war societies, the greatest challenge is often not finding sources, but creating the trust that allows sources to speak.
⸻
Beyond the Language of “Minorities”
During the discussion, I raised a conceptual issue that has increasingly concerned me throughout my research.
Although academic literature frequently employs the term minorities, I explained that I have become uncomfortable with the concept itself.
The language of minorities emerged within particular European political and legal contexts and often carries implicit assumptions of marginality, vulnerability, and separation from the national whole.
I prefer instead to speak of diversity.
The history of the Middle East is not merely the history of majorities and minorities; it is the history of interconnected communities that contributed collectively to the making of societies, cultures, economies, and civilizations.
From this perspective, Iraqi Jews are not simply a minority group. They are part of the history of Iraq itself.
Flexible Methodologies in Times of War:-
This is the fifth part of my previous post)
Another point I emphasized concerned the need for greater methodological flexibility.
Many Western academic institutions continue to evaluate research according to models developed under relatively stable conditions.
But researchers working in conflict zones often face realities that make rigid methodologies impossible.
Wars erupt.
Governments change.
Archives become inaccessible.
Communities are displaced.
Researchers themselves may face threats to their safety.
Under such circumstances, adaptability is not methodological weakness—it is methodological necessity.
Knowledge Production and the Funding Industry:
I also raised also a concern about the contemporary political economy of knowledge production.
Increasingly, academic research risks becoming a mechanism for securing funding rather than generating knowledge.
Universities and research institutions produce enormous quantities of reports, articles, and books every year.
Yet the crucial question remains:
How much of this work genuinely advances knowledge?
How much introduces new discoveries?
How much challenges established assumptions?
The quantity of research has increased dramatically.
The production of genuinely transformative knowledge has not necessarily increased at the same rate.
The Cost of Interrupted Research
During the discussion I was asked whether the interruption of fieldwork due to war represents a loss.
The answer, I suggested, is both yes and no.
On one hand, interrupted research may delay discoveries, prevent access to documents, and leave important stories untold.
My own research on Jewish shrines, endowments, and heritage sites in Iraq—including the shrine of Sheikh Ishaq—was affected by changing political and security circumstances.
On the other hand, interruptions often force researchers to develop alternative pathways to knowledge through local collaborators, intermediary networks, digital archives, and new forms of evidence.
Sometimes obstacles become opportunities for methodological innovation.
A Conversation with a Young Druze Syrian
One of the most memorable moments of the symposium came after my presentation.
A young Syrian participant approached me and introduced himself as a Druze.
He spoke openly about the fears experienced by many young Druze today: accusations of disloyalty, growing insecurity, and the pressure of being perceived through geopolitical narratives beyond their control.
He explained that he had participated in the Syrian uprising against the previous regime and that many Druze activists had rejected calls for Israeli intervention on behalf of their community.
Yet despite this, they continued to be accused by some of being aligned with Israel.
His question was simple but profound:
How do we protect our identity and existence without abandoning our country?
My answer was equally clear.
Violence is not the solution.
Nor is reliance on external powers.
The history of the region demonstrates that foreign actors rarely intervene out of concern for local communities; they intervene in pursuit of strategic interests.
I also warned against repeating the Iraqi model of sectarian and ethnic power-sharing.
After more than two decades, Iraq’s system of political quotas has benefited political elites far more than ordinary citizens—whether Arab Shi’a, Arab Sunnis, Kurds, or others.
The challenge facing the region is not diversity itself.
The challenge is learning how to transform diversity into citizenship rather than fragmentation.
Data, Theory, and the Future of Research
The subsequent panels extended these conversations in important ways.
The Data panel featured Sayed Ali Alavi (SOAS) and Ziad Khalil Abu Zayyad, King’s College London .
The Theory panel featured Sabiha Allouche (University of Exeter) and Fatemeh Sadeghi (Institute for Global Prosperity), chaired by Nikolay Mintchev.
Particularly striking was Fatemeh Sadeghi’s intervention, which argued against treating the current war involving Iran as an isolated event. Instead, she situated it within a longer continuum that includes Afghanistan, Iraq, and the broader transformations of the post-9/11 Middle East.
Her analysis highlighted the importance of understanding wars not as separate episodes but as interconnected processes shaping societies, institutions, memory, and knowledge production across generations.
I was honoured that she referenced some of the issues I had raised regarding the destruction of Iraqi cultural heritage and the loss of archives following the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
⸻
Knowledge, Trust, and the Future
The symposium concluded with reflections that moved beyond methodology and toward a broader vision of intellectual responsibility.
Among the most inspiring contributions came from Dame Professor Henrietta Moore, the distinguished anthropologist, who emphasized that theory emerges not merely from data but from reflection, imagination, and critical engagement with lived realities.
She argued that the experiences shared during the symposium should not end when the conference ends.
Instead, they should become the basis for new forms of scholarly collaboration, trust-building, and intellectual solidarity.
I was particularly honoured when she later suggested organizing a dedicated lecture around my research , poetry and experiences.
Concluding Reflections
I left the symposium convinced that the greatest threat facing the Middle East is not diversity itself, but fear of diversity.
Not difference, but the transformation of difference into a political project of exclusion.
The history that led me to study Iraqi Jews ultimately became a way of studying Iraq itself—and, in many ways, the broader history of the Middle East.
The future of the region will not be secured through violence, external intervention, or systems of sectarian division.
It will be secured through rebuilding trust, protecting memory, preserving archives, and rediscovering traditions of coexistence that long predate the modern conflicts that dominate our headlines.
The task of the researcher is not merely to collect information.
It is to illuminate what has been forgotten, recover what has been silenced, and help societies imagine futures beyond fear.
And perhaps the most important lesson I learned throughout this journey is that truth is rarely simple, never comfortable, and never fully possessed by any one person.
The search for it, however, remains one of the most important responsibilities of scholarship.
UCL Institute of Education UCL Institute for Global Prosperity