Books

I've just finished The Politics of Mass Violence in the Middle East by Laura Robson, which had for a main thesis the contribution of modern territorialialization (surveilling and controlling subjects in unprecedently thorough ways) to the forms of violence that were witnessed in West Asia, and specifically in the Levant or Mashriq rehion, beginning with the Ottoman project of statehood, the oppressive colonial occupation by Britain and France, and ending with the emergence of postcolonial states that inherited the same violent practices of their colonizers. Much attention was given to the Zionist settler colonialism, the Iraqi repression of Kurds, Shia Arabs and communists, and in general to to all the practices of sectarian and ethnic division and imperialist intervention (be it economic or military) across the region.

The only caveat is that the author is liberal minded. She doesn't differentiate between the different sources of violence with much nuance, specifically when she equates Soviet intervention to the imperialist intervention of the US or Britain or France; or when addressing the repression done by the Syrian Baathist regime against the merchant and landowning classes. The only exception was in the context of Israeli occupation, where she indirectly implied that nonviolent protests like the Intifada were unproductive against the terror of the Zionist war machine.