War and Society in the Middle East in Historical Perspective (DHP-H261)

Spring 2027 · DHP H261 · Tufts University · 3 credits · Undergraduate

Wars do not merely destroy societies; they remake them. They create new states, new refugees, new forms of citizenship, new humanitarian institutions, and new collective memories. This seminar examines the social history of war in the modern Middle East from the First World War to the ongoing war in Gaza. Rather than approaching war through campaigns, diplomacy, or military strategy alone, it asks how wars transformed societies and how ordinary people experienced these transformations. Drawing on history, anthropology, sociology, geography, memory studies, legal studies, and genocide studies, the seminar explores war as a social process. It examines mobilization, displacement, occupation, humanitarianism, gender, disability, veteranhood, urban destruction, reconstruction, and memory across six major conflicts: the First World War, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the June 1967 War, the Lebanese Civil War, the Iran-Iraq War, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Throughout the semester, students will work with an unusually diverse range of sources, including military archives, soldiers' letters, oral histories, memoirs, humanitarian reports, photographs, films, maps, legal documents, epidemiological studies, and digital evidence. The seminar emphasizes comparative analysis, asking how similar social processes recur across different conflicts while remaining attentive to the historical specificity of each case. Rather than treating Middle Eastern wars as exceptional, the course places them in dialogue with broader debates in the social history of war, historical sociology, and genocide studies. Students will examine both classic historiographical interventions and recent interdisciplinary scholarship while developing their own comparative research projects.

Course codes: DHP-H261

• 1-LEC (Lecture) — Khaled Fahmy