Religious Geopolitics of Palestinian Christianity: Palestinian Christian Zionists, Palestinian Liberation Theologists, and American Missions to Palestine

The introduction of Protestantism into the Middle East by American missionaries in the nineteenth century met with limited success while the responses and internalizations of local converts proved incredibly diverse. The two resultant theological descendants are Palestinian Christian Zionists and Palestinian Liberation Theologists. The article provides a short history of these two movements and highlights influential voices through interviews and media analysis. This article argues that hybrid religious identifications with nation and place has transcended, in some cases, political struggle for territory.

What���s behind Russia���s military build-up in Syria?

It seems unlikely that Moscow can hope for an outright victory in Syria���s civil war, so some kind of political compromise with the moderate opposition is in the offing. This, however, is at best a long shot given the hostility to Assad in the West and the intensity of the conflict in Syria.<br/><br/>Instead, the immediate priority seems to be to ensure a survival of the Syrian state and military institutions in the areas it can control, what one Russian observer called an ���Alawite Israel��� ��� a strip of land from the Mediterranean coast to Damascus, able to at least contain IS with some external support.<br/><br/>The Kremlin has consistently prioritised stability over revolutionary change and sovereign rights over humanitarian intervention. In fact, from the Russian point of view, the Western interventionist agenda of democratisation, which ignored local conditions, has made the situation in the Middle East worse ��� from Iraq to Libya and Syria.

Status and security: how Russian media is spinning airstrikes in Syria

Even before the Russian air force launched its first strikes over Syria, there was already a Russian presence on the battleground. These were not the spetsnaz, Kremlin���s special forces, but war correspondents from the leading Russian media outlets. This was as clear a sign as any that the Russia���s priority has shifted from Ukraine, where these reporters spent most of the past 18 months, to Syria.<br/><br/>There is, however, no unanimity on Russia���s latest escalation in Syria. As Russian state TV stations report successes of Russia���s high-precision weapons projecting an image of a high-tech Russian military equal to the US, doubts persist about the latest adventure in the Middle East.

Inside the tent: Community and government in refugee camps

Refugee camps are increasingly managed through a liberal rationality of government similar to that of many industrialized societies, with security mechanisms being used to optimize the life of particular refugee populations. This governmentality has encompassed programmes introduced by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to build and empower communities through the spatial technology of the camp. The present article argues that such attempts to ���govern through community��� have been too easily dismissed or ignored. It therefore examines how such programmes work to produce, manage and conduct refugees through the use of a highly instrumentalized understanding of community in the spatial and statistical management of displaced people in camps. However, community is always both more and less than what is claimed of it, and therefore undermines attempts to use it as a governing tactic. By shifting to a more ontological understanding of community as unavoidable coexistence, inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy, we can see how the scripting of and government through community in camps is continually exceeded, redirected and resisted. Ethnographies of specific camps in Africa and the Middle East enable us both to see how the necessary sociality of being resists its own instrumentalization and to view the camp as a spatial security technology. Such resistance does not necessarily lead to greater security, but it redirects our attention to how community is used to conduct the behaviour of refugees, while also producing counter-conducts that offer greater agency, meaning and mobility to those displaced in camps.