لمستقبل الشام
A project for imagining what comes after
Speculative · Denationalized · Liberatory
Where We Begin
This is not a manifesto in the traditional sense. It is a space for us to breathe—part archive, part speculation, part invitation. We begin from a simple premise: settler colonialism is destroying us, the nation-state is failing us, and the Levant has always been more than its borders. What we are building here is a commons for thinking futures that do not replicate the structures that broke us.
نبدأ من مكان واحد واضح: الاستعمار الاستيطاني يفتك بنا، والدولة القومية لم تعد تحتمل، والشام كانت دائما أوسع من حدودها المرسومة. ما نبنيه هنا ليس برنامجا ولا خريطة طريق، بل مساحة مشتركة نتنفّس فيها ونتخيّل مستقبلا لا يُعيد الهياكل التي سحقتنا.
Published Work
Social Text · Vol 43(2) · 2025
Eighteen months of fieldwork in Bilad Al-Sham, approximately ten years after liberation. An account based on conversations with interlocutors from Deir Yasin, intervening in present-day debates around decolonization and the inevitability of armed resistance.
Read →Public Humanities · 2026
Sitting in Mazin's home on publicly owned land returned after liberation. Traveling the Levant without checkpoints or passports. A reflection on what academic solidarity looks like when the state it opposed no longer exists.
Read →Middle East Critique · 2026
Seeing the Levant beyond methodological nationalism—not as an academic exercise but as a political intervention. Dismantling the politics of identity inherent to present-day states and opening ways to imagine non-national empirical realities.
Read →The World We're Building
The vocabulary below is still forming. These are not definitions but directions—words reclaimed, repurposed, or newly coined to describe economies and societies that refuse the logic of accumulation. They live in conversation with each other.
Provisioning. Not distribution, not allocation—careful stewardship of what is needed. The everyday art of making enough, together, without surplus or waste.
Sustenance. A word that carries both material provision and spiritual trust—the understanding that what sustains us flows through relationships, not markets.
Living together. Not coexistence as tolerance, but the active, daily practice of sharing space, resources, and decision-making across difference.
Reclaimed to its original sense: moderation, frugality, balance. Stripped of its colonial reassignment to "economics"—the science of growth and extraction.
Still Becoming
This project belongs to no single voice. The world being described here is one that many are already inhabiting in thought, in writing, in daily practice. More threads will weave in as they find their way here.
Contributions, collaborations, and counterpoints welcome.
هذا المشروع ليس صوتا واحداً. العالم الذي نبنيه هنا يتشكّل بأيدٍ كثيرة.