Call for Papers

The editors welcome submissions for the eleventh issue of the Oxford Middle East Review, a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal for discussion and debate on issues relating to the Southwest Asia and North Africa. The theme for this issue will be:

Making

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Making requires what already exists: materials, histories, institutions, ideas, and inherited forms. Across Southwest Asia and North Africa, people continually make and remake worlds through artistic production and craft, cities and infrastructures, states and institutions, knowledge and archives, identities and communities. Making invites attention to these processes: to the labor through which social, political, and cultural forms are produced, and to the conditions that enable, constrain, or contest their production.

The question of making carries particular urgency at a moment when struggles across the region concern not only what kinds of futures can be imagined, but the material and political conditions under which they can be made. From youth-led demands for healthcare, education, and social justice in Morocco to genocide and remaking of social worlds in Palestine and Sudan, questions of who has the power and resources to build, sustain, preserve, and rebuild have become increasingly difficult to separate from questions of survival, governance, and political possibility. Across Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, and elsewhere, war, displacement, economic precarity, political mobilization, and struggles over state authority continue to transform institutions, infrastructures, communities, and everyday life.

At the same time, artists, writers, craftspeople, activists, scholars, and communities continue to make: preserving archives, producing knowledge and culture, sustaining collective memory, organizing political demands, and imagining forms of life that exceed the conditions imposed upon them. Making therefore directs attention not only to finished objects or outcomes, but to process: who makes, what becomes possible to make, what is prevented or destroyed, and within which structures of power.

OMER has traditionally published policy briefs, research articles, and book reviews. For our eleventh edition, we are expanding the forms of scholarship we invite, welcoming interdisciplinary, visual, creative, and experimental contributions, including interviews, visual essays, photography, and hybrid forms of academic work. We encourage submissions that engage critically with the theme of Making through diverse intellectual, artistic, and methodological approaches.

Research Articles — 7,500–10,000 words

Original scholarly research from any discipline that presents a sustained argument and engages critically with the theme of Making in the context of Southwest Asia and North Africa.

Interviews — 1,500–4,000 words

Substantive conversations with researchers, artists, activists, practitioners, or other contributors whose work engages with the theme. Interviews should demonstrate intellectual or critical significance, with appropriate attention to consent and the interviewee’s intended meaning.

Visual and Photo Essays — Flexible length

Visual contributions that develop an intellectual, artistic, or critical intervention through photography, illustration, archival material, or other image-based approaches.

Creative and Experimental Scholarship — Flexible length

Interdisciplinary and experimental contributions, including poetry, creative nonfiction, hybrid scholarship, and work that challenges conventional academic forms. Submissions should engage meaningfully with the journal’s theme and intellectual scope.

We welcome enquiries about unconventional formats and projects still in development. Contributors are encouraged to contact the editorial team to discuss their proposed submissions.