Leyla Dakhli – författare

The question of dignity is central to the popular revolts and revolutions that have characterized the Mediterranean Arab world from the 1950s to the present. Whether demanded, declared or chanted, dignity – karama in Arabic – stirs up emotions and political aspirations. It also reveals the intrusion of the political into the personal, and the multiple forms of dispossession faced by populations attempting to live their lives (or merely survive) under authoritarian regimes. Yet if we look at the literature on the Arab revolts, there is very little discussion of dignity. Commentators focus mostly on the pursuit of freedom, democracy and justice, while the desire for dignity has been largely ignored.The aim of this book is to redress this neglect by exploring the revolts in the Mediterranean Arab world through the lens of struggles for dignity. The volume includes a wide range of case studies, from Syria, Lebanon and Egypt to Tunisia and Algeria, and offers a rich and illuminating perspective on the struggles for dignity in the region, both in the dramatic moments of revolutionary upheaval and in the cooler times of everyday struggles. All the contributors to this volume adopt a micro-historical approach, observing the relations between places and experiences of revolt and using maps to show how revolts are embedded in people's lives. By giving a central place to the spatial dimension, this mode of representation proves to be particularly effective as a means for grasping the multiplicity of entanglements between the terrain of life, territory and revolt. By placing life experiences at the centre, it thereby offers a novel way for observing and describing the meanings of a dignified life.

The question of dignity is central to the popular revolts and revolutions that have characterized the Mediterranean Arab world from the 1950s to the present. Whether demanded, declared or chanted, dignity – karama in Arabic – stirs up emotions and political aspirations. It also reveals the intrusion of the political into the personal, and the multiple forms of dispossession faced by populations attempting to live their lives (or merely survive) under authoritarian regimes. Yet if we look at the literature on the Arab revolts, there is very little discussion of dignity. Commentators focus mostly on the pursuit of freedom, democracy and justice, while the desire for dignity has been largely ignored.The aim of this book is to redress this neglect by exploring the revolts in the Mediterranean Arab world through the lens of struggles for dignity. The volume includes a wide range of case studies, from Syria, Lebanon and Egypt to Tunisia and Algeria, and offers a rich and illuminating perspective on the struggles for dignity in the region, both in the dramatic moments of revolutionary upheaval and in the cooler times of everyday struggles. All the contributors to this volume adopt a micro-historical approach, observing the relations between places and experiences of revolt and using maps to show how revolts are embedded in people's lives. By giving a central place to the spatial dimension, this mode of representation proves to be particularly effective as a means for grasping the multiplicity of entanglements between the terrain of life, territory and revolt. By placing life experiences at the centre, it thereby offers a novel way for observing and describing the meanings of a dignified life.

‘Endangered scholars’ is a recently highly relevant, yet historical notion. Embedded in the greater history of the 20th and 21st centuries, it captures the phenomenon of scholars who, after years of intellectual work and integration in their societies of origin, are forced to seek rescue in foreign host societies. The pressing urgency of the topic thus has an important historical background. From escaping Russian intellectuals after 1917 to the protection of Jewish refugees during World War II, Algerian intellectuals in contemporary history, or persecuted academics from Turkey today: Over the course of about a century, categories of inclusion, transnational relations, and forms of agency of scholars at risk remained surprisingly stable (and hence diachronously and synchronously comparable) while they also adjusted flexibly to contemporary conditions. This collective volume carves out this historical development and its recent expressions. It brings together researchers in a vivid yet largely unconnected field of migration and refugee studies. By developing a complex image of the origin of the global history and politics of protecting endangered scholars from the early 20th century until today, the book contributes to research on academics in exile as a part of refugee research, migration studies, the history of higher education, and the contemporary history of societies. The interdisciplinary volume explores the phenomenon as a historical, political and legal subject, brings together scholars of forced migration and intellectual studies, and includes currently affected scholars into those reflections.