In this conversation with Mezna Qato and Ala’a Shehabi, Bassam Haddad inquires about MERIP’s recent 'Paper Trail’ Issue. Mezna and Ala’a address the background, content, and details of the issue and some of the surrounding topics.
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This issue of Middle East Report explores how the Middle East is on the cutting edge of struggles to hide or reveal secret or important documents and paper trails that shape the lives of those across the region. The issue explores how the powerful utilize secrecy or deception to hide their paper trails from publics and how others weaponize archives and documents to serve their interests. At the same, time the issue explores how citizens and activists can fight for transparency to uncover the secret documents that hold clues over how they are governed and what is being hidden behind closed doors. The issue also explores how paper trails can be created through activism that turns the tables on the powerful or can be mined to explore and revive the past.
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Ala'a Shehabi is a co-founder of Bahrain Watch and works at University College London on a large inter-disciplinary project on Lebanon.
Ala'a Shehabi is a co-founder of Bahrain Watch and works at University College London on a large inter-disciplinary project on Lebanon.
Mezna Qato is a historian of the modern Middle East and is on the editorial committee of MERIP
Mezna Qato is the Junior Research Fellow in Middle East History at King’s College, University of Cambridge. She is currently writing a social history of education for Palestinian refugees, and is more broadly engaged with questions of class, development, settler-colonialism and the politics and practices of archives. She is a founding steering committee member of the Librarians and Archivists with Palestine, and is research co-coordinator of RIMAAL, the interdisciplinary research network on Latin America and the Arab World. She is active in various refugee initiatives in the US, Europe and Arab world.
