Short Abstract

This panel welcomes papers on how people navigate the end of worlds amid war and political rupture in the Middle East and its diasporas. We explore affinities between conspiracy theory and critical inquiry: their search for hidden connections, half-truths, elusive forces and opaque atmospheres.

Long Abstract

For many of us, the less fortunate ones, living through wars, sanctions and political ruptures in the Middle East, the end of a world is not a distant or speculative event. Familiar ways of knowing no longer hold as political orders collapse, alliances shift and economies become inaccessible. This panel asks what moves people when the world they knew becomes difficult to read, and how they navigate what comes after.

Bringing together ethnographic work from the Middle East and its diasporas, we explore how people make and remake political knowledge amid radically changing conditions. How do geopolitical transformations become objects of everyday reasoning? How do opaque infrastructures and hidden relations generate suspicion? What kinds of evidence, connections and narratives allow people to orient themselves when authoritative accounts are inadequate or untrustworthy?

Homing in particularly on conspiratorial ways of knowing, we approach its affective and epistemic registers, from “half-truth”, “paranoia” and “apophenia,” to suspicion, doubt and the desire to uncover connections. These conspiracy-affects emerge in ordinary practices of geopolitical reasoning, evidence-making, rumour, compliance, information-sharing and secrecy. They take shape both around dramatic political transformations and in mundane encounters with opaque institutions, sanctions regimes, bureaucratic demands and fragmented information about state secrets.

Rather than asking whether conspiratorial explanations are true or false, we attend to what they do: how they move and attune people, organize attention, produce affects and enable practical action. We understand conspiracy-affects as situated modes of navigating uncertain worlds—and imagining what might follow when one comes to an end.