Written with AI: For Middle East Studies the Iran War tests whether its collective judgment beats Washington’s. The Middle East Scholar Barometer happened to be in the field from February 19 to March 11, so a third of its responses came in after the shooting started. Five percent of the scholars polled supported launching the war. One percent thought a broad assault would produce a pro-American democratic government in Tehran. Ninety-four percent had already concluded that the administration’s approach made war likelier. Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami, who run the survey, argue in Foreign Policy that the academics read the cohesion of the Iranian regime and its willingness to absorb costs and hit back better than the policymakers did. Zachary Lockman at NYU makes the same point about the shape of the surprise: American officials appear startled by Iran’s reaction, and anyone who knows the country could have told them what was coming.
In September 2025 the Education Department sent non-continuation notices to every Title VI international education grantee, calling the grants inconsistent with administration priorities, and moved the $86 million to a one-time investment in historically Black colleges and universities. Congress partially restored the money in its most recent budget, but the retrenchment had already started: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill began dismantling its six area studies centers in December, and the University of Texas at Austin folded some of its area studies departments together in February. Osamah Khalil at Syracuse describes Title VI as a sourdough starter, roughly ten percent of area studies funding, with universities supplying the rest. Lockman’s read on why nobody defended the centers: institutions are in austerity, under attack, and want to stay invisible, so funding people the Education Department treats as enemies looks unwise to them.
So the field was right and got defunded in the same year. Anyone who assumes that predictive accuracy buys institutional security should sit with that.
Now the live questions, ranked by how much status they currently generate.
First, what political order actually exists between the river and the sea. This is where the field’s center of gravity sits, and the Barometer records the vocabulary hardening rather than softening: the share of scholars describing Israeli actions as genocide rose from 46 percent to 54 percent in one year, with another 32 percent calling them major war crimes akin to genocide, and the share describing the current situation as a one-state reality akin to apartheid rose from 62 to 68 percent. On the postwar arrangements, three-quarters expect the Trump Board of Peace to make a two-state outcome less likely and four in five expect it to raise the odds of Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Sherene Seikaly is the strongest question-framer in this territory because she puts Palestine inside global histories of capital, race, and medicine rather than treating it as a territorial dispute. What has lost standing is the peace-process specialist who treats two symmetrical national movements as needing better mediation.
Second, how authoritarian orders reproduce themselves. Lisa Wedeen remains the most respected asker here, and the reason is the shape of her question rather than her conclusions: why do people publicly repeat claims they privately disbelieve, and how do ambiguity and performance do the work of rule. Asef Bayat holds status for social nonmovements, the idea that dispersed ordinary activity changes social life without capturing the state. Both frameworks now get applied to Iran under bombardment, which no one designed them for.
Third, whether “the Middle East” is the right unit at all. Laleh Khalili converted ports, shipping, oil, and maritime labor into political institutions, and the Strait of Hormuz closures have made that a policy question as well as a scholarly one. Arang Keshavarzian at NYU is the clearest recent gainer: his Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East took the 2025 Roger Owen Book Award. Timothy Mitchell at Columbia remains the single most portable question-framer across the field, with technopolitics, expertise, and carbon democracy traveling far outside area studies. His status is consolidated rather than rising.
Fourth, what replaces rentier-state theory. Sovereign wealth, migrant labor, logistics, megaprojects, energy transition, and the political consequences of all four. Kevan Harris at UCLA is the model answer-builder here, using welfare institutions and survey data to explain Iranian durability, which the war has just made the most consequential empirical question in the field.
Fifth, how research survives when archives burn, field sites close, and visas vanish. This is methodological and existential at once. Oral history, family archives, remote and collaborative work, and explicit positionality all gain. Narges Bajoghli at Johns Hopkins SAIS bridges the framing and the answering on Iran.
Sixth, race, slavery, empire, and migration inside the region’s own history. The prize record makes this the strongest upward movement in the discipline.
Which brings me to something the standard account of the field gets wrong. Look at what MESA actually honored in 2025: Choon Hwee Koh at UCLA for The Sublime Post, on the Ottoman imperial post; Stacy Fahrenthold at UC Davis for Unmentionables, on Syrian American garment labor; Susanna Ferguson at Smith for Labors of Love, on gender and capitalism in modern Arab thought. The political economy prize went to Keshavarzian, with honorable mentions to Nora Barakat at Stanford for Bedouin Bureaucrats and Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky at UCSB for Empire of Refugees. Communications, textiles, land tenure, refugee administration. Almost nothing about the present war.
The field runs on two clocks. Prizes reward archival monographs conceived eight years ago, which means the honors list reflects the safe center of the discipline rather than its front line. The podium, the journal front matter, and the panel titles reflect the present. A young scholar reading these incentives correctly writes transregional history of mobility and paperwork before 1948, gets a Stanford University Press book and a prize, and speaks about Gaza and Iran in venues that do not go on the tenure file. That is a rational response to risk, and it will shape the field’s output for a decade.
On the asking-versus-answering question you raise, I think the more useful distinction now has three terms rather than two. There are concept-makers, whose vocabulary other people borrow: Mitchell, Wedeen, Bayat, Khalili, Seikaly, Ussama Makdisi on sectarianism. There are evidence-builders, who construct the surveys and comparative datasets that let you adjudicate: Amaney Jamal and the Arab Barometer, Melani Cammett on welfare and coexistence, Harris on Iranian class structure, Marwa Daoudy on climate policy and vulnerability. And there are conveners, who decide which questions become visible.
The third position has appreciated the most, and this is the part I would push hardest. When asking a question carries professional and legal risk, the person who controls the venue holds more power than the person with the better theory. Lynch can make a question visible to a subfield through POMEPS workshops and volumes. Lara Deeb at Scripps and Heather Ferguson at Claremont McKenna edit IJMES, which sets the terms for the humanities and interdisciplinary core. Seikaly holds editorial position at the Journal of Palestine Studies. MESA’s leadership under Aslı Bâli built an institutional apparatus for academic freedom. Editorial and convening power is cheap to run, survives funding cuts, and does not depend on a dean. Departmental prestige is the weakening currency here, because departments are where money gets lost while journals and networks are where status gets made.
Which is why the departmental question has a strange answer. Princeton Near Eastern Studies remains the traditional apex on language depth and archival training. Columbia MESAAS remains the concept apex, and its institutional position tells the real story. Federal officials demanded academic receivership for MESAAS as a precondition for negotiating the return of research funding, and the final deal softened that to a review of regional studies starting with the Middle East. Columbia paid $200 million and promised the review. In February 2026 a provost’s committee recommended new courses that should complement MESAAS while remaining clearly differentiated from it, in the social sciences rather than the department’s humanistic, language-based, transregional approach, alongside hiring in economics, history, and political science. MESAAS chair Gil Z. Hochberg says she took no part in those conversations. She also says nothing was imposed on the department and its academic autonomy was respectfully preserved.
The pressure built a second Middle East studies alongside the first, with its own money, its own hires, and its own faculty, and left the original in place with its autonomy and none of the growth. One university, two fields, no conversation between them. I expect that pattern to spread, because it satisfies the government, the donors, and the AAUP chapter simultaneously by giving each of them something different to point at.
Moving up institutionally: NYU on political economy and the Gulf, UCLA on the strength of Koh and Harris together, GW and POMEPS as the political science network, Georgetown CCAS on the policy-facing questions, LSE’s Middle East Centre and Exeter on Gulf political economy and logistics. Moving down: Harvard’s CMES, and every freestanding area studies center at a public university looking at its budget line.
External closure runs through money, immigration status, and litigation, and it is enforceable. MESA’s Academic Freedom Initiative, funded by Mellon, published its first report on the use of civil rights law to repress campus speech on Palestine and has been building datasets toward a public site. Internal closure runs through the cost of framing. It bans nothing and shapes everything, because a scholar who wants to argue that Islamist doctrine carries independent causal force, or that Israeli security calculations sometimes explain policy better than settler-colonial theory does, or that Gulf monarchies are adaptive rather than transitional, has to spend a chapter establishing standing before making the argument.
The freshest number in this area is the one nobody has written up. Self-censorship on Israel and Palestine has been stable and enormous for two years: 77 percent in the latest round, with 81 percent of those most worried about criticizing Israel, against 11 percent worried about criticizing Palestinians and 6 percent about criticizing American policy. Lynch and Telhami added an Iran question this year to establish a baseline. Before the war, 17 percent said they self-censored on Iran. After it began, that doubled to 33 percent overall and 40 percent in the United States. A second closed topic opening inside four weeks, measured as it happened. If you want one thing to watch in this discipline, watch whether that number keeps climbing, because it shows closure as a process rather than a settled condition, and it separates the effect of war from the effect of any particular coalition’s preferences.
Funding. Federal language-and-area money went away and came partly back into institutions that had already cut. Two philanthropic streams are growing, and both have positions on the field’s central controversy. The Education Department launched a foreign gift reporting portal in January 2026 under Section 117, and Qatar tops the list of donor countries, though most of that money went to institutions with branch campuses in Doha. The administration has paired the portal with a compliance crackdown framed as national security. On the other side, donor money is building new capacity fast: the Koum Family Foundation endowed a permanent Israel studies program at Stanford after a three-year pilot, NYU launched an antisemitism center with a seven-figure gift and Emory is planning a policy institute under Deborah Lipstadt, and a Contemporary Antisemitism Studies Association launched at the University of Haifa this month with founders from Gratz College and the London Centre.
The result is a field whose material base now consists of two rival philanthropies and a hostile federal government, with its most secure new research program being the study of its own repression. Both sides of the argument claim persecution, both can document some of it, and that is the one topic on which money is available from every direction.
