This paper is very near and dear to me, and is the product of lots of love given to a last-minute undergrad class project. It is an interrogation of the South Arabian identity in the context of Yemen's Southern Movement separatists, using digital trends to ascertain the nature of South Arabian nationalism within the framework of Lisa Wedeen's Peripheral Visions.

South Arabian nationalism is constructed, online, through a performance of patriotic posting asserting South Arabia as its own entity. The individual natures of the performances gives way to a discursively constructed South Arabian identity, though certain actors such as the Southern Transitional Council have their own visions for a South Arabian nationalism. The identity is marked by semiotic invocation of historical states in South Arabia, primordial assignment of South Arabia, as well as the designation of Yemen as an occupying entity in South Arabia.

You can read a very rough first draft before I incorporated the Wedeen angle here, and read my thoughts on the process of writing this paper here.

The Arabian nation-state is a very tenuous thing. The United Arab Emirates, as a federation of former vassals to the Omani sultan and caught in the crossfire between Arabia and Persia, is even more transient. The Emirates pursue a strategy of axis construction in Yemen and Sudan to project military power and gain riches as per the realists' formulation, yes, but there is a more existential play here. By pursuing a strategy of expansion, the Emirates reify themselves as an independent actor and one with an ontology to call its own.

The article is expected to be published in the Chicago Journal on Foreign Policy's Winter 2026 edition.

Virtually everything we have in terms of Kharijite studies is filtered to us by very relatively late sources that are retroactively identified with the Sunni tradition. The 'quietist' Kharijite faction is almost always neglected in favour of broadly identifying the Kharijites with the radical Azariqa faction, and these Kharijites are often used as tropes and narrative devices for traditional stories. But this does not quite suffice as a history to be accepted at face value. By looking at the one extant body of works by those who refused arbitration at Siffin -- the Ibadis based in Oman -- we can measure Kharijite self perception against the broad and bold claims made by historians such as al-Tabari and al-Baladhuri.

The abstract is to be presented at a graduate class in the University of Chicago's Center for Middle Eastern Studies.