Transregionalizing the Middle East

This special issue argues that the ‘Middle East’ is best understood not as a bounded region but as a historically produced field of relations shaped by circulation, displacement, imperial intervention, and uneven integration into global political–economic orders. Rather than treating contemporary mobility as rupture or unprecedented acceleration, it situates current dynamics within longer transregional entanglements linking the region to Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas through labor, refuge, trade, pilgrimage, and exile. The key analytical problem today is less movement itself than the fact that cross-border connections increasingly operate across multiple political, institutional, and normative arenas simultaneously, exposing the limits of approaches that separate ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, region and diaspora, origin and destination. Building on and reorienting transnational and diaspora scholarship, the issue advances transregionalism as an analytical lens to capture connections that precede, exceed, or bypass the nation-state, and to foreground multi-nodal, decentered configurations shaped by overlapping regimes of power. It expands the field beyond migrants and diasporas to include states, security institutions, international organizations, humanitarian infrastructures, finance, and digital technologies, emphasizing the infrastructures that enable, constrain, and regulate circulation.