Türkiye’s growing interest in reviving the historic Ottoman-era Hejaz Railway is driven by a combination of geopolitical, geo-economic, and strategic calculations in the Levant. Historically, the railway represented Ottoman connectivity from Anatolia to the Arab Peninsula, linking Damascus, Amman, and Medina under a single transport and political space. Today, Ankara pursues two major objectives from this corridor: first, it sees the project as an opportunity to transform post-war Syria into a transit corridor connecting Türkiye to Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf markets; second, it aims to court with Saudi Arabia to initiate an alternative corridor that could potentially replace the US-initiated and Israeli-backed India-Middle East-Europe corridor (IMEC) that bypasses Türkiye’s connectivity objectives.

Chloe Nasr

The title Ṣawt al-Maʿrakeh is toponymic wordplay: both “the voice of Maʿrakeh,” the southern Lebanese village, and “the voice of the battle,” since the name also means combat in Arabic.

Urbanism in warfare privileges spectacular physical destruction and the ruins it leaves behind. Just as telling, though far less talked about, are the logics through which war organizes daily life and urban inhabitation. Sound is where this may become audible: as diagnostic archive and analytical entry point, acoustic phenomena expose how violence restructures urban habitability and exerts territorial command over the home, the town, and the capital.