As the United States’ and Israel’s war with Iran enters its second month (a far cry from Donald Trump‘s “four-week” promise), our global conversations surrounding the conflict, the bloody fuel prices and the region itself have soared. Among activists and commentators, that discourse is evolving too, with a deliberate shift in language and the rise of a new term: SWANA.
SWANA is an acronym of Southwest Asia and North Africa and it’s used as a replacement for the term Middle East in an effort to decolonise language.
The term has been around longer than Trump’s had control over the US military but has recently found a renewed cultural relevance. As the war draws eyes to the region, according to Google Trends searches for ‘Middle East’ increased by 100 per cent after the US and Israel’s initial attack, TikToks promoting the term SWANA are gaining tens of thousands of likes.
So, as the world looks to the Middle East, should we all start saying SWANA instead?
What does SWANA mean and where has it come from?
Director of the ANU Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies Professor Karima Laachir, told PEDESTRIAN.TV the phrase SWANA “originated with Middle East scholars and circulated long ago”.
“It’s an attempt to overthrow coloniality”, she said, as the term Middle East “has been used by politicians and mainstream media to designate that geographical region as conflict-ridden, problematic, resistant to democracy and authoritarian”.
While SWANA may be rooted in academia, it’s begun to pop up on social media in recent weeks, with some posts gaining more than 80,000 likes on Instagram alone.
When asked if she thought this trend would catch on, Professor Laachir was unsure, telling us “it will take off at some stage” but that “we are so trapped in English, it’s hard to move on”.
“The Middle East attracts attention,” she said. “SWANA does not play well with policy makers and the mainstream media; it would take a lot of effort to change that.”
Despite the uphill effort, she did maintain it was high-time we addressed the region differently, saying, “There is a tendency to exceptionalise the Middle East as anti-democratic. It’s full of fanatics. It’s all about oil”.
“The use of the term Middle East enables the circulation of stereotypes … while glossing over the reality that the region has always suffered from constant military interventions”.
Is it time to move away from the term ‘Middle East’?
While speaking at the De Bali Freedom Lectures in Amsterdam, the late Egyptian feminist Nawal el Sawaadi caused a stir when she interrupted a line of questioning to call out the inaccuracy of referring to this cluster of countries as the Middle East.
“Middle to what?” she said. “Middle to whom?”
And you’ve got to admit, she’s got a point.
What middle are we talking about here?
When you trace back the term Middle East, you land in the early 20th century with a British officer, General Sir Thomas Edward Gordon, who refered to Iran and Afghanistan as the Middle East in article published in 1900. Two years later, an American naval strategist named Alfred Thayer Mahan popularised the phrase. Mahan had taken an interest in the Persian Gulf, seeing it as a potentially beneficial location for American expansion and, while writing about the territory between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, he borrowed Gordon’s term.
To El Sawaadi’s point, what middle are we talking about? At this point amongst this Anglo-centric group, maps used Greenwich, London as their centre point and worked their way outwards from there. So, when Gordon and Mahan looked to their east, he saw Turkey as the Near East, China as the Far East and, finally, this lot of land fell in the middle.
Fast forward through two world wars, the 1940s’ discovery of oil that saw global industries dominate the region and an invasion into Iraq, the term has well and truly cemented itself in the common lexicon.
So what term should we be using?
Well, at the end of the day, it’s up to you.
If you’re looking for accuracy, Middle East likely isn’t the term to choose. Depending on who you ask, it is a region made up of anywhere from 18 to 25 countries.
On official platforms discussing the region, terminology varies significantly. Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) refers to the region as Africa and the Middle East, the World Health Organisation folds these countries under the Eastern Mediterranean Region and demographic analytics site World Population Review goes so far as to break down countries by how often they are included under the grouping of the Middle East.
MENA, Middle East and North Africa, is considered to be a more accurate term and is often used across global organisations, such as the United Nations.
But Professor Laachir makes the point that this view of accuracy is itself a colonial lens, saying the effort to limit the region to a geographic collection of countries “flattens” cultural differences and that instead “we need to historisise and contextualise the region as a part of world history”.
So it seems, while the term SWANA may be a step in the right direction, to really discuss the region with the level of understanding and empathy required, a lot of us have to do our homework.
Lead image credit: @jaredvaneducation, @transgamegal
The post Is It Time To Retire The Term Middle East? Exploring The Internet’s Favourite New Phrase: SWANA appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
