On April 24, 2025, Associate Professor of Anthropology and International and Regional Studies, Julia Elyachar gave a talk on her soon to be released new book, On the Semi-Civilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo (which is also forthcoming in Arabic.) As Duke University Press writes, this ambitious project “is a sweeping analysis of the coloniality that shaped—and blocked—sovereign futures for those dubbed “barbarian” and “semicivilized” in the former Ottoman Empire. Drawing on thirty years of ethnographic research in Cairo, family archives from Palestine and Egypt, and research on Ottoman debt and finance to rethink catastrophe and potentiality in Cairo and the world today, Elyachar theorizes a global condition of the “semicivilized” marked by nonsovereign futures, crippling debts, and the constant specter of violence exercised by those who call themselves civilized.” (See here to preorder the book: On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo.) 

Among the fascinating ideas Elyachar presented in her talk, the idea of “financialized counterinsurgency” caught the audience’s imagination and sparked multiple questions. Her talk was followed by comments questions from Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, Fadi Bardawil who is a scholar of Arab intellectual traditions. Bardawil praised Elychar’s book for its attempt to illuminate enduring blind spots of classical social theory and for working across multiple temporalities, spaces, and scales. He asked probing, generative questions about what is meant by “semi-civilized,” prompting a larger discussion about how it is both a condition and a subject position. With many of Elyachar’s undergraduate and graduate students in the audience, the talk spurred a rich and expansive discussion on the role of the state in Egypt and beyond today, the non-colonial financial interventions of the Gulf States, and the re-organization of sovereignty and finance through the development of sovereign wealth funds – an initiative also recently adopted by the Trump Administration.