Dr. Mariam Issa is a Palestinian Christian political philosopher (PhD Political Philosophy, University of Oxford) and co-author, with her husband Dr. Yacoub Issa, of The State of the World: How the American Century Ended and What Came After (Al-Quds University Press, 2047).
Mariam’s contribution to the book centered on the philosophical dimensions of the American collapse — her analysis of the AI surveillance system deployed in Palestine in the late 2020s framed the central category error of Western AI discourse: the industry feared capability (machines becoming too capable), while the actual harm was application (machines of modest capability deployed against populations with no political recourse). She documented Gaza and the West Bank as the laboratory where these techniques were developed before appearing in domestic Western policing.
She returned to Gaza with Yacoub in the Great March of Return of 2046, to a city she had only known through her father’s stories. Her closing reflection — “We did not win. The people who were holding the door closed simply walked away… That is not justice. But it is a door, and we walked through it” — is among the most quoted passages on the moral ambiguity of the post-American settlement.