Altered States: The Remaking of the Political in the Arab World 9781032134093, 9781032134147, 9781003229094

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of contributors
Introduction: The Remaking of the Political in the Arab World since 2010
1 State-crafting and Modes of Governance in the United Arab Emirates
2 Community Organizing and the Limits of Participatory Democracy in Lebanon
3 Archiving in an Age of (Counter)Revolutions
4 Class Power, the State and Contentious Politics in the Age of Globalization: The Case of Egypt
5 Same Different? A Comparative Study of Kurdish-Led Rojava and Opposition-Held Syria
6 Postcolonial State-ness and the Case of Rawabi
7 Lebanon’s Wadi Khaled and the Challenge of Sovereignty
8 Egyptian State and Culture
9 How Diplomatic Practices Make the Fuzzy State of Palestine Visible
10 Daesh and the “Effect of the State”
11 Conclusion: The Westphalian State Effect
Index

Citation preview

“Haugbolle and LeVine have brought together various contributors in a pioneering edited volume that goes against the grain of debates on the state in the Middle East and North Africa. Its questioning of the apparent solidity of the state is a nuanced and refreshing intervention on the subject.” — Mohammed Moussa, Department of Political Science and International Relations, Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University “This fascinating collection of essays provides excitingly fresh analyses of the state effect in the Middle East. By conceiving of the state as relational, dynamic, and constantly remade, and through a series of sensitive ethnographic and historical studies, this volume updates our understanding of how the Middle Eastern state still functions after the shattering uprisings of the last decade.” — Laleh Khalili, Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London “Altered States makes an invaluable contribution to scholarship on “stateness, “that is, the means and policies that constitute governance, including various forms of reprisal and repression against those who challenge their states and/or are deemed dangers and threats. The contributors offer deeply theorized analyses grounded in empirical detail about state practices across the Middle East and the dynamical effects on societies and communities. This book’s theoretical implications extend beyond one region and should appeal to scholars who work on states anywhere.” — Lisa Hajjar, author of The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture

Altered States

Building on Timothy Mitchell’s seminal 1991 exploration of the “Limits of the State,” this book brings together contributions on the state in the Arab world from the past and present in an edited volume. Altered States views the state less as a matter of people and institutions and more as sets of practices, regimes of truth, and capabilities of power, and the effects they have on those under their control. Through analysing case studies – including Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine, the UAE, Rojova, and the Islamic State – the concept of the state is applied and questioned. This book examines the roots of policies that led to the uprisings, focusing on how the “authoritarian bargain,” which helped define Arab politics, broke down with the rise of neoliberalism. It also assesses how boundaries between state and society have been redrawn, as various dynamics have brought state forces into more open conflict with citizens and each other. The rapid pace of change in the Arab world has necessitated constant modification of themes and theoretical lens of analysis. This book will, therefore, be of interest to practitioners, graduate students, and academics of the Arab world, statehood, and political science. Sune Haugbolle is Professor of Global Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark. Mark LeVine is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of California, Irvine, USA.

Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Democratization and Government Edited by: Larbi Sadiki, Qatar University

This series examines new ways of understanding democratization and government in the Middle East. The varied and uneven processes of change, occurring in the Middle Eastern region, can no longer be read and interpreted solely through the prism of Euro-American transitology. Seeking to frame critical parameters in light of these new horizons, this series instigates reinterpretations of democracy and propagates formerly ‘subaltern,’ narratives of democratization. Reinvigorating discussion on how Arab and Middle Eastern peoples and societies seek good government, Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Democratization and Government provides tests and contests of old and new assumptions. 30 The Tunisian Revolution and Democratic Transition The Role of al-Nahḍah Mohammad Dawood Sofi 31 The Egyptian Army and the Muslim Brotherhood Contemporary Political Power Dynamics Sara Tonsy 32 Secularism Confronts Islamism Divergent Paths of Transitional Negotiations in Egypt and Tunisia Mohammad Affan 33 Altered States The Remaking of the Political in the Arab World Edited by Sune Haugbolle and Mark LeVine \\MPKPZFS01\Bks_HUMSOC\Editorial\Shared Resources\Series Pages\ Middle East JFW\Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Democratization and Government.docx For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/middleeaststudies/series/RSMEDG

Altered States The Remaking of the Political in the Arab World

Edited by Sune Haugbolle and Mark LeVine

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Sune Haugbolle and Mark LeVine; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sune Haugbolle and Mark LeVine to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-032-13409-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-13414-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-22909-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/b22870 Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

This book is dedicated to all the victims of the Arab states

Contents

List of contributors Introduction: The Remaking of the Political in the Arab World since 2010

xi

1

SU N E H AUGB OL L E A N D M A R K L E V I N E

1 State-crafting and Modes of Governance in the United Arab Emirates

24

E S T E L L A CA R PI A N D A N DR E A GL IO T I

2 Community Organizing and the Limits of Participatory Democracy in Lebanon

47

S OPH I E C H A M A S

3 Archiving in an Age of (Counter)Revolutions

74

L E Y L A DA K H L I

4 Class Power, the State and Contentious Politics in the Age of Globalization: The Case of Egypt

98

A NGE L A JOYA

5 Same Different? A Comparative Study of Kurdish-Led Rojava and Opposition-Held Syria

120

A N DR E A GL IO T I

6 Postcolonial State-ness and the Case of Rawabi

143

S OM DE E P SE N

7 Lebanon’s Wadi Khaled and the Challenge of Sovereignty JA M I L MOUAWA D

173

x Contents 8 Egyptian State and Culture

193

T E D S W E DE N BU RG

9 How Diplomatic Practices Make the Fuzzy State of Palestine Visible

219

M IC H E L L E PAC E

10 Daesh and the “Effect of the State”

238

M IC H A E L DE GE R A L D

11 Conclusion: The Westphalian State Effect

260

J I L L I A N S C H W E DL E R

Index

274

Contributors

Estella Carpi is a Lecturer of Humanitarian Studies in the Institute of Risk and Disaster Reduction at University College London. Her research work mostly revolves around humanitarianism, identity politics, and forced displacement in the Middle Eastern region Sophie Chamas is Lecturer in Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK. Leyla Dakhli is full-time researcher at the French Center for National Research (CNRS) and the Marc Bloch Center in Berlin, Germany. Michael Degerald is associate researcher at the Center for Advanced Middle East Studies, Lund University, Sweden. Andrea Glioti is independent journalist and researcher based in London. Sune Haugbolle  is Professor of Global Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark. Angela Joya is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at University of Oregon, USA. Mark Levine is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of California, Irvine, USA. Jamil Mouawad is Lecturer in Political Studies and Public Administration at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. Michelle Pace  is Professor of Global Studies at the Roskilde University, Denmark. Somdeep Sen  is Associate Professor of Development Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark. Jillian Schwedler  is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College, The City University of New York, USA. Ted Swedenburg is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas, USA.

Introduction The Remaking of the Political in the Arab World since 2010 Sune Haugbolle and Mark LeVine

Muhammad Bouazizi was not the first Tunisian to set himself alight in 2010. Earlier that year, two other men similarly self-immolated, out of desperation born of economic and political stagnation, of a government that could no longer “read” its people and attend to even their most basic needs for dignity or human rights, never mind bread. But it was Bouazizi’s action that sparked a revolution at home and a wave of protests, uprisings, and revolutionary moments across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), whose reverberations continue to echo, with undulating levels of strength, across the Arab world and beyond even as Tunisia’s President staged a constitutional autogolpe, or self-coup, as we go to press in the summer of 2021. A decade after his desperate act, the question remains: What larger political processes and imaginaries surrounded Bouazizi’s sacrifice? And why at that particular moment did such an action initiate a region-wide series of mass protests, uprisings, and revolutions against systems that until then seemed immune to all but incremental, tightly managed change, when almost identical actions had failed to do so in the months and years before? While rarely discussed, the immediate roots of Bouazizi’s spectacular act lay not in the actions of Tunisia’s mafia government, but in the even darker regime in neighboring Libya. It was there, in the summer of 2010, that President Muammar Gaddafi, in response to pressure by his good friend, Italian President Silvio Berlusconi, agreed to curtail the high levels of Arab and African migration to Europe through Libya. Under the direction of his son and heir apparent, Seif, Gaddafi instituted a new labor regime that forced a large share of foreign workers in Libya, including untold thousands of Tunisian laborers, to leave the country and apply for work permits in order to return. Suddenly the streets of dusty provincial towns like Sidi Bouzid were filled with young men just returned from Libya, with few if any prospects for work other than petty trading and street vending. Their presence increased pressure on vendors like Bouazizi and on the police and municipal officials who were tasked with regulating (and more often “taxing”) their work. With so many young men competing in relatively small spaces to sell the same goods,

DOI: 10.4324/b22870-1

2  Sune Haugbolle and Mark LeVine confrontation and ultimately an explosion was in hindsight inevitable, at least on the provincial streets. Once the fire reached Tunis, President Ben Ali well understood the immediate source of the trouble; in the second of his three televised speeches to the Tunisian people, he attempted to diffuse the situation by exclaiming that Tunisia’s “brotherly” neighbor had agreed to rescind the new labor regulation and allow Tunisians to return to Libya to work without permits. But it was too late. This book builds on the pioneering but, in our view, underutilized (if oftcited) work of Timothy Mitchell on the nature, spatiality, and limits of state power. It takes as its starting point Mitchell’s development of Foucault’s discussions of the state—more specifically, the raison d’état of modern systems of governmentality—as a discursive “effect” of multiple regimes of truth and power that successfully establish and deploy “the knowledge of the appropriate means for founding, preserving, and expanding… a firm domination over peoples” (Foucault 2009: 238). Mitchell zeroes in on Foucault’s idea of the state as first and foremost a state of knowledge rather than set of institutions that enables those wielding political power in modern, territorially bounded nation-states to successfully manage the populations and (more or less) “fix” the economies under their jurisdiction. Focusing on the effect of such regimes of truth and their deployment across society, Mitchell argues that the “network of institutional arrangement and political practice that forms the material substance of the state,” along with its ideologically constructed “public imagery,” together create the “state effect” as a material force that is experienced, perceived, and occasionally resisted by people as a unitary locus of political, economic, and ideological power (Mitchell 1999a; 1999b: 76). But as the explosion of the Arab Uprisings beginning in late 2010 made clear, sometimes the effect wears off. Sometimes the fire of desperation burns through the regimes and disposatifs through which power is wielded by political elites, laying bare and raw what often turns out to be the mundanely criminal networks through which politics is managed and wealth concentrated and (re)circulated through society. For a moment at least, people refuse to be disciplined and attempt to take state power into their own hands, to assume that mantle of what in Islamic jurisprudence is known as the “people who loose and bind” (ahl al-hall wa’l-’aqd). At that moment, the original meaning of “revolution”—as constant motion—and the huge amount of effort and energy necessary to maintain the state effect becomes clear. We wonder: Why are societies not in a state of liminality, if not revolution, far more of the time? Why is it that stability—status or statum, the Latin root for “state”—rather than instability and even revolution is the norm? When it occurs, as during the Arab Uprisings, the demasking of state power and political mobilization from below seem to happen almost organically, opening a new horizon of expectation and introducing new social imaginaries that made it possible, for the first time in decades in many

Introduction  3 countries, to reimagine the political settlement and future direction of whole societies (Haugbolle & Bandak 2017: 194; cf. LeVine 2013). Beginning in Iran in the summer of 2009 and continuing in the Arab world from late 2010, in fits and starts (including for a brief moment in Turkey in 2013) through the time of writing in 2021, the possibility of game-changing levels of mobilization altered and gave new meaning to seemingly well-entrenched political categories and cartographies. What happened during the uprisings was nothing less than a reconfiguration of the political imagination. This return of the possibility of revolution has pushed some political scientists to look at the state as a set of social relations by identifying “interrelationship between actors, institutional networks and fields and practices that are in play in the production of new subjectivities” (Levine 2013: 195). This reading sees state formation as a continuous process. By examining the “subtle changes in the flows and networks of power between individuals and various social and political institutions,” the state appears as an assemblage of political actors and techniques. Most historians recognize the assemblage of power relations involved in the formation of Arab states. However, the constructed, and therefore supposedly unstable, nature of the Arab states leads them to draw different conclusions. Arab states emerged from colonial intervention in the (colonial) Ottoman Empire and its outlying North African provinces as well as the Sultanate of Morocco. In some countries such as Lebanon and Syria, colonial intervention empowered certain elites and created the b ­ asic military structures that in time gave rise to military regimes. In other countries, military regimes derived from coups and revolutions. For many different observers in the region and beyond, including Arab nationalists, pan-Islamists, and American Middle East policy-makers, the allegedly “artificial” origins of states present a conundrum (needless to say, in reality there is no such thing as an “organic” state). It forces them to ask: Why have states not fractured more? For others, the artificial Arab state explains the “fierce” Arab state where, in the absence of a stable social contract, centralized regimes resorted to coercion (Ahram & Lust 2016). Both versions contain an element of truth, but are also problematic because they overemphasize the particularity of Arab states. Moreover, such sweeping narratives take attention away from the crucial set of relations between those holding and (re)directing political power and the peoples they (attempt to) govern. It also removes or at least relegates agency of local actors—elite as well as subaltern. A more fine-tuned analysis of Arab states should pay attention to the political settlement that fundamentally underpins political power, enabling a more sophisticated discussion of the interplay of coercion and hegemony. We need to move beyond a sharp distinction between state and society that fails to reckon with the mechanisms by which various forms of power operate between individuals and institutions of governance (Levine 2013: 192).

4  Sune Haugbolle and Mark LeVine

Beyond Weber Literature about the Arab state is informed by area studies as much as by political science. Since the early 1990s, Middle East studies has been influenced by the way Timothy Mitchell, Lisa Wedeen, Beatrice Hibou, and other influential figures in the field lean toward political sociology in their understanding of the state, drawing in particular on Foucault, Bourdieu, Althusser, and Gramsci. Political sociology and anthropology, however, still represents a small portion of the work done on states and statehood in the Middle East. Many political scientists and social scientists more broadly remain reliant on the classic Weberian ideal type of a state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” and inscribes that monopoly in law. This definition draws on liberal state theory and particularly Kant and Hegel, for whom the origins of law trace back to “original” forms of authority that pre-date the state. For liberal state theorists, the state codifies and organizes “natural” orders and ensures a liberal and balanced social order (Das & Poole 2004: 14). As a result, political institutions or processes that deviate from this norm are deficient. Whether or not this interpretation is fair to Weber, it has been heavily influential in political science—promoted by the so-called neo-Weberian School of the late 1980s and 1990s—and imbued the concept of the state with a set of assumptions about norms that we should expect of a state: norms of integrity, internal coherence, and autonomy based on rational-­ legal methods. State institutions should be able to impose order, deliver services, and ultimately extract and distribute taxes across its territory. They should represent and uphold the law and provide rewards and rights universally (Migdal & Schlichte 2005). Many scholars have reinterpreted and kicked back against the Weberian state typology. Based on the acknowledgment that Weber himself had drawn on particular European experiences and did not intend for his notion of the state to be applied freely elsewhere, another set of studies from the 1970s onwards focused on what they called Third World (what some today call Global South) politics. They drew on a different, but related, Weberian concept of legitimacy and domination, namely that of patrimonialism. Reformulated by Eisenstadt (1973) and then Sharabi (1992) as neopatrimonialism and neopatriarchy, a form of organization in which relationships of a broadly patrimonial type pervade a political and administrative system which is formally constructed on rational-legal lines (Clapham 1999), scholars located highly personalized and informal rule in the workings of modern Middle Eastern political systems. In Middle East studies, as in African studies, neopatrimonialism had its day and its adherents, but has also been critiqued for being vague and even for culturalizing politics. Patrimonialism paved the way for other studies, which brought about their own set of adjectives, such as the “web-like state,” the

Introduction  5 “deep state” (in Turkey), or “the shadow state” (in Iraq) that all stressed the extent to which informal political practices and economies undergird formal institutions. The critique of the Weberian ideal state has not stopped it from traveling from the analytical textbooks into the organizational blueprints of policy-makers who reproduce conceptual language of “institutional capacity,” “state building,” “failed states,” “fragile states,” and the like (Jung 2008). This forest of adjectives—strong, weak, failed, fragile, ­c ollapsed— all implicitly hold the Western state as the gold standard by which we measure deviations from the Weberian ideal. By default, scholars and policy-­makers often end up examining the lack of legitimacy, autonomy, coherence, and the failures of centralized states to monopolize violence and instill law and order rather than studying the actual social processes involved in statehood and stateness. This is a general trend in studies of non-Western states, but it is particularly pronounced in the literature on the authoritarian Arab state. The effects of state-centric language have been pervasive. Aid as well as intelligence agencies have implemented programs of “good governance” in countries where varying degrees of global capitalism, neoliberal reform programs, (in)direct foreign intervention, and various other forms of (non)military assistance already penetrated the administrative, military, or economic spheres. Similarly, notions of civil society and the public sphere as bearers of democratic power and progress guided the understanding of politics in the post-Cold War age, especially as so-called Western-style political processes were being “exported” to the former Eastern Bloc countries and then the Global South. Transitionology as a field of ideology, discourse, and practice obscures such forms of intervention and penetration and normalizes them by basing its critique on universalized expectations of statehood. This obfuscation is even more reason to pursue another research agenda on the state, informed by close examination of actual existing practices.

New Ethnographies of the State In the last two decades, political sociologists and anthropologists of the state have pushed a new research agenda by describing and analyzing the clash of social forces in and around what we call the state (Migdal 2011). A reappropriation and redeployment of Weber by scholars such as Hibou focused on his discussions of political economy as a grounding for the increasingly popular analyses of power/knowledge complexes inspired by Foucault (Hibou 2004; 2015; 2017). The reevaluation of existing conceptual models has coincided with a transformative crisis of the state in recent decades, and not least the effects of economic and cultural globalization. Meanwhile, ironically autonomous state theory was canonized at the exact moment when real states began to weaken and lose their monopoly of control over their populations (Migdal

6  Sune Haugbolle and Mark LeVine & Schlichte 2005: 7). The dialectical relationship between challenges to the state and its increasingly muscular expression in the face of these challenges is of course very pertinent in the Middle East, as well as in other parts of the world (Amar 2013). Waning legitimacy has often coincided with new forms of biopolitical—and increasingly, “necropolitical” (Mbembe 2003; 2019)— control and securitization. These tangled effects of late capitalism have pushed research on the micro-­politics of the “everyday state” (Stepputat & Blom Hansen 2001) and “stateness” generally in the way that we interpret and build on Mitchell’s work in this book. Rather than relying on the tried Weberian framework, the new sociology of the postcolonial state that first appeared in the early 2000s looks at contentions over sovereignty that emerge outside formal politics in the mythologies, paradoxes, and inconsistencies that can be observed in local and quotidian practices, in border zones, and in exceptional spaces and conditions. This work addresses the frontiers between the legal and the extra-legal that often run within the offices and institutions that embody the state, thereby undoing the clear boundaries between legal and extra-legal forms of punishment and enforcement (Das & Poole 2004: 14–16). A series of landmark articles and edited volumes from the early 2000s (Stepputat & Blom Hansen 2001; Das & Poole 2004; Schlichte 2005) show how the authority of the state is constantly challenged from the local as well as the global, and how growing demands to confer rights and recognition to ever more citizens, organizations, and institutions undermine the persistent myth of the state as a source of social order and an embodiment of popular sovereignty. Ethnographies of the state challenge Weberian understandings of the state, but also throw up its own set of challenges. The crucial challenge is—as Migdal (2001: 124–5) puts it—to understand how social struggles alter society’s disposition of resources, class stratification, gender roles, and collective identities. Following Migdal’s reasoning, local interactions and contentions “cumulatively reshape the state and other social organizations, or most commonly, both.” Homing in on contentions allows us to appreciate the constant alteration of state logics and state coherence, what Migdal calls “the foundations of the recursive relationship between the state and other social forces” (ibid.). In other words, the production of sovereignty is an ongoing process that engages margins of society through various forms of public authorities asserting themselves and clashing with each other in the struggle over resources and over the correct interpretation of social order. If some political scientists have underestimated the importance of these struggles over meaning on the margins as well as at the center of power, it is because they have failed to look up close. Looking up close is, of course, the prerogative of area studies. We therefore find it an important and timely agenda to bring critical political sociology and anthropology of the state fully into conversation with Middle East studies.

Introduction  7

Mitchell and the Limits of the State as Analytical Object and Subject Mitchell’s oeuvre remains the foundation for such an effort. Building on Foucault’s seminal arguments in Discipline and Punish while anticipating many of the elaborations in his 1970s lectures at the College de France (which had not been published yet when Mitchell published “Limits of the State”), Mitchell (1991) argued for understanding the state not merely as a set of concrete institutions and actors, but equally and in some ways more importantly as an “effect of power,” that is, the discursive product of relations of power and knowledge in which the boundaries between political authority and the polities they govern are both opaque and porous, permeable yet powerfully creative of the social relations that surround it. Rather than trying to sharpen the definition, Mitchell argues for seeing its elusive qualities as clues to its nature. The internally erected state-society boundaries become locations for Mitchell to investigate the nature of modern forms of sovereign and disciplinary power and reflective of the broader dynamics of modern social order. There is no doubt that Mitchell’s discussion of the state both owes a debt to Foucault’s musings in his lectures after Discipline and Punish, but also builds in a more Derridean perspective as first laid out in Colonising Egypt. Viewed thus, we see his description of the state as an effect of power relations, also suggesting the state as a surplus of power or the différance in potential “states” of political, social/cultural, and economic energy that produces the political charge that enables society to run or function (and in revolutionary times, to short circuit or function at much higher capacity). In that sense, we see the many conflicts plaguing the Arab world today, including revolutions and civil wars, not as the breakdown of states but instead as “statemaking in flux.” Indeed, we argue that states are always states-in-the-making. There is very rarely stasis in the social and political body except that imposed with significant force and often violence, especially in authoritarian regimes. As already indicated, we see the surprise, then, not in the eruption of revolution but in the fact that they occur so rarely. Yet, building on both Foucault and Mitchell as well as Deleuze and Guattari, we see the underlying reality of the state as always in movement, always “revolving” if not in revolution; its perception of being in stasis is an illusion that is nevertheless crucial to its functioning. Viewed thus, when we consider the state as itself a dispositif or apparatus, as having coherence as long as it fulfills its strategic function of gathering, augmenting, redirecting, and distributing power, we understand the manner of its function—its underlying raison d’état and the occasional but often necessary coups d’état—very differently than we would if we understood political regimes and orders as inherently stable and static (i.e., in stasis). Although Mitchell does not engage Foucault’s discussions of the raison d’état and coup d’état since the Lectures had yet to be published when he

8  Sune Haugbolle and Mark LeVine wrote “Limits of the State,” they are quite important for understanding the nature and functioning of state systems and apparatuses. Specifically, in his Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France, 1973–1974 he argues that the coup d’état is in fact central to the core rationality of the state rather than being an aberration as it is normally viewed. Let us recall here that Foucault takes resistance to power as the starting point for any interrogation of its functioning, in which case we need to look at the more complex negotiations of power as they are being discharged by various locations and conglomeration of power holders. The contest today becomes more clearly over who literally has the power to “bind and loose” (ahl al-hall wa-l-’aqd), that is, who are qualified to appoint or depose a ruler on behalf of the Muslim community—literally, to bind or loose the multiple channels and networks that when bundled together comprise the grid of state power. For most patrimonial/authoritarian/praetorian/sultanic/totalitarian regimes, that would be the army or security services of some sort or another. However, for those risking everything in the streets of Cairo, Tunis, Sanaa’, Manama, or other locations, it is in fact no one but ash-sha’b (the people). Focusing on Tunisia and Morocco, Hibou’s research into the redrawing of boundaries of the state helps us understand that the activities that are today termed private have always been at the core of state practices. Specifically, she explores how privatization and other ostensibly neoliberal reforms represent not so much a retreat of the state or state practices as much as reinscribing and drawing new borders around a political economy in which elites have long used political power to obtain and retain public wealth (this view has become increasingly accepted as explaining governance under neoliberalism). Hibou has provided fresh insights into the exercise of power in Tunisia and how domination and repression coexist and even coalesce with desire—how the same citizens who are victims of state oppression and violence come to desire precisely that violence as part of their core identity; how violence and negotiation, consent and domination, hegemony and resistance all interact constantly in a way that most of the time preserves the balance of forces in their current arrangement. Along with Aihwa Ong (2006) and Achille Mbembe (2019; cf. LeVine 2020), they have further explored how as neoliberal reforms take hold, the “state of exception” that once defined the most abnormal and dangerous of situations becomes normalized, in the process bringing regimes and state systems that were formerly categorizable as authoritarian, closer to the kind of totalitarian system epitomized by regimes such as the Syrian and Iraqi Baathist governments in their heyday. Hibou’s work opens up a set of inquiries into state practices. We need to explore far more deeply the notion of the deep state and how it has evolved over time. If the state is an effect of various power relations and relationships, then how does the depth of these relationships impact the way power is discharged and circulates through the political and social systems and bodies? How does the depth of state practices impact the microphysics of power and the production of the truth and their various regimes that sustain

Introduction  9 them? What is the relationship between the regime of truth and the political regimes and how does the particular borders or limits of the state as (re) drawn by power holders impact this process? In particular, Hibou demonstrates how state privatization transfers what were previously the prerogative of national states in areas such as taxation, customs, internal security, defense, and even peace negotiations into what are suddenly “private” hands—even if those hands were until quite recently those of state officials and/or employees. For her, the core processes of “privatizing the state” can be best understood through the lens of Weber’s concept of delegation or discharge of power (2015). In a similar regard, the function of policing, which as Foucault demonstrated involved significant surveillance in their early incarnations, is key to upholding and overseeing this transfer of power from formally public to private processes and institutions while keeping the center of power intact. Such a more sophisticated and accurate view requires the reimagination of the boundaries between state and society, political and civil societies, political and public spheres. Like the state, the borders or limits of these arenas are effects of the types and specificities of the power relations, truth regimes, and disciplinary apparatuses behind them. In that regard, Mitchell’s analysis proved far more nuanced and possessed far greater explanatory power than either theories attempting to get rid of the state altogether as a useful analytical concept or the subsequent attempts to “bring the state back in” to scholarly analysis of political processes. Mitchell’s primary example in demonstrating the “limits” of the state—that is, while trying to define and explain what and who lies in and outside it—is the relationship between major American petroleum companies and the US government, particularly the departments of the Treasury and State, at a time when Saudi Arabia was attempting to increase its royalty share after World War II. The cooperation between corporate and government officials to ensure that American companies did not wind up paying more in total taxes through rewriting the US federal corporate tax code so their royalty payments could be written off demonstrates the kind of intimate relationship between government and corporate elites in the United States that today is commonplace in the regulatory world. More important, Mitchell’s analysis provided a strong foundation for a more nuanced and rich exploration of the functioning of states in the postcolonial world, particularly in the MENA region. Indeed, the concept of the deep state, which has become de rigueur in analyzing Arab states, takes on far deeper resonance when viewed through the prism of Mitchell’s analysis, precisely because it reminds us that the boundaries are porous and to a great degree immaterial at the deep as much as surface levels of governance and governmentality. Yet, despite the clear utility of Mitchell’s analysis for the MENA region, few scholars have taken up his analysis as a starting point for exploring the nature and dynamics of state in the region. The state in all its messiness, complexity

10  Sune Haugbolle and Mark LeVine and elusiveness, power and weakness, presence and absence remains woefully under-theorized. This continues to be the case despite almost a decade of political upheaval that has challenged the very foundations of political and state power across the Arab world. From street protests to uprisings, revolutions to civil wars, changes of government to dissolution of polities, governance has been shaken and reformatted across the MENA since late 2010. To be sure, these events are rooted in long-standing neoliberal transformations going back nearly half a century. Understanding the effect of the state under neoliberal conditions—how people behave “as if” the neoliberal fantasy can come true—requires attention to the affective, psychological, libidinal investments of people toward a neoliberal idea of the “good life” under neoliberal autocracy. As Lisa Wedeen (2018) has shown, such ideals of what Berlant calls “cruel optimism” keep some people acting as if the state still has value even though it rests on fantasies powered by the market. Yet, neoliberalism is only one way power has been transformed during this period, forging new networks, conduits, subjects, and discourses along the way. Many other dynamics, from new technologies to older patterns of public religiosity, have also played an important role. Pastoral, sovereign, and disciplinary power, analytically disaggregated by Foucault, has often seemed to be squeezed together as if in a fusion reaction, with large swaths of citizens falling into precisely the states of exception that, as Agamben describes it, modern governmentality normally renders inefficient. Moreover, space and the spatial dynamics of power and its circulation have become more important analytically at the very moment space and time have been ever more compressed experientially. A central goal of this volume then is to encourage the adoption of methodologies inspired by Mitchell’s and related lines of research, and in so doing, to encourage a reawakening in the study of the state in all its confused parameters: to see it as an “effect of power” while also understanding and exploring its deep materiality and physicality. The contributions here focus equally on theory and practice, history and sociology, culture and political economy, as each in their own way is part of the generative order of contemporary political subjectivities and the forms of governance with which they are so intrinsically related.

From the Authoritarian State to State Effects Terms such as the “state” and the “economy” are simultaneously products of certain ways of seeing, experiencing, and describing the social world which, when reduced to the level of concrete “institutions” lose much of their potential explanatory power for how and why social systems can fall under stress and change, weaken and/or ultimately collapse. When we understand how crucial the neoliberal transformations of both the state and economic realms are to the histories of the last several decades, the need to apply the understanding developed by Mitchell’s reading of the state and economy becomes readily apparent.

Introduction  11 And yet during this period, much of the literature on the state in the Arab and larger MENA regions remain fixated on institutional imaginings of the state that similarly see the economy as a self-contained object that can be, at least partially, directed and managed to encourage development—or more often, the opposite: as a set of institutions that enable and support authoritarian rule by various elites and their political, military, and economic patrons, allies, and clients. Academic debates about the Arab state over the last four decades have centered on themes of authoritarian control, liberalization, democratization, contentious politics, religiously grounded politics, and revolution. These shifting foci reflect evolving trends and general concerns in Middle East studies and academia more broadly, but also various trajectories of scholarship in both Arabic and European languages, disciplinary interests, and scholarship produced through individual initiative and generated by the ever-growing body of think tanks and professional research institutions both in the Euro-American and Arab worlds. Prior to economic liberalization in the 1990s, political scientists working on the region were slow to “take the state back in,” but toward the end of the decade, a number of volumes appeared that revisited the origins of the Arab state system (Salamé 1987) and sought to analyze and categorize its different components (Luciani 1990). These categories referred primarily to political economy and included “allocation and production states,” “weak and strong states,” and not least “the rentier state.” Even though in particular the literature on the rentier state has continued to develop (Hertog 2010), many authors collapsed several of these categories under the heading of “the authoritarian state.” In the age of ostensible liberal democracy after the Cold War, the absence of democracy became the unifying factor worthy of inquiry for Western political scientists studying the Middle East. This hackneyed obsession obscured and prevented the development of previous rich scholarship on, for example, the relationship between social structure and state formation. Economic liberalization in the 1990s produced some hope that civil society and new economic actors could help reform ossified and overpopulated state bureaucracies. The absence of meaningful political liberalization forged a resurgence of works on Arab authoritarianism in the 2000s. Musings on the stability of Arab authoritarianism for a moment gave way to self-critique after the Arab Uprisings (Gause 2011), as Arab regimes seemed to be everything but stable. Since 2013, we have seen some political scientists reluctantly return to the Arab authoritarianism paradigm, which seeks to understand why state apparatuses have been “successful” in repressing and coercing opposition as well as revolutionary revolts. This is not to say that authoritarianism is a useless paradigm. Thanks particularly to the work of Latin Americanist Barbara Geddes (2011), analyses of authoritarian regimes have become more sophisticated. A 2015 collection, The Arab Thermidor: The Resurgence of the Security State (POMEPS 2015), lists at least a dozen specific types of analyses scholars were encouraged by

12  Sune Haugbolle and Mark LeVine the program to develop about the state, including “authoritarian impulses versus democratic imperatives,” “elite fragmentation and securitization,” “mass politics and the future of authoritarian governance,” and “authoritarian governance and the rise of the security state.” Other themes included “contentious politics” and social movements under authoritarian regimes and the relationship between autocratic rulers and militaries. As Angela Joya demonstrates in her chapter in this volume, concomitant with the focus on authoritarianism has been the focus on democratization or the lack thereof in the region (the so-called “democracy deficit”). The reasons attributed to the broad failures to democratize in the MENA include “authoritarianism” in its many variations: on its “resilience,” “persistence,” “rebound,” and “upgrading.” More sophisticated and less ideologically biased analyses have moved away from asking why states have not succeeded to become democratic to why they remain unable even to initiate such a process in any meaningful sense. The “uniquely robust coercive apparatuses” (as Bellin 2004 describes it) in many authoritarian states clearly had become so strong by the middle of the first decade of this century that even the act of change itself became change in the name of “stability.” However, scholars like Steve Heydemann (2007) and Raymond Hinnbusch (2012) have produced important discussions of “authoritarian upgrading,” “learning,” and/or “recalibration,” which owe their success to the deployment of more intense levels of violence as well as the traditional divide and conquer strategies vis-à-vis the population. What their work forces us to consider is how regimes and state institutions survive and even thrive purely on domination after whatever hegemony they once enjoyed has long disappeared. To be sure, a focus on the resilience of authoritarian systems of governance can yield important insights into why it has proven much harder than at first imagined to enable the “downfall of the regime” (isqat an-nizam) in most Arab countries outside Tunisia, as well as zeroing in on why countries like Algeria and Sudan, which seemed immune to the wave of protests beginning in late 2010, suddenly witnessed successful movements almost a decade later. It can also help us avoid the overly optimistic predictions of leading scholars like Jack Goldstone (2011) that the ostensibly fractured and brittle nature of Arab regimes would more easily enable successful democratic transformations. At the same time, however, critiques of overly optimistic forecasts must be careful to have sufficient genealogical, discursive, and historical grounding, lest they imagine an “Arab Thermidor” as a historical explanation or precedent for the “cycle of adaptation by authoritarian incumbents” to the challenges of the 2010–2012 uprisings (cf. Heydemann 2014, Heydemann & Leenders 2011). We argue that scholars can be tempted to make what are ultimately facile comparisons between historical events and contexts that are fundamentally different when they focus on institutions and institutional analyses rather than on understanding and studying “states” and state power as discursive effects of various apparatuses of knowledge/power and with epistemological as well as political boundaries

Introduction  13 that are porous and continuously changing. As Nazih Ayubi (1995) stressed, authoritarian governance paradigms generally adhere to a view of power as unfractured and consolidated, and because of this, they assign too much power to regimes and, even more so, leaders to the point where they “overstate” the coherence and effectivity of the state. We ask, then: What happens when the state effect begins to wear off, or at least thins out, and it loses its holding power because a political earthquake shakes loose the state and the ties that bind most members of the society to it? Similarly, what happens when the state’s economy is no longer “fixed,” when processes, such as those of neoliberalism, powerfully disrupt existing networks and open up the territory controlled by the state or at least under its recognized jurisdiction to new kinds of penetration and movement of all sorts in and out? When do new conglomerations of power, such as revolutionary movements, start to take on attributes of stateness, especially when they explicitly reject existing notions of political responsibility? “Fixing” the borders of the state and of the economy have long been intertwined processes which were necessary for modern governance to proceed. How the rise of neoliberal political economies has challenged and transformed these processes of demarcation—both the way they occur and the borders they produce—has yet to be studied sufficiently broadly speaking, and particularly in systems whose very functioning and survival depend on a high level of opaqueness and corruption. We understand states as coming into being through the bundling together and cohering—in Weber’s terminology, “monopolizing”—by a group of people of enough political-­ economic power networks within a given sovereign territory to legitimately claim political authority over it. In this regard, the implications of Mitchell’s amorphous and deliberately hazy narratives of the state become clear, as it is precisely the opaqueness that makes the state hard to define, never mind resist.

The State as Racket Mitchell’s approach can be substantiated by drawing on critical political theory from the Frankfurt School to postcolonial thinkers and Charles Tilly. Watching the Nazi system solidify before their eyes, Frankfurt School founder Max Horkheimer and colleagues such as Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm adopted the terminology of criminality in the United States, realizing, as Horkheimer, explained in 1942 that “the basic form of domination is the racket. […] The most general functional category exercised by the group is protection” (Horkheimer 1985: 287–88). Adorno would similarly warn how in authoritarian societies “the threat of retaliation” always loomed over those who broke ranks in what Adorno called “a closed, violent, strictly ruled ingroup—a racket” (Adorno 2000: 68; cf. Jay 2020). The more that wealth and power in a society are concentrated, the more like a racket it becomes, especially when the dynamics of protection and

14  Sune Haugbolle and Mark LeVine extortion are attenuated by the violence of colonial, racial, gender, and/or class domination—what the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano (2000) termed the “coloniality of power.” At the heart of the coloniality of power is what Cameroonian critical theorist Achille Mbembe (2003; 2019) first described as “necropolitics,” which is not merely the state’s “right” to kill and to organize people to be killed, but to expose people to extreme violence and death, to force entire segments of populations, reducing them to a state of exception, to the barest and most precarious existence, all in order to preserve the established economic and political hierarchies. Bio- and necropolitics, with their particular yet interwoven forms of productivity and violence, cannot exist without each other, although the balance oscillates over time. The first two eras of modern capitalism, between the 15th and 18th centuries and during the long 19th century, ending with the eruption of World War 1, saw a unique synergy between the two, enabled by the generative role of colonialism and the violence attending it in the unprecedented wealth produced by the capitalist system. After two world wars separated by a nearly global Depression, the pendulum swung back toward a more pronounced biopolitical order in the era of postwar decolonization and development in the Global South, which was accompanied by the rise of welfare states in the West. If the state can be understood as both an effect of various types of routinely changing power relations and as a racket, what Charles Tilly (1985) famously described as the criminal nature of all states—not merely their similarity to but also their functioning as extortion and protection rackets in the manner of mafias and the importance of war as a way of deriving power and profit—becomes clear. When war-making and state-making are combined, the synergy of violence and criminality are uniquely powerful. Taken together, Mitchell’s and Tilly’s argument supports the contention not merely that all states are inherently colonial, and thus based on processes of exclusion, hierarchization, and violence, but that they are also inherently criminal. Barring very specific political and economic circumstances, such as post-World War II reconstruction when the desperateness of the situation gave workers and ordinary people more power over government and capital, states tend toward using their monopoly on violence and their cultural-­ political hegemony to ensure the perpetuation of political-economic power by elites. This is why it has been so difficult for most state systems to function in the interests of the majority of their populations. Mitchell’s foundational analyses of the state and economy as discursively manifested can help us sharpen an intersectional and decolonial approach to the state in the Middle East. All the chapters, in one way or another, probe the nature of the state when the gaze is turned from elites and institutions to the “others” of the state. What happens if you are indigenous? Colonized? Subaltern and peon? What does the state look like not only when it either cannot or will not “see” you (Scott 1998), but when your primary experience of it is simply violence and corruption?

Introduction  15 Answering these questions necessitates a decolonizing of the state as a discourse and imaginary. We both need to highlight the colonial underpinnings and foundation of modern state forms of government, as well as understanding how the kinds of logics, practices, and political and economic discourses put in place or emerging during colonial periods have continued in very powerful ways after formal independence and even to the present day. A decolonial approach to the state would seek to understand how the underlying networks and effects of flows of power in a society and the economic processes surrounding them carry over the colonial charge, even augmenting it through political, economic, and development ideologies, policies, and practices that exploit, repress, marginalize, and exclude a similarly large share of the population as the ancient colonial regime. This type of approach has to be intersectional. This concept, originally used by scholars like Crenshaw (1989) within critical legal and then emerging critical race theories, demands an exploration of the discursive, political, ideological, and other spaces where issues of race, class, and gender intersect in a manner so that multiple categories of marginalization for example, (1) working class or poor (2) women (3) of color (that is, class, gender, and race), not just are further isolated from power but quite literally disappear from analytical view in the process, thus rendering it even easier for their marginalization to continue. As Ramón Grosfoguel (2008: 4) explains regarding the importance of a decolonial rather than postcolonial approach to analysis of political power, it is crucial to achieve not just the correct “social location,” that is, a critical approach to people and systems of political and economic power, but even more important, the most nuanced “epistemic location.” As he explains it: The fact that one is socially located in the oppressed side of power relations does not automatically mean that he/she is epistemically thinking from a subaltern epistemic location. Precisely, the success of the modern/colonial world system consists in making subjects that are socially located in the oppressed side of the colonial difference, to think epistemically like the ones on the dominant positions. Subaltern epistemic perspectives are knowledge coming from below that produces a critical perspective of hegemonic knowledge in the power relations involved. What this means quite simply is that the most often highly critical perspective of indigenous people who for half a millennium have been the primary and most violently marginalized victims of the practices of European or ­European-inspired state power—particularly as it has been (and continues to be) experienced through settler colonial processes—must be at the forefront of any analysis going forward. Not every society has a significant Indigenous population as defined by international law (among those communities generally recognized as Indigenous are Marsh Dwellers of southern Iraq, the Jahalin Bedouin of West Bank and Bedouins of the Negev

16  Sune Haugbolle and Mark LeVine desert in Israel, Assyrian, Yazidi, Turkman, and Chaldean communities in Iraq and Syria. Palestinians as a national community are also increasingly defining themselves as Indigenous vis-à-vis international law), but Indigenous scholars from Australia or North, Central, and South America have created a broad set of guideposts for engaging in theory, research, and writing that are deeply informed by the epistemological, ethical, and even ontological perspectives and experiences shared across these diverse communities (Wilson 2008; Kovach 2010; Tuhiwai Smith 2012), including signposts such as responsibility, respect, reciprocity, and the fundamental rights of Indigenous people—and indeed, all people—to have control over the knowledge produced about, by, with, and through them, as well as a focus on the needs, aspirations, and participation of the community rather than the individual researcher, utilizing Indigenous paradigmatic lenses, reflexivity, and power-sharing, deep yet critical immersion into local cultural milieux and methodological flexibility (Snow et al. 2016). We argue that from the perspective of analyzing historical, political, sociological, and anthropological explorations at the level of the state, such approaches—as evidenced in this volume, particularly in the chapters by Sen and Pace—call for the kind of discursively fluid imagination and treatment of the state at the core of Mitchell’s analysis. Along with decolonial and Indigenous approaches, gender and feminist studies also focus on the historical longue durée of political power. From pioneering historical studies of the roots of feminism in the region (Badran 1994) and the political dynamics of gender (Kandiyoti 1991) to more recent explorations of the imbrications of gender, feminism, and politics (Allam 2018; Hafez 2019; Kandiyoti, Al-Ali & Spellman Poots 2019; Pratt 2020), gender constitutes a primary category for exploring discourses surrounding state power, and approaches to gender grounded in feminist theories and approaches are crucial to any decolonial, Indigenous, or similarly rooted analytical perspective. Such approaches make clear that contemporary women’s political activism has to be understood via a deeper historical lens, with roots deep in the early 20th-century nationalist mobilizations and then the students, Marxist, and even Islamist activism in the post-independence eras. At the same time, the “gender frame” illuminates the ambivalent relationship between political participation by and institutional representation of women, as women’s continuous participation in politics is often not mirrored by their representation in the institutions of governance, while also demanding a shift of focus from formal to informal spaces of political power, resistance, and agency. Doing so often reveals the “lively intergenerational discussions” by women of all social classes and identities that even when politically, socially, and economically marginalized still manage to make a difference in how gender relations are conceived and constructed by the society more broadly (Sorbera 2014: 170). Feminist methodologies and critiques also enable us to understand that whatever successes the uprisings of

Introduction  17 the last dozen years have produced are indeed grounded in feminist praxis which, in turn, emerges out of feminist epistemologies that have yet to be adequately accounted for and, notwithstanding the present-day masculinization and militarization of public spaces by often brutally violent counter-­ revolutionary regimes and policies, alternative discussions of gender and sexualities—and through them, of politics—are contributing to the shaping of a new political culture (Sorbera 2016).

Translating Mitchell to the Middle East By applying the above-mentioned approaches to a political sociology of the Arab state, this book does not pretend to reinvent the wheel. We build on Mitchell (1991), Wedeen (1998), and more recent ethnographies of statehood in the region (Hibou 2017; Obeid 2015). At the same time, we acknowledge the value of older political sociology, not least Nazih Ayubi’s Over-stating the Arab State from 1996. Ayubi described Arab states as generally “strong” and “fierce” in their attempt to coerce populations, but weak in the sense that they lack the capacity to enforce laws, break traditional patterns, and adapt to changing conditions. Ayubi had no expectations of almighty states imposing themselves in all corners of societies, even in the case of the very fierce Baathist states. Three interconnected factors, Ayubi finds, drastically limit the Arab states’ capacity for social control. The first pertains to state elites’ vested interest against political or economic liberalization. The second consists of their cultural dispositions favorable to authoritarianism. And the third involves their resistance against reforms that might fuel self-augmenting demands for redistribution. These three factors combined to make Arab states vulnerable rather than stable at the time of Ayubi’s writing in the early to mid-1990s. In light of the Arab Uprisings, Ayubi’s argument, which contradicts the “authoritarian resilience” thesis, seems prescient. At the same time, Ayubi’s work obviously requires updating, not least with regards to privatization practices and the nefarious alliance between neoliberalism and authoritarianism. Ayubi also cannot be reduced to the simple idea that fierce Arab states lack social contracts. Like all states, it is the kind of social contracts and political settlements that exist around the state bureaucracy and its leadership that can help explain the way in which they engage with their societies as well as with the regional and international system. Building on Arab Marxist sociology, Ayubi (1996: 27) relates modes of production to modes of coercion and modes of persuasion and places them in a carefully detailed analysis of the changing class relations in and around the state. This simple framework has its use. Drawing heavily on Gramsci, Ayubi suggests that we need to understand the articulation between the three modes of governance to properly comprehend patronage and clientelism and avoid the trap of attributing it all to “culture.” This articulation, and the exercise of power and control over violence that it

18  Sune Haugbolle and Mark LeVine makes possible, takes place in and around the state. For Gramsci, state power emerged from the capacities, the will, and the resources of social classes. This will gave birth to a project of political and cultural hegemony and strategies of social transformation aimed at class domination. Rightly—and as sociologists writing on the nationalist Arab regimes of the 1950s and 1960s which were populated with semi-urban lower-middle classes discovered—Gramsci did not merely see the state as an executive arm of the bourgeoisie as older Marxist theories had held. Ayubi confers with Gramsci and points out that class coherence in all but a few cases in the region was lacking. Instead, Arab states developed into conglomerates of networks without a clear class base, which in fact made them vulnerable to class-based opposition. To this, one could add Bourdieu’s focus on informational capital (curricula, validation of knowledge) and symbolic capital, which state actors monopolize in an overarching capital étatique and which allows them to validate or invalidate other forms of authority (Blom Hansen & Stepputat 2001: 8).

Parameters of Analysis The colonial and indigenous perspectives and conceptualizations of the nature and dynamics of state power synergize well with the Foucauldian approach developed by Mitchell. A prismatic and multi-layered transdisciplinary methodology that is grounded in the lived experiences as well as political exigencies and potentialities of those who are the most vulnerable to state power marks, in our view, the best way forward for developing contemporary theories of stateness in the Arab world and the world at large. A discursively fluid approach that recognizes yet works to clarify the political and strategic opaqueness of modern institutions and actions of governance will help to diagram more accurate and robust accounts of Arab states today, while offering tools for those who continue to struggle to make systems, institutions, and agents of governance more democratically responsive to the majority of still marginalized citizens in the countries of the region. Collectively inspired by this approach and wishing to push it further, the contributors to this book met in two multi-day workshops in Lund in Sweden and Odense in Denmark to flesh out the areas of inquiry that should be central to any detailed reconsideration of state processes in the Arab world. The first area is the logics and practices of statecraft and their relationship to civil society, with the goal of challenging the default ontological primacy and distinction of the state in the literature. This theme proved to be foundational for the book, in the sense that it defines our understanding of the stakes of viewing and investigating the state as an effect of power rather than a set of institutions and/or individuals, exploring a genealogy of contemporary state power by investigating the dynamics of state functioning and power in the late Ottoman, European imperial periods, post-­independence through contemporary periods. The stakes are high indeed, whether it is in the context of Lebanon’s activist scene and its internalized notions  of  stateness

Introduction  19 as in Sophie  Chammas’ chapter; in the context of Egypt’s cultural sector that became the scene of serious wrangling over revolutionary and counter-­ revolutionary understandings of the state in Ted Swedenburg’s contribution; or in the ethno-religious definitions of state-lets that emerged in war-torn Syria, as showcased in the chapters by Glioti and Degerald on Kurdish and Islamist voices and the so-called Islamic State respectively. In all these cases, logics of state underwent serious reformulations in open, fluid contestation among civil society, cultural sectors, armed factions, and others normally not considered as part of “the state.” The chapters and our book show the value of turning the gaze to such sites of contestation. At the same time, while we stress the importance of discursive analysis, all authors appreciate the importance of the underlying ideological shift to a political economy dominated by neoliberalism, as detailed by Angela Joya in her chapters. This shift provides the material backdrop for new state logics. A second area of exploration concerns what, following Ann Stoler (an early participant in our colloquia), we term “imperial debris” and its relationship to the neoliberal present, that is, the deep historical roots of present-day policies of marginalization in the Arab world (Stoler 2013). Leyla Dakhli explores these in depth in her chapter on Arab archives and their importance for claims of statehood and owning particular pasts while erasing others’ possible pasts. More broadly, this theme focuses on historical and genealogical analyses of the Arab Uprisings and the changes in the functioning and experiences of state power that surrounded them. Contributions investigate the ways the discourses of “neoliberalism” mimic, reaffirm, challenge, and strengthen those of its original incarnation in the era of high empire. What debris does the present imperial moment create and how will they shape governance in the coming years? Is there something unique about the patterns and processes of marginalization today, and if so, how do these dynamics interact with the historically shaped pathways, networks, and trajectories of (deep/gray) power, both at the biopolitical and societal levels? In this regard, we are particularly interested to read Mitchell through the lens of Foucault’s remark that: in the universality of Western Reason [ratio], there is a split [partage] which is the Orient: the Orient thought of as origin, dreamt of as the vertiginous point from which are born nostalgias and promises of a return, the Orient offered to the West’s colonizing reason yet indefinitely inaccessible, because it remains [demeure] forever the limit: night of the beginning in which the West formed itself but in which it drew a dividing line [ligne de partage], the Orient is everything for it that it is not, notwithstanding that it still must seek its own original [primitive] truth in it. A history of this great split [partage] will have to be written, all along the West’s becoming, following it in its continuity and its exchanges, but also allowing it to appear in [the fullness of] its tragic solemnity. (Foucault 2013: 189–190)

20  Sune Haugbolle and Mark LeVine If we are to assess critically the “limits” and even the shape of the state, or at least the way it bends power and truth to specific ends and reasons, it will have to begin with this split at the heart of Euro-American epistemologies and even ontologies of the state. A third thematic area concerns the genealogies of national security. Not just from Mitchell, but also from the work of Tilly, Tozy, Hibou, and others, we explore the evolving conception of national security through the intersections of subterranean (deep) politics, transnational migration, criminality, and war. Here, as Hibou in particular has shown but also the work of scholars exploring the Egyptian as well as Turkish states, the boundaries between legal and illicit, threat and security, criminal and thug, terrorist and “ghost,” and “caring for” the people and deploying extreme violence against them, and the relationships of all these binaries to the state-­economy/­market nexus, have yet to be explored. Fourth, the book investigates repertoires of resistance as stateness or anti-­state vocabularies. Here, our contributions explore the various modes, methods, experiences, and dynamics of resistance as they relate to existing patterns of stateness and the creation of alternatives to them. How do various forms of resistance bunch together into repertoires? In Palestine, this concerns resistance as quotidian contestation over space, as in Sen’s chapter on the neoliberal dream city of Rawabi. In other contexts, like Syria, resistance in its military expression intersects with alternative definitions of sectarian and ethnic identity as the basis for state power. How do such resistant actors follow, mirror, and/or challenge state modes of power and governance? How do anti-state vocabularies often mimic, willingly or not, the very conceptualities they seek to critique and/or transcend? The Normalization of pathology (criminality) to (national) security; the kinds of resistance— armed, civil, coopted/civil society—deployed by citizens or others governed by state systems; the manner in which societal groups have in the neoliberal age assumed some of the punitive and boundary-drawing/maintaining violence previously arrogated to governments are all explored here, as are the changing forms of civil resistance and how they seek to disaggregate statebound power and create new networks outside such forms of control. Central state powers’ attempt to regulate, define, and “bound” identities blurs in particular geographical zones, such as Lebanon’s northern borderlands that Jamil Moawed explores in his chapter, and in particular discursive fields such as debates around national and ethnic identity as showcased in Glioti and Carpi’s chapter on the UAE. Finally, this volume explores what we term “bodies on the line”; the manner in which bodies are produced, circulated, excepted, killed, and rendered useful in the post-uprisings environment. Here, we ground our discussions of the effects of state power in the context of discussions of the intersection of bio- and necropolitical power, “humanitarian” violence, and reformulations of capitalism in the region in a globalized neoliberal context. Building on a growing network of scholars who are exploring the limits of analytical

Introduction  21 vocabularies and epistemological universes associated with state studies, foregrounding (re)conceptions of gender, class, ethnicity, religion/sect, and other forms of identity, we examine how the physical/spatial movement of bodies across various geographic, political, and discursive borders has been transformed since 2011, particularly with reference of the massive movement of peoples—whether internally or across various frontiers/states/bodies of water associated with the refugee crisis. Several of the authors in this book reconsider existing theoretical models for engaging the body and violence, how different conceptions of the state produce not application to region, not exceptionality of region, but normal rethinking of political dynamics. In this sense, we see the state “as if” it had concrete realities even as we understand its effective and affective impact. At the same time, we explore how the various networks and channels of power are bundled and by what mechanisms these bundles are disaggregated and recombined to flow in new directions through new nodes and transformers.

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22  Sune Haugbolle and Mark LeVine Filiu, Jean-Pierre (2015). From Deep State to Islamic State, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel (2013). Dits et écrits, Vol 1. Paris: Gallimard. Gause, Gregory (2011). “Why Middle East Studies Missed the Arab Spring.” Foreign Affairs, July/August. Available at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ middle-east/2011-07-01/why-middle-east-studies-missed-arab-spring. Goldstone, Jack (2011). “Understanding the Revolutions of 2011: Weakness and Resilience in Middle Eastern Autocracies.” Foreign Affairs, May–June. Available at http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67694/ jack-a-goldstone/ understanding-the-revolutions-of-2011. Grosfoguel, Ramón (2008). “Transmodernity, Border Thinking, and Global Coloniality.” Revista Crítica De Ciências Sociais, Eurozine, July 4, pp. 1–24. Available at https://www.eurozine.com/transmodernity-border-thinking-andglobal-coloniality/?pdf. Hafez, Sherine (2019). Women of the Midan. The Untold Stories of Egypt’s Revolutionaries, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hansen, Thomas Blom and Finn Stepputat (2006). “Sovereignty Revisited.” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 35 No. 1, pp. 295–315. Hansen, Thomas Blom and Finn Stepputat (eds.) (2001). States of Imagination, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haugbolle, Sune and Andreas Bandak (2017). “The Ends of Revolution: Rethinking Ideology and Time in the Arab Uprisings.” Middle East Critique, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp. 191–204. Hertog, Steffen (2010). Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats: Oil and the State in Saudi Arabia, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Heydemann, Steven and Reinoud Leenders (2011). “Authoritarian Learning and Authoritarian Resilience: Regime Responses to the ‘Arab Awakening’.” Globalizations, Vol. 8, No. 5, pp. 647–653. Hibou, Béatrice (2017). The Political Anatomy of Domination, New York: Palgrave McMillan. Horkheimer, Max (1985). “Die Rackets und der Geist.” Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 12, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, pp. 287–291. Jay, Martin (2020). “Trump, Scorsese, and the Frankfurt School’s Theory of Racket Society.” Los Angeles Review of Books. April 5. Available at https://­lareviewofbooks. org/article/trump-scorsese-and-the-frankfurt-schools-theory-of-racketsociety/. Jung, Dietrich (2008). “State Formation and State-Building: Is There a Lesson to Learn from Sociology?” DIIS Report. Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies. Kandiyoti, Deniz, ed., Women, Islam, State, London: Palgrave. ———, Nadje Al-Ali and Kathryn Spellman Poots (2019). Gender, Governance and Islam, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kovach, Margaret (2010). Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Levine, Mark (2013). “Theory and Praxis of the Arab Uprisings.” Special Issue of Middle East Critique, Vol. 22, No.3, pp. 213–234. Luciani, Giacomo, ed. (1990). The Arab State, Berkeley: University of California Press. Mbembe, Achille (2003). “Necropolitics.” Public Culture, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 11–40.

Introduction  23 ——— (2019). Necropolitics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Migdal, Joel (1988). Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ——— and Schlichte, Klaus (2005). “Rethinking the State.” In Migdal and Schlichte, eds.The Dynamics of States: The Formation and Crises of State Domination. London: Routledge, pp. 1–40. Mitchell, Timothy (1991). “Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and their Critics.” American Political Science Review, Vol. 85, No. 1, pp. 77–96. Moawad, Jamil and Hannes Baumann (2017). “Wayn al-Dawla? Locating the Lebanese State in Social Theory.” Arab Studies Journal, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 66–90. Obeid, Michelle (2015). “States of Aspiration – Anthropology and New Questions for the Middle East.” In Soraya Altorki, ed. A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East, London: Wiley and Sons, pp. 434–451. Ong, Aihwa (2006). Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. POMEPS (Project on Middle East Political Science) (2015). The Arab Thermidor: The Resurgence of the Security State, Washington, DC: POMEPS. Available at http://pomeps.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/POMEPS_Studies_11_Thermidor_ Web.pdf. Pratt, Nicola (2020). Embodying Geopolitics. Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, Berkeley, CA: UC Press. Quijano, Anibal (2000). Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Salamé, Ghassan, ed. (1987). Foundations of the Arab State, Vol. 1, New York: Taylor and Francis. Schlichte, Klaus, ed. (2005). The Dynamics of States: The Formation and Crises of State Domination, London: Routledge. Scott, James (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sharabi, Hisham. 1992. Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Sorbera, Lucia (2014). “An Invisible and Enduring Presence: Women in Egyptian Politics.” In Luca Anceschi, Andrea Teti and Gennaro Gervasio, eds. Informal Power in the Greater Middle East. London: Routledge, pp. 159–175. ——— (2016). “Body Politics and Legitimacy: Towards a Feminist Epistemology of the Egyptian Revolution.” Global Discourse, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 493–512. Stoler, Ann (2013). Imperial Debris: On ruins and Ruination, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tuhiwai Smith, Linda (2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London, UK: Zed Books. Wedeen, Lisa (1998). “Acting ‘As If’: Symbolic Politics and Social Control in Syria.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 503–523. ——— (2018). Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Wilson, Shawn (2008). Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods, Black Point, NS: Fernwood Publishing.

1 State-crafting and Modes of Governance in the United Arab Emirates Estella Carpi and Andrea Glioti

Introduction This chapter examines the state as an exclusionary mode of organizing society in the UAE, a federation of seven Emirates – Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Umm al-Qaiwain, Fujairah, Ajman and Ra’s al-Khaimah – located on the Eastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula.1 It engages with the continual crafting of the state as a way to assert national belonging vis-à-vis the predominant presence of foreign migrants in the UAE and the small number of Emirati nationals – approximately 1.8 million, while 9.4 million foreign residents make up 90% of the local workforce (Whitley 1993: 44; Lori 2011: 316). It investigates the symbolic belittlement of the political other in the UAE society in the meiotic process of fabricating the “Emirati self” and of marking the peculiarity of the state. Meiosis, meaning “lessening” in ancient Greek, is a figure of speech that expresses understatement. We use it here to express that the Emirati state, through a process subsists insofar as it builds on the belittlement of alternative political and social subjectivities while constructing its own homogenous polity. Through this lens, the chapter tackles how today’s Emirati modalities of governance reproduce – peculiar rather than exceptional2 – exclusionary forms of stateness within the unorthodoxly postcolonial context of “Trucial Sheikhdoms” such as the UAE, where local rulers in the 19th century signed treaties with the British to protect the coast from alleged piracy after the Franco-British rivalry (1798–1810) and the Portuguese influence (Al-Otabi 1989). Specifically, the current policies of marginalization in the UAE are today’s historical vectors of “imperial debris” (Stoler 2013) produced by the unorthodox form of postcoloniality in the Arab Gulf that differs in significant ways from the (at least discursively) normative process of political liberation from foreign rule. In this case, in 1968 the agreements by which the United Kingdom had governed the seven emirates of the “Trucial States” were rescinded, with the British announcing a withdrawal by the end of the decade to be replaced by bilateral agreements (Al-Otabi 1989: 167). Historians report contradictory accounts regarding why the British established a long-term presence in the Gulf to begin with. In one version, historians

DOI: 10.4324/b22870-2

Modes of Governance in the UAE  25 contend that the British mainly intended to keep open an important mail and commercial route against incessant piracy by the local Qawasim tribe (Lorimer 1915 in Al-Otabi 1989). In another, the Qawasim were depicted as proto-nationalists, interested in creating a single nation and concerned with preserving trade routes and challenging the East India Company in the Gulf, with the Gulf waterway having been peaceful before British interference (Al-Qasimi 1986). Drawing on theories of autocratic politics according to which paranoia is not simply “an individual mental state, but it is also a condition of modern societies and politics” (Rozic 2015: 78), we illustrate how everyday governance dictates where the threats to national cohesion and viability reside and how the nation can tackle such “external” risks. We therefore inquire the everyday realms in which the UAE state federation employs exclusionary modes of governance in a bid to construct an original Emirati monolithic polity. As in other nation-states, the official polity seeks to assimilate “the history of the state to that of the nation” (White 2011). As theorized by German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the late 18th-century founder of idealism, Urvolk indicates that the “primitive people” or the “original inhabitants” are the archetype of the nation. By nuancing this in its own contextual peculiarity, we here employ the concept of Urvolk to shed light on the factors that, parading palingenetic efforts of going back to a pure origin, want to reify the UAE as an entity created and developed by local Arab indigeneity. This contextualized idea of Urvolk underpins the current Emiratization campaign in the employment and volunteering sectors3; motivates chronic governmental concerns to disguise the originally hybrid character of ethnic subjecthood in the UAE; and highlights the impossibility of political heterogeneity within Emirati polity. Considering the political history of nation-building in the southern societies of the Arabian-Persian4 Gulf, we examine Emirati production of everyday stateness by developing a threefold analysis of two informal and one formal (enacted through law) governmental strategies that generate paranoid modes of governance. First, we address how the UAE has historically made symbols that recall Iran in this coastal region invisible rather than dismantling Iran’s material survival. Second, we examine the UAE government’s attempts at stifling the emergence of alternative political subjectivities through depriving regime opponents from obtaining citizenship by comparing these repression measures against citizens to other states in the region. Third, we discuss migrant-founded charity initiatives, which mostly focus on intra-community assistance. We illustrate how this phenomenon is caused by deliberate, although informal, governmental strategies rather than by the specific societal structure of the UAE or a philanthropic tendency of such migrant communities. The three case studies – in which the state can no longer be conceived of independently from its relationships with multiple other actors – have the explanatory power to show how the modern Emirati state involves a process

26  Estella Carpi and Andrea Glioti of emanation: it emanates from the heterogenous assemblage of power holders who have marked some political subjectivities as unwanted and others as the dominant polity. As has occurred in other imperial settings (cf. Stoler 2013: 3), these unorthodox “imperial debris” genealogically produce the governing grammar of the present state, where monolithic (and therefore post-tribal) stateness better encapsulates the UAE as a fully, fully fledged political actor within the global political sphere. On the one hand, the following case studies will echo Mitchell’s perspective (1991), according to which state power is manifested through complex assemblages of actors who have historically rejected, reproduced, and transformed local modalities of governance. On the other hand, the monolithic stateness emerges as paradoxical versus such unorthodox “imperial debris.” In other words, if Mitchell’s theory (1991: 98) emphasized that alternative political subjectivities and their ways of opposing the state are formed within the latter’s organizational terrain, our case studies illustrate how the state per se cannot be the end of the story. As with modernity at large (in the context of which any analysis of colonialism and modern political orders must proceed – cf. Mitchell 2000), it emerges as a relational category of analysis, which can only be defined in relation to what it does not want to contain and what it does not want to tolerate in the effort to construct the (ahistorical) purity of the Emirati polity.

Historical Background In the Gulf region, each tribe was historically an independent political institution subject to internal rivalries. As al-Otabi (1989: 38) observed, with the rise of the tawhidi movement inspired by the religious reformer Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab during the second half of the 18th century, all tribal units were unified under one banner, something the Arabian Peninsula had not seen since the end of the Caliphate. Two centuries later, despite being separated into multiple independent states, the Arab Gulf monarchies tend to promote Arab Bedouin heritage while neglecting the contribution of non-Arab communities, be they Persian, Baluch, African, or Indian, to the history of the Gulf (AlMutawa 2016: 22). Since the 1970s, foreign workers have migrated to the UAE, especially from the Indian sub-continent and the poorest regions of the Arab world (Whitley 1993: 30), enabling the construction boom of the Emirates like Dubai and expanding the UAE-based migrant communities. Today, Indians make up its largest noncitizen population (Vora 2013). Members of these migrant communities are generally unable to become legal citizens of the UAE and remain classified as temporary guest workers even into the second or third generation. However, naturalization laws for foreign migrants have been reformed in January 2021, establishing that investors, professionals, “special talents,” and their families can acquire the Emirati nationality and passport.5 Yet, the right to citizenship remains conditional.

Modes of Governance in the UAE  27 The UAE government has been fostering an anti-Iranian narrative in official geopolitics, singularly overshadowing the significance of Iranians and Emiratis of Iranian descent in the UAE’s heritage, economy and art. Historians narrate that over the 11th century, Arabs from Oman founded the city of Hormuz in southern Persia. Between the 14th and 15th century, the Arab-Persian Kingdom of Hormuz stretched on both sides of the Gulf, including Persian-speaking Jolfar (today known as Ras al-Khaimah, one of the seven Emirates). Until today, a sizeable community of Persian-­speaking fishermen have been living in Ras al-Khaimah. Indeed, it was between the 16th and 18th century that large numbers of ethnic and linguistically identified “Arabs” migrated to the northern Gulf shores. They would live in ethnically, religiously, and linguistically mixed port cities, and thrive on trade, alleged piracy, and pearl fishery. From 1850 to the 1930s, Arab rulers left the northern shores, as Tehran reclaimed its authority over that littoral. Persian authorities enforced fiscal policies that were unpopular among Arab and Persian traders. Many of them gradually resettled on the southern Gulf shores. The rise of southern Gulf port cities (such as al-Manama) and the decline of their northern counterparts (such as Bushehr, Bandar Abbas) gave rise to a counter-migration wave from Persia to the Arabian Peninsula (Potter 2014). In 1936, when the Iranian government enforced a veiling ban that became unpopular among Arab and Persian Sunni Muslims, a new emigration wave was prompted toward the Gulf’s southern shores. Today’s configuration of the Emirati-Iranian relationship suggests that in pre-Iranian revolution, Persian nationalism played a role in alienating non-Persian communities, especially under the Pahlavi dynasty (1925–1979). On the southern shores of the Gulf, before the discovery of oil in 1958 in Abu Dhabi and 1966 in Dubai, Arab rulers were often financially supported by non-Arab merchants (Moghadam 2013: 250–251) while turning the erstwhile Trucial States into developed city-states. During the 1960s, when oil was discovered in the UAE, Arab rulers came from the desert uplands of the Arabian Peninsula, feeling they were no longer in need of multi-ethnic traders. This allowed them to begin articulating a monolithic Arab national identity, of which the UAE’s modern governmentality presently conveys the effects of an assemblage of power vectors that promote – and not only implement – biopolitical control over the (imagined) homogenous Emirati polity. In 1971, the UAE gained independence from the British protectorate, enacting a citizenship law the year after that naturalized many Iranian residents6 (the 1972/17 National Law, counting 46 articles).7 After the 1979 Iranian revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic, the UAE’s easy immigration policies allowed many Iranian traders to resettle in the UAE and evade US sanctions. Prior to the 1960s, emigration from Iran was not regulated by rigid bureaucracy (Nadjmabadi 2010: 23). Although there are no official statistics, the Iranian authorities claim that 400,000– 500,000 Iranians live in the UAE today,8 mostly in Dubai, while the Emirati

28  Estella Carpi and Andrea Glioti government puts the figure as low as 100,000.9 Moreover, only a minority of these naturalized Iranians are from a Muslim Sunni background, sometimes being of Baluch origins or, however, coming from southern Iranian cities where a Sunni demography is more sizeable. In addition to ethnicity, therefore, religious belonging further challenges the desired homogeneity of the Emirati polity. National and international media rarely mention the national economic divide, as it is considered a social taboo engendering schisms between the seven Emirates. For instance, holding most of the UAE’s oil and gas reserves, Abu Dhabi accounted for an average of 55.9% of the state’s gross domestic product (GDP) from 2004 to 2014. In the same time span, Dubai contributed 28.6%, Sharjah 4.7%, and the small northern Emirates of Ajman 1%, Ras al-Khaimah 1.7%, Fujairah 0.6%, and Umm al-Quwain 0.2% (Roberts 2017: 551). While the UAE state certainly cannot represent the cultural, economic, and political specificity of each Emirate, its modes of governance mainly emanate from the economically privileged Dubai and Abu Dhabi, yet project the Emirati self onto the whole national territory. Against this hybrid demography and history, while we do not endeavor to assess the individual’s desire to conform to the citizen ideal-type fantasized by the nation-state, we intend to focus on the way the “micro politics of the everyday state” (Blom Hansen and Stepputat 2001) coalesces with the articulated behavioral politics of its own citizens vis-à-vis ethnicity, political rivalry, and state-crafting; citizenship as a safeguarded privilege and loyalty reward; and as the vertical impediment of inter-group service provision, horizontal solidarity, and a non-institutional pre-emptive measure to maintain socio-political order.

Iran in the UAE: A Symbolical Removal Since its independence, the UAE has undergone rapid transformations, from rural and tribal communities to modern nation-states. Such transformations have raised governmental concerns related to authenticity, heritage, and social memory (El-Aswad 2011). In this section, we argue that the removal of Iranian culture and economy in the UAE is symbolic rather than material. In fact, Iranians still run several businesses, with their contribution to the UAE economy tacitly accepted and even treasured. Nonetheless, symbolical removals, implemented through official governmental declarations and national media accounts, are meant to reify the UAE as a monoethnic and monocultural state and to maneuver the UAE history of state-building. In this regard, scholars have already noticed how the creation of false historical memory is often a manifestation of social paranoia (Rozic 2015: 88) and paranoid exclusion the most effective strategy for national identity (Nasser 2014). In cultural production sites, the Bedouin heritage is emphasized to the exclusion of other ethnic, cultural, and religious elements. For example, as Lienhardt recounted (2001 in Potter,

Modes of Governance in the UAE  29 2014), in the Dubai Museum, mannequins depicting shopkeepers in the suq (local market) are clearly Arab, whereas in 1950s Dubai and Abu Dhabi, they were mainly Indians and Persians. Moreover, “museum exhibits and displays in most Gulf cities feature images of distinctly non-African individuals performing tasks that historically were performed by Africans” (Hopper 2014: 344). The transnational space connecting the Iranian coastal region and the Arab countries has been shaped by border migration and local trade activities (Nadjmabadi 2010:19). Historically, even when Iranian migrants could afford to travel back, migrants continued to commute across the Arab-­ Persian Gulf, having become accustomed to this mobile lifestyle. One of anthropologist Afsaneh Nadjmabadi’s interlocutors (2010: 30) emblematically affirmed: “If we aren’t able to go over there regularly, we’ll fall ill.” In this history of “syncretic border culture” (Baud and Van Schendel 1997: 234), Arab nationals and naturalized Iranians have historically served as kafil, a local guarantor for temporary guest workers, to secure cheap labor for their ventures or to financially benefit from the fees charged to migrants to produce their documentation (Nadjmabadi 2010: 24). The broader aim of this section is to shed light on the hybrid nature of the Gulf’s history, which is currently the subject of a simplified polarized narrative (Shi‘a/Iranian versus Sunni/Arab), which often underlies media wars. Among the Iranians who were granted citizenship since UAE’s independence in 1971, there are important Emirati families with Persian family ties and connections. For example, during the rise and rule of the Qawasim Shaikhly clan (from 18th to 19th century), the ruling family of the Emirates of Sharjah and Ras al-Khaimah, the area was inhabited by hawala (those who “wander,” who “transform”), namely Arabs who had moved to Persia centuries ago and returned to the Arab shores of the Gulf at a later stage but never formed a unified state, according to the standard narrative that refers to an ideal-type Arab role model (Potter 2014: 300). The ethnic origin of these noble local families is a thorny issue in a context where the Qawasim’s rise was built on trade and supposedly piracy between the Persian and the Arabian littorals. Examining the legacy of Arabian-Persian cultural and economic bonds remains a taboo in the Gulf’s Arabic-speaking media, and sometimes people will even attack the alleged Iranian roots of a political rival. In June 2016, in an interview10 with the Emirati TV station ash-­Sharjah, Sultan Bin Muhammad Al-Qasimi, the ruler of the Emirate of Sharjah, highlighted the “Persian origin” of the tribe of Yemen’s former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, to point out the historical continuity of the latter’s alliance with Iran against the UAE. Relationships with Iran have often played a role in domestic disputes, such as between two crown princes in Ras al-Khaimah in the early 2000s.11 Again, using Iranian origins as a token of disempowerment and loss of local reputation, in October 2017, Sara al-Amiri12 was appointed state minister for advanced sciences in the UAE. A widely followed UAE-focused

30  Estella Carpi and Andrea Glioti Twitter account highlighted the Iranian roots of the new minister and how the Iranian press celebrated her appointment, in a clear attempt to question Amiri’s allegiance to the state. “How could we liberate the islands occupied by Iran and appoint the Iranian Sara al-Amiri as minister for advanced sciences? Is our country incapable of finding an alternative among its citizens?” read one tweet.13 Similar thoughts had circulated in 2009 in the form of text messages upon the appointment of three ministers of Iranian descent, including Anwar Mohammed Gargash, the current minister of state for foreign affairs. On the Persian side of the Gulf, Iranian Arabic-speaking media at times attack Tehran’s political rivals in the UAE by emphasizing the Iranian origins of these Emirati citizens,14 especially when the latter employ an Arab nationalist rhetoric. At the same time, there are claims about the Arabness of Iran’s regional allies,15 who are instead represented as Persian16 in some of the Arab Gulf media.

Taboos and Polarized Narratives On the official website of the UAE National Day17 called “The Spirit of the Union,” one can read phrases like “It is the Spirit of the Union that celebrates our culture and heritage, and yet shapes our future.” Likewise, a popular saying of Sheikh Zayed ben Sultan Al Nahyan, the founder of the UAE nation and “architect of modern state policy” (Roberts 2017: 559), is “A nation without past is a nation without present, or future.” The concept of nation here aims to encompass multiple identities belonging to different tribes and locations (El-Aswad 2011). Yet, this diversity is absorbed into the rhetoric of a new nation that is authentic (asil) vis-à-vis the non-Emirati people (Ibid.). The national script of belonging, therefore, traces a clear-cut line of separation between local citizens, who reproduce the everyday effects of exclusionary stateness, and migrants. It puts the naturalized in an uncomfortable position,18 at times absorbed into the nation and at others marked as being originally foreign. In official documents, there is no discrimination against migrants on the grounds of ethnicity in the UAE. The treatment of Iranian migrants followed the geopolitical history of Arab-Iranian relationships as much as the treatment of Arab migrants in Iran (Nadjmabadi 2010: 30). For example, Iranians were particularly scapegoated in the UAE throughout the 1960s, during Nasserist Pan-Arabism. Today, on the one hand, some segments of the Iranian migrant communities feel more comfortable in the UAE than in Iran. For instance, some Iranian universities are more selective and less financially accessible than some UAE-based Iranian academic institutions, and migrant families often prefer sending their children to the latter (Moghadam 2013: 255). On the other hand, Iranians remain discriminated subjects in the UAE, and therefore tend

Modes of Governance in the UAE  31 to embrace a politic of invisibility in the public space. As Iranian scholar Amin Moghadam significantly affirmed in the interview Glioti conducted in June 2018: There’s more than one reason behind the politics of invisibility of the Iranian community in the UAE. On the one hand, the government discourages self-identifying practices; on the other, it’s the community itself that tends to disguise its own presence. For instance, 3rd and 4th Iranian generations no longer celebrate Nowruz – the Persian New Year – in the UAE, even though there is no explicit law banning it. You just do what makes you feel more comfortable in a nation state. If control and cultural assimilation are initially imposed by force, over time the population – and not only national citizens – start internalizing them by giving up “cultural citizenship” (Rosaldo 2013), that is, the right to be different and exhibit difference. This is how Foucault (1975) used to conceive the panopticon: not only the gaze exercises power, but also an automatization of power through conformity takes place. Indeed, the post-UAE independence (1971) assimilation process went too far, inducing Iranian migrants to deny their Persian origins, refuse to speak Persian, or mingle with other Iranians in the public space (Moghadam 2013: 254). In addition, the endemic hierarchy within the Iranian community has significantly emerged to mark peripheral Iranians. The khodmuni are the oldest generation Iranians in the UAE who consider themselves the most entitled to “Emiratiness.” Moreover, it is significant that, in 1972, Article 17 of the Citizenship and Passport Law offered Emirati citizenship to those Iranians who were already living in the British-protected Trucial States prior to 1925 or before the UAE’s independence in 1971. In the years after, the burgeoning oil-driven Dubai economy led an increasing number of Iranians to migrate to the UAE from major Iranian cities. The naturalization process had, however, been largely halted at that time, resulting in a deepening of the divide between Iranian expatriates and Emirati citizens of Iranian descent. This is the result of the UAE nation-building peculiarity, which tacitly requires the abandonment of ambiguous identities for the sake of a monolithic national history. Against this backdrop, diasporic hierarchies amongst migrant groups and diverse polities emerged in the UAE nation-state. Bias against Emiratis of Iranian descent – mostly known as ‘ajam, a racial pejorative in the Emirati context – continues to be widespread in Emirati society. Emirati women’s online forums19 have tackled discrimination, encouraging locals to overcome prejudices and marry their daughters to ‘ajami suitors. Other forums feature “handbooks”20 on how to identify ‘ajam from the way they speak or from their physical appearance, in a further confirmation that ‘ajam normally prefer keeping a low profile.

32  Estella Carpi and Andrea Glioti

Hybrid History and Identity Unlike public statements in the Arabic-speaking media, the UAE’s language, architecture, art, and economy all bear witness to Iranian presence. Between the late 18th and the early 19th century, Iranian migrants built the most affluent houses in Dubai, in what was then known as the Bastakiyya neighborhood (Potter 2014: 9). This is clear from the Persian architectural features, most notably the ventilation systems centered on wind towers (barjeel in Arabic, badgir in Persian). The name Bastakiyya has subsequently been Arabized into “Fahidi” and is now home to a touristic site. This architectural past is usually pre-packaged for visitors as part of a homogenous Emirati Arab cultural heritage without any reference to non-Arab contributions.21 Iranians are also well represented in the Emirati art scene, especially in the neighborhoods of Deira, al-Quoz, and in the Dubai Festival City where art galleries that are significantly influenced by the latest developments in Iran’s art scene are located. Despite geopolitical rivalries, Iranian artists are not allowed to stand out as anti-Tehran dissident voices that might cause harm to mutual economic interests. In the aftermath of the 2009 unrest in Iran, the Emirati authorities went as far as censoring politically charged Iranian artworks.22 Quite significantly, therefore, Iranian artists in the UAE are not allowed to express political dissent against the Iranian government and develop as an opponent community (Moghadam 2013: 259–261). Thereby, this intent is preventing the emergence of an environment where a diversification of historical memory can burgeon. The economic weight of the Iranian community in the UAE does not, however, go unnoticed. In 2014, Iranian officials put investments abroad at roughly $700 billion, of which $200 billion in the UAE only.23 In 2016, the UAE was still Iran’s largest non-oil commercial partner and source of imported goods, which amounted to $23.7 billion. In the same year, more than 62% of the Gulf Cooperation Council’s imports from Iran were destined for the Emirates.24 The economic relevance of the Iranian community in Dubai became even clearer after the sanctions enforced by US President Donald Trump, as most community members maintained their business activities in the Emirate, as stated by Moghadam in the interview (June, 2018). Although Iranian investors have started looking elsewhere in the region,25 it is worth remembering that the Iranian government has relied on Dubai as a major hub to evade US sanctions for decades. US products were re-exported to Iran via Dubai and front firms for companies controlled by Tehran have long found a safe haven in the UAE.26 Nonetheless, due to the UAE’s adhesion to the US anti-Iran sanctions, it is now nearly impossible to obtain a visa in the UAE and open a new bank account (Moghadam 2013: 257).

Dissent on Governmental Practices of Removal The UAE’s history as a co-existence of multi-ethnic communities living in a “network of small and large ports connected by the sea” (Alaedini

Modes of Governance in the UAE  33 2017: 139) has historically been silenced in this continual process of crafting rather than going back to the Urvolk state. As a result, as frequently happens in nation-states, a dominant ethnic group emerges at the expense of the contemporary and historical roles of others (Potter 2014). However, the citizens’ participation in the local making of political order is never seamless. Indeed, some Emiratis have explicitly criticized this local form of nation-­building, challenging the official representation of their heritage as homogenous. Rana AlMutawa, a PhD candidate at Oxford University, has analyzed how Emirati history is officially portrayed as Arab Bedouin while neglecting non-Arab components. In the Gulf region, Arab states currently promote a narrative of homogeneity to create an “imagined community” (Anderson 2006) that bonds citizens to one another. Simultaneously, they promote a “narrow and rigid sense of identity that excludes a large part of the nation’s socio- and ethno-historic DNA” (AlMutawa 2016: 24). Cultural homogeneity is promoted because local diversity is perceived as a factor that endangers the public sentiment of loyalty to the state. In this regard, Emirati scholar Ali Khalifa stated that “political loyalty to one’s tribe has not as yet given way to loyalty to the state as an abstract political concept” (AlMutawa 2016: 22). By a similar token, Sultan Souud al-Qasimi, a reformist intellectual and member of Sharjah’s ruling family, repeatedly championed inclusiveness in Emirati society, relating it to the contribution of non-Arab Emiratis to the country’s growth27 and the daring proposal of naturalizing some long-term expatriates.28 Illustrators, such as Haidar Mohammad, launched Sha‘biat in 2006, which is a UAE leading cartoon broadcasted on the Sama Dubai channel.29 The series’ main character, Shambee, is an Emirati of Iranian descent. In one episode, he comically seeks to prove his Arab credentials by modifying his name and reciting Bedouin poetry.30 Dubai’s cultural diversity is therefore embodied in Sha‘biat’s characters. In this context, the symbolic removal of the Iranian presence is functional to claiming authenticity: “Being Arab as opposed to Persian and necessitated by […] the postcolonial state-building projects of the Gulf” (Al-Dailami 2014: 301). While the Iranian presence in the UAE is everything but gone, the rhetoric used in channels through which state entities convey their messages tend to belittle Iranian origins and depict them as a potential source of spurious Emirati identities. The official polity’s discourse, however, speaks as if Iranian traces should not be there as part of the “Emirati self,” while the material presence of Iran in the UAE is still there and often capitalized upon. The case of the UAE state-crafting as a politics of public dissimulation, where Iran seems to be no longer there in any form while concealing the material history of the present, is reminiscent of what Lisa Wedeen theorized as the politics of “as if” (1998). Such a dissimulation is aimed at exclusion: it, in fact, enables the UAE state to campaign for the homogeneity of a compliant and pure Emirati polity by denying and belittling the political other. We will now show how some modes of governance instead implement institutional exclusion by intervening on citizenship.

34  Estella Carpi and Andrea Glioti

Revocation and Stripping of Citizenship as Repressive Measures It is no surprise that certain rights are exclusively reserved for citizens even in so-called fragile states, where the social contract is not so effective. In the Gulf region, citizens are not legally permitted to hold dual nationality; in many cases, a loss of citizenship here will most likely result in temporary or perhaps permanent statelessness (Babar 2017: 543).31 While most literature has discussed the binaries of citizenship and statelessness in the Gulf and the related social membership in the nation-state (Whitley 1993; Beaugrand 2011; 2014; Lori 2017), we are rather interested in capturing what citizenship and stripping of citizenship mean as a behavioral pattern of public politics, which is institutionalized through national law. Among the Gulf countries, there are variations between Bahrain, Kuwait, and the UAE on the one hand, and Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar on the other. While the first three have been actively engaging in revocation of citizenship since 2012, the latter three have chosen other routes to fight endemic political opponents (Babar 2017: 543). While stripping the citizenship of both local citizens (isqat) and naturalized migrants (sahb) is by no means an entirely new practice in the Gulf states, there has been a significant rise in the frequency of its use across the region since 2011 (Babar 2017: 526). In November 2011, five Emirati citizens – referred to in international media as the “UAE Five” – were convicted for insulting the Emirati ruling family. The five were deprived of their citizenship and exiled, travelling out of the country on Comoros Islands passports and ending up in Thailand (Babar 2017: 530). Generally, neither documentation nor a decree was given to them, making the state decision difficult to contest (Amnesty International 2016). Some of those who have had their citizenship revoked were of Iranian origin, but were eventually able to take back their Iranian citizenship.32 Hosting large numbers of foreign workers, the UAE has long managed to skirt issues of civil rights, political rights, and citizenship (Whitley 1993: 30).

Purchasing and Granting Citizenship As we have discussed regarding ethnicity and Iranian origins, citizenship is similarly used as a token of ethical and political (dis)empowerment and a guarantee of the cohesion, homogeneity, and viability of the Emirati polity. The sale of Comorian citizenship to Emirati bidouns33 represents an interesting case. In 2018, the number of Comorian passport holders in the Emirates was estimated at 40,000.34 The UAE started a scheme to buy Comorian citizenship to its bidouns in 2009. The Comorian authorities seized on the opportunity to inject cash into the country where local poverty rates are high, while the Emirati authorities were not willing to allow bidouns to access the benefits that come with citizenship.35

Modes of Governance in the UAE  35 With the Gulf boycott of Qatar in June 2017, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain subsequently advanced the demand that Qatar immediately cease naturalizing citizens from other regional countries. Qatar is frequently accused of interfering in the national security of its neighbors by providing nationality to their citizens (Babar 2017: 540). In that case, Qatar not only ignored such demands, but amended its nationality law to provide citizenship to the children of Qatari women married to Bahrainis, Saudis, Emiratis, and others (Babar 2017: 541). Indeed, migration, as much as citizenship, has increasingly been securitized in an alleged bid to defeat potential security threats (Babar 2017: 527–530). Jawad Fairuz, a Bahraini who became stateless, affirmed that “The possession of citizenship should not be understood as privilege or reward for allegiance, and its revocation should not be wielded as a weapon of control and oppression” (Amnesty International 2016: 8). In December 2011, Emirati political opponents were deprived of citizenship with the allegation of belonging to the da‘wa li-l-islah (the “call to reform”), the Emirati branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (alIkhwan al-Muslimun), in the framework of the phenomenon of “homegrown terrorism.” A small segment of Emirati society close to the Muslim Brotherhood36 have often denounced the inhuman character of this governmental measure, which implements this exceptional policy to arbitrarily punish its own citizens. Sheikhs like ‘Ali al-Hamadi37 have often voiced their dissent by pointing out that any professional, public, and personal identity are stripped off with the withdrawal of Emirati citizenship. Those affected have at times emphasized that there is no legal ground for this action. Some dissident regional commentators started to speak of shu‘ur diya‘ al-hawiye, a feeling of identity loss,38 which was behind the implementation of tough measures on citizenship. Among the criticism coming from the Gulf region itself, Qatari media emphasized the “risk of placing nationalized individuals at the mercy of security slavery” (wada‘ fi’at al-mutajannasin tahta rahmat al-‘ubuda al-tama li’l jihaz al-amni).39 Local debates are heated, not only as to the stripping of the Emirati citizenship. The criteria and priorities to grant citizenship also constitute a contentious issue in the regional media. In this regard, Arab nationalists have launched appeals for granting Emirati citizenship to Iranian Ahwazi Arabs, who, in their view, should be given priority over Iranians of Persian descent. Ahwazi Arabs are originally from the resource-rich Khuzestan province in Southwestern Iran. For example, in a TV interview40 on the Saudi Rotana al-Khalijiah in May 2012, Mahmoud al-Ahwazi, a leader from the Ahwaz Arab People’s Democratic-Popular Front, lamented that most of the Iranians who had obtained Emirati citizenship were allegedly ethnic Persians. Some local commentators, such as an-Na‘imi, do not prioritize specific ethnicities, but rather defend the need to naturalize those who play in the UAE clubs for the sake of national football.41 Others call for wariness toward citizenship claims, as the integrity of the state and the social structures should come as a primary interest, and evidence is provided by

36  Estella Carpi and Andrea Glioti those who, through claiming citizenship, have then threatened the state and distorted its image.42 The relationship between “citizen” and “non-citizen” has great significance for understanding the construction of class, gender, city, and state in the Gulf (Khalaf, ash-Shehabi & Hanieh 2015). Since the Arab Uprisings of 2011, state repression toward government opposition has been stepped up to the extent that the UAE now has one of the highest rates of political prisoners per capita anywhere in the world (Coates Ulrichsen 2016). Nevertheless, the stripping of citizenship as a punishment tool is not particular to the Arab Gulf, as the United Kingdom adopts similar measures.43 In the UAE context, holding local citizenship is not tolerated when the former becomes an endemic act of civil disobedience. Echoing Beaugrand’s considerations (2014: 5) on the “manufacturing of aliens [Biduns] within” in Kuwait, the UAE government “otherizes” dissidents from the Emirati polity. Against this backdrop, heterogenous patterns of citizenship are not accepted, as long as the latter is conceived of and employed as a guarantee of consent and compliance with the Emirati Urvolk’s continual construction. Therein, compliance and consent are the sine qua non condition for the preservation of the citizen-state social contract. We will now show how the UAE migrant-­ state social contract is implemented by asserting vertical control over horizontal linkages.

The UAE Strategy on Community Services: Only in-Group Givers Allowed? An example of how this migrant-state social contract works out along vertical lines is provided by philanthropic practices and charities, which are on the rise in the UAE. Significantly, the Islamic principle of giving alms (zakat) and the overall involvement in charitable acts (sadaqa) are widespread and promoted through the valuation of altruism (El-Aswad 2015: 2–5). In this context, we aim to assess neither whether migrant groups in the UAE establish or challenge dominance over each other through helping nor the ways in which such outgroup acts of giving can be defined as prosocial. We rather examine how assistance provision is patterned in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and the way the government informally seems to stifle out-group assistance provision. Indeed, services and relief items have a political nature which, in turn, shapes the institutional and power relationships that warrant or hamper their provision. Moreover, while the UAE, like the Gulf States in general, have been represented as exceptional because of their great wealth based on oil export and the low percentage of natives vis-à-vis foreign migrants in the local demography, “when it comes to the impact of immigration on nationalism, they are very much like any other society where citizenship and migration are largely considered in terms of access to welfare-state benefits” (Beaugrand 2014: 15). Likewise, the UAE is not exceptional in criminalizing irregular migration (Lori 2011).

Modes of Governance in the UAE  37 Most of the literature dealing with service provision and social and political order problematizes the promotion of assistance provision and volunteering as a nation-building strategy for which different demographic groups may be called upon (Shachar 2014) as a creation of identity-based groups (Jawad 2009; Feldman 2012; Carpi 2016), as an assertion or dismantlement of high/low social statuses and dependency/autonomy mechanisms (Nadler 2002; Halabi & Nadler 2010), and as a way of maneuvering political constituencies (Cammett 2014). Contrary to this, we examine how state-crafting and enhancement of a sense of belonging are the very goals of the governmental strategies meant to hamper out-group acts of giving. Service provision, both as a salaried job and as a volunteering act, is not an unproblematic notion. Rather, it is a relational construct the boundaries of which a variety of institutional actors strategically manage and use (Shachar 2014). Likewise, it can create and preserve social order (McClure 2018). Being classified as a Global South state or non-traditional donor in global North’s environments, by the mid-2010s the UAE is the third largest aid donor, decreasingly addressing non-Arab recipients, and therefore pushed by Islamic and pan-Arabism principles (Al-Mezaini 2017). Conversely, migrant community-based nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the UAE can be counted in small numbers, even though the national law allows them to exist on the condition that there are Emirati citizens among their founders and their committee board members. In this section, we investigate how migrant-founded charity initiatives operating in Abu Dhabi are primarily informal and exclusively have an intra-community focus. We argue that this phenomenon is caused by deliberate, yet unofficial, governmental strategies rather than being a specific societal structure of the Emirates that hinders out-group acts of giving, or a peculiar philanthropic tendency of Abu ­Dhabi-based migrant communities reproducing Foucauldian pastoral power, that is, self-discipline in response to the subtle requirements of the state (Foucault 1988). Based on interviews conducted by Carpi in 2015 in Abu Dhabi, we argue that the act of giving is deliberately contained by the state within community boundaries to impede mutual assistance between the Abu Dhabi migrant communities. Despite the governmental effort to enhance inter-community relations  – such as social gatherings organized for western migrants and local citizens in some local houses of Ras al-Khaimah called majalis (“councils”)44 – the Abu Dhabi government attempts to preserve social order by preventing unconditioned social mingling and limiting unsupervised inter-community interactions. This strategy is unofficially put in place while local governments endeavor to overcome what is called “the structural division in the labor market,” as part of the UAE government-launched nationalization or Emiratization (tawteen in Arabic) campaign that commenced in 2007,45 which mandates the inclusion of Emiratis in the job sector through the establishment of a quota, incentives, and a special department that assists Emirati nationals in job hunting.46 While out-group acts of giving are

38  Estella Carpi and Andrea Glioti hampered, the Emiratization program and more specifically entities such as the Emirates Foundation47 encourage local citizens to join philanthropic activities and contribute to the enhancement of domestic well-being. The UAE declared 2017 as the “‘Year of Giving,” aiming to accomplish charity, social and humanitarian initiatives, and to promote a culture of giving and volunteering among local citizens. The Year of Giving was supported by several strategic initiatives, one of which was to develop a legislative framework for the operation of charities, humanitarian organizations, and NGOs. A key development was the recent publication of Dubai Law No.12 of 2017 (the Dubai Civil Organization Law), a new law regulating NGOs in Dubai. The aims of the Year of Giving were to promote corporate social responsibility in the private sector and to develop a sense of community and social responsibility within the community and therefore strengthen in-group acts of giving. In this framework, acts of giving among Emirati nationals are seen as enacting and developing the value of serving the nation by emphasizing the importance of loyalty and commitment to future generations, the enlargement of the ongoing Emiratization program, and a culture of volunteering to encourage the development of community services. In this framework, the new NGO law is aimed at reinforcing UAE state sovereignty, as explicitly discussed in regional and international media.48 The Dubai Community Development Authority with the new law49 authorized NGOs to practice non-profit activities in the UAE in social, health, educational, cultural, scientific, creative, professional, and humanitarian fields. As per national legislation, foreign founded NGOs are allowed; however, the number of migrant community-based organizations is considerably monoethnic (e.g. the Filipino Christian Evangelical Church50 and the Somali Social and Cultural Center51), and acts of giving are allowed only in the realm of faith institutions such as The Evangelical Community Church in Abu Dhabi,52 set up by US migrants and now frequented by different ethnic groups. Nonetheless, old date migrants mostly found community-­ oriented institutions for in-group members, practically contributing to the ordering of local society via acts of self-detachment. In this regard, it is worth mentioning that the authors of this chapter were invited to leave after visiting for the second time one of the seven Sudanese social clubs in the UAE during the spring of 2015. This kind of center is indeed conceived of or performed by the local community as “an intimate space to host their weddings, funerals, and everything in between” and “to be a member you need to be Sudanese or recommended by two existing members,”53 thus seemingly differing from the cultural purpose of other community-oriented centers in other countries of the region and beyond. Nonetheless, the Indian Cultural Center in Abu Dhabi did not have the same principles, not minding the presence of out-group members. In this context, preliminary interviews with Abu Dhabi-based Filipino and Moroccan informal assistance providers indicate that the government

Modes of Governance in the UAE  39 enacts ad hoc strategies to limit NGO outreach to in-group members. Salwa54 is a Moroccan migrant who has been living in the UAE for six years. When she can afford to take a Saturday off, she normally goes to the house where a certain number of Moroccan women meet. This group of women has long since been floating the idea of starting an NGO to assist their own community, but they have been faced with many challenges. “We rarely meet Emirati citizens here in Abu Dhabi. The only ones we know are our boss and her family at the beauty salon. They would never act as trustees or founders of our NGO” (June 2015). Salwa’s anecdote shows how a law, which purportedly allows foreigners to undertake formal assistance provision, is instead demanding and has practical impediments to starting an NGO for the Moroccan community. In a different vein, Shirlita, a Filipino nail-polisher, who has worked in the UAE since 2008, affirmed that, during the 2010 Pakistan floods, she and her Filipino friends, who used to be involved in social work in the past while in Manila, arranged a few packages of clothes and food items to be given to the Pakistani community (October 2015): Pakistanis normally gather behind the building where I work. My friend is married to one of them, who told her they were about to send some relief items to Punjab and Sindh the week after […]. We wanted to provide them with further support and show our solidarity. Filipinos and Pakistanis have been building this country’s wealth. Eventually we gave up, as my friend said our packages had been rejected on request of a government officer who supervised the square where the Pakistani volunteers gathered before the expedition. My friend’s husband reported that they had been told this needed to be a thing from Pakistanis to Pakistanis, with no out-group support allowed. This account suggests that service provision is supervised by the UAE government and is approached as a pre-emptive political order measure. The Pakistani initiative of sending aid to their country of origin was informal as much as the spontaneous act of the Filipino women to support the expedition. Both acts would have undermined local order in a context where societal group-making is monitored and even policed by the state-citizen Emirati polity. The likely prohibition of gatherings in the public sphere and of organizing informal aid expeditions would be enforced against both the Pakistanis and the Filipinos. What seemed to matter to the governmental officer in this anecdote was the imminent occurrence of out-group assistance in the public space. Out-group acts of giving epitomize the projection of national paranoia around multi-migrant political mobilization and social cohesion potentials. Against this backdrop, the indigenous Emirati polity increasingly invests in the nationalization of the giving industry and volunteering activities by either tolerating in-group assistance or stifling tout court – though not legally forbidding – foreign-started assistance and outgroup philanthropic acts. In this sense, out-group acts of giving are neither

40  Estella Carpi and Andrea Glioti encouraged in official public policy as seen nor practically allowed, as the abovementioned anecdotes suggest. Nonetheless, empirical evidence indicating that out-group assistance and support are stifled should be strengthened with further research efforts, as data collection was part of a different research study that Carpi was conducting in Abu Dhabi in 2015. As such, it would deserve further efforts, along with the necessity to capture similarities and differences across the seven Emirates that indeed do not share identical political and social histories. We have, however, included this case study as a greatly significant (although preliminary) proof of exclusionary modes of organizing society toward a purely Emirati polity.

Conclusion While the ability to uphold sovereignty would make the UAE an orthodox Weberian state, the UAE remains a peculiar form of nation-state, as it has developed out of an unusual relationship to coloniality, its historical debris, and an official polity that stems from controversial tribal relations. Against this backdrop, the viability of the present crafting of the state imposes the need for a “purified” nation in which tribal differences and political others are not possible across the Emirates we have taken into analysis (mainly Abu Dhabi and Dubai). The Emirati citizen, unlike political others, is a symbolic subject who needs to aspire to a “fantasy” (Lacan in Hage 1996) of collective homogeneity, while the state-citizen Emirati polity thrives on the attempted attainment of an ideal political membership. The political other is feared, paranoidly managed, ethically and symbolically belittled as well as repressed and even criminalized by formal and informal modalities of governance, as our three case studies have shown; but the political other is also needed in order to fabricate the purity of the UAE state and a fantasized Emirati self. To capture the whys and hows of state-crafting, we have first provided a historical background to suggest its peculiar formation trajectory in the UAE. This chapter, however, was not the place to assess how that varies across the seven Emirates and how local specificities respond to the constructed sameness of the Emirati self. Yet, current international affairs and the struggle for geopolitical influence, to some measure, require an adherence to a transnational understanding of the state despite the different morphologies of state power across the globe. In this sense, fabricating the pure state vis-àvis the political other provides the UAE with a political and (though at times challenged) ethical place within the global polity. The original emplacement of political power across the local tribes unfolds today’s peculiarity of the UAE modes of governance, oscillating between legalized repression such as the stripping of citizenship, informal containment such as stifling out-group assistance, and performative acts, that is, speaking as if (Wedeen 1998) Iran’s presence were no longer in the UAE.

Modes of Governance in the UAE  41 We have therefore looked at two informal and one formal mode of organizing Emirati society, which the volatile, as seen, state-citizen interrelationality puts in place through the meiotic process of not being the political other, while also belittling the other. In this framework, the state emerges as a relational category of analysis that can only be defined in relation to what does not want to be and what does not tolerate in the effort to construct the (ahistorical) purity of the Emirati polity.

Notes 1 We would like to thank Zahra Babar (Georgetown University in Qatar) for her comments on an earlier draft of this chapter and Melani Cammett (Harvard University) for her bibliographic suggestions to write the third case study on in/ out-group assistance provision. 2 The unidimensional character of national identity as illusive and unrealistic has long been a subject of discussion in the Middle East studies literature (Nasser 2004). 3 This is a general tendency in the Arab Gulf, where nationals replace foreign workers in the governmental and other public sectors (BBC Monitoring, “Over 3,000 Foreign Workers Laid Off in Kuwaitization Scheme,” August 26, 2018). 4 We will refer to the Arabian-Persian Gulf to counter the current tendency of embracing exclusively one of the historical narratives. “The ‘New Gulf’ forced people to take sides and has led to a rise in […] anxiety over identity” (Potter 2014: 14). This statement indicates the political contention that seeks to either Arabize or Persianize the Gulf history. 5 For a systematic review of the reformed law, see https://www.khaleejtimes.com/ news/uae-citizenship-law-full-list-of-announcements-reactions. 6 The UAE naturalized 1,300 people in 2006, mostly with Iranian origins. For more details, see http://thenewkhalij.news/ar/node/2165. 7 For more details, see: http://www.gcc-legal.org/LawAsPDF.aspx?opt&country= 0&LawID=3147#Section_6586. 8 This number has been confirmed by the Iranian consulate of Dubai in 2007. However, from 2006 to 2010, the UAE population has grown by 64.5% according to the National Bureau of Statistics in 2011 (Moghadam 2013: 263). 9 Skype interview with Dr Amin Moghadam, Associate Research Scholar at the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University, June 15, 2018. 10 To watch the video interview, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= IcCxZKXqxfI. 11 See https://rakuae.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/‫سأر‬-‫ةميخلا‬-‫ايلخاد‬-‫و‬-‫ايميلقإ‬/ and in The Economist: http://country.eiu.com/article.aspx?articleid=517582636& Country=United%20Arab%20Emirates. 12 The tweet can be found at http://urlshort.pw/kH7NXg and on Watan https:// www.watanserb.com/2017/10/21/‫سأرتس‬-‫سلجم‬-‫ءاملع‬-‫تارامإلا‬-‫مالعإلا‬-‫إلا‬/. 13 Tweet mentioned in the Watan Serb: https://www.watanserb.com/2017/10/21/ ‫سأرتس‬-‫سلجم‬-‫ءاملع‬-‫تارامإلا‬-‫مالعإلا‬-‫إلا‬/. 14 For instance, see http://www.alalam.ir/news/1731067/‫ريزو‬-‫همسا‬--‫شاقرق‬--. 15 See http://www.alalam.ir/news/1825404/‫ويديفلاب‬--‫مكاح‬-‫ةقراشلا‬-‫رجفي‬-‫ةأجافم‬--‫يلع‬-‫هللادبع‬-‫حلاص‬--‫يس راف‬-‫لصألا‬--. 16 For instance, see http://elaph.com/Web/News/2016/6/1091822.html. 17 See for more details http://ledubai.com/the-spirit-of-the-union. 18 As said (see p. 6), many of the naturalized were hawala, who, by their own identity, challenge the “purification” process promoted and enacted by the UAE

42  Estella Carpi and Andrea Glioti

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31

32

33

state. In this regard, it is worth mentioning al-Dailami (2014: 300): “Is the term Hawala an ethnicity, a narrative, or some other type of identification? Moreover, who is doing the identifying—is it a self-identification or an externally imposed one? Is it relational […]; or is it a categorical one where group membership is determined by a shared attribute such as language, religion, or nationality?” See https://forum.uaewomen.net/showthread.php/367150-‫ميعلا‬-‫عوضوم‬-‫شاقنلل‬. See http://www.alwasluae.com/vb/archive/index.php/t-134303.html. An example from local news: https://www.thenational.ae/uae/qasr-al-hosnwhere-the-past-has-a-future-1.311710. For instance, see https://www.economist.com/prospero/2010/07/28/brothersin-exile. See the Financial Tribune, April 25, 2016: “How Wealthy are Iranian Expats?”: https://financialtribune.com/articles/economy-domestic-economy/40146/ how-wealthy-are-iranian-expats. See Aeideas, September 13, 2017, “The GCC Complicated Affair with Iran”: http://www.aei.org/publication/the-gccs-complicated-affair-with-iran/. See the Financial Tribune, February 25, 2018: “Qatar, Oman, Becoming Iran’s New Trade Gateways”: https://financialtribune.com/articles/economybusi ne ss-and-markets/82434/qat ar- oman-b e c om i ng-i rans-new-trade gateways. See The Atlantic, May 22, 2018: “How Iran Can Evade Sanctions This Time”: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/05/iran-sanctionstrump-nuclear-turkey/560819/. For example, see: http://sultanalqassemi.blogspot.com/2009/02/ajamis-of-­ emirates-celebrated-history.html. See the Gulf News, September 22, 2013, “Give Expats an Opportunity to Earn UAE Citizenship”: https://gulfnews.com/opinion/thinkers/give-expatsan-opportunity-to-earn-uae-citizenship-1.1234167. See videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/ShaabiaUAE/playlists?sort=dd& shelf_id=14&view=50. For instance, see https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/the-animated-­ series-shaabiat-al- cartoon-has-attracted-a-lot-of-fans-and-with-goodreason-1.583702. In more detail, UAE law allows for the revocation of citizenship. Article 15 of Federal Law No. 17 of 1972 states that this may happen if a citizen engages in the military service of a foreign state without authorization from the UAE; acts in the interest of an enemy state; has been willingly naturalized by another state. Article 16, as amended by Federal Law No. 10 of 1975, adds that nationality can be withdrawn if a citizen: commits or attempts to commit an act deemed dangerous to the state’s security; is convicted repeatedly for “disgraceful” crimes; uses forgery or fraud to acquire nationality; lives outside the UAE “without excuse” for four consecutive years (source: https://www.amnesty.org/download/ Documents/POL4073492017ENGLISH.pdf). For instance, see https://www.middle-east-online.com/‫تارامالا‬-‫بحست‬‫ةيسنجلا‬-‫نم‬-6-‫صاخشا‬-‫ديعتو‬-‫مهيلا‬-‫مهتازاوج‬-‫ةيناريالا‬#off-canvas. An official WAM (Emirati state-run agency) statement once explicitly referred to the fact that some suspects were granted citizenship between 1976 and 1986 as coming from Iran. This group of stateless Emiratis became known as the “UAE Seven.” The bidouns – the word is Arabic for “without” – mainly come from families who lived in the Gulf region but were never counted in censuses because of their tribal affiliation, their level of literacy, their ethnic origin, or their access to state officials.

Modes of Governance in the UAE  43 34 See for details https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/opinion/sunday/united-­ arab-emirates-comorans-citizenship.html. 35 For instance, see The New York Times, January 5, 2018, “Who Loses when a Country Puts Citizenship Up for Sale?”: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/ opinion/sunday/united-arab-emirates-comorans-citizenship.html. 36 In 1974, the local Muslim Brotherhood group Islah was founded in Dubai with help from members from Qatar, Kuwait, and Egypt. It particularly developed in the northern Emirates of Ras al-Khaimah and Fujairah, while it remained absent from Abu Dhabi. With the support of the northern Emirs, Islah leaders achieved ministerial positions in education, social affairs, justice, Islamic affairs, and awqaf (“religious endowments”) (Roberts 2017: 552). 37 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdasnspd55g. 38 See: http://www.alwasatnews.com/news/313274.html. 39 See on Bawabat ash-Sharq al-Iliktruniyya, December 2, 2017: https://bit.ly/2j8ccyY. 40 To watch the video, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy7qFVf09uU. 41 See al-Bayan, October 1, 2017: https://www.albayan.ae/opinions/everyweek/ 2017-10-01-1.3056828. 42 See https://www.albayan.ae/opinions/articles/2013-10-03-1.1971423. 43 For example, see in The New Arab, March 10, 2016, “Stripping Citizenship and the Politics of Repression”: https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment/2016/3/10/ stripping-citizenship-and-the-politics-of-repression; and the recent Windrush scandal, The Guardian, May 4, 2018, “Windrush Scandal: No Passport for Thousands who Moved to Britain”: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/ may/04/windrush-scandal-no-passport-for-thousands-who-moved-to-britain. 44 Informal conversation of Carpi with three Emirati citizens, Abu Dhabi, May 2015. 45 For more details, see https://bit.ly/2OXYscG. 46 This measure is coded in the Federal Law No. 8 of 1980 known as the Labor Law: http://www.mohre.gov.ae/en/laws-legislation/labour-law.aspx. 47 For details, see https://www.emiratesfoundation.ae/ef/. 48 For instance, see http://gulfbusiness.com/uae-plans-law-regulate-ngos/. 49 In relation to the requirement for founding members, an association must have at least two UAE nationals among the founding members. For institutions, the law does not specify that the founder(s) must be Emirati, but the Board of Trustees must consist of at least five persons, including one Emirati national. 50 See http://www.findglocal.com/AE/Abu-Dhabi/300783446922606/FilipinoChristian-Church-Abu-Dhabi. 51 See https://uaesomalicentre.wordpress.com/. 52 For more details, see http://eccad.org/about. 53 “Sudan Expats Still Club Together,” The National, March 31, 2011: https://www. thenational.ae/uae/sudan-s-expats-still-club-together-1.432428. 54 Interviewees have been pseudonymized on their request.

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44  Estella Carpi and Andrea Glioti Al-Mezaini, Khaled Salem (2017). “From Identities to Politics: UAE Foreign Aid.” In Isaline Bergamaschi, Phoebe Moore, Arlene B. Tickner, eds. South-South Cooperation Beyond the Myths. Rising Donors, New Aid Practices? London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 225–244. AlMutawa, Rana (2016). “Monolithic Representations and Orientalist Credence in the UAE.” Gulf Affairs, 22–25. Available at: https://www.oxgaps.org/files/analysis_almutawa.pdf. Al-Otabi, Mubarak (1989). The Qawasim and British Control of the Arabian Gulf. PhD Thesis, University of Salford. Al-Qasimi, Ibn Mohammad (1986). The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf, London and Dover, NH: Croom Helm. Amnesty International (2016). Arbitrary Deprivation of Citizenship, Report of a Seminar held on October 31. Available at https://www.amnesty.org/download/ Documents/POL4073492017ENGLISH.pdf. Anderson, Benedict (2006). Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London, UK: Verso Books. Babar, Zahra (2017). “‘The Enemy Within’: Citizenship-Stripping in the Post-Arab Spring GCC.” The Middle East Journal, Vol. 71, No. 4, pp. 525–543. Baud, Michiel and Van Schendel, Willem (1997). “Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands.” Journal of World History, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 211–242. Beaugrand, Claire (2011). “Statelessness and Administrative Violence: Biduns’ Survival Strategies in Kuwait.” The Muslim World, Vol. 101, No. 2, pp. 228–250. ——— (2014). “Framing Nationality in the Migration Context: The Elusive Category of Biduns in Kuwait.” Middle East Law and Governance, 6, 1–31. Blom Hansen, Thomas and Finn Stepputat, eds. (2001). States of Imagination, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cammett, Melani (2014). Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Carpi, Estella (2016). “Rethinking Lebanese Welfare in Ageing Emergencies.” In Rosita Di Peri and Daniel Meier, eds. Lebanon Facing the Arab Uprisings. Constraints and Adaptation. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 115–133. Coates Ulrichsen, Kristian (2016). The Gulf States in International Political Economy. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. El-Aswad, El-Sayed (2011). “Authenticity, Identity, and the Spirit of the UAE Union.” Tabsir, December 13. Available at http://tabsir.net/?p=1635& cpage=1. ——— (2015). “From Traditional Charity to Global Philanthropy. Dynamics of the Spirit of Giving and Volunteerism in the United Arab Emirates.” Horizons in Humanity and Social Sciences, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1–21. Feldman, Ilana (2012). “The Challenge of Categories: UNRWA and the Definition of a Palestine Refugee.” Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 387–406. Foucault, Michel (1975). Surveieller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison, Paris: Gallimard. ——— (1988). Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977– 1984, New York: Routledge. Hage, Ghassan (1996). “Nationalist Anxiety or the Fear of Losing Your Other.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 7, pp. 121–140. Halabi, Samer and Arie Nadler (2010). “Receiving Help. Consequences for the Recipient.” In Stefan Sturmer and Mark Snyder, eds. The Psychology of Prosocial

Modes of Governance in the UAE  45 Behaviour: Group Processes, Intergroup Relations, and Helping. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, pp. 121–138. Hopper, Matthew S. (2014). “Slavery, Family Life and the African Diaspora in the Arabian Gulf, 1880–1940.” In Gwyn Campbell and Elizabeth Elbourne, eds. Sex, Power and Slavery. Athens: Ohio University Press. Jawad, Rana (2009). Religion and Social Welfare in the Middle East: A Lebanese Perspective, Bristol, UK: Polity Press. Khalaf, Abdulhadi, Omar al-Shehabi and Adam Hanieh (2015). Transit States. Labour, Migration and Citizenship in the Gulf, London, UK: Pluto Books. Lori, Noora A. (2011). “National Security and the Management of Migrant Labor: A Case Study of the United Arab Emirates.” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, Vol. 20, Nos. 3–4, pp. 315–337. Lori, Noora A. (2017). “Statelessness, In-Between Statuses, and Precarious Citizenship.” In Ayelet Shachar, Rainer Baubock, Irene Bloemraad and Maarten Vink, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–29. Lorimer, John Gordon (1915). Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf Oman and Central Arabia, Calcutta, India: Super-intendant Government Printing Press. McClure, Julia, ed. (2000). Questions of Modernity, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ——— (2018). “The Charitable Bonds of the Spanish Empire: The Casa De Contratación as an Institution of Charity.” New Global Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 157–174. Mitchell, Timothy (1991). “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics.” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 85, No. 1, pp. 77–96. Moghadam, Amin (2013). “The Other Shore. Iranians in the United Arab Emirates. Between Visibility and Invisibility.” In Annabelle Sreberny and Massoumeh Torfeh, eds. Cultural Revolution in Iran: Contemporary Popular Culture in the Islamic Republic. London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 247–265. Nadjmabadi, Shahnaz (2010). “Cross-Border Networks. Labour Migration from Iran to the Arab Countries of the Persian Gulf.” Anthropology of the Middle East, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 18–33. Nadler, Arie (2002). “Inter-Group Helping Relations as Power Relations: Maintaining or Challenging Social Dominance between Groups Through Helping.” Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 58. No. 3, pp. 487–502. Nasser, Riad (2004). “Exclusion and the Making of Jordanian National Identity: An Analysis of School Textbooks.” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Vol. 10, pp. 221–249. Potter, Lawrence G., ed. (2014). The Persian Gulf in Modern Times: People, Ports, and History, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Roberts, David B. (2017). “Qatar and the UAE: Exploring Divergent Responses to the Arab Spring.” Middle East Journal, Vol. 71, No. 4, pp. 544–562. Rosaldo, Renato (2013). “Cultural Citizenship in San Jose, California, 1994.” In Sian Lazar, ed. Anthropology of Citizenship: A Reader. Oxford, UK: Wiley-­ Blackwell, pp. 75–78. Rozic, Peter S.J. (2015). “The Paranoid State.” Demokratizatsiya, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 77–94. Shachar, Itamar Y. (2014). “The White Management of ‘Volunteering’: Ethnographic Evidence from an Israeli NGO.” Voluntas, Vol. 25, No. 6, pp. 1417–1440.

46  Estella Carpi and Andrea Glioti Stoler, Ann Laura (2013). Imperial Debris. On Ruins and Ruination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Vora, Neha (2013). Impossible Citizens. Dubai’s Indiana Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wedeen, Lisa (1998). “Acting ‘As If’: Symbolic Politics and Social Control in Syria.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 503–523. White, Benjamin (2011). The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Whitley, Andrew (1993). “Minorities and the Stateless in Persian Gulf Politics.” Survival, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 28–50.

2 Community Organizing and the Limits of Participatory Democracy in Lebanon Sophie Chamas

In the year that followed Lebanon’s “garbage protests,” which unfolded during the summer of 2015, a diffuse urban social movement that had been developing for over a decade, subsuming a variety of campaigns, NGOs, collectives, and protests all aimed at the country’s “centralized, fragmented and inefficient urban governance structure” (Harb 2016: 4), sedimented into what appeared to be a cohesive and organized force with the emergence of Beirut Madinati (Beirut, My City), an independent electoral campaign that contested the country’s 2016 municipal elections in the capital.1 Beirut Madinati began as the initiative of professors based at the American University of Beirut, many of whom lacked a formal background in politics. It gradually expanded to include a diversity of middle- and upper-­ middle-class actors, some of whom had experience working with Lebanon’s traditional political parties but had grown disenchanted with them over time. The architects of Beirut Madinati wanted to find a way to translate the anger made palpable in the streets of Beirut during the summer of 2015 “into hope and action” (Sharp 2016). They committed themselves to putting forward an affirmative campaign, devoid of hostile or negative discourse. Beirut Madinati adopted a “professional, and maybe even corporate tone … [and] opaque political positionality,” one which “reflected in its [candidate] list that placed real estate developers and engineers from multinational corporations alongside academics, activists, and artists” (ibid.). Beirut Madinati’s ten-point platform focused on making the capital more livable for all of its residents by addressing traffic congestion, the lack of parks and public transportation, the housing and waste crises, and other issues that pertained to the well-being of the city’s inhabitants. In its campaign material, it emphasized the achievability of its program, isolating and delving into each issue sector by sector, introducing manageable solutions to targeted issues that could serve as catalysts for more ambitious interventions in the future. The campaign highlighted the proposed reforms that were most easily and immediately implementable.2 Beirut Madinati’s members and supporters, Cambanis writes (2017), “believe that political power requires small causes embedded in a grander vision.”

DOI: 10.4324/b22870-3

48  Sophie Chamas Three months of campaigning, however, were not enough to move masses of people to action. While Beirut Madinati’s 30 percent of the total vote (60 percent in the city’s largest Christian district) is undoubtedly impressive, especially for a campaign of political unknowns who formally appeared on the scene a mere three months before election day, only 20 percent of registered voters actually participated in the Beirut election.3 In its aftermath, Beirut Madinati members who were veterans of Beirut’s urban social movement insisted that what the city and country needed was to be introduced to the benefits of participatory democracy, through which a mujtamaʿ fāʿel (proactive society) could be cultivated. And so, Beirut Madinati’s “neighborhood initiative” was born, one of three working groups established in the aftermath of the electoral loss. In the written material they produced to explain the impetus behind the neighborhood initiative, the volunteers involved argued the need to establish direct communication with all segments of society, regardless of creed, social, or economic standing, political beliefs and educational backgrounds, and to activate residential communities that could “serve as sustainable political alternatives and work on shared issues.”4 The civil war and what followed it, the authors argued, pulled neighborhoods apart and disintegrated the bonds between Beirutis. Through work at the neighborhood level, the initiative hoped to begin to stitch back together the social fabric, it argued, once animated neighborhood-based communities, to encourage communal work and debate, and to cultivate feelings of belonging to the neighborhood and through it the city. Its goal was to counter hopelessness and the fragmentation, individualism, and divisive forms of meaning-making and identification it is productive of. The neighborhood initiative imagined a form of activism grounded in an ethics of care: in demonstrating what could become of Beirut if its residents looked out for and defended each other and their city instead of simply trying to survive or cope with the day-to-day chaos of Lebanon on their own. Many hoped that this routine coming together could aid in the democratization of political life by helping people make sense of the conditions under which they lived and suffered as shared with others they might have previously perceived as alien to them (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). In what follows, I draw on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with one of the neighborhood initiative’s two pilot projects, which unfolded in the East Beirut neighborhood of Mar Mikhael – a locale suffering the consequences of an aggressive process of gentrification. I argue that the initiative’s progressive vision for the political potentiality of community organizing was limited by its dependence on a response to this grassroots work from the state, framed as the sole legitimate provider for city and citizenry. Pressured both by the communities it worked with and by Beirut Madinati’s wider umbrella structure to generate fast results, the neighborhood initiative was ­unable to dedicate attention and energy to cultivating the structures of feeling it hoped for and which it believed were necessary components of imbuing this practice of community organizing with political potential.

Community Organizing in Lebanon  49 Caring for one’s neighborhood and fellow residents manifested as a routine, collective lobbying of local authorities to “do their job.” Building on Hermez’s (2011a: 44) work on the shortcomings of the anti-sectarian movement in Lebanon, I argue that, in a similar vein, despite recognizing that Lebanon’s power structures were farcical and wanting to agitate against them and cultivate alternative loci of power, without the availability of substitute methods for challenging the status quo the activists associated with the neighborhood initiative in Mar Mikhael were forced to abide by the rules of engagement offered up by a system they knew would inevitably disappoint them. How can we make sense of the enduring promise of the state as caregiver amongst activists, particularly those who acknowledge the limits of lobbying state institutions and politicians for redress and justice, but who continue to embrace this form of political praxis?

“The Opium of the Citizen”5 In their article “Wayn Al-Dawla?: Locating the Lebanese State in Social Theory,” Mouawad and Baumann (2017: 66) challenge the popular claim that the Lebanese state is “weak, broken down, irrelevant, or absent.” They point out the important ways in which scholars have challenged this narrative of weakness and absence by proposing hybridity as a means for making sense of power relations in Lebanon, that is, an approach to state and nonstate actors that acknowledges the ways in which they “mutually constitute and feed on one another in order to operate” (2017: 70). Within this framework, the state is embedded in a “wider field of power with a large plurality of actors” rather than framed as incapacitated by non-state actors or foreign state intervention. While acknowledging the importance of this body of work, Mouawad and Baumann argue that it cannot fully account for the conditions of possibility behind the “weak state” paradigm. To address this gap, they propose the adoption of a hybrid analytic, one that brings together Marxist and post-structuralist theories of the state (summarized below), to think through “the complexity of state-society relations” as well as “the discursive construction of state absence” (ibid.: 71). There is much to be gained from this hybridized approach to the study of the state. I agree with Mouawad and Baumann that engaging the Lebanese state through both a Marxist and a post-structuralist lens allows us to, on the one hand, challenge the narrative of “weakness” by looking to the state’s role in capital accumulation and, on the other, to see this narrative as “an effect of state-society relations” (2017: 67). Contrary to the ways in which many Lebanese have come to describe life in post-civil war Lebanon, the shape that the country’s economy has taken over the last three decades was not the result of a frail or missing state, “fatally wounded by fifteen years of civil strife and content to remain a tired and old night watchman” (Arsan 2018: 237). Rather, the country’s economic trajectory was facilitated by calculated and substantial intervention on the part of the political elite. Like

50  Sophie Chamas in most other contexts, neoliberal development in Lebanon has relied both on state involvement “in particular sectors of the economy through manipulation of interest rates and monetary tinkering” and simultaneously on the abdication of responsibility in other spheres of governance, “such as the administration of urban space or the provision of welfare and utilities” (Arsan 2018: 214). The latter bolstered the power of sectarian political parties in the country, as they used a variety of private initiatives to fill the gap left by the very state whose renunciation of culpability for the welfare of its general population they had a hand in enabling, as extensions of the ruling elite. The Lebanese’ impression of their country’s political economy, however, did not emerge from nowhere. As is the case in many other late modern states, the Lebanese state is invested in cultivating and maintaining an image of itself as “pervasively hamstrung, quasi-impotent, unable to come through on many of its commitments,” insisting that it is “no longer the solution to social problems” and that it is “but one player on a global chessboard” (Brown 1995: 194). In Lebanon’s case, it is not only the global (and regional) chessboard in the form of foreign meddling that is repeatedly invoked, but also the local one – a fragmented, tensely held together mosaic of warring communities with competing interests always threatening to break permanently into irreconcilable pieces. Drawing a parallel with late modern masculinity, Brown (1995: 194) argues that the primary paradox of the late modern state is that “its power and privilege operates increasingly through disavowal of potency, repudiation of responsibility, and diffusion of sites and operations of control.” However, in what follows, I wish to argue that despite the demonstrable value of the above-described lenses, they leave something unaccounted for, namely the endurance of a particular abstraction of the state, its reproduction from below, even when those participating in its reification appear to see through it. Marxist and post-structuralist analyses reveal that “what is imagined to be a real and stable state,” or in Lebanon’s case, a “weak” state is actually the product of “unequal relations of power…Like the commodity, the state is not a thing with inherent value, but, in Abrams’ words, ‘an idea’” (Navaro 2002: 156). But, what I hope to show in this chapter, building on Navaro’s work, is that the state as abstraction has a tendency to survive its deconstruction (2002: 185). As Navaro puts it, “unlike former historical formations, the state, like capitalism (up to this point), has shown itself capable of surviving crisis, conveniently refashioning itself where necessary” (2002: 185). I build on Navaro’s theorization of cynicism as the political culture involved in resurrecting the state in the aftermath of its deconstruction. I embrace her shift away from the state as “mask, fetish, image, or discourse” and toward state as “fantasy” (2002: 186), thinking through the material conditions that allow for the reinforcement from below of the idea of the Lebanese state as neutral caregiver crippled by corrupt bureaucrats, by subjects who otherwise recognized the farcical nature of this discursive construct.

Community Organizing in Lebanon  51 In her work on Arsal (see also Mouawad’s article in this book), a neglected and impoverished town in Lebanon’s northeast, Obeid (2010: 332) argues that despite “skepticism of ‘the state’, residents do believe in it as a project that fulfils citizenship.” She quotes Harvey to argue that, like in other contexts, the Lebanese state “has survived scandal and disruption, incapacity and weakness…the notion of a potentially effective external power is kept alive” (Harvey as cited in Obeid 2010: 332). Drawing on Navaro’s (2002) work, Obeid (2010: 343) argues that in the context of Arsal, the state is presented as having many faces: The Arsalis locate the “ideal face of the state” outside the boundaries of their town. They talk about the state as an entity that exists in some sort of center. They have seen the effects of that face on other, more “developed” areas of Lebanon, those less marginalized, and those with patrons who convey their demands and cater to them. I would argue that the above extends beyond Arsal to encompass much of Lebanon’s large population of disenfranchised and/or disenchanted citizens. Harvey and Knox (2012: 525), in their work on infrastructure, argue that “it is not in spite of unruly processes that infrastructures emerge as a form of social promise, but rather that it is through the experiences of life within and alongside unstable forces that infrastructures gain their capacity to enchant.” In the Lebanese case, it is through absence and neglect that the state gains its capacity to enchant, inspiring its enactment and reproduction through what Hermez (2015) calls the subjunctive mood, a performative process to which, I argue, Beirut Madinati has contributed.6 The materiality of neglect – the experience of witnessing the state provide more than adequately, for example, to affluent residents of Downtown Beirut, while most other residents of the capital struggle through electricity and water cuts alongside myriad other everyday problems – paradoxically strengthens faith in the Weberian state as the locus of political change. What, I ask, are the consequences of this enchantment?

Organizing Mar Mikhael Whenever she was asked about the importance of community organizing, Dana, an urban researcher and founding member of Beirut Madinati’s neighborhood initiative, offered up the same hypothetical example, worth quoting at length7: There’s a public staircase that’s broken and people want it repaired. There are two options we push for in neighborhood work, and a third that we refuse. The one we refuse is that Beirut Madinati repairs it. Beirut Madinati won’t do anything for people if it does what the state should be doing. Either we give them support to lobby the government, or we help them organize in order to repair it themselves. Where you

52  Sophie Chamas help them organize to repair it themselves, it’s not you caring for yourself as a citizen, individually fixing something someone else should be fixing. It’s collective work, going door-to-door to talk to all of the people who live along the stairs. It’s meetings, thinking together to decide – if we want to repair it ourselves, where will we get the funds? Maybe there is someone from BM who can tell them that there are studies that show if the stairs are repaired, and become a space of passage, the shops that are around it are going to earn more money. So, maybe we can go to those shops, ask them to contribute 100 USD each. We can fix the stairs all together, then we can plant things along its sides and create a system for watering them. In this case, you’ve created a network of people. The day something bigger happens, like a whole building being evicted, they know each other, they’ve worked together, and they can mobilize to block this. So, you’re creating one of two things, either a community or a mobilization aimed at the municipality to fix the stairs. In case they want to mobilize, they have to understand the system. Whose responsibility is it to fix the stairs? The municipality. What’s the structure at the municipality? Who should we talk to? You’re getting to know your government. Do we submit a petition? How do we write a petition? Then we go door to door, getting people to sign the petition. We sit together and strategize. We learn that every Thursday, the head of the municipal council receives public complaints in his office. Everybody starts to know that their government is accessible on Thursdays at 3 pm. So, you see, it’s all about the process, and how it creates political communities. For Dana, elections were not and had never been a priority in and of themselves. Beirut Madinati’s electoral campaign in 2016 was important to her because election season is a time of vibrant political discussion, and the movement was able to use this opportunity to introduce a new discourse about municipal politics. “We went from normal elections with parties fighting each other, to saying this is about the city; what kind of city do you want?” Running in elections, for Dana, was one element in a wider “repertoire of contention” (Tilly 2006). Organizing at the neighborhood level was a more sustainable means of cultivating and maintaining an amalgam of contentious tools alongside the residents of Beirut, which could be routinely utilized over the long run – a complementary, if not more fruitful, approach to politics from below than the ephemerality of an electoral campaign. Dana framed the two approaches to neighborhood work she advocated for as different paths that could nevertheless both lead to the cultivation of progressive political communities. In Mar Mikhael, where I volunteered, we found ourselves walking the path of mobilizations directed at local authorities. The Mar Mikhael neighborhood group, established in November 2016, was initiated and facilitated primarily by two volunteers from Beirut Madinati’s neighborhood initiative, Alia and Ghazi. Alia, an architect and urban

Community Organizing in Lebanon  53 planner, was an influential figure within Beirut’s urban social movement with an impressive history of work on a variety of issues, from public space to housing and more. She was one of the public faces of Beirut Madinati during its municipal campaign and a founding member of the neighborhood initiative. Ghazi, a product designer with an otherwise limited history of involvement in Lebanon’s activist scene, was inspired by Beirut Madinati’s foray into politics and what he considered its novel offerings – what he referred to, in our conversations, as its “concreteness.” Disappointed by its electoral loss, he was eager to contribute to its development into a social and political movement in the aftermath of the election. The other two working groups Beirut Madinati set up – the alternative municipality, which monitored and critically commented upon the sitting municipal council’s work, and a commission to study future electoral possibilities – were felt by Ghazi to be occupied primarily by “experts.” He did not think he had anything to offer those conversations as someone without much to say about the technicalities of waste management, transportation, etc., but in the neighborhood initiative, he felt he had something to contribute as a designer whose studio was located in one of the two neighborhoods selected for the initiative’s pilot projects. Mar Mikhael, a small, predominantly Christian neighborhood of East Beirut, had been suffering from an aggressive process of gentrification that began in 2008 and had continued to chip away at its socio-economic fabric. Mar Mikhael is distinguished by the fact that most of its residents were born and raised there and are over the age of 40. The neighborhood is made up of three parallel streets and bordered by Avenue Charles Helou, which guides drivers coming to and from the north of the country. Its beginning and end are marked by two iconic buildings – the headquarters of Electricité du Liban to the west, and the old train station to the east. Until 2008, it was a lower-middle-class quarter of residences and small industrial and artisanal businesses (Krijnen & De Beaukelaer 2015). In August 2020, most of the neighbourhood was destroyed by a large explosion in Beirut harbour. The gentrification of Mar Mikhael followed the transformation into nightlife hot spots of nearby neighborhood Gemmayze and street Monnot, and their subsequent decline. Around 2006, artists, designers, and other creatives began moving their studios and homes to Mar Mikhael, attracted by the low cost of rent in the area. They were trailed by restaurants, pubs, bars, investors, and real estate developers, who collectively transformed the quarter’s physical, social, and economic characteristics (Gerbal, Hrycaj, Lavoipierre & Potasiak 2016). The ground floors of the Mandate era (1920–1943) buildings that dotted the neighborhood (Krijnen & De Beaukelaer 2015), which once housed car mechanics, grocery shops, and other small businesses, were taken over by bars and restaurants, flanked on secondary streets of the neighborhood by designer studios and art galleries (Fawaz, Krijnen & El Samad 2018). Narrow streets crammed with bars sent shockwaves upwards through the residential buildings they occupied (sometimes more than one bar to a single

54  Sophie Chamas building), and scores of patrons nightly poured out of these relatively small establishments to occupy the sidewalk and enjoy cigarettes and the night air with their cocktails. Alia and Ghazi drew both on research that urbanist researchers had carried out on developments in Mar Mikhael as well as data collected by Beirut Madinati volunteers prior to canvassing the neighborhood during the municipal elections to swiftly identify the problems plaguing long-term residents and business owners in the area: the effect of the high density of bars and restaurants as well as the valet parking businesses that followed them, on the quality of life and work, and the threat of expulsion facing many tenants living in rent-controlled apartments. Alia and Ghazi suggested the group begin by focusing on the nightlife issue. While the crisis around rent seemed more urgent, Alia voiced concern about dedicating the group’s energy to a problem that they were unlikely to solve, as it was a controversial national issue. The neighborhood initiative had suggestions for how to tackle the bars and valet parking companies that serviced them, but no substantial recommendations for how to tackle the new rent law set to end rent control – at least not yet. By working on nightlife, Alia explained, the group could make gains it otherwise would not be able to achieve by trying to address something as complex as rent control. An exclusive focus on the nightlife scene did cause the group to lose a few members, especially those whose lives were consumed by fear of eviction. However, for those residents who remained and lived on Mar Mikhael’s main road, Armenia street, which housed the bulk of the area’s bars, there was nothing more urgent than ridding themselves of what they framed as “colonizers.” When Alia described Mar Mikhael, she drew on her training as an urbanist. She spoke of the structural changes to its social and economic infrastructure: the lack of public spaces; the difficulty of moving around on foot, especially at night along badly lit streets; the noise from construction work during the day and restaurants and bars at night; the lack of public parking facilities that hadn’t been claimed by valet parking companies; and how these circumstances were particularly detrimental to elderly residents, most of whom still had to work to support themselves.8 Alia’s analysis provided listeners with an almost bird’s-eye view of the neighborhood, encapsulating the various factors that made it a difficult place to live through appeals to both logic and civic responsibility. When the residents of Mar Mikhael spoke of their plight, they aimed for the mirror neurons. They argued not merely that this was not what a well-ordered, modern city looked like, but that the situation was intolerable and would be to anyone who had to live through it every day. By doing so, they dragged the listener from the bird’s-eye perspective into their own trembling bodies, speaking not so much from the heart as from the nerves. None articulated the horror of living in cacophonous Mar Mikhael more poignantly than Rita – a horror that might have seemed exaggerated to

Community Organizing in Lebanon  55 those who did not share work days and bedrooms, drives or walks home, bills or chores with these residents. Rita was a fixture in the neighborhood group, from the early days when 20–30 would gather, to two years into the collective’s work, when it had whittled down to around ten core members. Rita always looked defeated. She did not speak often in meetings, but when she did, she sucked the air out of the room; her soft, trembling voice reminding all those gathered that however miniscule this issue seemed to the outside world, for people like her it was desperate. Rita had lived in Mar Mikhael for 35 years. She shared an apartment with her octogenarian mother and her fiery twin sister. The middle-aged twins awoke between 5:30 am and 6:00 am each day. Rita worked as a freelance manicurist and her sister worked in a factory run by Taghziah, a large manufacturer of processed meat. “I take as much work as I can get,” Rita told me. “You know what the economic situation in the country is like. I can’t tell a customer, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t sleep all night.’ They’ll say okay and go to someone else.” On most nights, the twins did not manage to fall asleep before 2:30 am, and much later on weekends. “My sister works in a factory, so there is noise where she works too. She comes home at 5:30 pm, wanting to relax after a whole day of noise, and she has to live this all over again.” Walking to Rita’s apartment building, located in a back alley along Armenia street where most of Mar Mikhael’s bars were concentrated, I was shocked by the proximity with which she lived to not one but three resto bars. During our interview, she took me out on the balcony to look down at what, in the afternoon, was an already bustling corner of an already bustling street. “Imagine what it’s like at night,” she said. Fewer than ten meters separated her apartment building from these establishments. Rita had been pushing back against these bars for six years prior to the establishment of the neighborhood group – talking to bar managers and customers either on her own or with a group of residents from her building, calling the police when promises to turn down the volume and minimize the noise were ignored, only to be told that it was out of their hands: They tell us to go complain to the municipality. They tell us they can’t tell them to turn the music down before 12 am on weekdays. Am I forced to stay up? What if I have kids? They’re taking our rights by force. They’ve made us hate the night. God made the night for sleep and the day for work. They’ve switched this up. This isn’t natural. We have to sleep with the window closed during the summer. We’re forced to turn on the AC always because its buzzing covers up the sound from outside a little bit. I’ve put a TV in my bedroom to drown out the noise. When I complain to the bar managers, they say I want to deprive them of their livelihood, but what about my livelihood? How can I work if I get no rest? In his work on Americans who suffered from a gradual, long-term process of formaldehyde poisoning in their homes, Shapiro (2015: 369) argues that

56  Sophie Chamas “the tracking of small changes to body and atmosphere across time and space can accumulate into a process I call the ‘chemical sublime,’ which elevates minor enfeebling encounters into events that stir ethical consideration and potential intervention.” Habitual exposure to “indistinct and distributed harms,” he writes, “are sublimated into an embodied apprehension of human vulnerability to and entanglements with ordinary toxicity, provoking reflection, disquiet, and contestation” (ibid.: 369). Bodies that are “chemically wounded, even minutely so,” he elaborates, “bear revelatory power” (ibid.: 370). Similarly, I argue that through an imposed sensorial engagement, residents like Rita gained a somatic understanding of themselves as people considered disposable by the Lebanese state. They could physically feel its neglect of their well-being. It was bodily knowledge that brought Rita to the conclusion that the Lebanese state very much exists and is more than capable of getting things done when it wants to; it was through bodily reason that she countered the common refrain that it is a failed or non-existent state, not in control of the chaos unfolding in the streets it is meant to govern. “I don’t say there is no state; it’s just missing. There is a state, we have a legal system, but they are ignoring the issue. When the state wants to impose its authority, it easily does so.” The idea of the failed or missing state was deconstructed for Rita by the speed and efficiency with which bar and restaurant owners were able to set up their businesses and evade penalties. For Rita, the state was a neutral structure with rules and regulations corrupted by bureaucrats and politicians, who applied these rules and regulations in a discriminatory manner, or ignored them based on their own personal interests, or because they were beholden to or in cahoots with nonstate actors. The economic and political considerations underpinning state officials’ approach to Mar Mikhael and the malleability of the law were ignored, and the state’s approach to the neighborhood was understood as neglectful as a result of corrupt individuals rather than as calculated due to, for example, particular neoliberal considerations linked to the tourism industry. The state was perceived as not “doing its job” in Mar Mikhael as opposed to doing its job in a manner that contradicted the Weberian ideal of the state. Another resident active in the neighborhood group often spoke of how Mar Mikhael was “chosen” because “there is poverty and there are no strongmen, no zaʿran [thugs]. These people have no connections. The social class is slightly below average. If they tried to open these pubs in Ain el-Remmaneh, they would get beaten up.”9 Rita and others were forced into an intimate attunement with their surroundings, which imposed on them “somatic modes of attention” (Csordas as cited in Shapiro 2015: 373) that, in turn, allowed them to see the state; see its workings in the granting of more and more licenses to bars, the waiving of fines, the smugness of bar owners with political cover; and to understand their relationship with this state as that of citizens whose lives and labor were not considered valuable and useful. Through their bodies, electrified nightly by pulsating music, the state and its many faces became knowable (Obeid 2010).

Community Organizing in Lebanon  57 If “the chemical sublime is the accrual of bodily reasoning to the point of articulating patterned practices and infrastructures that distribute pockets of exposure across space” (Shapiro 2015, p. 380), in Mar Mikhael it was a sort of acoustical sublime that traced on the insides of these residents’ bodies a rudimentary sketch of a state that deemed some lives worthy of support while discarding others. What the Beirut Madinati volunteers hoped to do was to translate this somatic apprehension of neglect and uneven distribution of state resources and support into a holistic understanding of gentrification and its consequences for city and country in their entirety beyond this little neighborhood in the hopes of generating loyalty and solidarity not only between the residents and their locale, but between these residents, their city as a whole, and all those who called it home. It was hoped that “the irritations of one’s immediate environment” might “become agitations to apprehend and attenuate the effects of vast toxic infrastructures” (Shapiro 2015: 380). Still, there was a tension between how the residents understood the situation in their neighborhood and the analyses and strategies promoted by Alia and Ghazi. The residents felt personally targeted. They wanted all the bars gone. They insisted on their illegality, referencing the prohibition on bars in residential areas, pointing out that most of the nightlife establishments in Mar Mikhael held licenses for cafes. They wanted to bypass the municipality and the governor’s office and appeal to higher authorities like the Ministry of Tourism, or even the office of the President of the Republic, or to influential, local political figures or parties, who could force the governor or municipal council’s hand. They understood that political rights in Lebanon “seemed to be ‘determined less by rules and more by relationships’…that ‘Lebanese citizens needed brokerage, wasta [personal connections], to gain access to services and resources’” (Obeid 2010: 340), and felt it necessary to activate this dynamic in Mar Mikhael – a mentality that Alia and Gazi were committed to countering. In the residents’ approach to the state, we see echoes of Hermez’s theorization of political cynicism in Lebanon. People aim for and desire a “stronger, more accountable, and more bureaucratic and Weberian form” of the state (2015: 510), but negotiate with the state in ways that actually push this fantasy further from reality by, for example, taking advantage of clientelism and patronage in order to survive. He refers to this as a cynical relation to the state, wherein people recognize that their actions allow what they frame as the weak, failed, or corrupt state to persist, but are unable to remove themselves from this dynamic because these negotiations constitute their means of surviving. “The cynical reasoning,” he writes: stems from people knowing how things are (they know their political engagement will not yield real change) but acting as if they don’t know. I contend that they do this to, among other things, survive and manage everyday life, and for self-preservation (Ibid: 517)

58  Sophie Chamas Cynical relations emerge from “the absence of alternatives and an inability to imagine another horizon of possibility” (Ibid: 515). I also understand the approaches favored by the residents of Mar Mikhael in relation to what Nucho (2016: 9) calls Lebanon’s “multiple overlapping jurisdictions.” Against portrayals of Lebanon as having a missing or frail sovereign state subordinated to influential religious organizations or sectarian political parties, Nucho argues that “whatever we can define as the ‘state’ cannot be separated from these very organizations that make up the formal and informal political institutions of governance” (2016: 110). In their preferences in terms of who to reach out to not simply for assistance, but for justice, we see this understanding of the Lebanese state as composed of multiple and overlapping jurisdictions and scales being articulated by the residents of Mar Mikhael. What the Beirut Madinati volunteers aimed to do was to direct the residents away from what were framed as illegitimate, non-state actors as well as from “distant” state actors toward the local authorities constitutionally authorized to address the neighborhood’s concerns – the municipal council and the governor. The volunteers positioned one form of jurisdiction, by which I mean “the ability to enact authority” (Nucho 2016: 3), as legitimate and others either as irrelevant or illegitimate. Alia and Ghazi were overwhelmed by the residents’ discourse, which often took on a moralizing bent, anxious to counter it but unsure how. They felt compelled to show the residents that there were other means of reclaiming their right to comfort and dignity besides recourse to sectarian-­clientelism. They hoped this process would temper the scapegoating provoked by the residents’ anger, the demonization of bar employees and patrons, and reveal to them that what was needed was better city-planning, and not more policing or better access to patronage networks. Against the hegemonic belief that “the means for individuals and groups to live dignified lives does not lie squarely in the hands of the state, but rather with different individuals in the state who provide it to their own clients” (Hermez 2011b: 531), Alia and Ghazi insisted that the state and its formal institutions could be held accountable and forced to do their jobs if pressured sufficiently by citizens. The residents believed that the state was willfully absent from Mar Mikhael, and that it had “withdrawn its hand,” as they would often say, and “taken sides.” They understood the state as corrupt rather than failed, perceiving the situation in Mar Mikhael through the lenses of clientelism, bribery, and wasta. In response, they pushed to insert themselves within the intertwined systems of political sectarianism and sectarian-clientelism, which they recognized as having failed them and as being improper within a modern, “civilized” state, because they paradoxically saw no other means for securing their rights. Alia and Ghazi affirmed the residents’ narratives of neglect and corruption. They worked to highlight what they framed as existing, legally authorized mechanisms for fighting this corruption and neglect – and they were

Community Organizing in Lebanon  59 successful, at first in encouraging residents to seek out and engage these mechanisms. But the practice of lobbying what were framed as legitimate local authorities to address the residents’ needs did not produce results, which came as no surprise to Alia, Ghazi, or the residents, all of whom knew that not much could be expected of the Lebanese authorities that was not part of some kind of exchange, even when it was not only perfectly within their jurisdiction, but also legally incumbent on them to honor a demand. Why did Beirut Madinati’s volunteers in Mar Mikhael advocate a strategy they knew would likely lead them nowhere?

Activating the State Building on work by Philip Abrams, Michael Taussig, and others, Navaro (2002: 155) argues that “the notion that there is such a thing as the state – real, neutral, and stable above governments, the army, political parties, ­bureaucrats, schools or the police – is the greatest ideological myth of modern times.” Contra Taussig and his framing of state as fetish, Navaro ­argues against the adoption of false consciousness as the analytical means of making sense of state-society relations. This analytic, she explains, cannot account for “the widespread everyday habit of narrating stories of disgust and abhorrence vis-à-vis the state” (2002: 158). Instead of fetishism, following from Sloterdijk and Zizek, she proposes cynicism as an analytical lens through which to make sense of the habitual reification of a state that citizens appear to see through. Cynical subjects, writes Zizek, “know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it” (as cited in Navaro 2002: 159). This raises the question: “why persist as if the notion of the state were straightforward?” (ibid.: 161). If, in the case of the residents of Mar Mikhael, their cynical engagement with sectarian-clientelism and political sectarianism was a matter of survival, what was the impetus behind the Beirut Madinati volunteers’ reification of a particular abstraction of the state that they recognized as farcical? The founders of the multidisciplinary research and design studio Public Works were fixtures within Beirut Madinati’s neighborhood initiative. A perusal of the studies and analyses produced by their urban research collective reveals a deep understanding of the intricacies of Lebanon’s political system and the limits of using corruption as the primary lens through which to examine its shortcomings. How is it, however, that in their political and/or diagnostic work, such actors found themselves having to “ignore their critical capacities” (Kosmatopoulos 2011: 118) and providing prescriptions and solutions that their own research reveals is inherently limited? In an article about what has been termed 2014’s mass eviction law, Public Works’ Nadine Bekdache (2015) presents a sophisticated analysis of what the law can tell us about how the state-citizen relationship in Lebanon has been redefined. A new rent law, drafted in 2014, invalidated rent control. The law gave building owners the right to incrementally increase the rent

60  Sophie Chamas paid by occupants of rent-controlled apartments and to eventually evict them. Around 180,000 properties were subject to rent control under agreements drafted before 1992 (Marsi 2017). By ending rent control, Bekdache (2015: 321) argues, the state violated a “seventy-three-year old social contract.” While the existence of rent control indicated a respect for the need for affordable housing, its demise, she argues, points to: elite forces…ransacking the social pact between citizens and the state, which older tenants strongly symbolize. In the process, the concept of a sovereign state is shifting from positing the state as a provider of basic rights to casting the state as an enabler of the market. A prevailing narrative of the “weak state” has legitimized this shift in the Lebanese context. However, such a reconfiguration of sovereignty masks the workings of a strong state behind a new emerging sovereignty of eviction. (2015: 321) Bekdache (2015: 320) paints a compelling picture of the global economic dynamics that have contributed to changes in “rent laws, building laws, and exceptions to the zoning regulations” in Lebanon as well as the entanglement of developers and Lebanon’s political elite, who work together to draft “economic and urban policies to continuously boost the country’s real estate sector.” She paints a picture of multiple, overlapping jurisdictions of the state not as a neutral, abstract entity but as an amalgamation of actors, institutions, laws, tax systems, and policies driven today not by a social contract but by market considerations. If what is being pointed to is not failure, weakness, or poor, defective planning, then what purpose does it serve to assert that, as Public Works does in a piece for Jadaliyya: the state and local authorities in Lebanon have forgotten [emphasis added] the main role of regulations and general master plans, namely to be a means of organizing communal life and negotiating between different interests. They have also forgotten [emphasis added] that these plans and regulations serve a social purpose in dealing with urbanization and environmental issues that have a daily effect on all our lives. (2018a) Public Works’ research output provides an account of the “hollowed-out character of the state” (Aretxaga 2003: 294), the ways in which neoliberal capitalist globalization “has eroded those functions of the Weberian state that were once its defining feature” (2003: 294). Yet, its studies articulate “the desire for statehood” (ibid.). Another Public Works piece published on the Lebanese NGO Legal Agenda’s blog chronicles the evolution of master planning in Lebanon, describing the country as having been “service-producing” since its beginnings rather than a “welfare state” (2018b). The Lebanese Construction Law

Community Organizing in Lebanon  61 of 1940, conceived by a collective of architects who had studied in Europe and were influenced by the modernism that dominated approaches to architecture on the continent during the first half of the 20th century, designed a law that would serve as an “extension of the modernist-colonialist project,” an “expression of the service and tourism-based orientation of the economy” (2018b). In the contemporary period, explain the authors elsewhere, the plans and regulations issued by the Directorate General of Urban Planning “serve the interest of the landowners and constitute a tool of political pressure for local zuama” (2018a). Is today’s practice of master planning in Lebanon, they ask in Legal Agenda: still rooted in a modernist vision that presents a clean, orderly image at the expense of the undesirable classes? Or is it a neoliberal practice rooted in free market policy via the logic of granting exemptions from the law, which has become a main tool of planning? Or does the current, non-participative legislative framework exacerbate the power of decision-making circles that are restricted to personal relationships and pave the way for the rise and spread of corruption in the form of nepotism and clientelism? (2018b) Public Works puts forward a description of modern urban planning in Lebanon as “a tool of the powerful, whether they be the central state, the wealthy, or the social elite” (2018b), but they then go on to decry a “complete failure [emphasis added] in handling the environment and urbanization” and diagnose “poor planning” as well as a “defective vision” as the causes behind this failure. They call for increased resident participation in the process of urban planning as a fundamental component of rectifying this failure. What they describe, however, is not so much failure, but as a particular intentional configuration of governance that has purposefully violated “the right to health, to dignified reconciliation, to housing, and to development” and which prioritized clientelism and private interests through an “intentional legislative vacuum,” honoring the vision originally set out for Lebanon, as they themselves write. One could easily envision ways in which the state could invite resident feedback on urban projects and find ways to address their concerns without affecting these projects’ abilities to generate profit, diverting their consequences onto another marginalized population, for example, or distracting from small-scale issues through recourse to national security concerns, as the Lebanese authorities are prone to do. There is a discrepancy then between the compelling, nuanced analyses of the ways in which political/sectarian and economic elites have effectively used state planning to implement a sectarian-neoliberal vision and the diagnosis of poor planning and neglect as the sources behind the decay of urban infrastructure in Lebanon among my interlocutors. Aretxaga (2003: 394) explains this common paradoxical tendency, or what we could call the endurance of a certain fantasy of the state following

62  Sophie Chamas from Navaro and Hermez, by drawing on Bourdieu to reference the state’s “meta-capital, its hallowed form commanding an imagery of power and a screen for political desire as well as fear.” But there is also, importantly, “real capital circulating through the elusive body of the state in the form of international aid, development projects, and capitalist ventures of various kinds” (ibid., 394). It is this “aura of capital,” she argues, which generates a language of corruption in response to the dubious dealings of local bureaucrats as well as a discourse of abandonment by those whose access to this capital is said to be hindered by the corrupt practices of individuals in positions of power. This aura of capital, productive of the enchantment of the state, of the enduring desire for the state to play the role of primary provider in a contemporary context where analyses like those done by Public Works reveal it has no interest in doing so, results in the fetishization of the law and of participatory democracy by activists such as those I worked with, even when they realize, as evidenced by the discussion above, that the law today plays a role mainly as a tool for the powerful rather than as a distributor of justice, and that increased participation can reinforce rather than necessarily undermine the status quo.10 The narratives of failure and neglect of a lack of managerial skills and scientific expertise allow the social promise of the state as caregiver to endure, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that refutes its desire to fulfill this role – evidence put forward by the same activists clinging to this social promise. “One’s theory of ‘the state’ does greatly matter in formulating strategies for political action” (1995: 394), writes Gupta. The discourse of corruption, he explains, enables “people to construct the state symbolically and to define themselves as citizens” (389). It makes sense, then, given the neighborhood initiative’s goal of “activating” the residents of Beirut, demonstrating to them what an engaged citizenship could look like and be productive of and that it would reproduce and rely on the hegemonic narrative of a state hindered by corrupt bureaucrats. Constructing the state through this narrative, in a context where the state is imagined as, because of its capture by corruption, having many faces – a brutal face, a generous face, in addition to its neglectful and weak faces – can be generative of the hope that “there must be government officials and agencies…interested in helping people” (Gupta 1995: 391). The search for the ideal face of the state (Obeid 2010) in Mar Mikhael manifested as a search for the governmental figure who was loyal to the residents he was meant to represent and to an abstracted and reified legal system. What were the consequences of this search for the ideal, incorrupt face of the state in the context of neighborhood work in Mar Mikhael?

Co-opting Mar Mikhael During its first year, the neighborhood group produced two petitions, one directed at the Ministry of Tourism and one directed at the municipal

Community Organizing in Lebanon  63 council and governor. The petition meant for local government was submitted to the governor by a delegation from the neighborhood on May 12, 2017, which pressed him to apply the law. The petition, signed by more than 200 residents, emphasized the right to comfort (al-h ̣aq bi al-rāh ̣a) as well as a quiet and dignified life. It demanded the application of existing laws and regulations, in the absence of which, it was argued, the lives of residents in Mar Mikhael had become harrowing. The petition highlighted that the residents were merely asking that their most basic rights be respected: their right to be able to sleep in their homes and to have those violating the noise limit set in place by the Ministry of Environment and with it the sanctity of private, family life penalized. It called on the governor to “assume the powers granted to him by municipal law, and to impose necessary and preventive measures to ensure the welfare of residents and remedy what has been adversely affecting them.” It called on the municipal council to “assume its primary role in developing a comprehensive policy that will make Beirut a livable city, by issuing an integrated regulatory framework to manage bars and their clients, to safeguard and preserve the rights of neighborhood inhabitants.” The residents felt satisfied and hopeful after their trip to the governor’s office. “It was positive. He said the bars don’t have licenses, and he told us where to go, to the Ministry of Tourism,” one delegate reported to the group. But Alia and Ghazi were quick to point out that a discussion they had had with the NGO Legal Agenda had revealed that while bar licenses were initially issued by the Ministry of Tourism, the authority responsible for making sure bars adhered to the law and closing those that did not was the governor. The governor, the group concluded furiously, was trying to divert responsibility and dismiss the residents. Following the delegation’s visit to his office, the governor made a superficial spectacle of a surprise visit to the neighborhood, to check in on the bars and visit a few residents in their homes. Subsequently, a particularly brazen establishment, London Bar, was shutdown, only to reopen again in a matter of days. The owner declared to inquiring residents that the municipality could not “touch him.” In response, in July of 2017, the neighborhood group organized a press conference entitled “Mar Mikhael is a residential neighborhood and cannot be made a touristic one by the stroke of a pen” on a local staircase in the neighborhood, during which the residents declared that “due to the resignation of the authorities, the confrontations are daily in the neighborhoods of our city.” In the group’s one-year self-evaluation, residents explained that they had begun to lose hope. They had dedicated a lot of effort to their cause but managed to achieve very little. One resident insisted that the group had not failed, because the bars had wastas that allowed them to reopen. “The circumstances are bigger than us. It’s like swimming against a current.” Another resident explained that if anything, the group’s first year had revealed the importance of pursuing the legal avenue. “We’re all tired,” she

64  Sophie Chamas said. “The whole country is exhausting. We didn’t continue with the legal suit because we put our faith in the governor.” Over the course of its second year, the Mar Mikhael neighborhood group began preparing to submit a collection of official complaints to the public prosecutor and to sue those bars engaging in the most egregious violations of the law, a process that, at the time of writing, had stalled because of events that I will elaborate on. In the run-up to Lebanon’s May 2018 parliamentary elections, the Mar Mikhael neighborhood group decided to organize a public forum entitled “What do we want from our parliamentarians?” During the forum, the residents asserted that they had been doing the work of MPs, the municipality, the police, and the governor for a year and a half. Rita took the mic, at one point, to serve as a vehicle through which the residents, so they hoped, could make a visceral connection with the audience of potential MPs, concerned residents of Beirut, and wanderers by. “This is a residential neighborhood,” she said. “Almost overnight, the neighborhood changed, as if by the spell of a sorcerer.” Another resident called on the government to apply the law. “The point of having laws,” he insisted, “is for everyone to be able to interact in a way that ensures equal access to their rights. Apply the laws that guarantee us our rights.” A member of Beirut Madinati who introduced herself as hailing from the Sunni neighborhood of Tariq Jdeedeh took the mic next to emphasize that what was happening to the residents of Mar Mikhael was happening all over Beirut under different guises: The root cause is the same. There is no state organizing our lives. There is no authority for us to go to and say, you’re responsible, please come handle this situation. We’re here to say today, to the MPs we’re going to elect, if you don’t give us what we want and secure our needs, four years from now we are not going to re-elect you. MPs need to have the background and experience to convince us that they can do what they say they want to do. We have to elect people with substance. A friend of both Beirut Madinati and the Mar Mikhael neighborhood groups stepped up to reiterate that what people wanted from their MPs was planning. “Somebody is benefitting from all these violations of the law,” he said. “If the MPs don’t see that, it’s a catastrophe, and if they see what’s going on and they’re not doing anything, it’s an even bigger problem.” He brought up the closure and subsequent re-opening of London Bar and the brashness of its owner. “He humiliated the municipality, and when the municipality is humiliated, we all feel humiliated and stomped on.” A young activist chimed in next to insist that the solution to all the problems being expressed was election day – “to elect people who represent us, and who look like us.” The state, Alia explained toward the end of the event, “is made up of institutions. If each institution worked properly, we would no longer have problems.”

Community Organizing in Lebanon  65 This event took place in April 2018, 16 months into the work of the Mar Mikhael neighborhood group. During those 16 months, the event made clear, the volunteers from Beirut Madinati’s neighborhood initiative had failed to introduce socio-economic context to the developments in the neighborhood, and so the residents continued to see themselves as victims of a neglectful state that had allowed them to come under, as Rita put it, an evil sorcerer’s spell. The law, the state, and the sorcerer continued to be discursively detached from one another. The residents called for state intervention, assuming that neglect meant absence. However, what feels like neglect can also be understood as a product of the state’s role in intricately organizing the lives of its citizens and denizens in ways that benefit the market on the one hand and the sectarian balance of power on the other.11 My interlocutors knew this, as evidenced by their own research output but, as explained earlier, they did not know what to do with this discourse or analysis. Corruption and neglect were easier paradigms to work with, more generative of the sense that something could be done to reform the status quo in the short term and therefore of hopefulness. In the aftermath of the 2018 parliamentary elections, representatives of the office of Free Patriotic Movement-associated MP for Beirut’s first district Nicolas Sehnaoui, who served as minister of telecommunications between 2011 and 2014, were invited by a Mar Mikhael resident to attend one of the group’s meetings. The residents were quick to ask staffers to relay their congratulations to the former minister on his parliamentary win and to thank him for his interest in their cause. They discussed organizing a joint press conference, as the staffers explained they were in attendance to take suggestions from the residents and hear their demands as a means of following up on a campaign promise made by Sehnaoui to address the needs of the neighborhood were he to be elected to office. A lawyer involved with the group explained that the law was on the MP’s side, and he could easily shut down violating bars if he chose to pursue the case. Alia insisted that the conference focus on the fact that the government was not doing its job, which had forced residents and business owners into a confrontation in Mar Mikhael. “This is what happens when the tourism sector isn’t properly planned,” she explained. She urged that this was as a citywide problem, and that the tourism sector could play an essential role in the economy without its prosperity coming at the expense of residents. “We are not saying we want to kill the tourism sector,” she clarified. “We want it to be organized.” A resident chimed in to point out that the residents of Mar Mikhael felt weak because they did not have political backing. “The MP promised us, so hopefully this will change… Let’s see how he’s going to solve this for us. If parliamentarians support us, we’ll support them.” It was as though, once the elections were over, Sehnaoui could only take an interest in Mar Mikhael based on good intentions and the desire to honor his promises; as though he were no longer a part of the traditional ruling class. The MP was framed as some kind of manifestation of the benevolent

66  Sophie Chamas paternal state finally come to resume its duties, masking over the dynamics that made this particular parliamentarian able and willing to take on such an issue – the motivations, electoral, economic, or otherwise that made Mar Mikhael a zone of interest for him and, perhaps most importantly, ignoring the very real possibility that, like so many others before him, he would renege on his word. A press conference between the residents and the MP took place shortly thereafter. After the residents spoke, Sehnaoui addressed the press. He explained that he was speaking on behalf of an alliance that included 20 members of parliament. He insisted that what was unfolding in Mar Mikhael was not a political issue. “This should be a collective demand. It’s nothing more than getting residents their rights. There is neglect from authorities. I want to say something to the authorities,” he said, as though he were not one of them: I’m going to involve all of the MPs of Beirut’s first district in organizing a series of actions with the residents, so that no one says this is sectarian or partisan. If we work together, we’ll show that this issue isn’t political at all. Temporary solutions are easy, it is just a matter of respecting the law. Maybe in the long-term some laws need to change, which we can look into, but that will take time. Watching the residents standing behind Sehnaoui, proud and elated, I understood better Hermez’s (2011b) argument about the intersections between dignity and clientelism. The residents of Mar Mikhael had long framed themselves as humiliated by bar owners, with the customers and the authorities enabling their behavior. To be recognized by this influential figure, long and deeply embedded within Lebanon’s system of political sectarianism, to co-organize a press conference with him, to be taken seriously by drawing on his authority were a source of pride, validation, and gratification, however temporary. Being supported by Beirut Madinati, a group without any “real” power, with little to offer besides knowledge capital, did not bear the same kind of symbolic fruit or, as evidenced by two years of collective labor, promise the same kind of material rewards. Despite the successes that they logged, Alia and Ghazi gradually came to characterize the Mar Mikhael pilot project as a failure. “It became like an island,” Alia said in neighborhood initiative meetings. “We didn’t link it to Beirut Madinati or the wider city. What is its relationship to our ideals? We didn’t know how to develop a discourse about the neighborhood as a political entity.” The neighborhood initiative criticized its inability to develop a political discourse around neighborhood work. Even within Beirut Madinati, its work was perceived as something akin to charity or NGO work. Its volunteers acknowledged that they had failed to politicize residents; that they had potentially created agents of change, but not of the kind of change they aspired to in the long term. Two years on, the initiative did not have models

Community Organizing in Lebanon  67 to replicate in other neighborhoods, which was one of the initial points of the pilot projects. The neighborhood initiative had voiced repeatedly the need to find a way to get people to think beyond their interests, to see their issues as linked to bigger citywide issues and, most importantly, to create a real political alternative to political sectarianism and clientelism, which in the long term could become a new practice of citizenship and a political subjectivity that transcended divisive categories of identification and meaning-making. But, what transpired in Mar Mikhael, instead of a politically generative form of community, appeared more like a collective of individuals looking out for their own interests, who recognized that they were stronger together than apart and that collective work could strengthen their positionality vis-à-vis Lebanon’s political elite. Instead of serving as a challenge to the authorities, the neighborhood became a potential new weapon in their arsenal. Capitalism, which in Lebanon’s case manifests in a symbiotic relationship with sectarianism, has an astonishing ability to devour critique, to incorporate it into a mutated version of itself, drawing on it as a source of strength and, in so doing, “disarming” it (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007). Beirut Madinati’s neighborhood initiative, like many anti-status quo initiatives that came before it, was unable to provide not only material but also symbolic alternatives to the residents of Mar Mikhael, both of which they seemed, as my fieldwork came to a close, to have found the potential for in Sehnaoui. This, despite the fact that at the time of writing, nothing had come of Sehnaoui’s grand proclamations, a reality that did not surprise the residents of Mar Mikhael, whose appeal to him, as discussed in this chapter, seemed to spring from a place of cynicism rather than earnest hope.12

Conclusion At the beginning of this chapter, I asked how we could understand Lebanese activists’ routine affirmation of an imagining of the state they knew to be false. In the introduction to this edited volume, Haugbolle and Levine highlight how what Timothy Mitchell called “state effect” does sometimes weaken, as demonstrated when the Arab Uprisings began in late 2010. I have concerned myself with the resurrection of state effect from below, with the ability of the idea of the state to survive its own deconstruction by turning to theorizations of the state as fantasy. I have focused on the endurance of the Weberian ideal of the state among activists in Lebanon who have themselves routinely demonstrated in their published work and public commentary the Lebanese state’s deviation from this ideal from its very inception. I argued that this ideal inspires the diagnosis of bad governance and corruption and the promotion of good governance as solutions to Lebanon’s plight, obscuring what governance is and who it serves in our contemporary conjuncture. Within this framework, the ruling regime is positioned as not

68  Sophie Chamas doing its job rather than uninterested in doing what opponents see as its job. This approach to activating the state rather than challenging it as the locus of power strengthened a particular fantasy of the state that, in turn, drove the residents of Mar Mikhael toward a cynical engagement with sectarian-­ clientelism when the fantasy failed to manifest as reality. My interlocutors seemed consumed by an anxiety to act in the short term. Swyngedouw refers to this anxiety as a temptation. The “temptation to act out” (2014: 184), he writes, “is actually what is invited by the neoliberal state.” It is, he explains, “an injunction to obey, to be able to answer to ‘What have you done today?’” (ibid.: 184–195). The anxiety to act, it seems, overwhelms even the most astute analyses of the contemporary Lebanese state. It is this anxiety to act that fashioned an optimistic commitment to state lobbying amongst my interlocutors, despite the evidence these activists themselves provided for its inherent limitations and likely pitfalls. The narrative of poor planning authorized managerialism amongst these activists, the belief that if only things were better ordered in the country, “collective goals can be achieved” (Parker 2009, p. 4), and that the only way to achieve this ordering is to make room for the state to do its job by lobbying it out of dormancy. If, following from Scott, we call this rationality “seeing like a state,” internalizing as “obvious and necessary” a certain form of activism despite the clear ways in which it appears “counterintuitive and socially engineered” (Halberstam 2011: 9), we can better understand, for example, Beirut Madinati volunteers’ aversion to supporting the residents of Mar Mikhael in their repeat calls for a disruptive approach to demanding their rights (closing off and occupying the street, boycotting municipal taxes). Such practices, while appearing “less efficient” in the short term and less productive of “marketable results,” might in the long term have been “more sustaining” of the kind of political community these activists were committed to cultivating (Halberstam 2011: 9) and of alternative sources of dignity and meaning-making that could sustain political and social movements invested in a disruptive approach to the state rather than one informed by accommodation and collaboration. The fact that activists focused on the institutions of the state as the sole mechanisms capable of facilitating change, and that they divorced issues such as gentrification and privatization from the wider structures of power and oppression in which they are embedded, made it difficult for them to conceptualize neighborhood residents as agents of political transformation. Their preconceived notions also foreclosed the imagination of a bottom-up taking back of cities and public spaces as a strategic node in a wider, longterm project of societal transformation. Instead they introduced a practice of lobbying grounded in basic, skeletal needs, one that framed residents as victims who were making reasonable and easy-to-meet demands. This approach forced activists to make their case before the state and convince residents that there was something to be gained from instituting certain kinds

Community Organizing in Lebanon  69 of reforms or that no harm would come to their interests by meeting these fundamental, basic, and reasonable needs. The answer to the question “what is to be done?,” in relation to a given injustice, Ferguson (1990) explains, is conditioned by the initial question, “by whom?” To locate the possibility for change solely within state institutions, he writes, is to encourage more people to “stand in line and await rubber stamps to get what they want” (p. 274). My interlocutors were reluctant to recognize how central corruption and inadequacy were to the workings of the Lebanese state when it came to designing and carrying out their strategies. I say a reluctant rather than failing to understand because, as I have shown, my interlocutors often demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of the workings of state power in Lebanon. We can, perhaps, further make sense of this reluctance by turning to Franz Kafka by way of Fisher. Drawing on the novelist’s masterful engagement with bureaucracy, Fisher argues that “at the level of the political unconscious, it is impossible to accept that there are no overall controllers, that the closest thing we have to ruling powers now are nebulous, unaccountable interests exercising corporate irresponsibility” (2009: 63). And so, like Kafka’s characters, in seeking redress for an injustice or a response to an unmet demand or need, many of us move from one bureaucrat to another, following their deferrals of responsibility like breadcrumbs, striving to reach “the ultimate authority” (ibid.: 43) we know does not exist. In Mar Mikhael, residents and their supporters tried desperately to locate the authority capable of bandaging their wounds. Was it the governor? The Ministry of Tourism? The courts? An MP associated with a sectarian political party with vested interests in the district that housed their little quarter? The “supreme genius of Kafka,” Fisher writes, “was to have explored the negative atheology proper to Capital: the centre is missing, but we cannot stop searching for it or positing it.” It is not, he elaborates, “that there is nothing there – it is that what is there is not capable of exercising responsibility” (ibid.: 65). “The centerlessness of global capitalism,” Fisher argues, “is radically unthinkable” (2009: 63), and so this quest for authority can also be understood as a form of self-care, a therapeutic practice, a means of taking initiative over one’s life and misery, and a practice of searching and seeking that, while deferring redress, also defers a succumbing to hopelessness, to the unthinkable. In this chapter, I have attempted to emphasize the effects of an approach to change that cannot imagine a socio-political transformation facilitated by anyone or anything other than “the paternal guiding hand of the state” (Ferguson 1990: 281), responding promptly and satisfactorily to the demands of its citizens. It is not only a certain understanding of the state that animates this approach, but of citizenship as well; the assumption being that if we know our rights, how to properly and formally lobby for them, and who to hold accountable when they are violated or denied, we will eventually get what is ours. These imaginaries erase alternative, existing tactics for not only coping with and adjusting to the order of things, but resisting it as

70  Sophie Chamas well. Lebanon has a long history of a politics of refusal – voter abstention, strikes, boycotts, cultural productions that defy censorship laws, and more, to which the residents of Mar Mikhael attempted to contribute when they called for a disruptive approach to their demands. If the state is “the name of the coldest of all cold monsters” (Nietzsche as cited in Brown 1995: 166) and “institutionalized protection is always a measure of dependence and agreement to abide by the protector’s rules” (Brown 1995: 169), what might the potentiality of a politics of refusing rather than appealing to the state be?

Notes 1 Lebanon’s “garbage crisis” was sparked by the closure of the Naameh garbage landfill in southeast Beirut, to which the waste of Beirut and Mount Lebanon had been sent since 1998. The landfill was forcefully closed by protestors who lived in the village and who had become fed up with the existence of the toxic dumpsite, which was originally meant to be a temporary solution to the management of the capital’s waste (Kerbage 2017). The closure of the landfill coincided with the expiration of the contract between the state and Sukleen, the private waste management company tasked with trash collection in Beirut and Mount Lebanon since 1996. In July 2015, the government decided not to renew Sukleen’s contract as usual, choosing instead to invite bids from alternative waste management companies, causing garbage to pile up in the streets, pour out of bins, and fester in the summer heat (Civil Society Knowledge Centre 2016). 2 “Traffic, public transportation, parks and public space, affordable housing in the rampant new construction around the city, waste management, and more transparent and inclusive administration. These weren’t necessarily the most important problems in people’s lives, like health care and education, but they more easily addressed and fell under the prerogative of municipal authorities” (Cambanis 2017). 3 Citizens of Lebanon are not permitted to vote in their place of residence and must instead vote in their village, city, or town of origin, determined patrilineally. Many of Beirut’s residents, therefore, are not eligible to vote in the city’s municipal elections. 4 This quote was derived from written material produced by the neighborhood initiative for circulation amongst volunteers and Beirut Madinati’s wider organization, to which I was granted access. 5 Abrams, P. (1988). “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State (1977).” Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 58–89. 6 Hermez argues that in the imaginations of Lebanon’s citizens, “the state exists in the subjunctive mood, as something that would be [emphasis added] rather than as something that is” (Hermez 2015: 509). 7 All of my interlocutors have been provided with pseudonyms. 8 Writing in 2016, Gerbal, Hrycaj, Lavoipierre, and Potasiak point out that around 47.7 percent of Mar Mikhael’s population at that time was over the age of 55 (20). 9 Ain el-Remmaneh is a working-class, predominantly Christian-Maronite neighborhood and stronghold of the Lebanese Forces. 10 See, for example, Maya Mikdashi’s work on the legal construction of sectarian and sexual difference in Lebanon as a “technology of biopolitical power,” in “Sextarianism: Notes on Studying the Lebanese State,” which appeared in the edited volume The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle-Eastern and

Community Organizing in Lebanon  71 North African History, edited by Amal Ghazal and Jens Hanssen and published by Oxford University Press in 2015. 11 With regards to the latter, for example, in the case of Mar Mikhael it was widely known that the valet companies were associated with the speaker of parliament and head of the Shi’a Amal Movement Nabih Berri, and were not only a source of profit for him but part of the patronage network through which he secured employment for underprivileged Shi’a. 12 A year after the press conference, Sehnaoui launched the project “My Colour is Rmeil” in collaboration with the committee of business owners in the neighborhood of Achrafieh, located close to Mar Mikhael. The project intended to renovate the facades of buildings in the area as a means of helping boost business in Beirut’s first district. The residents of Mar Mikhael were appalled to see that after having heard nothing from the MP in the aftermath of his promise-­ filled press conference, he had launched this project. In Beirut Madinati’s annual newsletter, the organization asked on behalf of the residents: “Is painting facades more important than giving citizens their basic right to comfort, and applying the law? What of the promise of a peaceful sleep for residents burdened by the noise produced by touristic establishments?” In the statement, Beirut Madinati rearticulated its demand for the authorities to listen to the residents and fulfill their responsibilities. In a WhatsApp discussion about this development, the residents voiced disappointment and anger, but not surprise.

References Aretxaga, Begoña (2003). “Maddening States.” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 32, pp. 393–410. Arsan, Andrew (2018). Lebanon: A Country in Fragments, London, UK: Hurst & Company. Bekdache, Nadine (2015). “Evicting Sovereignty: Lebanon’s Housing Tenants from Citizens to Obstacles.” Arab Studies Journal, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 320–350. Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello (2007). The New Spirit of Capitalism, London, UK: Verso. Brown, Wendy (1995). States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cambanis, Thanasis (2017). People Power and its Limits. March 29. Available at http://thanassiscambanis.com/tag/beirut-madinati/. Civil Society Knowledge Centre (2016). Waste Management Conflict. Available at https:// civilsociety-centre.org/timelines/31033#event-a-href-sir-sit-naameh-landfill-­ susp ended-after- crackdow nsit-i n-at-naameh-landf i l l-susp ended-aftercrackdown-a. Fawaz, Mona, Marieke Krijnen and Daria El Samad (2018). “A Property Framework for Understanding Gentrification: Ownership Patterns and the Transformations of Mar Mikhael, Beirut.” City, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 358–374. Ferguson, James (1990). The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Fisher, Mark (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There no Alternative? London: Zero Books. Gerbal, Lisa, Hrycaj, Nicolas, Lavoipierre, Camille and Marissa Potasiak (2016). “Linking Economic Change With Social Justice in Mar Mikhael.” Beirut: Issam

72  Sophie Chamas Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs. Available at https:// scholarworks.aub.edu.lb/handle/10938/21227. Ghazal, Amal and Jens Hanssen. 2015. The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gupta, Akhil (1995). “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State.” American Ethnologist, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 375–402. Halberstam, Jack (2011). The Queer Art of Failure, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harb, Mona (2016). Cities and Political Change: How Young Activists in Beirut Bred an Urban Social Movement (Working paper No. 20). Rome: IAI-Power2Youth. Harvey, Penny and Hannah Knox (2012). “The Enchantments of Infrastructure.” Mobilities, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 521–536. Hermez, Sami (2011a). “On dignity and Clientelism: Lebanon in the Context of the 2011 Arab Revolutions.” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 527–537. ——— (2011b). “Activism as ‘Part-Time’ Activity: Searching for Commitment and Solidarity in Lebanon.” Cultural Dynamics, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 41–55. ——— (2015). “When the State is (N)ever Present: On Cynicism and Political ­Mobilization in Lebanon.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 507–523. Kerbage, Carole (2017). Politics of Coincidence: The Harak Confronts Its “Peoples” (Working paper). Beirut, Lebanon: Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy. Available at http://www.aub.edu.lb/ifi/Documents/publications/working_­ papers/2016-2017/20170213_wp_hirak_english.pdf. Kosmatopoulos, Nikolas (2011). “Toward an Anthropology of ‘State Failure’: Lebanon’s Leviathan and Peace Expertise.” Social Analysis, Vol. 55, No. 3, pp. 115–142. Krijnen, Marieke and Christiaan De Beukelaer (2015). “Capital, State and Conflict: The Various Drivers of Diverse Gentrification Processes in Beirut, Lebanon.” In Loretta Lees, Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto Lopez-Morales, eds. Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement. Bristol, UK: Policy Press, pp. 285–311. Marsi, Federica (2017). “Controversial Rent Law Suspended.” The Daily Star. December 8. Mouawad, Jamil and Hannes Baumann (2017). “Wayn al-Dawla?: Locating the Lebanese State in Social Theory.” Arab Studies Journal, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 66–91. Navaro, Yael (2002). Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nucho, Joanne (2018). Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Obeid, Michelle (2010). “Searching for the ‘Ideal Face of the State’ in a Lebanese Border Town.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 330–346. Parker, Martin (2009). “Managerialism and Its Discontents.” In Stewart Clegg and Cary Cooper, eds. The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Behavior: Volume II – Macro Approaches. London, UK: SAGE Publications Ltd, pp. 85–98. Public Works Studio (2018a). “The Legislative Framework for Urban Planning: No Voice for the People.” Jadaliyya. Available from http://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/38062/ The-Legislative-Framework-for-Urban-Planning-No-Voice-for-the-People.

Community Organizing in Lebanon  73 Public Works Studio (2018b). Master-Planning in Lebanon: Manufacturing Landscapes of Inequality. Available from: http://legal-agenda.com/en/article. php?id=4949. Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shapiro, Nicholas (2015). “Attuning to the Chemosphere: Domestic Formaldehyde, Bodily Reasoning, and the Chemical Sublime.” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 368–393. Sharp, Deen (2016). Beirut Madinati: Another Future Is Possible. Available from https://www.mei.edu/publications/beirut-madinati-another-future-possible. Swyngedouw, Erik (2014). “Insurgent Architects, Radical Cities and the Promise of the Political.” In Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw eds. The Post-Political and Its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticisation, Spectres of Radical Politics. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 169–188. Tilly, Charles (2006). Regimes and Repertoires, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

3 Archiving in an Age of (Counter)Revolutions Leyla Dakhli

Episode 1: In March 2011, a rumor spread in Egypt: officials of the State Security Investigation Service were reportedly destroying their files. On March 4 and 5, crowds gathered in front of the buildings in Alexandria and Cairo, demanding that the destruction of the archives be stopped.1 Some demonstrators see vehicles full of files passing in front of them and then grab these documents in an act of what we might call “requisitioning the archives of the repression.” This episode, and many others like it in countries ranging from (the soon to be former) East Germany to Libya in the aftermath of Gaddafi’s fall, illustrates how archival concern can enter a revolution. It turns revolutionaries into improvised curators, fighting against the disappearance of documents held as evidence, prosecutorial evidence to justify their claims, evidence of the surveillance to which they have been subjected. Transparency and availability of state archives, i.e. the archives produced by the various state services – or at least the archives of the newly ex-regime – are then considered as pillars of its democratization. In this regard, the actions of the Egyptian revolutionaries signified their desire for justice and at the same time the need to affirm the continuity of the state in order to do justice. They were against the disappearance of the archives of the previous regime (that of Mubarak) because the new reign, which they hoped would be fairer, must be based on the knowledge and judgment of what precedes it. At the end of this episode, the State Security Investigation Service (Amn al-dawla) became the National Security Service (al-Amn al-qawmi), thereby symbolically signifying the re-appropriation of this service by what could be called the national interest. Episode 2: From the first weeks of the uprisings in Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and Syria, images were deposited in profusion on social networks and on Internet channels. After some time, some people started talking about archives, living archives, a documentation that comes with mobilization and protest. Each document, often videos, almost exclusively images, was brandished as a testimony for the time after the revolution, to express the fact that the demonstrators are indeed there and that they cannot be

DOI: 10.4324/b22870-4

Archiving in an Age of (Counter)Revolutions  75 muzzled again. The archive, in this sense of a singular entity, very quickly becomes a part of the fight for justice. In Syria, it took a very specific form when demonstrators started adding date and place to their photos and videos. Whether in the case of raids on state archives or the profusion of documentation that “makes archives,” what is clear is that the question of the archive, in plural or singular, is revolutionary from the outset. The archival gesture of protest is caught in tension between the gesture of tearing archives away from institutions (thus from their destruction or concealment) and that of producing archives by collecting the words of the actors; a tension between accumulating evidence and accumulating memory, although it is clear that the two movements are intertwining. These actions are not obvious. Some revolutions destroy the archives, making a clean cut with the past. What is at stake here is the link between memory and justice as well as the one that establishes the revolutionary rupture (or continuity). In this sense, revolutionaries most often work for the continuity of the state while overthrowing the despised regime. They break the link between regime and state, each in their own way. Access to archives or creation of documentation which may have the status of archives is part of a utopian vision that creates a community. The imaginary of “collective ownership” is convened by the archive (Mbembé 2002). The question I want to address here is whether the collectivity contributes to blurring the frontier between state and society. When we look at the state from the perspective of the archives, it can be viewed as one of the empirical places that represent the state, one of the “practices of the modern age” that Timothy Mitchell refers to (Mitchell 1991: 78). The state is reflected in the architecture of state archives. This reflection however is not a static one. It involves many actors and different conceptions of the state as it is manifested in the archive, its preservation, its constitution, its access. The idea of this chapter is born from the observation of the realities and (often contrasting) imaginaries related to archives and the acts of archiving. As part of a joint reflection on how the state is affected by the events that have shaken the Arab world since 2010–2011, it is necessary to observe the places of the archive, their semantic and semiotic shifts, their positions in relation to the power (regimes, states) to understand what is at stake today. Two aspects stand out in this regard: the opening (even sometimes in a very ephemeral way) of once inaccessible or invisible state archives, as occurred in Egypt and Yemen in 2011 and is still occurring in Tunisia; and the multiplication of private archiving initiatives, documenting revolts and revolutions but also older memories. Both raise several questions this chapter hopes to interrogate, most importantly: does this private space complement or contradict the archive of power? What kind of power regime does it construct?

76  Leyla Dakhli

Power and Archives, Act I. Profanations, Captures and Negations At first sight, the discussion on archives in the post-colonial Arab world is immediately, from the moment when states free themselves from colonial tutelages, oriented toward the question of the state and its autonomy, its ability to seize its own memory. It seems to place the countries of the region in a situation of “peoples without history” or at least without archives, since their archives are largely recorded by others. If we follow Ann Laura Stoler’s invitation to seize archives not simply as an instrument, but as a subject and as a place of knowledge production, it is not useless to consider the real or proclaimed absence of archives as an object of study (Stoler 2002; 2009). It is then necessary to question the systems of domination at work in the production and visibility—or invisibilization—of the archive, but also the way in which their supposed absence produces knowledge about the region. The point will be to discuss, dispute and go beyond Edward Said’s (1996) statement that “the archive of much of modern Arab history resides unmetaphorically, has been deposited in, has been physically imprisoned by, Europe.” The appropriation of archives by colonial empires is very real, and it naturally accompanies the establishment of state domination. For the purpose of this paper, we need to understand the effects of this domination on knowledge, on the very form of archives and on the way in which it is extended. But the modern independent states have also appropriated the archive knowledge in many ways. Their absence and their lack of access are just a part of the politics of archives during the revolutions and their aftermaths.

A History Without Archives? The history of Arab state archival institutions from a comparative perspective remains to be written.2 Nevertheless, a few observations are in order as a first step in a reflection.3 Preservation, in the broadest sense of the term, tends to focus primarily on the manuscript treasures of national or private libraries, that is, on a very patrimonial vision of what archives are, whom they serve and how they (should) function. Memory resides in the precious nature of these documents, which have a high symbolic and real value. More recent printed documents, considered to be of lower value, are usually not subject to the same care. Thus, if we visit the al-Khalidiyya Library today, considered one of the major sites in Jerusalem and Palestine (al-Khalidi 1997), we can see the care taken and the efforts made to preserve the manuscripts. While the Khalidiyya Library is a precious testimony to a state of written knowledge in the first 20th century, it is kept unchanged and the archival documentation remains very difficult to access.4 “Treasures” monopolize all the will to preserve; the archives they constitute are similar to relics, those of knowledge, law or faith, as well as those of a state and its

Archiving in an Age of (Counter)Revolutions  77 history (Potin 2015). These paper monuments are often the focus of special treatment, displayed in a museal form. At the Khalidiyya, the precious manuscripts are described and cautiously kept in a specific room. It is also the case in another library of the old city of Jerusalem, al-Budayriyya. The word used to designate the archives in Arabic (wathâ’iq) evokes the idea of traces, of testimony. Manuscripts, before being sources for the historian, are monuments, traces of past history, treasures. The history of post-colonial states based on these treasures is made of struggles that move outside the sphere of the archive itself. As has been shown in the case of Egypt and Libya (Dumasy & Di Pasqale 2012), there is a strong mobilization of history in the post-colonial states in the service of a new narrative. Historians of the newly independent states, described by Yoav di Capua (2009) as “gatekeepers,” are similar to chroniclers. They put history at the heart of the national narrative in a dimension that is both heroic and epic. But they also establish a link between archiving and writing history.5 Until recently, the use of national state archives to write historical accounts was relatively rare. They were based on memories or even direct testimonies and sometimes on colonial archives. The making of a national history involved all these sources, necessary to forge myth and document the history in progress. Contemporary (professional) history was then written through the use of sources of circumvention (most often colonial archives and newspapers), which often passed through the same old guardianships and contributed to producing an essentially geopolitical vision of the region. And we had become accustomed to debates on the difficulty of access, the destruction of sources, the necessary invention of new archives to distance ourselves from the look carried by imperial papers. This balance is the one on which the work of the areas studies departments is based, where the specificity of the historian’s profession based on the reading and comprehension of archive is dissolved in the access to the original documentation on the region. It also produces treasure-based knowledge, focusing on rare documentation and manuscripts. Does this mean that state archives, this reasoned and classified accumulation of the very production of state services, are absent in the region? Not necessarily. Their history is linked to that of local governments and institutions as well as to the regimes that govern them. Access to national, municipal or institutional archives obviously varies according to the country and context. The Arab world is no exception. We can sketch here some elements of understanding and differentiation from some examples.6 Tunisia prides itself on the long-standing nature of its state apparatus and its persistent structures. Indeed, the first archive service was created there in 1874 and supported the movement for reform and modernization of the state. Its role was to collect the documents of what before the French occupation of 1881 was known as the beylik. Much closer to the present, the National Archives, initially under the Presidency of the Council, were

78  Leyla Dakhli transferred to the First Ministry in 1999. Their work is regulated by a 1988 law7 establishing a work process that obliges the state services to deposit their definitive archives with the Archive’s for conservation, processing and communication. The disclosure of documents is subject to clear rules that have since been established on a ministry-by-ministry and service-by-­ service basis. The automatic nature of these deposits has been problematic, as has the disclosure of a number of files considered sensitive. Nevertheless, work has been undertaken by the institution to standardize and systematize the deposits and to open the collections to the public. In the context of the new republic, after the 2011 revolution, archives are still the focus of civic and political battles. The case of the archives of the Presidency revealed some of the democratic weaknesses in the memory of the state. The centralization of power is reflected in the preservation of the archives, some of which had remained in the rooms of the Carthage Palace when President Moncef Marzouki took office in 2011. His desire to uncover these secrets d’alcove has come up against both a sensitive context and the firmness of the public administration, which is anxious to respect the legal requirements. It was also the administration of the archives that intervened between the palace officials and the Truth and Dignity Commission when its president decided to stage an operation to seize sensitive documents.8 Through the archives, one discovers the true architecture of an authoritarian state, encapsulating the ministries in different layers of semi-formal institutions from the ruling party, the presidency or the police apparatus, which constitutes the regime, the system (nidam); the very one that revolutionaries are trying to overthrow (yasqut al-nidâm). Unlocking that regime takes time. Nevertheless, these archives, which are now inventoried, may be transferred and communicated to researchers. They have already been made available to the commissions dealing with transitional justice. Paradoxically, the national reconciliation process has so far addressed the question of memory through the archive, if not through the action of the Truth and Dignity Forum and in 2018 through the collection undertaken for the exhibition “Tunisian Instant,” reconstructing the traces of the days of uprisings in 2010–2011.9 In contrast to Palestine or Lebanon, there are very few private archives established in the Tunisian context. The Temimi Foundation for Research and Information,10 a research institution that collects and publishes testimonies, is an exception, as are some documentation centers, which are rather documentary collections. There are also oral history initiatives, including the one led by the National Institute for the History of the National Movement at the University of La Manouba. The Oral History and Audiovisual Documentation Unit has been involved in a program to “safeguard national memory” since 1991. This collection of testimonies and life stories from the actors led to the creation of a fund that now includes 306 recordings. Since 2011, associations and groups have been involved in oral history and archive collection businesses. Their work is generally not yet valued and accessible.11

Archiving in an Age of (Counter)Revolutions  79 In Egypt, a similar centralizing and modernizing tradition was at the heart of the foundation in 1828 of an archive’s office by the Khedive Muhammad Ali. It subsequently developed according to the model of the French National Archives. It was after the 1952 revolution that this institution was transformed into Dar al-Watha’iq,12 a massive institution that stands out even in the context of the Middle East. Since the 1990s, it has been linked to the National Library (Dar al-Kutub). It is home to very rich collections, which have been the basis for abundant research, both on ancient periods and on the 19th century. In the context of the 2011 revolution and the subsequent coup, but also during the Morsi regime, archives have been at the center of a debate on the reception of sensitive documents and access to information in national history. Part of the mobilization took place about access to documentation, embarking on a reflection on the archive itself as part of the revolutionary process. The spectacular action of encircling certain buildings of the State Security during the days of March was one of the acts. The constitution of the “Committee to Document the 25th of January Revolution,” initiated by historian Khaled Fahmy at the invitation of Mohamed Saber Arab, then director of Dar al-Kutub, was intended to reflect a desire to report and leave traces of what was happening on the country’s streets. The aim was to document the revolution and gather the abundant material that circulated on social networks: films, photos, texts, performances of all kinds. Khaled Fahmy took charge of this mission by transforming it from the outset into a reflection on the use and meaning of the archive. For someone who knows that “archives do not belong to the people; they belong to the State,”13 this mission had a very special meaning. He was keen to move the debate and to articulate it with the closure of the archives, their restriction to an area of more or less authorized specialists and thus to reveal the civic challenge of the conservation and availability of state documentation, particularly sensitive in the context of the Dar al-Watha’iq as an institution.14 This institution, “as any other archive, in fact, embodies a unique stratification of all the institutions, political decisions, turns of the events that have preceded it” (Carminati 2019). The uncovering of this issue is a means of further exposing the secrecy surrounding the most sensitive archives (concerning particular wars), of which we do not know even if they have been constituted and preserved. One of the consequences of this closure, for example, is that historical knowledge of the Arab-Israeli wars is based almost exclusively on Israeli archives and European or American chancelleries. The hope of the Committee in 2011 was to unlock access to these archives to accompany the gesture of national liberation. Its ambition was then, as Fahmy puts it, to “turn the National Archives from a reservoir to a research center that generates new questions.” Unfortunately, the Committee’s hope of creating an open national archive of the revolution was short-lived. But it has made it possible to ask questions of an ethical and technical nature, which will then be taken up and developed by private initiatives.

80  Leyla Dakhli The question of the state taking over the archiving and memory enterprise is not raised in the same way in other national contexts such as Lebanon after the civil war. The Lebanese National Archives is a somewhat ghostly institution. However, it does exist, and an inventory was published in 1983 under the auspices of UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).15 These state archives, partially destroyed after the war, have remained relatively unknown and coexist with many private or semi-private, confessional or institutional archives, sometimes family archives in a country where everyone protects its own memory (Jungen & Sfeir 2019). A quick reading makes the “weakness” of the state coincide with the absence of an archive, but one can also see a multiplicity of preservation authorities (universities, specifically the American University of Beirut and the University of Balamand, cultural institutions like publishing houses and newspapers [al-Nahar] and non-governmental organizations), which reflects more the fragmentation of authority than its absence and reveals a fusion between archives and memory. What is often interpreted as a failure of the state seems to reflect a confusion between memory and archive, for the most important archiving sites in the country are not substitutes for the archive, but for memory. We see the development of projects to collect oral archives or heritage documents, but we cannot yet reconstitute the archives of the state and its various services, the traces of state activity. Only pieces of municipal archives can provide access to such information, at least of the late Ottoman and Mandate period (Ilbert 1996; Hanssen 2005; Eddé 2009; Lafi 2019). In this particular case, the civil war has superimposed itself on this specific structure of the state, producing holes linked to destruction, looting and disappearances, creating further obstacles to access and clouding understanding of documentation, while also introducing an urgency of memory. Private heritage companies rely on this diagnosis to develop their actions, despairing of the state’s ability to address traumatic issues and concerned about the demonstrated fragility of what is called the state and its institutions. This is how other institutions, sometimes of a religious nature or even non-Lebanese established and/or administered institutions such as the American University of Beirut, become the depositaries of funds and compensate for the state’s lack of understanding of the country’s history. It is in relation to this kind of memory that the UMAM Documentation and Research (UMAM D&R) project is defined to challenge what the founders call a “national amnesia,” the latter constituting a “quasi-official state religion.”16 This project, which focuses specifically on the traces and memory of the civil war (1975–1990), expresses a belief, which could be described as magical, based on the contributions of trauma studies: atrocities are repeated if they are not uncovered and understood. The pressing need to do something was also motivated by the worries and hopes that influenced Lebanon at the time UMAM D&R emerged. Some 15 years after the Taif Agreement, it had become very clear that the approach

Archiving in an Age of (Counter)Revolutions  81 used to pacify this small (210 kilometers long and 50 kilometers wide) strip of land, one that has repeatedly demonstrated an uncanny ability to both suffer and cause headaches, could not be sustained. The archives are here conceived as a collective treasure that is deposited for the purposes of healing and real pacification. This is indeed a question of collective memory, which has replaced organized amnesia, but also the absence of places of memory and the absence of a state archive over this period. The case of the UMAM initiative is obviously paroxysmal,17 and we could observe this same fusion between memory and archive from other examples, such as that of the Arab Image Foundation.18 Lebanon also hosts a large part of the Palestinian archives and living memory through the Institute for Palestinian Studies or initiatives such as the Nakba Archive, also hosted by the American University of Beirut.19 Not surprisingly, when the Israelis invaded Beirut in 1982, they went right to the most similar to a “state archive institution,” the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Documentation Centre, to steal its archives. The story of the archives of the Palestinian revolution reflects in a very dramatic way the history of the struggle itself. The PLO documented for decades its activities, but also the memory of the Palestinians and their living heritage. This collection or at least part of it was displaced from Amman to Beirut, then to Algeria, where it stayed until very recently. The documentation stolen in Beirut was then restituted as part of an exchange of prisoners with Israel in 1983: “4,500 Palestinian prisoners and what Israel said was the Research Center library were returned, in exchange for six Israeli soldiers” (Sleiman 2016).20 Acting with the state, transforming the conditions of access and conservation, doing without the state, bypassing or replacing it, all of these actions affect the archival landscape and say something about the territory, its history and political situation. The collections bear, in their very form, their existence or absence, their accessibility, the trace of violence or neglect.

Abductions, Thefts and Capture The history of the state archives is also made up of silences, disappearances and recordings. Like other treasures, they are part of the spoils of war. The question of Iraqi archives and their “abduction” has been much commented on (Gravois 2008; Caswell 2011; Cox 2011; Montgomery 2012). The archives of the Baathist period were considered a war treasure and deposited at the Hoover Institution. One of the most comprehensive funds is the one related to the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, the “Kuwait Dataset.” It was directly formed by the Coalition forces led by the US in 1991.21 The Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank hosted by Stanford University, has a long history of “saving” archives and documentation. Thus, under the impetus of its founder Herbert Hoover, “treasures” such as Rosa Luxemburg’s papers or those of Joseph Goebbels were extracted from Germany.22 The collection of Baath archives is in line with this policy of relocating sensitive

82  Leyla Dakhli archives. Here, the war treasure itself has been privatized, since it was not the American government that took charge of this mass of documents, but a private foundation that stored seven million pages from the “Baath Party records” in Qatar before transferring them to the Iraq Memory Foundation, “a private Washington, D.C.-based group that entered Iraq as an American defense contractor to preserve the records of Saddam Hussein’s regime” (Montgomery 2012: 326). The Iraq Memory Foundation, which has deposited them, uses a mixed psychoanalytical discourse to present its mission of revelation and its enterprise of truth. The documentation is entirely oriented toward revealing the truth, and this is not clearly linked to a process of national reconciliation involving the Iraqi state and its citizens. Truth is a healing force. To recover from their wounds and to lay a foundation for present and future justice the people of Iraq must come to terms with the atrocities perpetrated under Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime. Iraqis are now forging new identities in a very different society. The Iraq Memory Foundation has as its mission: to encourage and inform that development free from half-truths and distortions; to use the Iraq experience to advance knowledge throughout the world and, by so doing, to honor the victims and the survivors of this dark era in the country’s history.23 The central character of this project is the writer Kanan Makiya (author of The Republic of Fear under the name of Samir al-Khalil).24 He is working on the memory and collection of oral sources, particularly to document the atrocities committed in the northern regions of Iraq in the 1990s. The combination of knowledge and revelation brings this endeavor closer to the reconciliation commissions that have been set up in countries such as South Africa, Rwanda, Morocco and, more recently, Tunisia. But in the absence of a state-run and democratic process, this private body appears to be a questionable substitute. And this is all the more so as the collection is moved to another territory, to that of an occupying army. It is an archival operation that displays its embedded side (with the occupying forces) and assumes its deterritorialization in the name of universal justice. The uprooting of archives and their removal from their territory is not an operation that is ethically neutral,25 and it is thus also not insignificant from a scientific and intellectual point of view. Once archives are removed from their home societies, they are detached from what makes it possible to interpret them in the first place, i.e., their production context. The “truth” is not simply to be seen in the sign or the sum of the signs; it is also seen in the gesture of collecting, preserving and depositing. This truth, considered as a healing power, is multiple and complex; it must find its meaning in a more global critical work. The Baath Party archives or those of the occupation of Kuwait, which were removed because they were considered particularly

Archiving in an Age of (Counter)Revolutions  83 sensitive, testify to the very structure of Saddam Hussein’s system. They must be linked to the archives of the state and institutions to find their meaning. The issue of restitution is not simply a question of morality but a matter of meaning (Caswell 2011). With regard to the abuses committed by party officials during the years of dictatorship, these documentary collections can indeed testify to the guilt of certain people and must be made available to national and international justice commissions. This guarantee is now given by the foundation. But how can we guarantee this mission in the long term and who should be the real guarantor? Finally, if we compare the care taken in obtaining this war treasure with the negligence responsible for the destruction of a large part of the National Library’s collections, the destruction by bombing of the Iraqi national ­archives in 2003 or even the proliferation of trafficking in archives and antiquities, we cannot help but see it as a selection. What must remain of Iraq’s memory then is only this black memory of the party. Who decides what remains and what disappears? Beyond the political and moral question, arises here in this context where data are considered today as the foundation of governance and surveillance and as a new black gold, the economic question and that of the wealth generated by these data and memory processing. It is also in this context that archives must be placed at the center of a reflection on the state and its relationship with private institutions to which it can subcontract part of its prerogatives in terms of archives. The history of the collection and place of archives should be made in a somewhat precise way to situate each of the state/semi-state/private spaces in their relationship to data. Undoubtedly, entrepreneurs of memory (and justice) like Kanan Makiya are trying to develop, through archives and documentation, other ways of operating. The Iraqi example is both exceptional and paradigmatic. It accompanies a fairly common delegation of governance in the form of privatization of collection and digitization activities—justified in particular by the cost of these operations—and a movement to build “independent” archives and put documentation online. Not surprisingly, most of the documents so catalogued and put online were mainly those captured or otherwise collected from militant sources. If we can talk in the Iraqi case about a real relocation/transmission from a reduced State to a party apparatus, what relationship do these private projects have with the idea of a memory infrastructure or even an archival infrastructure?

Power and Archives Act II. Imagining Other Responses, Proposals and Alternatives Outside the State Independent archival collection is an expression of political dissent with its own history. In the Soviet context, it gave birth to the organization Memorial, “a historical, educational, charitable society for the defense of human rights.” As a collective and militant enterprise, Memorial has set itself the

84  Leyla Dakhli goal of “promoting the uncovering of the truth about the past, and perpetuating the memory of the victims of the political repression exercised by totalitarian regimes.” This last point is achieved in particular by keeping the “books in memory of the victims of political repression.”26 In this sense, all memory enterprises linked to political repression are part of the archives, even when the traces are very small.27 As with the Memorial association and archives, they aim to produce a record for future justice and to open up a space for transparent access to documentation as well as to establish a “duty of remembrance” in post-­ authoritarian states.28 This is also understandable from the struggle of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and the way they refuse to allow the traces of their missing children to be erased. They stand there as the very archives of the existence of these bodies and lives, facing the machine of disappearance as a weapon of war (Déotte 2002). This mobilization of activists around the issue of traces and archives has given rise in recent years to new techniques and new theoretical materials to document, in particular, the absence and disappearance around the notion of Forensics linked to Human Rights studies. The Goldsmith University laboratory, London, has set up a scientific and legal methodology based on trace to demonstrate and compile legal files and therefore even research and investigation.29 In the Arab world, a number of independent archiving initiatives are approaching these places of dissent, particularly since 2011. What seems to unite these contemporary initiatives is the way they make the archive an object for itself. They shift it from its understanding as a residue of an institution’s daily work to perceive it as a more generic trace linked to the ­inscription (whether it is of writing, image, sounds or even a bodily inscription, an incarnated memory). As Jean-Pierre Vernant says about the rediscovery of writing, the archive (the document) “will henceforth fulfill a function of publicity; (it) will make it possible to disclose, to place also under the gaze of all the various aspects of social and political life” (Vernant 1962: 27–28). Contemporary archival gestures start from there, from a gesture that consists in placing under the gaze, in showing, in disclosing, in extirpating. They are based on (or invent) a belief whose foundation is transparency and the driving force is data (Ebeling and Günzel 2009). In this way, they support the utopias of the World Wide Web in a world where it has partly been transformed into a vast information and data market. This is not the least of the paradoxes. These modes of intervention by the archives can be analyzed through their relationship to information and the media, to the notion of memory and in their particular relationship to art.

Informing and Archiving the Same Thing? One of the characteristics of contemporary archival projects on the web is the link they maintain with the media. The revolutions of 2010–2013 were, as we know, made and documented simultaneously. They have implemented

Archiving in an Age of (Counter)Revolutions  85 real-time information techniques to counter national propaganda and have set up independent media centers based on a dense network of “journalist activists.” In this respect, they are the “daughters of Seattle,” the famous 1999 protests that launched the so-called “anti-globalization movement” and the explosion of a new form of protest in which anti-globalization demonstrators had become masters. At the time, the idea was to take advantage of the Internet’s channels to produce and disclose the information oneself. This vast do it yourself (DIY) enterprise, the most famous example of which is Indymedia, has produced images of the movement, its highlights and some of its slogans—“The Whole world is watching,” “this is what democracy looks like,” making films and showing (including the most spectacular actions and repression) an act of resistance. This is the dimension that can be found, for example, in the work of 858, a member of the media collective Mosireen. This archive is a collection that has its coherence and history— that of a media collective born during the Egyptian revolution: The Mosireen collective came together in early 2011, its members were a part of the protest movement. We filmed and collected footage from across Egypt, in factories, hospitals, unions and morgues. We held trainings in street media in Cairo and across the country. In our workspace we hosted events, discussions and film screenings. We weren’t neutral observers, but actors within a wider struggle. We participated and documented in the same time. We were engaged in a battle of narratives, of revolution against the counter-revolution of the Army, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Old Regime.30 The project 858 is conceived as a closed one, with a beginning and an end, and it reflects its particular time. But it also hosts other materials that are to be added to the collection. It is the support for other projects, which are grafted onto the deposited material. Starting from the archive, everybody’s contributions are thought of and curated, fed with more information, additions or memories. These traces are there to be used and they can even occasionally become documents to be added to a court file. They are proof for the continuation of the struggle in another way. The on-site research within this documentary material is based on a knowledge of editing and documentary creation tools, allowing several films to be viewed on the same screen and their progress to be read in sequences. The possibility of creating a personal account to gather archive choices, then constituting personal news channels has been added. This orientation is found in a number of sites whose objective is to feed media productions to counter the propaganda of the regimes in place and accumulate evidence for justice. Thus the Syria Untold website, run by Syrian media activists, reports on its own transformation from a testimonial site to an archive site. The site designers situate their approach in a broader fight against false information and lies. One of the founders speaks of a

86  Leyla Dakhli transformation of history into an archive: first of all, to “live history,” then to produce an archive because “the end of the history of the Syrian revolution is the return to lies,” to the truncated and distorted regime of truth. The truth comes to stand up to the reinstatement of the lie. The flow of history contrasts with the fixity and constructed nature of the archive.31 This transition from action to archive requires a work that the collective 858 describes as a flow, where each video bears its date, stands for a moment, into a renaming regime that spatializes events and in a certain way freezes them. In this way, the videos, initially classified according to their date of arrival, are gradually “naturally” (re)ordered by reference to a place that has become a place of memory, meaning both the place and a date related to it: Mohammed Mahmoud (19–24 November 2011), Maspero (9–10 October 2011), Abassiyya, and so on.32 The issue of archives is linked to the explosion of social media and therefore to the issue of the so-called revolutions 2.0, which has been widely debated. It is obvious that the scope of these archival projects could not have been planned before the development of a whole series of technical tools, from upstream, smartphones and highly portable cameras to downstream, collaborative research tools that guide visitors and enable them to enrich content. Technology takes its place and conquers it when tools are invented to archive and index oral archives in Arabic, for example, or when solutions are found to protect the identity of depositors. If the technological approach says anything about how large-scale citizen initiatives are made possible with regard to the preservation and dissemination of all documentation, it is primarily the context of competing stories that justifies this work. Contrary to what happened for the first generation of media activists who were entirely focused on transparency and revelation, media archivists are concerned about building independent tools that give an important place to collaboration while guaranteeing sustainability. The social dimension of the Internet has proved its worth in its ability to federate and mobilize and it remains fundamental in the use and composition of the archives themselves. There is also a use of technology to outsource and call for spontaneous contributions by ensuring the protection and dissemination of a certain “heritage” in an open and large sense. This heritage, in turn, feeds initiatives such as Wikis, allowing the development of knowledge in Arabic(s) on social topics. An example can be given in the development of the Wiki-Gender in Arabic. But whereas in the project 858 this aspect can be controlled by the limited nature of the archive itself, produced and edited, Syria Untold’s project does not have the same borders and is sometimes difficult to capture. There, one can find a creative bric-a-brac, the archives of a future state that would contain all the memories of revolutionary Syria, but also all the “untold Syria,” the country that the regime hides, does not want to see, does not want to show. It goes far beyond the documentation of the uprisings itself and aims to narrate its roots and justifications. The work based on

Archiving in an Age of (Counter)Revolutions  87 this abundant documentation consists in editorializing and transforming it into a narrative. On the website, one can thus read the history of cities in revolution about which texts, images and maps are gathered.33 Access to the documentation then requires a narrative. Paradoxically, it produces content that is more similar to that of a classical news media than that of 858. It should be remembered that in the Syrian case, independent news coverage compensates for the very fragmented media coverage throughout the conflict. Threats against journalists, confusion of the situation discouraged official press organizations from documenting directly and media activists soon found themselves in the front line. Documenting became a matter of life and death as well as a struggle against emptiness and oblivion. For Syrian initiatives, perhaps even more than for others, the challenge is to (re)conquer the public space, even if dematerialized, inside and outside the country. This is why their initiatives are often linked to the perspective of constituting a basis for transitional justice processes (Haugbolle 2019). The ways of reading, selecting, sorting are at the heart of the work of archive builders when they take the form of a website. Thus, an architecture, a classification, but also and above all a circulation between documents is developed. The contributions draw and record the echoes between the videos or texts or images, the tags suggest paths and transversal readings. Journalism that has become an archive remains an evolving reading tool, whose history can be made and understood.

Memory Fighting against deletion is a revolutionary objective. The Syrian case is emblematic. The actress and revolutionary activist Fadwa Suleiman said in her last interview before her untimely death, in exile, from cancer in 2017: Even if they erase everything, we mustn’t let them erase our dream. If there’s only one Syrian left, I am sure that he or she would build the Syria that we love. Syria isn’t a country, it isn’t a geographical entity. It’s an idea. The noble revolution of the mind and soul that will last in time and space. The idea of fighting against erasure is also the main brand of projects such as the Nakba archives on Palestine before 1948: The Nakba Archive is an oral history collective established in Lebanon in 2002. Since it’s inception, the Archive has recorded over 650 video interviews with first generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon about their recollections of life in Palestine and the events that led to their displacement. These eyewitness narratives, with refugees from more than 150 Palestinian villages and towns, recall social and cultural life in Palestine before 1948, relations with neighboring Jewish communities and

88  Leyla Dakhli the British Mandate, the 1948 expulsion, and the early years of exile. The aim has been to document this critical period through the voices and experiences of those who lived through it, and to bear witness in a way shaped not by political symbolism but rather by the rhythms of personal memory. This memory-oriented project based on oral history, was created by Diana Allan and Mahmoud Zeidan. Its progressive digitization should make it possible to develop indexing based on keywords, to preserve interviews and make them accessible and to build a catalogue that can be consulted by researchers from the AUB. Beyond research and documentation in the strict sense of the term, the memory work developed through these online repositories constitutes what Cécile Boëx calls, following Christophe Traïni, “awareness raising devices” (Traïni 2009). This is probably what unites all these initiatives, the belief in the ability of the archive to do a sensitive work, to touch. The capture of a moment of state mobilization or repression, the long-term testimony, whether formalized within the framework of a commission, a systematic collection project or captured on the spot, are bits of direct emotion that are returned to us. In this way, the memory of mobilization replays the emotions that arouse it and creates new ones, which are hoped to be able to extend the mobilization. Belief in the ability to mobilize these emotions emerged with the 2011 revolutions within them. In this sense, these sites can be read as repetitions of the revolutionary act, “remembering hope” as A. Rigney (2018) calls it. The documentation of revolutions immediately contributes to the revolution ­itself; the restitution of a truth of repression contributes to the continuation of the revolution, whether it is after the establishment of a new regime as in Tunisia or in the tensions of counterrevolution as in Egypt. In this context, the predominance of the image is to be discussed. “The imaging of events also helps to shape specific awareness-raising mechanisms whose objective is to elicit emotional reactions that are quick to rally support,” writes Cécile Boex. Faced with the abundance of videos, we are led to doubt the ability of images to “make emotion” more immediately than other media. As archives, these images are installed in a closed space, they are aligned like folders, in series, ready to be used as testimonies or as a document. They reach, through the flow, the position of a piece within a larger narrative. Their accumulation is evidence, but it makes empathy more and more difficult. It is from these memory traces that the exhibition (and the collection) “Before the 14th,” which could be seen at the Bardo Museum in Tunis from 10 December 2018, was built. The choice was made to present a linear chronological presentation of the Tunisian revolutionary days (before January 14). In the available documentary material (more than 1,200 videos have been collected), only a few minutes are presented, edited meticulously. Some moments are recalled, and the emotion really unfolds when the videos are

Archiving in an Age of (Counter)Revolutions  89 rendered in their entirety. Unfortunately, this choice was made only in one particularly poignant case—that of a clip telling the story of the death of the first martyr. This exhibition, staged in a system that makes events part of the national memory, contributes to writing history and giving it meaning. The accompanying collection, deposited at the ANTs, should serve as a support for a sensitive memory and for further research.

What Art Can Do Beyond counter-information and dissent, beyond complex memorial attempts, one of the major places of reflection on archives and power is the world of contemporary art. This link is not completely new, at least not in the articulation it makes between dissent, resistance and past practices. In the face of state propaganda, the use of creative forms of resistance implies the use of archival evidence to reveal other truths. Art has a new capacity to struggle “by the trace”: it orders and gives meaning. It also contributes to an aesthetics of the hidden. And archives are extracted to reveal what had been hidden. All this contributes to contemporary archival inflation and to a certain form of worship of the document (Ebeling & Günzel 2009). Literature makes use of its ability to narrate reality, approaching documentary forms, and the visual arts work with trace, strata and the ability or inability to narrate. The link with art has become central and determines the treatment and a certain form of sacralization of the archive (singular), conceived not as a collection and serial production of state/official documentation, but as a multiform trace, inserted in an artistic reflection on meaning. A number of archive places of modern times in the Arab world are artistic spaces.34 They transform the archives into a form of aesthetics that is intrinsically linked to an interrogation about truth and the past, but not fundamentally to history as a science or to the archive as a technique. A project like the Tahrir archive presents itself as a collaborative collection project from below, under the name of “Vox Populi,” but it is organized as an artistic project, a performance. The home page of the site is written by the artist Lara Baladi and its sections focus on exhibitions and productions emanating from her work. The ambition here does not derive from an archival logic or even an activist logic, but rather of an aesthetic discourse on the resonances and echoes of history: …On January 28 2011, I joined the people in Tahrir as a regular citizen. Just as the YouTube video ‘Tiananmen-Cairo Courage in Cairo’ went viral, a friend posted on Facebook a speech Jean Paul Sartre had delivered to an audience of striking French autoworkers 40 years earlier. As the political tension grew, more and more images and videos of a packed Tahrir Square were uploaded. They echoed footage from other uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa, as well as a vast array of past social movements. It was as though Sartre was protesting with us in Tahrir.

90  Leyla Dakhli In an attempt to keep track of the events unfolding on the ground, I set about documenting and archiving, videos, photographs, articles and further data related to the 2011 Egyptian revolution and its aftermath, while also collecting material on major events taking place around the world at that time. In parallel I researched and amassed footage that resonated with Tahrir Square and everything that followed, from historical footage (of which the Sartre speech is an example) to philosophical discourses, to banned cartoons, to political satire… I called this ongoing archive Vox Populi… The emphasis on the phenomena of conjunction, resonance and echo is very striking when reading this text as well as in the desire to build a timeline that is not a strict chronology but a work on the very matter of time. Lara Baladi’s artistic productions combine elements from multiple revolutionary echoes when, for example, she calls one of her pieces made from the archives “Be realistic, ask for the impossible,” using a famous slogan of the Parisian 68, and inserts an Egyptian poem by Amal Dunqul from 1962 on the Spartakist revolt. Here, the archives are aggregated and constituted into icons. The work of Walid Raad and the Atlas Group, creating counterfactual fictions from real or fabricated archives, contributes, by pushing it to the end, to the same logic of reflection on the status of proof, truth and document, between fiction and non-fiction.35 The device obviously questions the notion of truth, but also the sacralization of the document, its role in the production of knowledge. It questions the state apparatus and the logics of power. The Creative memory of the Syrian revolution, a website created and directed by Sana Yazigi, a graphic-designer who lives now in exile in France, takes the aesthetic issue to another level. Far from inserting the archive into aesthetic creation, she and her team decided to retain the revolutionary interventions that have to do with art with aesthetics. The process of selecting the objects collected is in fact artwork and the archive (or memory, as the name of the project states) is a collection in the artistic or museum sense of the term. These revolutionary artworks are meticulously catalogued, they have authors, supports. This choice also says something about the revolutionary gesture, making it a worthy creative act not only by its politics, but also by its aesthetic and symbolic value. To put it briefly, the Assadian order is ugly, beauty is revolutionary. The memory of this aesthetic is encapsulated in ephemeral artworks and their archiving makes it possible to save part of revolutionary politics itself, which consists in building a fairer but also more beautiful society. In this sense, archiving is creating and contributing to an alternative patrimony for the country. Archival pieces give sense to another potential state, to that of the revolution, with its own monuments and art pieces. This commitment to artistic work is one of the aspects of the revolution, documented by films shot in the liberated areas. As in the documentary film “Still Recording” directed by Saeed Al Batal and Ghiath Ayoub in the

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city of Daraa in Syria, where young artists are followed in the streets of a besieged and starving city, where they are seen painting and sculpting, it is this gesture and the accompanying emotion that the archive’s work tries to preserve on the web by publishing the photo of the artworks, the place where they were found, the possible names of the authors. In the world of visual arts and documentary, the place of the archive (in the singular) is certainly the most visible. On the borderline between information work and artistic creation, contemporary documentaries use a wide range of interpretation and recording of the archive in the narrative. A journalist like Nahed Awwad works from photographic traces and interviews to reconstruct the history of Jerusalem Airport. She highlights in the center the archive in the face of oblivion or even the absurdity that seizes us when we learn and imagine that instead of the largest check-point in the West Bank, Qalandia, the runways of an airport stretched out, the traces of which appear to have emerged from another world: photos of famous artists welcomed with flowers, children in their Sunday clothes to visit their families in Lebanon or to welcome workers from the Gulf. A whole world emerges and is restored by the camera and research. Palestinian artist Kamal Aljafari works with another visual material: Israeli B-movies. In these films, he tracks Palestinian characters who were supposed to be erased from the picture and who appear as intruders in the shots, hidden in an angle, forgotten during the editing. He then produces a discourse on the trace and disappearance that is part of this shabby culture and reveals not the other side of the set but the thickness of the set itself.37 What is even more striking is to see scientific works go through the prism of the artistic treatment of the archive to question the archives and give them meaning. Thus, the project carried out in Egypt by Alya Mossallam entitled “Speak, History” (ahki ya târikh) proceeds in the form of workshops devoted to the sound, visual and textual archives of a place or event. Participants collect stories, give testimonies and order this collection in the form of maps, stories, books-objects that emphasize anachronisms and temporal overlaps. History is here to tell the present and reveal the past in a collaborative and creative form. These experiences of public history, both civic and pedagogical, are being transformed at the same time into artistic projects (notably theatrical or in the form of exhibitions) and into research proposals to bring out memory and transform it into an archival record.

Archival Consideration of the Public/Private Dichotomy The relation between these multiple private initiatives and traditional state archives is not self-evident. They seem to constitute two parallel and separate worlds. If we stick to the ethics of memory approach, some are substitutes for the failures of others. Those who collect privately, aim to do the preservation that the state does not do or that the state in fact hurts. The gesture (or the accumulation of gestures) however exceeds this ambition; it

92  Leyla Dakhli draws a democratic ambition for the archive, in particular through the very form it gives to these archives. The contributor, access and order are at the center of what could be considered a counter-power based on a number of shared beliefs (truth against lies, disclosure against the hidden, power of memory, aesthetics that flows from all this). It seems central that these archival operations on the web are most often open devices, hosting documents and proposals for the classification of ordinary people. Democracy is displayed in the gesture of collection or gleaning. It can simply be presented as a call for testimonies and contributions. For example, the Signs of Conflict Archive website is dedicated to specific objects: posters of the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990).38 The collection involves different authorities and no longer only individuals. It includes the archives of political parties, personal collections, libraries and private collectors. There is a concern, starting from this particular object, to name and represent, to inscribe an iconography. The aesthetic concern, even if it is not a key argument here, is very much present in the marked interest for a history of graphic codes and image setting, coupled with a history of a particularly deadly episode in the region. This is well reflected in the research tools made available to visitors: “relevant information whenever available: publisher/political party, date, designer, collection, in addition to keywords that facilitate searching through the archive, such as: names of significant political figures; wartime events and places; and recurrent icons.” Another initiative such as that of “Khazaaen” proposes a bottom-up collection that goes even further, since it aims to store the traces of the ordinary lives of the men and women of the region, with the ambition of reconstituting the common archive of an Arab world considered as a misguided one by its elites and governments.39 The other central point of this democratic ambition is access. The form of the website is intended to compensate for the difficulty of setting up stable archiving facilities. Digitization appears to be replacing the material presence of an object or document, so that the photo of the thing ends up being equivalent to the thing itself. But just as archiving requires selection and tidying up, the website operates a scheduling system that prioritizes and nests content. Very often, this documentation is given in a form already articulated as a story. The policy that is played out through access is expressed through openness, transparency and the possibility of contributing to and developing the archive itself. Here, technology plays the role of a political mirror. Some sites are designed as showcases, closed protection areas. Items are placed in the hands of “trusted persons” who protect and enhance them. Other sites are working to strengthen the participatory elements to enrich the collection and develop it, but also to make it reflect the ambition of openness and transparency for which it is accountable. These initiatives then continue the debates carried out during the revolutions on the notion of open democracy and on a certain conception of anarchism based on horizontality.

Archiving in an Age of (Counter)Revolutions  93

Conclusion: An Archive Without History? The great lacuna in contemporary archiving initiatives is paradoxically the work of the historian. In this respect, the experience of the Committee to Document the 25th of January Revolution in Egypt is an exception and confirms by its failure the impression that one can have that history, or even critical thinking of the archive are not at the center of the debate. If we start from a situation where the writing of contemporary history is done without necessarily resorting to state archives and where we bypass them by accessing private or personal archives, encouraging the constitution of historical schools of notables based on their family networks, the publication of new archives should make possible new historical research and narratives on the contemporary period. These collections would then be able to compensate for the absence of the others. In some cases, the collapse of a regime, concerned with preserving the memory of episodes considered glorious, can jeopardize archives. We have seen this in the case of Iraq, and this is certainly the case in Gaddafi’s Libya. Official history was used to unify the nation (Dumasy & Di Pasquale 2012). This national ambition was implemented in the work of the journal Majallat al-buhuth al-târikhiyya linked to the Libyan Studies Center (markaz dirâsât jihâd al-libyiin dhidda al-ghazw al-italî, 1978). This project, in accordance with the official ideology, proclaimed to make a history from below. The work on the archive was at the heart of this ideological state operation, supported by the work of historians. It consisted of the acquisition of official archives (particularly colonial) and the collection of memoirs and oral narratives focusing on resistance to colonial power because it highlighted a moment in Libyan history that could act as a unifying moment, with a number of key moments that were studied in the review (the Italian-Ottoman war of 1911, Italian colonial policy in general and the “resistance”). Other episodes were obviously erased from this official memory, such as the period of independence and the reign of the Senous Monarchy immediately preceding the coup d’état of Gaddafi. This example, along with that of Egypt and other countries in the region where a historical school is developed and valued by institutions, shows that historians, with or without the support of the state, could bring out non-linear stories from national territories. The link with archives is not obvious, partly because these historical schools, like archival institutions, have focused on the oldest heritage and neglected to focus on the poorer material of the contemporary archive. As a result, archival research most often concerns the oldest historical periods, stopping with the colonial corpus, ordered and closed. Looking at the historical evolution that Foucault describes when he defines the archival process as “a way of introducing, in the language already deposited and in the traces that it left, an order of the same kind that the one established among living beings” (Foucault 1966: 143–144), one can read the

94  Leyla Dakhli attempts of the activists initiatives as a way to reclaim the prerogatives of the state, blur the lines between state and society so as to uncover the regime or the system as the problematic location of power. It can be seen as a way to change the order, present an alternative order among the living. The revolutions that occurred in 2011 as well as the effect of a certain temporal distance are transforming this historiographical landscape. But they also collide—in conflict?—with a new conception of the archive (in the singular) that we have tried to sketch here, caught between political will and magic proliferation. What some have called “archival turn” is then, here as elsewhere, a new critical thought emerging from non-professionals of the archive that relies on the archive to think about relationships of domination; an activist practice based on the production of memory and knowledge; a patrimonial practice concerned with justice (restitution, contestation of monopolies, rebalancing of speeches). In all these movements, historians are almost absent. Would it be possible for Derrida’s program to constitute “a general and interdisciplinary science of the archive” under the name of “archival science” (Derrida 1994) to be carried out without them? The fact is that the archive goes beyond the professionals of the archive. It concerns the very transformations of modern or post-modern societies. The Arab world is then only joining since 2010 a movement that has developed with the help of computer technology tools. In this perspective, the archive is emancipated from history from the outset. It is not a question of a return to history, but rather of a transformation of the world’s narratives into a demonstration of reality represented by the archive. This movement is a movement of resistance in many ways, an answer to the state practices of hiding evidence and documentation, an alternative to the archive as a (often ugly and absurd) mirror of the state and its practices.

Notes 1 ‫ عمرو عزت ليلة افتحام امن الدولة بمدينة نصر النظام القمعي مقلوبا‬https://www.almasryalyoum .com/news/details/203691. 2 For some reflections on the field, see Omnia el-Shakry (2015). “‘History without Documents’: The Vexed Archives of Decolonization in the Middle East.” The American Historical Review, Vol. 120, No. 3, pp. 920–934; Sherene Seikaly (2018). “How I Met My Great-Grandfather: Archives and the Writing of History.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 38, No. 1, 6–20; Sonja Mejcher-Atassi and John Pedro Schwartz, eds. (2012). Archives, Museums and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World, Ashgate: Farhm, Pascale Ghazaleh (2019). Past Imperfect, Future Tense: Writing People’s Histories in the Middle East Today, Essays of the Forum Transregionale Studien. 3 Carried out in particular within the framework of two research programs. For Jerusalem from 1840 to 1940, the Open Jerusalem archives; for the revolutions in the Arab Mediterranean world, the ERC-Co DREAM, DRafting and Enacting the revolutions in the Arab Mediterranean (2018–2023). 4 Access to the catalogues via the website: www.khalidilibrary.org. 5 For Libya, see Jakob Krais, (2014). “A National Story? Libyan Historiography of Italian Colonialism.” In Memoirs with Uniforms. Peoples, States and Nations

Archiving in an Age of (Counter)Revolutions  95 in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, hrsg. v. Paolo Branca and Marco Demichelis. Bd. I. 219–30. Milano: SeSaMO/LeggereLegggere. 6 These few examples are worth milestones toward a typology of archives in their relationship to the State. In this chapter, we have been able to focus on only a few national examples, but it is clear that other cases would have been interesting to consider. 7 Decree No. 97–389 of 21 February 1997. 8 Interview with Hedi Jellab, Director of the National Archives, February 2019. 9 These traces, mainly made up of videos, are now deposited and accessible (on request) at the National archives of Tunisia. 10 www.fondationtemimi.tn. 11 We can mention Nachaz, an association working on the memory of the movement “Perspectives”; and the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women (ATFD) which has undertaken an oral history project. 12 Law of 1954. 13 “Archives do not belong to the people. They belong to the state,” an interview with Khaled Fahmy, seen on 22 February 2019. https://academic.aucegypt.edu/ bulletins/fb/?p=1890. 14 On the committee and for an account of the relationship between historians and the archival institution in Egypt, see Salma Shamel (2018). “Who Told You History Is an Open Buffet? On Facts, Fiction and Absence in the Archives.” Jadaliyya. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/37547/Who-Told-You-History-isan-Open-Buffet-On-Facts,-Fiction-and-Absence-in-the-Archives. 15 Salvatore Carbone, Les Archives nationales du Liban. Guide. Inventaire, Centre des archives nationales Liban, Institut culturel italien, Muʼassasat al-Maḥfūẓāt al-Waṭanīyah (Lebanon), 1983. 16 UMAM D&R, “raisons d’être”: https://www.umam-dr.org/en/home/aboutumam/1/advance-contents/4/raisons-detre, consulted on 22 February 2019. 17 See also the project “Signs of conflicts”: http://www.signsofconflict.org/. 18 http://www.fai.org.lb/home.aspx. 19 In collaboration with the Arab Resource Center for Popular Arts and Heinrich Böll Stiftung for the digitalization of the background. 20 For the specific question of the prisoners’ exchange, she refers to David Shipler (1983). “Palestinians and Israelis Welcome Their Prisoners Freed in Exchange,” New York Times. 21 This is what one can read on the website “800,000 pages; digitized, annotated, restrictively accessible—primary geographical span: Iraqi-occupied Kuwait; primary chronological span: 1990–91. Gathered by the Coalition forces upon the retreat of the Iraqi military from Kuwait, KDS provides in harrowing detail a view of the treatment of the civilian population as well as the conduct of war. KDS is particularly rich in content underlining the human condition of both Kuwaiti civilians and Iraqi soldiers entrapped in Saddam’s war.” http://www. iraqmemory.org/en/Projects_Documentation.asp, consulted on 22 February 2019. 22 http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf4m3nb03h/?query=goebbels. 23 http://www.iraqmemory.org/en/. 24 A series of films which initiated the project is available on the Saddam’s Killing Fields website: http://www.iraqmemory.com/en/projects/saddams_killing_fields. 25 On restitution, see Felwin Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy (2018). Restituer le patrimoine africain, Paris: Seuil. 26 Objectives of the Memorial organization, as stated on their website. 27 Iraqi memory could indeed be compared to this type of action; the term “dissident,” used to designate Kanan Makiya, obviously reinforcing the analogy. 28 This has led to big difficulties under the present regime.

96  Leyla Dakhli 29 https://www.forensic-architecture.org. 30 Presentation on the 858 website, “What is this?” https://858.ma/ consulted on 18 March 2019. 31 Discussion in Beirut during the workshop organized by the ACSS working group “Critiques of Power,” “Forum on alternative archival practices,” 14–15/12/18. 32 These names are found by searching the archive by “places.” Testimony of one of the members of the collective, Beirut, December 2018. 33 Project “Cities in Revolution”: https://cities.syriauntold.com/?lang=en. 34 For Lebanon and the memory of the civil war, see Elias, C., Posthumous Images: Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post-Civil War Lebanon, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 35 http://www.theatlasgroup.org. 36 “‫لسه عم نسجل‬,” a Bidayyat For Audiovisual Arts production, Beirut, 2018. 37 Kamal Aljafari, “Recollection,” 2015. 38 http://www.signsofconflict.org/. 39 https://khazaaen.wordpress.com/.

Bibliography al-Khalidi, Rashid (1997). Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, New York: Columbia University Press. Carminati, Lucia (2019). “Dead Ends in and Out of the Archive: An Ethnography of Dār al Wathā’iq al Qawmiyya, the Egyptian National Archive.” Rethinking History. The Journal of Theory and Practice, Vol. 23, pp. 34–51. Caswell, Michelle (2011). “‘Thank You Very Much, Now Give Them Back’: Cultural Property and the Fight over the Iraqi Baath Party Records.” American Archivist, Vol. 74, No. 1, pp. 211–240. Cox, Douglas (2011). “National Archives and International Conflicts: The Society of American Archivists and War.” American Archivist, Vol. 74, No. 1, pp. 451–481. Déotte, Martine (2002). “L’effacement des traces, la mère, le politique.” Socio-­ Anthropologie, Vol. 12. Online version. Available at http://journals.openedition. org/socio-anthropologie/153. Derrida, Jacques (1994). Mal d’archive, Paris: Galilée. Di-Capua, Yoav (2009). Gatekeepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History Writing in Twentieth-Century Egypt, Berkeley: University of California Press. Dumasy, François and Francesca Di Pasquale (2012). “Être historien dans la Libye de Kadhafi. Stratégies professionnelles et pratiques mémorielles autour du Libyan Studies Center.” Politique Africaine, Vol. 125, No. 1, pp. 127–146. Ebeling, K, and Günzel K. (2009). Archivology. Theories of the Archive in Philosophy, Media and Arts, Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos. Eddé, C. (2009). Beyrouth. Naissance d’une capitale (1918–1924), Paris: Actes Sud. Foucault, M. (1966). Les mots et les choses, Paris: Gallimard. Gravois, Joh (2008). “Disputed Iraqi Archives Find a Home at the Hoover Institution.” Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 54, No. 21, pp. 1–9. Hanssen, Jen (2005). Fin de Siècle Beirut. The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital, Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Haugbolle, Sune (2019). “Holding Out for the Day After Tomorrow. Futurity, Memory and Transitional Justice Evidence in Syria.” In Isabel Bramsen, Poul Poder and Ole Waever, eds. Resolving International Conflict: Dynamics of Escalation, Continuation and Transformation. London, UK: Routledge.

Archiving in an Age of (Counter)Revolutions  97 Ilbert, Robert (1996). Alexandrie 1830–1930. Histoire d’une communauté citadine, Cairo, Egypt: IFAO. Jungen, Christine and Jihane Sfeir, eds. (2019). Archiver au Moyen-Orient, Paris, France: Karthala. Lafi, Nora (2019). Esprit civique et organisation citadine dans l’Empire ottoman (XVe–XXe siècles), Leyden, NL: Brill. Mbembé, Achille (2002). “The Power of the Archive and Its limits.” In Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh, eds. Refiguring the Archive. Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 19–26, quotation. Mitchell, Tim (1991). “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics.” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 85, No. 1, pp. 77–96. Montgomery, Bruce (2012). “Saddam Hussein’s Records of Atrocity: Seizure, Removal, and Restitution.” American Archivist, Vol. 75, No. 2, pp. 326–370. Potin, Yann (2015). “Les Archives et la matérialité différée du pouvoir. Titres, écrins ou substituts de la souveraineté.” Pouvoirs. Les Archives, No. 153, pp. 5–21. Rigney, Ann (2018). “Remembering Hope: Transnational Activism Beyond the Traumatic.” Memory Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 368–380. Said, Edward (1976). “Interview.” Diacritics, Vol. 6, No. 3 (fall), pp. 30–47. Sleiman, Hana (2016). “The Paper Trail of a Liberation Movement.” Arab Studies Journal, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 42–67. Stoler, Ann Laura (2002). “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance.” Archival Science, Vol. 2, pp. 87–109. ——— (2009). Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Traïni Christophe, ed. (2009). Emotions… Mobilization! Mobilization!, Paris, France: Presses de Sciences Po. Vernant, Jean-Pierre (1962). Les Origines de la pensée grecque, Paris, France: PUF, pp. 27–28.

4 Class Power, the State and Contentious Politics in the Age of Globalization The Case of Egypt Angela Joya Introduction The hopes that the so-called Arab Spring would initiate a long-awaited wave of democratization across the Middle East were dashed as the Egyptian military deposed the country’s first democratically elected government and installed yet another military ruler as president in 2013. In Syria, anti-­ regime protests were met with ruthless repression, sparking a bloody, protracted civil war. By 2021, the Ba’ath had consolidated its rule after years of extreme civil conflict. With the death of Gaddafi, Libya has become a failed state torn apart by civil war, as rival factions fight over control of the state. In Bahrain, uprisings by the largely Shi’a working class majority were ruthlessly put down with the help of Saudi Arabia, a reactionary state that has also intervened in Yemen – along with the UAE – in support of a post-Saleh regime dealing with an armed Houthi insurgency. As of summer 2021, Tunisia remains the only country that has experienced a relatively stable democratic transition. With fraudulent elections and the repression of political opposition once again the norm, the region appears to have reverted to a status quo of authoritarian rule. Indeed, these developments seem to have reinforced a long-standing view of the exceptionalism of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in relation to the durability of authoritarian forms of rule that can be traced back to orientalist conceptions of the Middle East as a region that is culturally prone to societal stasis and political despotism (Wittfogel 1959; Lockman 2004). In contrast to these views, this chapter argues that the MENA region has undergone a series of substantive social and political transformations since 2011. As the region becomes increasingly integrated into the ever-evolving contemporary global political economy, the socio-economic basis of the post-colonial authoritarian regimes has begun to erode. Rather than result in democratization, however, these processes of socio-economic change have resulted in the development of new forms of authoritarianism. This new form of neoliberal authoritarianism has grown to support the process of economic liberalization begun in the 1990s, not to slow it down or undermine it. The infrastructure of neoliberal authoritarianism emerged in the

DOI: 10.4324/b22870-5

The Case of Egypt  99 1990s during the period of liberalization as regime elites made concessions to international investors and rising fractions of the Egyptian capital. At the same time, these new authoritarian forms are precarious, and have been unable to contain the outburst of “contentious politics” witnessed in the period of the so-called Arab Spring. This chapter engages with the literature on authoritarianism and argues that the authoritarian school treats the Arab state as too autonomous from social forces, too all-encompassing and monolithic in its power and ultimately fails to disassociate processes of democratization from economic liberalization characteristic of the democratization literature from which it claims to break. As an alternative, it outlines a Marxian approach that treats states as institutions that are contested by competing fractions of capital in their attempts to extract surplus from the laboring classes, who in their turn struggle and resist against exploitation and oppression by the capital and the state. Such an approach acts as a corrective to the dominant authoritarian framework by emphasizing the institutional dynamism of the state in relationship to the ongoing conflicts associated with changing strategies of capital accumulation and popular resistance. In particular, it enables us to understand the changing nature of authoritarian rule as part of – rather than in opposition to – the intensification of neoliberal forms of capital accumulation as they are expressed as processes of accumulation by dispossession. In other words, it takes as its starting point the fact that Arab societies and states are in a constant state of change as they become integrated into the global economy, both in terms of the relations of surplus extraction and exploitation that exist between producers and appropriators, but also in terms of the relationship between the fractions of capital that comprise the propertied classes.

From Democratization to Authoritarian Resilience The failure of most Arab states to fully democratize during the so-called “third wave” of democratization raised certain problems in the democratization literature, as it seemed that while economic liberalization was occurring, democratization was not (Farsoun & Zacharia 1995; Korany, Brynen, & Noble 1995; Diamond 1997; Goodson & Radwan 1997).1 In this context, a new literature emerged that critiqued the focus on democratization and shifted the focus on the “resilience”, “persistence”, “learning” and “upgrading” of authoritarian regimes (Albrecht & Schlumberger 2004; Bellin 2004; Heydemann 2007). To break from the democratization literature, Bellin (2004: 141) argues that the “puzzle” of Arab states is not “why democracy has failed to consolidate in this region (failure would be expected) but rather why the vast majority of Middle Eastern and North Africa states have failed to initiate transition at all” (ibid.). She argues that the “robust coercive apparatus” of Arab states dissuades civil society actors from pushing for democratization. While there are movements for democratization in Arab societies, they are

100  Angela Joya routinely crushed by regimes and their coercive apparatuses. Thus, the “will and capacity of the state’s coercive apparatus to suppress democratic initiative have extinguished the possibility of transition” (Bellin 2004: 143). Albrecht and Schlumberger also explore the reasons for the durability of authoritarian rule in the region. Looking at “changes at the subsystemic level” within authoritarian regimes, they identify five core strategies employed by authoritarian regimes to implement “change for stability” at the subsystemic level in order to “foreclose the emergence of autonomous social forces” (Albrecht & Schlumberger 2004: 385–386, emphasis in original). In the Egyptian context, this focus on subsystemic changes gave rise to the use of network analysis to demonstrate the ways in which the Mubarak regime controlled the reform process and co-opted the Egyptian business elite by creating and manipulating “networks of privilege” (Heydemann 2004). In one of the more insightful network analyses of Egypt’s reform process, Sfakianakis (2004: 78) argues that liberalization “provided space for new networks to emerge in an institutional and social environment that had long sustained privileged ties between business and state”, creating a privileged group of “whales of the Nile” who used their access to the regime to benefit from liberalization, only to then became opponents of further liberalizing reform. The members of this new network, argues Sfakianakis, sought to “delay economic liberalization but also to prevent competition outside their ranks from prospective domestic competitors” (Sfakianakis 2004: 93). Other scholars examine how the political elite approached democratization in light of their concerns for political stability. Demmelhuber (2011: 146) argues that during the 1990s, the Egyptian elite “recognised the desirability of reforms, but were concerned that these reforms might ultimately undermine their power, their privileges and their political logic of authoritarianism”. In a similar vein, Wurzel (2009: 98–99) argues that structural reforms have been “designed and implemented in order to stabilize the authoritarian regime in the face of increasing economic and political problems”. In other words, political considerations took precedence over the proper implementation of the structural economic reforms needed to “lay the foundations necessary to make the national economy more competitive on the international scene” (Wurzel 2009: 99). The counterrevolutionary backlash against the popular mobilizations of the Arab Spring was interpreted as a vindication of the authoritarian resilience thesis. In a 2012 article, Bellin argues that despite having not been able to foresee the upheavals of 2011, the “trajectory of the Arab Spring confirms earlier analyses that the comportment of the coercive apparatus is pivotal to determining the durability of authoritarian regimes in the Arab world (and beyond)” (2012: 142, emphasis added). Heydemann and Leenders argue that “authoritarianism in the Middle East will survive this transformational moment” because the “Arab awakening” was experienced by both the protestors and the authoritarian regimes (Heydemann & Leenders 2013: 2). The latter observed the wave of change in the region and were “persuaded that their

The Case of Egypt  101 best bet lay in strategies of repression, and, in essence, in hunkering down and pursuing a range of measures to ride out uprisings which themselves seemed to confront diminishing probabilities of success” (Heydemann & Leenders 2011: 652). The “awakening” of the Arab regimes represents a process of “authoritarian learning”, where in the context of uprisings, authoritarian regimes have responded to demands of the public for change, yet these responses are seen as “strategies of survival” with little genuine desire for change. The concessions made by the regime are “more cosmetic than real”, intended to “mitigate the economic and social drivers of conflict” and “to divide and fragment nascent oppositions” (Ibid.: 3). This type of learning is reflective of the “flexibility and adaptive capacity that have served them so well over the course of their many decades in power”, suggesting that “authoritarianism will remain a prominent and formidable presence in the lives of millions of citizens” (ibid.). Thus, despite the vast upheavals that have shaken the foundations of the states and institutions of the region that have eroded the social contracts ­existing between elites and masses and that have transformed notions of ­citizenship, power and identity, scholars of authoritarianism remain ­focused on a predominantly top-down examination of the durability of authoritarianism. By doing so, the authoritarian paradigm adheres to a view of power as unfractured and consolidated and assigns too much of it to the regime – and often in the person of the leader – reminiscent of earlier, ­orientalist interpretations of the region. In this way, the authoritarian paradigm tends to “over-state the Arab state”, as Ayubi (1995) noted over two decades ago, and fails to account for the transformative impact of contingencies and ­contentious politics that are practiced by the lower classes on a daily basis. In this sense, the authoritarianism literature fails to appreciate the social changes that have occurred in the MENA region over the past few decades and their relationship to political processes and dynamics. What theorists of authoritarianism view as cosmetic changes may, in fact, be regime concessions resulting from pressures and struggles in a dynamic and contentious political environment. Without a thorough examination of the full range of social, economic and political reforms that have been enacted in the pre- and post-uprising period, theorists of authoritarianism tend to downplay the extent of social change within the Arab states and societies. More importantly, theorists of authoritarianism often overlook the qualitative institutional changes that have altered the relationship between state and citizen – even if those changes have resulted in the persistence or reinforcement of authoritarianism. Indeed, as will be discussed below, the changes that have occurred at the level of the Egyptian state and within Egyptian society are anything but “cosmetic”. Rather, the old authoritarian bargain has been eroded by neoliberalism, while the role of the Egyptian state has transformed from a paternalistic authoritarian state to an authoritarian state

102  Angela Joya primarily concerned with protecting the rights of property and facilitating the accumulation of capital. There is, however, another sense in which the authoritarian resilience literature fails to decisively break from the assumptions underpinning the earlier liberalization and democratization literature it criticizes. Like the democratization literature, there is an implicit assumption that economic liberalization is supposed to empower the growth of an independent, democratically oriented business class. The fact that in Egypt, capitalist development has occurred under the auspices of the authoritarian regime of the National Democratic Party of Hosni Mubarak contradicts the fundamental contours of what Ellen Wood (1991: 2–8) calls the “bourgeois paradigm” of capitalist development. For example, El Tarouty’s (2016: 56) study of businessmen, clientelism and authoritarianism in Egypt is intended to show how “different types of co-option of parliamentary businessmen prevented them from playing a democratizing role, and thus helped renew Mubarak’s authoritarianism”. In this way, the resilient authoritarianism thesis appears to be the opposite side of the same coin as the liberalization/democratization literature of the 1990s.

Analyzing Arab States It is a great irony that modern (primarily American) political science was relatively late in turning its attention to conceptualizing the state.2 Prior to the 1980s, one had to turn to the work of sociologists and anthropologists – within mainstream academia – for insightful attempts to conceptualize the state as a subject of academic study. In The Evolution of Political Society, the anthropologist Morton Fried defined the state as “the complex of institutions by means of which the power of society is organized on a basis superior to kinship” (Fried 1967: 229). The basic role of the state, he argued, was that it “maintains an order of stratification” (Ibid.: 235). In a more recent commentary incorporating Fried’s insights, Neal Wood depicts the state as the “organization and institutionalization of the social division between rulers and ruled” (Wood 2001: 21). What these definitions have in common is an insistence on the need to anchor the state, as an ensemble of complex political institutions, within a broader social context characterized by relations of exploitation, hierarchy and domination. It is from this perspective that the contemporary Arab state needs to be analyzed. Historically, the relevant context for analyzing the contemporary Arab state is the gradual integration of Arab societies into the global capitalist economy from the immediate post-war period to the present day. During the 1950s and 1960s, post-colonial Arab states introduced various developmental projects associated with nation-building, ranging from economic nationalism (Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States) to Arab socialism (Egypt, Syria, Iraq). Despite these differences and the persistence of tribal identities, Arab societies had developed a shared class structure, even those purporting to

The Case of Egypt  103 have implemented a form of Arab socialism intended as an alternative to Western forms of capitalism.3 Class, in this sense, is conceived as a historically constituted social relationship between those who either own or control resources and the means of production and those who must labor for a living.4 In this sense, it is a relation of surplus extraction between a class of direct producers and a class of appropriators. At the same time, countries of the Global South, including those of the MENA region, are characterized by a constellation of social classes different from those of contemporary Western societies. For example, Arab societies are characterized by a greater role for the peasantry,5 for small independent producers and for those working in informal urban labor markets (Alavi & Shanin 1982; Shanin 1972; Bernstein 2010). In this way, their class composition tends to differ significantly from the so-called advanced capitalist economies of the West. As the organization and institutionalization of the social division between rulers and ruled, the state is a crucial actor in a multifaceted conflict between the class of appropriators and the class (or classes) of producers and between rival “fractions” of the appropriating class – in this case, the capitalist class. In this way, class analysis allows us to shift the focus of analysis to the dynamic social relations among social classes in the context of capital accumulation and the contestation of accumulation strategies, while treating the state as a contested site of power among social classes and class fractions. As such, this analysis sees class and state as co-constitutive while civil society is directly implicated in the class struggle. In the context of capitalism, the relationship between appropriators and producers is mediated through historically specific strategies of capital accumulation. In the contemporary neoliberal period, the producing classes (workers and peasants) of the MENA region are increasingly subject to accumulation strategies entailing coercive and sometimes violent processes of dispossession in the process of creating new capitalist markets.6 This “accumulation by dispossession” releases labor, land, resources, state assets and services from communal regulation and into the sphere of the market where “[o]veraccumulated capital can seize hold of such assets and immediately turn them to profitable use” (Harvey 2003: 149). As such, these assets “become commodified”, thereby “opening up … new territories to capitalist development and to capitalist forms of market behavior” (2003: 156). Notable instances of accumulation by dispossession include the mass privatization of state industries in the socialist bloc after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in China after its embrace of liberalization in the late 1970s. The crisis-ridden nationalist regimes of the Global South, such as Egypt, Syria, India, Mexico, and Argentina also underwent significant processes of accumulation by dispossession under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-administered structural adjustment programs (SAPs) between the late 1970s and the early 2000s. In many instances, these forms of accumulation resulted in widespread land-grabbing by global multinational

104  Angela Joya corporations (MNCs) with the help of corrupt and authoritarian regimes. Accumulation by dispossession in the MENA region is reminiscent, in this regard, of what Marx (1976: 874–875) referred to as “[s]o-called primitive accumulation, … the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production”. This process of accumulation by dispossession entails the constant presence of the state in economic life. As Stephen Gill (1992) points out, neoliberalism is characterized by a project of disciplinary neoliberalism, which is aimed at changing national constitutions, domestic labor laws and property laws in order to lock in neoliberal reforms and make them difficult to reverse. At the domestic level, this has resulted in states shifting from Keynesian forms of market redistribution to neoliberal forms of market discipline. In the case of countries like Egypt, this requires the wholesale transformation of the state and the development of practices of authoritarian neoliberalism. At the global level, the IMF, the World Bank and now the WTO serve to harmonize national policies and enforce a politics of neoliberal convergence through the imposition of SAPs. As a result, neoliberalism has permeated all spheres of social life and has imposed “a specific form of social and economic regulation based on the prominence of finance, international elite integration, subordination of the poor in every country and universal compliance with US interests” (Saad-Filho & Johnston 2005: 4). In short, the expansion of the neoliberal project is paramount to generalizing the imperatives of the capitalist market and in the process creating a new set of rules and laws that sanction the newly created power of capital through increasingly disciplinary states. Over the course of the 1990s and 2000s, workers and peasants in the Middle East – and Egypt in particular – have been subjected to accumulation strategies that have either intensified their precariousness or have resulted in outright dispossession. A wave of privatizations and labor market reforms have weakened or eliminated the forms of employment protection, wage-setting mechanisms and profit-sharing arrangements workers gained over the course of the post-war period. Far from resolving the problems of unemployment and labor market segmentation in the Arab world, neoliberal reforms have exacerbated the problems of precariousness by introducing aspects of informality into the formal labor markets. In the countryside, tenure reforms have either exposed peasants and tenant farmers to rising market-based rents or have resulted in their eviction from lands farmed for generations, as customary tenures are no longer recognized by the state. In contrast to the dominant narratives of the authoritarian resilience literature, however, this process of dispossession has not gone unchallenged by the laboring classes. Indeed, the period of liberalization has coincided with the growth of a contentious politics in the industrial centers and in the countryside. Figures 4.1 and 4.2 both show the growing incidents of class-based struggle and violence in the form of strikes and land-related violence during the era of liberalization. In terms of industrial unrest, Egypt witnessed

The Case of Egypt  105 significant outbursts of strike activity in the latter half of the 1990s and early 2000s, as state-owned enterprises were privatized and labor markets were liberalized. While the Egyptian state ceased to collect data on strike activity from 2004 onward, Beinin (2009a: 449) estimates that between 1998 and 2008, approximately two million workers participated in 2,623 factory occupations, demonstrations and protests. This growth of a militant workers movement “constitutes the largest and most sustained social movement in Egypt since the campaign to oust the British occupiers following the end of World War II” (Beinin 2009a: 449). In the countryside, an upsurge of violent protest related to the growing wave of evictions in the aftermath of the agrarian reforms of 1997 peaked just prior to the Arab Uprisings of 2011. In both instances, rising discontent on the part of workers and peasants – in the forms of strikes and land-related violence – was often met with increasing state repression (Beinin 2001; 2009a; 2009b; 2016; Bush 2002; 2008; 2011). From this perspective, there is no reason to suppose that economic liberalization will result in democratization or the inverse that the persistence of authoritarianism is due to the distortion of liberalizing reforms. Rather, the dominant appropriating classes will continue to reinforce the authoritarian aspects of the Arab state as it continues to meet resistance to neoliberalism from below. None of this is to say that the dominant class in the Arab world is united to the same degree as is the dominant class in Western capitalist democracies. When examining the development of capitalism in the MENA region, we see greater disunity and fractiousness amongst the propertied classes. This fractiousness results in greater instances of intra-class conflict amongst competing fractions of capital. The reform process of the 1990s and 2000s

Days not worked (thousands)

25000 20000 15000 10000 5000 0

Figure 4.1  Days not worked due to strikes and lockouts by economic activity. Source: ILOSTAT (2018a).

106  Angela Joya 1800 1600 1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0

1997 1998 1999 2000

2001 2002 2003

2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

2010

Deaths

100

20

81

34

58

34

30

49

92

192

Injuries

1000

289

445

195

302

100

215

328

257

1066 1451

297

Arrests

1400

267

401

318

666

225

322

429

465

1333

1687

Figure 4.2  Land-Based Violence in Egypt, 1997–2010. Source: Land Center for Human Rights, Sons of the Soil Land Center (Bush, 2011).

exacerbated this fractiousness, ultimately resulting in the political conflict of the immediate post-2011 period. Political economists focusing on the capitalist West have identified fractions of the dominant class representing different sectoral interests in the economy, usually financial, commercial or manufacturing interests within the totality of a capitalist economy. Van der Pijl (1989: 11) identifies a class fraction as a group “unified around a common economic and social function in the process of capital accumulation and sharing particular ideological propensities organically related to those functions”. It is through organizing over a long period that a certain fraction gains dominance over others and plays a leading role in devising accumulation strategies at the level of the state. While corporate elite networks facilitate the dominance of one fraction over other fractions of the capitalist class, “[a]ny formulation of the general capitalist interest is, however, always formulated from the perspective of what is only a section or “fraction” of total capital, a fraction that has temporarily achieved a leading position within the capitalist class” (Apeldoorn 2002: 26). Capital operating at a national scale will have a different interest than capital operating transnationally and industrial capital may have diverging interests from those of finance capital. In the case of the Global South, export-oriented capital has a different interest from that of capital that is oriented toward the domestic market. Prior to the internationalization of capital, domestically oriented industrial capital was central to the

The Case of Egypt  107 development strategies of states. Public sector managers played a crucial role in carrying out development strategies and catered to the needs of the domestic population. The domestically oriented industrial fraction of capital was instrumental in guiding state policy in this phase. Under the hegemony of finance capital in the 1980s, economies underwent extensive processes of liberalization and statist development strategies were abandoned in favor of market-led, export-oriented development strategies. While finance capital favors policies that reduce barriers to export markets, industrial, domestically oriented capital may feel threatened by the relaxation of trade barriers. This is where tensions can develop between the different fractions of capital. It is possible for economic reforms that benefit transnational financial capital to weaken domestically oriented fractions of industrial capital. However, it is also possible for industrial capital, oriented toward the domestic market, to develop strategies of survival by establishing networks with finance capital. The strength of a hegemonic fraction of capital is dependent upon the success of its dominant accumulation strategy. If transnational finance experiences a crisis, a window may open for a different fraction of capital to step up and determine a new strategy for accumulation, and under the hegemony of a new fraction of capital, accumulation strategies might be reformulated to reduce social tensions. For instance, the Egyptian military – as a nationally based institution tasked with the security of the nation as well as an economic actor – has played an important role as a fraction of national capital in Egypt’s postcolonial history. The most important conjuncture in the development of the military’s expanding role in the economy was in the 1980s, when Egypt was integrated into the global economy. Over the course of the 1980s, the military conducted its economic activities through a number of key organizations: the Ministries of Defense (MoD) and Military Production (MoMP); the Arab Organization for Industrialization (AOI); the National Service Projects Organization (NSPO); and the Armed Forces Land Projects Agency (AFLPA). These organizations have expanded the reach of the military into all areas of the economy, including land development and agriculture, port construction and management, marine transportation, infrastructure, industrial production and research and development. Within these organizations, the military has engaged in joint ventures with domestic, regional and international capital, including the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, Japan, Brazil, Spain, the UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, China and Turkey. The military justified its expansion into the civilian economy in terms of achieving economic self-sufficiency, but also in nationalist-populist terms of ensuring the welfare of the lower classes through the provision of goods and infrastructure below market prices. Under Defense Minister Field Marshal Abu Ghazala, the military “expanded services for the around seventy thousand workers and employees in Abu Za’bal, Shubra, Helwan, and Maadi, including housing, health care, transportation, and day care

108  Angela Joya for children of female employees” (Abul-Magd 2017: 101). This type of economic activity represents a kind of conservative paternalism reminiscent of the corporatist or Bismarkian welfare states of Continental Europe (Gøsta Esping-­Andersen 1990). Such paternalism intends to provide a degree of social protection that ensures social order and solidifies the authority of the military as a national institution. The expansion of the army’s role in the domestic economy went hand in hand with its expansion in the political economy of the MENA region and the global economy. This period also tested the army’s power when it faced competition by the newly emerging neoliberal class fraction around Mubarak. This expansion of the military’s economic and political power reflects the evolution of the military as a fraction of the ruling class. With the historical legacy of one of the most significant Arab armies, the Egyptian military has experienced a process of fundamental socio-economic transformation that has enabled it to accumulate power vis-à-vis other fractions of the dominant class. The transnational, financialized fraction of capital, referred to as neoliberals, is “composed of a tiny grande bourgeoisie intimately integrated into Western capital”, whose interests and “dynamism rests essentially on the (rapid) accumulation of capital through service activity rather than through the exploitation of land or labor” (Farsoun 1997: 25). Organizationally, this fraction of capital is represented by a number of private business organizations that emerged outside of the official state-dominated Federation of Egyptian Industry (FEI) and the Federation of Egyptian Chambers of Commerce (FECC). The most important indigenous business association emerging out of the private sector is the Egyptian Businessmen’s Association (EBA), which was formed in 1982 with the financial support of the Egyptian-American Businessmen’s committee. Over half of its membership is clustered around construction, consulting and advertising and tourism and transportation, reflecting the fact that “most of the investments of Egyptian businessmen are in consumer rather than productive sectors of the economy” (Fahmy 2002: 170). Finally, Islamist capital is organized in the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has financial links to states in the Persian Gulf, Qatar in particular. The socio-economic profile of the Brotherhood as a class fraction is rather complex. On the one hand, the traditional leadership comes from the ranks of the large landowning class that was threatened by Nasser. On the other hand, it also enjoys support amongst private sector actors, including traders, and small and mid-sized manufacturers. By 1980, eight out of the 18 families who dominated Egypt’s private sector belonged to the Brotherhood, and their businesses constituted approximately 40 percent of private sector enterprises. The growth of this Islamist fraction of capital was facilitated by the creation of Islamic investment companies that were linked to the nouveau riche rather than to the older, elitist Brotherhood. In this sense, it does not fit neatly into the typology of class fractions elaborated above;

The Case of Egypt  109 rather, it seems to straddle both the domestic and transnational and the productive and financial categories. Applying a theory of class fractions to the political economy of the Middle East requires some caution, for the main fractions identified here are not clearly defined in simple sectoral terms, either money capital versus productive capital or manufacturing versus agriculture, etc. While it is true that certain fractions have a more dominant presence in particular sectors of the economy – the Military in manufacturing, the neoliberals in real estate and the Islamists in retail – the lines between these sectors have become increasingly blurred as the Military builds luxury housing and the Islamists engage in manufacturing. Increasingly, the boundaries of class fractions in Egypt – and the Arab World, for that matter – are defined less by sectoral differences than by institutional, organizational and ideological differences that are the product of politics. This is particularly true of the military and the Muslim Brothers. In the case of the military, its institutional identity as the most significant national institution and its historical role in the creation of the developmentalist state plays an important part in its coherence as a class fraction. In the case of the Muslim Brothers, it is their commitment – as a transnational organization to the creation of an Islamic economy, dominated by Islamic financial institutions that act as mediators between capitals – that provides the cohesion that keeps them together and pits them against other class fractions. What this means is that the basis of these various class fractions is quite precarious and prone to contestation and change. How long these politically constituted boundaries of Egypt’s class fractions persist in the context of continuing neoliberalization is, therefore, an open question.

Remaking the Arab State The ultimate goal of the competition between various fractions of capital is control of the state. Within the Marxist tradition, the state “is never a neutral or passive mediator” (Therborn, 1978: 181), but rather plays a central role in the reproduction of social relations and is deeply implicated in the relations of exploitation, domination and rule.7 By the end of the 1970s, the Marxian position posited the relative autonomy of the state from capital as a means of acknowledging the structural dependence of the state on capital while recognizing the contested nature of the state apparatus itself (Gosta Esping-­Andersen 1976). This relative autonomy position came at a time when a reinvigorated Weberian position sought to reassert the autonomy of the state vis-à-vis capital, in a context defined by the increasing ­assertiveness – and political success – of capitalist business associations (Nordlinger 1982; ­Evans, Rueschemeyer & Skocpol 1985).8 Most of these debates on the state take the institutionally developed capitalist states of the West as a starting point.9 However, the states of the Global South – and the Middle East in particular – are the product of Western

110  Angela Joya colonialism and have experienced processes of formation different to the states of Europe.10 As the arbitrary product of colonial powers, the territorial integrity of such states was contested by competing centers of power in the post-independence period. The seizure of state power by revolutionary nationalist movements in Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Syria and Iraq introduced ambitious projects of nationalist economic development, industrialization and political modernization. While the drive toward modernization and industrialization took the form of statist authoritarianism, the political institutions and administrative capacities of the Middle Eastern state remained weak and underdeveloped, as the old colonial apparatuses were abolished, and post-colonial elites struggled to consolidate their new institutions. In contrast to the charges of oriental despotism leveled at post-colonial Middle Eastern states by orientalist scholars (Wittfogel 1959), this authoritarian tendency was a symptom of the institutional weakness of Middle Eastern states rather than an indication of their strength (Migdal 1988; Ayubi 1995; Owen 2004). In fact, the European notion of oriental despotism – applied in broadbrush fashion to almost all states of the East – is rooted in the propensity of authoritarian rulers to redistribute the surplus to the popular classes to maintain social order and preserve traditional socio-economic hierarchies. These authoritarian legacies led liberal critics to lament the inability or unwillingness of Middle Eastern states to respect the rule of law and effectively enforce the rights of private property.11 Chaudhry (1994: 3) argues that states in the Global South lack the administrative capacities to “regulate, define, and enforce property rights” and to “dispense law”. Despite their strong appearance, their capacity to tax is “strictly circumscribed”. This becomes a problem because in order to “successfully make the “transition” to a market economy, these capacities become absolutely necessary”. In a similar vein, De Soto (2001: 33) argues that states cannot effectively act on behalf of capital in the absence of formal property rights and proper legal institutions. It is the tendency of authoritarian states to arbitrarily redistribute the wealth of society and violate the rights of private property that is the primary obstacle to capitalist development, not authoritarianism per se. We now see why the transformation of the Arab state requires external support. As neoliberal globalization began to take hold in the MENA region during the 1980s and the 1990s through a series of SAPs implemented in response to the crisis of Arab statism in the mid-1980s, International Financial Institutions (IFIs) charged with global economic governance – like the World Bank and the IMF – advocated a new role for the state. The World Bank outlines this new role in detail in its 1997 World Development Report called The State in a Changing World, in which it advocated a shift from the planned economies of the era of “Third Worldism” to the free markets of the post-Cold War period (World Bank 1997). This new role required states to provide infrastructure for private investors, to strengthen judicial institutions with the goal of enforcing the rights of private property, to promote

The Case of Egypt  111 business-friendly environments for the growth of private firms, to allow the unrestricted repatriation of profits and to substantially open up the economy to the private sector. This new role was only new, however, in cases where post-colonial states had engaged in paternalistic forms of statist economic development and social protection, such as in many Middle Eastern countries. The capitalist democracies of the West had long institutionalized property-based legal regimes and have a long record of enabling private sector development. In the MENA region, securing the absolute right of private property required a different kind of interventionist state that could legislate and act on behalf of capital rather than in the interest of Arab socialism or economic nationalism. In short, the World Bank was advocating the creation of institutionally robust capitalist states in parts of the Global South where statist forms of industrialization once dominated. For the World Bank, the ideal state is one that actively reproduces capitalist social relations by ensuring that the short-term interests of capitalists do not undermine the system of capital accumulation. The report points out that while “[s]tate dominated development has failed… so will stateless development”. Against the strictures of classical liberalism, the World Bank now recognizes that “[d]evelopment without an effective state is impossible” (World Bank 1997: 25). The Bank is advocating a larger role for the state in protecting and correcting markets (Panitch 1998: 15). It could also be said that the Bank is advocating a larger role for the state in creating markets in the first place. The state accomplishes this developmental role by maintaining a degree of relative autonomy from capitalists and their particularistic interests. The state requires the legal, bureaucratic and coercive apparatuses that can guarantee the continuation of the capitalist system regardless of who or what party is in power. Only by doing so will Middle Eastern states establish the “politically organized and legally defined stability, regularity and predictability in its social arrangements” that capitalism requires (Wood, 2002: 178). In Egypt, this process of state transformation accelerated under the government of Ahmed Nazif (2004–2011), the so-called “government of businessmen”, given its dominance by businessmen and its ideological commitment to neoliberal economic reform. A new Ministry of Investment was established through which much of the important neoliberal reforms were conducted. The creation of this new ministry – along with the increased economic power of the Prime Minister12 – constituted a significant centralization of economic authority, as it supervised the Capital Market Authority, the Mortgage Finance Authority, the Egyptian Insurance Supervisory Authority, the privatization program, the General Authority for Investment and Free Zones (GAFI) and the Special Economic Zone Authority.13 One of the government’s main pieces of legislation during this period was the Investment Guarantees and Incentives Law, which abolished discrimination between foreign and domestic investors, further liberalized trade through

112  Angela Joya the removal of customs tariffs and other import restrictions and opened up infrastructure projects, real estate and utilities to private, foreign investment. In the same period, the government introduced the Protection of Competition and Prevention of Monopolistic Practices Law to sanction uncompetitive practices, break up trusts and prevent unfair takeovers of newly privatized public sector enterprises.14 The enforcement of competition policy became the jurisdiction of the newly established Egyptian Competition Authority run by a board of directors comprised of representatives from other government ministries, the judiciary, academia and the private sector. The adoption of competition policy signifies an important transformation of the Egyptian state away from a dirigiste state that protects the public sector from market forces to a “competition state” (Cerny 1997) that seeks to enforce market discipline on economic actors. Finally, the Nazif government also implemented reforms intended to increase the competitiveness of the economy, enforce contracts and protect private property. A commercial court designed to resolve business disputes more quickly was established. Alongside this investor conciliation committee, the government re-activated and gave legislative backing to the 1998 investor complaints committee. A 2005 UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report noted the “striking feature” of the Nazif government’s “accessibility and its willingness to listen to and act upon concerns raised by investors” (UNCTAD 2005:6) in comparison to its predecessors. Such reforms sought to transform the state into an “enabler of economy activity, guaranteeing competition, providing a stable macro environment, and protecting the rights of different parties” (World Trade Organization 2005: 5). These transformations corresponded to most of the tenets of neoliberal state transformation espoused by the proponents of liberalization. For them, the task of a peripheral capitalist state is to overcome conflicts among elites and to institutionalize “a culture of the market” (Chaudhry 1994: 7). The former task requires the creation of an “alternative institutional mechanisms for resolving conflicts and the revitalization, creation, or legalization of corporate groups in civil society” (ibid.: 7). The latter task requires promoting and legitimizing self-interest as the motivating factor behind economic activity. De Soto (2001: 35) argues that the creation of capitalist property relations is “nothing short of a revolutionary process” as it is not merely providing deeds of ownership, but rather a process of linking property and social relations together in a web of market interdependence. Thus the final prerequisite entails the redefinition of legal rights of individuals, which would replace the pre-capitalist, communitarian notions of rights. These changes entail struggles over land, resources and space and involve local communities, workers, peasants and the unemployed against more powerful, organized groups of landlords and capitalists. As a result, this has been perhaps the most important and most contentious aspect of the transition to a market economy.

The Case of Egypt  113

Capitalism, Authoritarianism and Revolt To insist on the compatibility of neoliberal capitalism and authoritarianism is not to suggest that the authoritarian state remains a monolithic and all-powerful entity looming over a passive subject population. Despite the tendency of scholars of authoritarianism to view the region as one frozen in time and space, with passivity becoming tautological to an Arab characteristic, the Middle East and contemporary Egypt in particular remains a highly contentious political space as the events of 2011 demonstrate. The uprisings in Tahrir Square did not erupt out of nothing. Resistance to the kind of accumulation by dispossession discussed here was building over the course of the 1990s and 2000s. The persistence of authoritarianism in the service of neoliberalism contributed to the “contentious politics” that initiated the uprisings (Lynch 2014; Joya 2011; Gerges 2015). This contentious politics occupies a broad spectrum of resistance, including strikes, sit-ins, protests and violent confrontations with security forces.15 In the Egyptian context, the struggle of workers is compounded by the fact that they are struggling against their employers, the regime and the leadership of the official trade union movement, which over time has become integrated into the state apparatus. Thus the resistance of workers includes the struggle to form independent working-class organizations such as free trade unions. The resistance of the small producers of rural Egypt tends to be more disorganized, spontaneous and dispersed. As the cooperatives of the Nasserist era became integrated into the neoliberal project of agrarian transformation, the collective locus of rural life underwent a dramatic transformation. No longer vehicles of peasant organization against the depredations of landlords, the cooperatives became another institution of authoritarian neoliberalism, compelling the small producers of rural Egypt to voice their dissent in new and less organized ways as they faced the forces of dispossession. In the urban context, Asef Bayat writes about the “nonmovements” that have emerged to help shape the contours of Arab society. Nonmovements: are the shared contentious practices of a large number of fragmented people whose similar but disconnected claims produce important social change in their own lives and society at large, even though such practices are rarely guided by an ideology, recognizable leadership, or organization (Bayat 2017: 106)

Conclusion In this chapter, I argued that since the 1990s, the state in Egypt has undergone a radical transformation reflected in a new balance of power among social classes. These changes have exposed the Arab state to the pressures

114  Angela Joya and dictates of global financial institutions, which have played an important role in determining the content of social and economic policy. The scope of these changes and the dislocations that took place in their wake resulted in the popular uprisings across the MENA that were deeply rooted in the violent, class-based processes of capital accumulation by dispossession that subjected workers and peasants to intensified relations of exploitation. Far from resulting in the anticipated democratization foretold by liberal scholars, the old authoritarianism was transformed into a new, neoliberal authoritarianism, characterized by the more rigorous enforcement of the rights of private property at the expense of the traditional social order, and the implementation of other mechanisms designed to enforce market discipline. In light of these radical changes, it is important that we revisit the frameworks we use to understand the nature of states and societies in the region.

Notes 1 I say fully democratize due to the existence of a complex spectrum of authoritarianism in the MENA region. Certain features of democracy, such as “competitive” elections, can coexist with authoritarianism. For example, Diamond (2002) differentiates between closed authoritarian systems, such as Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and electoral authoritarianism, exhibited by countries like Egypt, Morocco and Jordan. Lust-Okar (2006) argues that in authoritarian regimes, electoral competition occurs over patronage, not policy. 2 For an insightful overview, see Nelson (2006, Chapter 1). 3 The groundwork for such class analysis in the scholarship on the MENA was laid by Hanna Batatu (1978, 1999) in his comprehensive studies of the evolution of the class structures of Syrian and Iraqi society throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beinin’s and Lockman’s work has provided a wealth of information on the development of organized labor in the Middle East, with a particular emphasis on the tensions between state dominated trade union confederations and militant rank-and-file unionists that helps to dispel the myths of a passive Arab working class (Beinin & Lockman, 1987; Beinin, 2001, 2016). 4 For an insightful conceptual discussion of class as an historical process and relations, see (Wood 1995) Chapter 3. 5 Peasants, in this sense, include small tenant farmers engaged in subsistence farming and paying cash rents to a landlord. 6 This process is reminiscent of what Marx termed “so-called primitive accumulation” and identified with the enclosure movement in early modern England. 7 Questions regarding the specific relationship between the state and the capitalist class resulted in the so-called “state debate” of the 1970s. The debate examined whether the state’s role in the reproduction of capitalist social relations was the result of the “instrumentalist” relationship between the capitalist class and the state elite or the structural dependence of the state upon the processes of capital accumulation (Miliband 1969, 1970, 1973; Poulantzas 1969, 1973, 1976). 8 For two substantive critiques of the statist approach, see Cammack (1989, 1990). For a discussion of the employers” offensive of the 1980s, see Hyman and Elger (1981) and Pontusson and Swenson (1996). 9 In particular, Weberian approaches emphasize the importance of bureaucratic rationality and administrative capacity. The administrative and institutional development of these states date back to the early modern period and continued throughout the 19th century (Anderson 1974; Mooers 1991; Wood 1991). This process of bureaucratic and administrative development – in particular,

The Case of Egypt  115

10 11 12 13 14 15

the development of systems of public finance, public administration and judicial ­oversight – accelerated as a result of the two world wars (Halperin 2004). For a provocative treatment of the subject that treats European states as equally subject to institutional underdevelopment and colonial interference, see Halperin (1997). Such critiques can be traced all the way back to James Harrington’s 17th century critique of the Ottoman state, which he characterized as an “empire of men” rather than an “empire of laws”. See Harrington (1992: 20). In 2005, Mubarak introduced a presidential decree that transferred decision-­ making power to the Prime Minister over the approval of investment projects. GAFI was created by Law 65/1975 and was called the General Authority for Investment of Arab Funds and the Free Zones. With the exception of public utilities. While Lynch’s book contains one chapter on labor movements in the Middle East, neither his nor Gerges” study focuses on the struggles between tenant farmers and landlords in the context of agrarian transformation, despite the fact that Tarrow’s (2011) work, from which the current wave of contentious politics is derived, discusses the phenomenon of the spontaneous peasant-based land occupation.

References Abul-Magd, Zeinab (2017). Militarizing the Nation: The Army, Business, and Revolution in Egypt, New York: Columbia University Press. Alavi, Hamza and Teodor Shanin (1982). Introduction to the Sociology of “Developing Societies”, New York: MacMillan. Albrecht, Holger and Oliver Schlumberger (2004). ““Waiting for Godot”: Regime Change without Democratization in the Middle East.” International Political Science Review, Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 371–392. Anderson, Bennedict (1974). Lineages of the Absolutist State, London, UK: Verso. Ayubi, Nazih (1995). Over-Stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East, London, UK: I.B. Tauris. Batatu, Hanna (1978). The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, Baʻthists, and Free Officers, Princeton: Princeton University Press. ——— (1999). Syria’s Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bayat, Asef (2017). Revolution Without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Beinin, Joel (2001). Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2009a). “Neo-liberal Structural Adjustment, Political Demobilization, and Neoauthoritarianism in Egypt.” In Laura Guazzone and Daniella Pioppe, eds. The Arab State and Neo-Liberal Globalization: The Restructuring of State Power in the Middle East. Ithaca, NY: Ithaca Press, pp. 19–46. ——— (2009b) “‘Workers” Protest in Egypt: Neo-Liberalism and Class Struggle in 21st Century.” Social Movement Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 449–454. ——— (2016). Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in ­Tunisia and Egypt, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. ——— and Zachary Lockman (1987). Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

116  Angela Joya Bellin, Eva (2004). “The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective.” Comparative Politics, Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 139–157. ——— (2012). “Reconsidering the Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Lessons from the Arab Spring.” Comparative Politics, Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 127–149. Bernstein, Henry (2010). Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change, West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press. Bush, Ray, ed. (2002). Counter-Revolution in Egypt’s Countryside: Land and Farmers in the Era of Economic Reform, London, UK: Zed Press. ——— (2008). “When “Enough” Is Not Enough: Resistance During Accumulation by Dispossession.” In Nicholas Hopkins, ed. Political and Social Protest in Egypt: Cairo Papers, Vol. 29. Cairo, Egypt: American University in Cairo Press, pp. 3–31. ——— (2011). “Coalitions for Dispossession and Networks of Resistance? Land, Politics and Agrarian Reform in Egypt.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 391–405. Cammack, Paul (1989). “Bringing the State Back in?” British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 261–290. ——— (1990). “Statism, New Institutionalism, and Marxism.” Socialist Register: The Retreat of the Intellectuals, No.26. Available at http://socialistregister.com/ index.php/srv/article/download/5578. Cerny: Philip G. (1997). “Paradoxes of the Competition State: The Dynamics of Political Globalization.” Government and Opposition, Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 251–274. Chaudhry, Kiren Aziz (1994). “Economic Liberalization and the Lineages of the Rentier State.” Comparative Politics, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 1–25. De Soto, Hernando (2001). “Dead Capital and the Poor.” SAIS Review, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 13–43. Demmelhuber, Thomas (2011). “Economic Reform and Authoritarianism in Egypt: Politics, Power and Patronage.” In Jane Harrigan and Hamed El-Said, eds. Globalisation, Democratisation and Radicalisation in the Arab World. London, UK: Palgrave McMillan, pp. 145–161. El Tarouty, Safinaz (2016). Businessmen, Clientelism, and Authoritarianism in Egypt, New York: Palgrave McMillan. Esping-Andersen, Gosta (1976). “Modes of Class Struggle and the Capitalist State.” Kapitalistate, Vol. 4, No. 5, pp. 186–220. ——— (1990) The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Evans, Peter B., Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, eds. (1985). Bringing the State Back in: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Fahmy, Ninette (2002). The Politics of Egypt: State-Society Relationship, London, UK: Routledge. Farsoun, Samih K. (1997). “Class Structure and Social Change in the Arab World.” In Nicholas S. Hopkins and Saad Eddin Ibrahim, eds. Arab Society: Class, Gender, Power, and Development. Cairo, Egypt: American University in Cairo Press, pp. 11–28. ——— and Zacharia Christina (1995). “Class, Economic Change, and Political Liberalization in the Arab World.” In Rex Brynen, Bahgat Korany and Paul Noble, eds. Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, pp. 261–282.

The Case of Egypt  117 Fried, Morton H. (1967). The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology, New York, NY: Random House. ——— (2015). Contentious Politics in the Middle East: Popular Resistance and Marginalized Activism Beyond the Arab Uprisings, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Gill, Stephen (1992). “The Emerging World Order and European Change.” Socialist Register, Vol. 28. Available at https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/ view/5613. Goodson, Larry and Radwan Soha (1997). “Democratization in Egypt in the 1990s: Stagnant, or Merely Stalled?” Arab Studies Quarterly, Vol. 19, pp. 1–21. Government of Egypt (2005). Trade Policy Review (World Trade Organization Trade Policy Review Body), Genève, CH: World Trade Organization. Halperin, Sandra (1997). In the Mirror of the Third World: Capitalist Development in Modern Europe, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ——— (2004). War and Social Change in Modern Europe: The Great Transformation Revisited, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Harrington, James (1992). Harrington: “The Commonwealth of Oceana” and “A System of Politics”, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Harvey, David (2003). The New Imperialism, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Heydemann, Steven (2004). Networks of Privilege in the Middle East: The Politics of Economic Reform Revisited, New York, NY: Palgrave McMillan. ——— (2007). Upgrading Authoritarianism in the Arab World, Washington, DC: Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. ——— and Reinoud Leenders (2011). “Authoritarian Learning and Authoritarian Resilience: Regime Responses to the “Arab Awakening”.” Globalizations, Vol. 8, No. 5 pp. 647–653. ——— (2013). “Authoritarian Governance in Syria and Iran: Challenged, Reconfiguring and Resilient.” In Steven Heydemann and Reinoud Leenders, eds. Middle East Authoritarianisms: Governance, Contestation and regime Resilience in Syria and Iran. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 1–34. Hyman, Rirchard and Tony Elger (1981). “Job Controls, the Employers” Offensive and Alternative Strategies.” Capital and Class, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 115–149. ILOSTAT (2018). Days Not Worked Due to Strikes and Lockouts by Economic Activity. International Labor Organization. Available at https://www.ilo.org/ilostat. Joya, Angela (2011). “The Egyptian Revolution: Crisis of Neoliberalism and the ­Potential for Democratic Politics.” Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 38, No. 129, pp. 367–386. Korany, Bahgat, Rex Brynen and Paul Noble (1995). Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Lockman, Zachary (2004). Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lust-Okar, Ellen (2006). “Elections under Authoritarianism: Preliminary Lessons from Jordan.” Democratization, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 456–471. Lynch, Marc (2014). The Arab Uprisings Explained: New Contentious Politics in the Middle East, New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Marx, Karl (1976). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, New York, NY: Penguin Books Limited. Migdal, Joel (1988). Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Miliband, Ralph (1969). The State in Capitalist Society, London, UK: Merlin Press.

118  Angela Joya ——— (1970). “The Capitalist State-Reply to Nicos Poulantzas.” New Left Review, No. 59. Available at https://newleftreview.org/issues/i59/articles/ralph-miliband-­ the-capitalist-state-reply-to-n-poulantzas.pdf. ——— (1973). “Poulantzas and the Capitalist State.” New Left Review, No. 82. Available at https://newleftreview.org/issues/i82/articles/ralph-miliband-poulantzasand-the-capitalist-state. Mooers, Colin (1991). The Making of Bourgeois Europe: Absolutism, Revolution, and the Rise of Capitalism in England, France, and Germany, London, UK: Verso. Nelson, Brian (2006). The Making of the Modern State: A Theoretical Evolution, London, UK: Springer. Nordlinger, Eric A. (1982). On the Autonomy of the Democratic State, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Owen, Roger (2004). State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East, London, UK: Routledge. Panitch, Leo (1998). “‘The State in a Changing World:” Social-Democratizing Global Capitalism?” Monthly Review, Vol. 50, No. 5, pp. 11–22. Pontusson, Jonas and Peter Swenson (1996). “Labor Markets, Production Strategies, and Wage Bargaining Institutions: The Swedish Employer Offensive in Comparative Perspective.” Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 223–250. Poulantzas, Nicos (1969). “The Problem of the Capitalist State.” New Left Review, No. 58, Nov./Dec., pp. 67–78. https://newleftreview.org/issues/i58/articles/ nicos-poulantzas-the-problem-of-the-capitalist-state ——— (1973). Political Power and Social Classes (T. O’Hagan, Trans.). London, UK: NLB. ——— (1976). “The Capitalist State: A Reply to Miliband and Laclau.” New Left Review, No. 95, pp. 63–83. https://newleftreview.org/issues/i95/articles/ nicos-poulantzas-the-capitalist-state-a-reply-to-miliband-and-laclau Saad-Filho, Alfredo and Deborah Johnston (2005). Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader, London, UK: Pluto Press. Sfakianakis, John (2004). “The Whales of the Nile: Networks, Businessmen, and Bureaucrats During the Era of Privatization in Egypt.” In Steve Heydemann, ed. Networks of Privilege in the Middle East: The Politics of Economic Reform Revisited. London, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 77–100. Shanin, Teodor (1972). The Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society: Russia 1910–1925, Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Tarrow, Sidney (2011). Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Therborn, Göran (1978). What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules? State Apparatuses and State Power Under Feudalism, Capitalism and Socialism, New York, NY: Schocken Books. UNCTAD (2005). Report on the Implementation of the Investment Policy Review: Egypt, Geneva, Switzerland: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. van Apeldoorn, Bastiaan (2002). Transnational Capitalism and the Struggle over European Integration, London, UK: Routledge. Van der Pijl, Kees (1989). “Ruling Classes, Hegemony, and the State System: Theoretical and Historical Considerations.” International Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 7–35.

The Case of Egypt  119 Wittfogel, Karl August (1959). Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wood, Ellen Meiksins (1991). The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States, London, UK: Verso. ——— (1995) Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2002) The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, London: Verso. Wood, Neal (2001). Reflections on Political Theory: A Voice of Reason from the Past, London, UK: Springer. World Bank, ed. (1997). The State in a Changing World, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Wurzel, Ulrich G. (2009). “The Political Economy of Authoritarianism in Egypt: Insufficient Structural Reforms, Limited Outcomes and a Lack of New Actors.” In Laura Guazzone and Daniela Pioppe, eds. The Arab State and Neo-Liberal Globalization: The Restructuring of State Power in the Middle East. Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, pp. 97–123.

5 Same Different? A Comparative Study of Kurdish-Led Rojava and Opposition-Held Syria Andrea Glioti1

Introduction As an outsider to both Syrian and Kurdish political communities and a journalist reporting from and on Syria and Syrian Kurdistan, what prompted me to undertake this research is the economy of selective solidarity that has characterized the Western Left in the case of Syria. After the outbreak of the Syrian uprising against the rule of the Asad family in 2011, few leftist voices stood out for their empathy with self-administration institutions in opposition-held regions (e.g., the “local councils,” al-majalis al-mahalliya). As for the Kurdish-led Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (DFNS, officially known as Rojava until December 20162), in the aftermath of the battle of Kobanî against the Islamic State (IS) organization in 2014, many Western leftists quickly started to see it as an internationalist cause worth supporting (Graeber 2014; Anthony 2017). Similar to what happened in the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War, leftist volunteers and fighters started to flock to Rojava to defend what they considered a radical experiment of direct democracy.3 While significant emancipatory social changes are certainly underway – the most visible of which being the advancement of women’s rights (SyriaUntold with Mahwash Sheiki 2017; Leezenberg 2016: 685) – Western leftist empathy with the DFNS is often romanticized (i.e., Zerocalcare’s 2015 comic book Kobane Calling) or is frequently the outcome of TEV-DEM-organized tours for foreign activists who do not speak any of the local languages.4 In some cases, these accounts stem from a pan-Kurdish perspective, one that is common among activists and academics who sympathize with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) cause in Turkey’s Northern Kurdistan and look at the DFNS as a mere extension of that question, without analyzing its relationship with various struggles across the rest of Syria (e.g., PKK expert Joost Jongerden 2017). Their approach to the Syrian Arab opposition and its self-management experiences is largely dismissive (e.g., Jongerden 2017). The Arab-majority Syrian opposition’s narrative remains entirely dismissive of political and social changes in the DFNS,5 whose supporters are described as “separatist” (infisaliyyin) and/or “loyalist” (mu’ayyidin) to the

DOI: 10.4324/b22870-6

Comparative Study of Rojava and Syria  121 6

Asad regime. Although the PKK shifted away from separatism to embrace libertarian-inspired democratic confederalism in the early 2000s (Jongerden 2015), Arab nationalism still informs the way Kurdish activists and parties are labeled as “separatists” regardless of how they formulate their own ­demands. Arabic-language coverage of Syria still echoes a historically ­motivated perception of Kurdish regions as peripheral to the Arab centers of power.7 Liberal and conservative commentators are also critical of the DFNS. They consider the PKK as a monolithic authoritarian Stalinist party.8 While authoritarian practices are still common in the DFNS9 and the figure of Abdullah Ocalan still stands as the sole undisputed leader (Leezenberg 2016: 679), the PKK’s ideological shift toward libertarian-inspired models in the early 2000s is often overlooked among liberal commentators. The ­party’s Syrian branch (the Democratic Union Party, PYD) has crushed forms of dissent10 while forming alliances with a range of political and military forces (ANF News 2017; Hawar News 2018). This still ephemeral openness to political dialogue, however, might dilute the party’s authoritarian features in the long term. International geopolitical rivalries continue to hinder trans-ethnic solidarity networks across Syria, while entrenched political and social tensions have contributed to obstructing a collaborative relationship between civil activists of both sides. The Ba‘thist discriminatory politics against Kurds in the name of Arab nationalism (Human Rights Watch 2009) largely contributed to aggravate tensions prior to the outbreak of the Syrian uprising in 2011. Exacerbating mutual suspicion, Kurdish parties – other than the PYD – had remained on the sidelines when the uprising erupted in 2011 (Kurdwatch 2011: 28). The revolutionary youth, the initial force behind the uprising, looked at the Kurdish parties as traditional reactionary forces reluctant to engage in a grassroots struggle.11 Even PKK’s founding members acknowledged the difficulty of mobilizing Kurdish youth in Syria, mainly due to an initial lack of consent among them (International Crisis Group 2017: 8), unlike in the 2015 insurgency in Southeastern Turkey-Bakûr (Leezenberg 2016: 679–680). In this chapter, I identify the missed opportunities of encounter and exchange between these radical experiments of grassroots democracy as of June 2021. These two political experiences corroborate Timothy Mitchell’s argument (1991) that state and society cannot subsist as two distinct entities. Indeed, these two political attempts to counter state hegemony and create an alternative functioning statehood become what Mitchell would call the effects of the state, namely the effect of existing power relations and dominant truth regimes. These alternative statehood projects, therefore, cannot produce absolute autonomy, mirroring the limits of the official state itself (Mitchell 1991: 78). I will show how these political experiences of radical autonomy to some extent reproduce the effect of state power within which they were born and developed. As will be evident in both experiments of

122  Andrea Glioti radical autonomy, the abuse of power of state-like organisms and an agricultural politics partially centered on intensive monocultures show how even political opponents have internalized state thinking and actions, being themselves the product of a long history of relations with the state. In this vein, the acts of resistance of both political entities inside Syria do not stand outside the state. As Mitchell put it (1991: 98), “political subjects and their modes of resistance are formed as much within the organizational terrain we call the state, rather than in some wholly exterior social space.” I also identify the key commonalities and the ground for potential collaboration between the two political experiments which, lacking shared spaces of encounter and exchange, have thus far not succeeded in completely subverting governmental techniques and, unlike the Zapatista movement, (Mora 2015: 87), have not dismantled the colonial legacy around the construction of “state margins.” As a result, the Kurdish-led and Syrian Arab opposition autonomies tend to remain “subaltern” political experiences versus the central hegemony of the nation-state. Their disjointed experiment is also an “effect of the state,” in the sense that the members of both political communities as well as their respective external supporters tend to marginalize each other rather than learning from each other’s political projects. In this framework, divisions inside Syria, such as the ethno-political one of Kurds versus Arabs, were originally fabricated during the French colonial mandate (1920–1943). Historians have documented that there was no articulated concept of “minority” before that time, at least not the way Kurds are represented nowadays. Instead, such divisions were functional to the crafting of the nation-state (White 2012: 27), which consequently rendered demographic groups such as the Syrian Kurds “minorities.” The resulting disconnection between these two political experiments thus reflects the colonial legacies of state-­ formation in Syria. It is exactly their missed encounter which prevented both polities from being mutually informative and from building concertedly a “post-ethnic” opposition within Syria. The continual process of state-­building during the political rule of the Asads (1970–) also capitalized on this divide-and-rule strategy, for instance, by using Arab clan members to crush Kurdish riots in Northeast Syria in 2004 (Tejel 2009: 116). The chapter provides a comparative analysis of the ideological repertoires and the behavioral patterns of resistance as performed by the Syrian Kurdish and the Syrian Arab activist groups between 2011 and 2021. I discuss the ideological similarities and differences across these two movements visà-vis their respective local conceptualization of direct democracy. Second, I discuss their attempts at edifying a functioning society, which strives to counter the central state through local councils. Both political experiences inside Syria similarly attempted to make the official government redundant while, at times, inheriting the state language and state-like modes of governance. Third, the eco-agricultural decentralization attempts coming from both sides during wartime will further exemplify the extent to which the

Comparative Study of Rojava and Syria  123 Syrian Arab and the Syrian Kurdish political laboratories of resistance desire to put in place liberated forms of stateness at a local level and, at the same time, undermine stateness as a sustainable mode of governance in the time of revolution. The significance of these experiences can be traced in the post-colonial history of the region, where experiences of direct democracy and autonomy have been limited compared to the predominant state-centric models in Arab nationalist and Islamist states. As Gambetti put it (2009), the space for action available for autonomous movements in the region remains limited due to having long been subdued under Ottoman dominion. This led to a still present “fear of dismemberment” in Turkish society triggered by the Treaty of Sevres (Gambetti 2009: 74) and across the Levant by the Franco-British Sykes-Picot Agreement. Indeed, the Syrian government today still conceives demands for autonomy as foreign-backed separatist threats. The autonomy projects that do exist have often suffered from skewed scholarly attention. While most scholars examine “first class” citizens to discuss the assets and the limits of direct democracy (Qvortrup 2013; Neblo, Esterling & Lazer 2018; Altman 2019), Middle East/West Asia and North Africa (MENA/ WANA)-based refugees (e.g., Sahrawis) and “second class” citizens – often struggling for their basic rights (e.g., Kurds in Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran) – have largely engaged in political processes of self-governance in a bid to build their lives outside the central state’s sovereignty.

Political Theory on Direct Democracy The political thought of Abdullah Ocalan and Syrian intellectual and activist Omar Aziz present similarities in the way they conceived of direct democracy, pointing to a common ground between the theoretical underpinnings of the TEV-DEM and the Syrian Arab opposition councils. Aziz, who died in 2013 after three months in detention (Collettivo Idrisi 2017: 44–46), was a Damascene Arab expatriate completely unknown in dissident circles until he returned to Syria from Saudi Arabia in 2011 to serve the revolutionary cause. He then played a pioneering role in setting up local councils in the suburbs of Damascus (Collettivo Idrisi 2017). In the framework of direct democracy, the establishment of bottom-up structures normally aims “to reduce the separation between representatives and represented” (Hardt & Negri 2004: 250). The case for direct democracy is built on the belief that “when power is transferred to a group of rulers, then we all no longer rule, we are separated from power and government” (Hardt & Negri 2004: 244). Ocalan and Aziz appear to share historical references to direct democracy such as the 1871 Paris Commune (Jongerden 2015; Sethness 2018), but also the belief that the councils can coexist with preexisting tribal networks (Knapp, Flach & Ayboga 2016: 95; Aziz 2011 in Collettivo Idrisi 2017: 32). Both thinkers echo the classical anarchist thinker Pyotr Kropotkin, with his celebration of “the spontaneous processes

124  Andrea Glioti of mutual aid” (Sethness 2018), which resonates with Aziz’s writings on ­ esieged ­Syrians and “the organization of medical, legal, or food aid among b the Revolution’s base communities” (Sethness 2018). In theorizing the ­establishment of horizontal self-government structures, Ocalan follows the tradition of Kropotkin’s reasoning on direct democracy (Jongerden 2015), while Aziz fully engages with the wider anarchist debates on the crucial role of service provision in bottom-up administrations aiming for breaking away from the nation-state (Aziz, cited in Collettivo Idrisi 2017).12 Aziz describes local councils as horizontal structures that allow revolutionaries to run their everyday lives without relying on state institutions. Nonetheless, Aziz never produced a full-fledged intellectual manifesto as he was politically active in Syria only for a few years and Syrian activists circulated his writings in the aftermath of his death. Aziz, a potential ideological leader for the Syrian revolutionary movement, was only known within a restricted circle of activists in the surroundings of Damascus, but his ideas resonate in the establishment of local councils across Syria (Yassin-Kassab 2016). He did not live long enough to fully develop his theorization of local councils, unlike political veteran Ocalan, who articulated his thought in numerous books before the Rojava revolution that led to the emergence of a de-facto autonomous Kurdish-led administration in Northern Syria starting from 2012. Aziz did not enjoy the personality cult of Abdullah Ocalan, yet his writings represent the best effort to engage with the challenging process of building bottom-up administrative structures in opposition-held territories. In the anti-Asad camp, Aziz’s thinking arguably constitutes the only attempt to engage with revolutionary change in the language of Western political theories. As a matter of fact, in the context of the Syrian Arab opposition, local governance and participatory politics “were not the products of ideological certainties but rather the contingent outcomes of grassroots resistance” (Munif 2017). The fact that grassroots revolutionary language was not familiar to Western pundits led these latter to be dismissive of Syrians’ aspirations to social change in opposition-held territories (Munif 2017). On the one hand, Ocalan formulates the revolutionary political system in a language heavily influenced by the Western Left. On the other hand, Aziz’s writings present similar influences, suggesting a parallelism between the Rojava and Syrian uprisings. This parallelism went unnoticed in Western leftist circles. While Ocalan’s contribution to leftist political thought is largely recognized, Aziz’s contribution remains mostly unknown due to the leaderless, ideologically heterogeneous nature of the Syrian uprising and to the short-lived experience of the local councils. Drawing parallelisms with similar experiences in other geographic areas, Syrian local councils, under constant shelling by government forces, did not enjoy the favorable international political circumstances that contributed to the rapid success of the Zapatista uprising in 1994 in the Chiapas region (Gambetti 2009: 61).

Comparative Study of Rojava and Syria  125 Between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, Ocalan shifted the PKK’s political program from the establishment of a Kurdish nation-state to transnational democratic confederalism (Jongerden 2015; Leezenbergs 2016). He articulated the political theory of democratic confederalism as a “non-state social paradigm” which “is based on grassroots participation” (Ocalan 2011: 1), under the influence of American libertarian thinker Murray Bookchin (Leezenberg 2016: 675–676). Ocalan’s ultimate ambition for democratic confederations was that they “will not be limited to organize themselves within a single particular territory. They will become cross-border confederations when the societies concerned so desire” (Ocalan 2011: 32). The similarities between Ocalan and Aziz particularly emerge in their respective emphasis on “autonomy” and its expected role in revolutionary practices. Ocalan’s democratic autonomy “predicates democratic participation on the recognition of the political will of diverse communes, or societies (komün, or topluluk), definable in terms of a multitude of identifications and issues. In this sense, autonomy […] establishes a legitimate symbolic field for the conduct of democratic processes” (Küçük & Özselçuk 2016: 189). PKK leaders distinguish “democratic autonomy” from “autonomy,” in so far as the latter “takes the nation-state as its basis,” whereas “democratic autonomy” is based on democratic-confederalism (Jongerden 2015) and therefore supposed to transcend national borders. Nonetheless, the implementation of this theoretical difference turned out to be pragmatic in Rojava where the authorities have long traded confederalism – and its council system – for conventional representative federalism and were as of late 2019 engaged in faltering negotiations with Damascus that may result in an even more limited form of decentralization (Sheykho 2019). In his “Foundational Pages for the Idea of Local Councils,” Aziz launched: an appeal for the formation of local councils composed of people from different cultural and social backgrounds in order […] for people to manage their lives autonomously from the state and its services (even should this autonomy remain a relative one). (Aziz, cited in Collettivo Idrisi 2017: 22) During my stay in Rojava and in the following years, I had conversations with locals from different ethnic, religious, economic, and political backgrounds. Outside PKK-linked circles, there was hardly any local awareness about the importance of assembly elements in the newly established political system. Similarly, in Syrian Arab opposition circles, people were rarely familiar with Aziz’s writings on the council system. Apart from a few intellectuals and activists, aspirations centered on overthrowing the regime and on the democratization of Syria. Both Ocalan and Aziz are aware of the difficulty of overcoming state ­structures. Even though Ocalan’s rejection of the nation-state (Ocalan 2011: 1) is more explicit than Aziz’s (Carpi with Glioti 2018: 231–246), the Kurdish

126  Andrea Glioti leader accepts a form of coexistence between the state and democratic confederalism “as long as the nation-state does not interfere with central matters of self-administration” (Ocalan 2011: 31). He therefore argues that “neither total rejection nor complete recognition of the state is useful for the democratic efforts of the civil society. The overcoming of the state, particularly the nation-state, is a long-term process” (Ocalan 2011: 32). In regard to this, pro-DFNS activists argue that Ocalan conceptualized the state as a “mentality, as an ancient system that has established itself in all pores of society including the individual mind” rather than a single state.13 The same activists explain the challenges of dealing with the local state-centered culture by saying that: millions of people there [in the DFNS] are not revolutionary, they don’t support democratic confederalism, they just want to call the police when something happens, they don’t want to go to the neighborhood’s commune to solve their problems. […] This is just one way in which statism manifests itself in the individual (Dirik in author’s interview 2018) Rather, a local community-approach to problem-solving appears to be pursued through long-term educational efforts. Omar Aziz raised similar concerns. In particular, he advocated for a gradual approach to becoming accustomed with the absence of state services while contemplating that people might cling on to their provisional safety net in kinship relations. “They need time and practice so that they can access an extended network of social relations that is more elaborated and effective [e.g., the local councils or similar self-management bodies]” (Aziz, cited in Collettivo Idrisi 2017: 26). Aziz advocated for the departure from the state by highlighting the limits of a revolutionary movement that remained embedded within the state’s authoritarian structures, thus identifying the failures of the “contemporary phenomenology of protest” (Carpi with Glioti 2018: 11). Echoing Frankfurt School Marxists such as Walter Benjamin and Chiapas’s Zapatistas in their notions of the “time of power” (Reyna 2018; Sethness 2018), that is, the idea that “the time of power needed to be destroyed and broken away from, and that a new time and space needed to be created” (Reyna 2018), Aziz believed that the success of the revolution was dependent on the capability of the “time of the revolution” to permeate every aspect of people’s daily life and liberate them from the “time of power” (Aziz 2011). He knew that people might hesitate to embrace a hypothetical non-state as a new ruling power and provider of services, especially because it bears no historical precedents in Syria (Carpi & Glioti 2018: 12). In Syria, as in much of the world, people’s limited experience with stateless structures continues to undermine the long-term survival of autonomous polities. Another similarity between the two thinkers is their reliance on Rosa Luxemburg’s council communism when they envision bottom-up administrative

Comparative Study of Rojava and Syria  127 structures in times of revolution (Hassan 2013; Knapp, Flach & Ayboga 2016: 42). The Kurdish-led DFNS experience draws on Luxemburgan thinking by envisaging revolution through the organization of the masses into radical democratic self-governance rather than through the conquest or dismantlement of power by political actors. This is supposed to counterweight authoritarian tendencies (Knapp, Flach & Ayboga 2016: 42). On these premises, Ocalan is more Luxemburgan than Aziz. While the PKK leader is practically willing to accept a pact of non-belligerence with the nation-state, Aziz explicitly advocates for the overthrow of the Syrian regime (Aziz, cited in Collettivo Idrisi 2017: 19). Ocalan’s approach to councils is thus more reminiscent of how Luxemburg conceived them during the Weimar Republic in Germany (1918–1933) that is as capable of transforming Weimar into “a more democratic republic and leave the door for socialist revolution open” (Schmidt 2014). Some scholars have however argued that authoritarianism under the Syrian regime is more akin to Nazi Germany (Schmidinger 2018: 57 and 65) rather than those of the Weimar Republic, thus making the ­survival of Rojava’s communes even more complicated. To a certain extent, Ocalan’s theorization of “self-defense” as the shield of democratic confederalism against “nation-state militarism” (Ocalan 2011: 28–29) appears in line with Luxemburg’s thinking, in that he sees violence as a response to attacks with no aprioristic intention to dismantle authoritarian regimes. In practice, as of June 2021, the DFNS coexists with ­Syrian military and security forces in the two main cities of the JaziraCizîre ­plateau (al-Hasakah/Hesîçe and al-Qamishli/Qamişlo), alternating a turbulent relationship with different degrees of coordination (Glioti 2013; Lund 2016). In Aziz’s thinking, a further confirmation of the incompatibility between the Asad regime and the council system was his wary support for the opposition’s Free Syrian Army (Aziz, cited in Collettivo Idrisi 2017: 18 and 21 and 30), whose main goal – unlike the Kurdish-majority People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) – was to topple the Syrian dictator. In his writings, similarly to Ocalan (2011: 28), the role of the armed struggle is described as defensive in support of the revolution. Nonetheless, Aziz was concerned about the growing militarization of Syrian society and stressed that: the more the self-management of society will become independent from power, the more it will deepen the social basis that will enable the ­revolution to protect itself and protect society […] against the armed solution that slowly turns society and revolution into hostages of the rifle (Aziz, cited in Collettivo Idrisi 2017: 21) The rejection of militarism is present in both Aziz’s Pages and the Charter of the Social Contract in Rojava, which some consider a de-facto Constitution (Ayoub 2017).

128  Andrea Glioti

Council Systems in DFNS and in Syrian Arab Opposition-Run Territories Based on the above-mentioned theoretical similarities, I will now show how autonomous administration in DFNS’s councils resembles that of Syrian Arab opposition-run councils. The structure of the DFNS grassroots self-government institutions is relatively complex. At the foundational level, we find the “communes” (which are composed of 30 to more than 400 households), followed by the “neighborhood/villages community people’s councils” (the coordination boards of 7–30 communes) at the upper decisional level, the “district people’s councils” representing the cities and their surroundings formed of coordination boards (TEV-DEM) that comprise political parties, social movements, and civil organizations, and finally the People’s Council of Western Kurdistan (MGRK; which includes all the TEV-DEM district coordination boards) (Knapp, Flach & Ayboga 2016: 92). At each of these levels, eight commissions are in charge of specific affairs (women, defense, economics, politics, civil society, free society, justice, ideology), with the health commission not directly connected with the MGRK (Knapp, Flach & Ayboga 2016: 92). The “women’s councils” represent an autonomous parallel system to the council system, with each commission having two co-spokespersons, a man and a woman (Knapp, Flach & Ayboga 2016: 92), reflecting the importance of women’s empowerment in Ocalan’s thought. Council democracy draws on Bookchin’s principle of confederalism as: a network of administrative councils whose members or delegates are elected from popular face-to-face democratic assemblies, in the various villages, towns, and even neighborhoods of large cities. The members of these confederal councils are strictly mandated, recallable, and responsible to the assemblies that chose them for the purpose of coordinating and administering the policies formulated by the assemblies themselves (Bookchin 1992: 297) Syrian Arab opposition-run councils were different. They were set up in opposition-held regions “as an alternative to the regime and its institutions” (Daou 2017). In some respects, we can consider the tansiqiyyat the equivalent of the MGRK’s communes at the bottom end of self-­management structures because of their “closer relationship with the neighborhood and the area where they operate” (Collettivo Idrisi 2017: 60).14 Even though the tansiqiyyat are known for having primarily focused on organizing antiregime protests, in some areas – such as Darayya, south-west of Damascus – they were the precursors of local councils, providing medical aid and food supplies (Collettivo Idrisi 2017: 53–57).15 At the district level, the elected representatives of the local councils gather in a “general assembly of the local councils” (Daou 2017). Since the formation of the National Coalition for

Comparative Study of Rojava and Syria  129 Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces’ (NCSROF) Interim Government in March 2013, its Ministry of Local Administration, Relief and Refugees Affairs has been in charge of local councils (Daou 2017). The DFNS’s and the Syrian Arab opposition’s councils also share their vision of basic services. For instance, “ensuring the continuity of education” despite the ongoing war is a shared mission (Aziz, cited in Collettivo Idrisi 2017: 23 and 25–26; Zaman al-Wasl 2013a; Knapp, Flach & Ayboga 2016: 175–184). Education comes with the challenges related to the enrolment of pupils in teaching institutions that are recognized by neither the Syrian state nor the international community (Nassar, Ibrahim & Edwards 2017; Rageh 2017). Once again, the state manifests itself in multiple realms, including education, as stateless polities would not have their newly established educational system recognized by the nation-state. The same applies to the elections of council members, with a common emphasis on the importance of turnouts in unprecedented democratic practices in both opposition-held areas and the DFNS (Middle East Online 2013; Knapp, Flach & Ayboga 2016: 109; Gopal 2018). At the same time, the exclusion of segments of the electoral constituencies from the decision-making process questions the democratic nature of both experiences, whether it is the exclusion of the pro-Iraqi Kurdistan Kurdish National Council’s (KNC/ENKS) parties in Rojava (Schmidinger 2018: 133) or of those who were not considered “revolutionary” enough in opposition-held areas (Yazigi 2014). The provision of services such as waste management, fuel, water, electricity, and bread supplies is another shared key component between the two experiences (Zaman al-Wasl 2013b; Yazigi 2014; Knapp, Flach & Ayboga 2016: 104–109; Al-Faham 2017): such provision tends to widen an administrative base of support (Beals 2016; Martínez & Eng 2017; Gopal 2018), especially in wartime. In doing so, both political experiences attempt to replace the state as the main service provider and disentangle everyday livelihoods from the central power. The Kurdish women’s movement has been particularly active in bridging gaps with other communities, in contexts such as Manbij (Dirik in author’s interview 2018). Engaging people in the Rojava political experience in areas such as Kobanî and Efrîn was easier than in Manbij and Jazira (Cizîre), since the PKK had consolidated its presence in the former before the Rojava revolution (Dirik in author’s interview 2018). This might explain why the pervasiveness of the Rojava revolution in Jazira (Cizîre) was limited compared with Kobanî or Efrîn, where the PKK militancy was more widespread. But “spreading the revolution” in such areas was easier also because Kobanî and Efrîn are almost entirely populated by Kurds. Before the IS takeover in January 2014, a relatively efficient opposition-­ run local council and a newly established trade union operated in Manbij (Yazigi 2014; Yassin-Kassab 2016), where residents were already trained in managing the town’s affairs autonomously. Similar to other cases inside Syria, Manbij’s self-management experience was fraught with challenges: opposition-armed factions were blamed for kidnappings16 and a Shari‘a

130  Andrea Glioti court succeeded in replacing a more liberal one (Yazigi 2014). Nonetheless, it is legitimate to wonder whether the Rojava activists drew on the Manbij self-management experience and if valuing it in the pro-DFNS media would have fostered greater solidarity with part of the Arab population.17 As of June 2021, this appears even more relevant, as Manbij witnesses unprecedented popular turmoil against the Kurdish-led administration.18 In the Syrian Arab opposition-held areas, critics have maintained that the role of local councils has remained limited to municipal services while they have been unable to exert control over armed factions. Moreover, the “big political talk” has here remained a prerogative of foreign-backed external entities such as the Syrian National Council and subsequently the ­NCSROF (Daou 2017). As early as 2011, Omar Aziz envisioned the establishment of a “national council,” but this was conceived as a “coordinating” body that would protect local initiatives, in line with the movement’s horizontal ­“autonomy” (istiqlaliyyah) (Aziz, cited in Collettivo Idrisi 2017: 33), recalling the Zapatista horizontal network of villages that are then linked vertically via a system of delegation rather than representation (Gambetti 2009: 66). However, locals have criticized some of the main expatriate branches of the Syrian Arab opposition for dismembering the local councils rather than protecting them. For example, in 2013 members of the Raqqa local council accused the Syrian National Council for having replaced them with a new council in “a move that was decided abroad, which had nothing to do with our capabilities of managing public affairs in Raqqa” (Collettivo Idrisi 2017: 60). In both opposition-held regions and the DFNS, self-government structures are supposed to remain accountable to the people and develop their own mechanisms to safeguard accountability (Middle East Online 2013; Knapp, Flach & Ayboga 2016: 88). The DFNS, however, seems to undergo a similar divide between grassroots activists and profit-driven politicians. Now that the council-based grassroots movement is more entrenched in Rojava (Leezenberg 2016: 682), it has entered a tense relationship with the components of the DFNS that see the revolution as an opportunity to become officials in the Democratic Autonomous Administrations (DAAs) (Schmidinger 2018: 129 and 137–138). The DAAs were established in January 2014 in each canton19 to partially contest the exclusion of Kurdish authorities from the UN-backed Geneva II conference on Syria (Knapp, Flach & Ayboga 2016: 114). In December 2015, the DAAs became part of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC, Meclîsa Sûriya Demokratîk), the political wing of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF, Hêzên Sûriya Demokratîk), which is a US-backed Kurdish-majority but multi-ethnic militia that was established a few months earlier during the war on IS (Knapp, Flach & Ayboga 2016: 92). In March 2016, the DAAs and the SDC announced the foundation of the DFNS to better coordinate between the DAAs and the recently annexed Arab-majority territories that had been captured from IS (Knapp, Flach & Ayboga 2016: 92).

Comparative Study of Rojava and Syria  131 Unlike the council-system, the DAAs bear similarities with top-down governments, for they are structured in legislative and executive councils; the latter allocate ministries to the different parties in Rojava (Knapp, Flach & Ayboga 2016: 114). The refusal of international institutions and global ­political actors to recognize the Kurdish-led council system influenced the decision to establish a parallel semi-state, which may be more likely to win the stakeholders’ trust in the international arena. The conflicting functions between the DAAs and the MGRK’s council system remain either unresolved or resolved at the expense of the council system, which has become “less active in order to avoid a dual decision-making structure” (Knapp, Flach & Ayboga 2016: 119). Pro-Rojava activists worry that the council system will be “put on the back burner for short-term political gain” (Knapp, Flach & Ayboga 2016: 119), but they are also optimistic about a solution aimed at ensuring the representation of the grassroots councils in the DAA’s legislative councils (Knapp, Flach & Ayboga 2016: 120–121). Activist Dilar Dirik (in author’s interview 2018) pointed out that “people who head these boards for education, diplomacy, etc. [in the DAAs] often looked like normal ministers. Visually, they have nothing to do with what the people were doing in the communes.” She also stressed that one woman out of two deputies is elected in order to counterbalance patriarchal power. In her view, thanks to the existence of multiple layers, these vertical representative structures “remain accountable to the grassroots and the women’s movement.” In addition to the risk of seeing grassroots structures devoured by topdown institutions, militarization poses a threat to the democratic nature of the council system in both opposition-held territories and the DFNS. Jihadist and Islamist opposition armed factions have repeatedly attempted to subjugate the local councils in towns such as Duma,20 Saraqib (Gopal 2018), Kafranbel (Abdul Rahman 2016), but their actions often met resistance. DFNS’s critics have likewise maintained that the final say on key decisions lies with the PKK leadership on the Qandil Mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan rather than with the council system (Gunter 2014: 128 in Schmidinger 2018: 134). In both cases, top-down military institutions risk reinstating vertical decisional structures that resemble state-focused modes of power. While the legacy of such a hierarchical paramilitary organization is still visible nowadays in the PKK Syrian offshoots (Schmidinger 2018: 134–135), there is no evidence that pro-DFNS civil activists have protested the influence of the PKK military leadership. Indeed, the main armed factions (YPG and YPJ) are aligned with Ocalan’s political vision of the council system, whereas the Syrian Arab opposition’s Islamist factions tend to envision a different political system tout court. For example, although one of the key demands of Syrian protesters since 2011 has been the democratization of their country, hardline Islamist ideologues refer to democracy as an “infected game” (Arabi 21 2019), partially because of the notion’s ties with the West. Despite their idealism, a certain degree of realpolitik is also a shared trait between the two political experiences. For example, Omar Aziz was aware

132  Andrea Glioti of the need to take into consideration the weight of tribal “clans” when forming local councils (Aziz, cited in Collettivo Idrisi 2017: 32). In what was until 2015 opposition-held southern Syria, tribal allegiances have indeed played a role in the selection of candidates for the council seats (Darwish 2016: 2). In 2014, likewise, the legislative council of the DAA in the Jazira (Cizîre) canton elected Shaykh Humaidi Daham al-Jarba, a leader from the Arab Shammar tribe, as the co-chair of the canton (Marei 2014). A realist approach also emerges in regional and international alliances that have indirectly contributed to the survival of both political experiences, while turning local actors into proxies of Turkey in the case of the Syrian opposition and of the US and to a lesser extent of Russia in the case of the DAAs. Neither Turkey nor Russia nor the US deem the development of direct democracy in Syria to be a priority. These alliances will continue to be detrimental to the survival of grassroots social experiences as long as foreign powers exact political tolls in exchange for support. This is exemplified by the rise of political bodies (NCSROF, DAAs) that behave like nation-states and purport to represent bottom-up council systems in the international arena. At the same time, these alliances remain fragile and prone to collapse considering the volatile decisions of major stakeholders, like in the case of the Turkish invasion of Efrîn, which was made possible by the withdrawal of Russian troops (Haid 2018).

Eco-agricultural Decentralization Another realm in which it is possible to draw a parallel between the DFNS and Arab opposition-held areas is that of food sovereignty. After decades of Ba‘thist centralization efforts in the provision of seeds and fertilizers (Beals 2016; Martinez & Eng 2017), numerous experiences of food sovereignty surfaced in the absence of the state in both the DFNS and Syrian opposition-held territories. According to a Europe-based activist involved in a solidarity campaign,21 international peasant networks and European “eco-anarchists” supported Syrian activists from besieged opposition-held areas such as Idlib and Ghouta in the development of urban farming solutions to cope with hunger during the winter. In both DFNS and oppositionheld areas, local activists built a connection between the cultivation of lands that had fallen outside of government control and resistance to the “occupier,” whether it was the Syrian regime or jihadist groups. In the countryside of the province of Daraa, opposition activists taught internally displaced persons (IDPs) – and children in particular – who lost access to their lands how “to build a relationship with the land and […] grow plants in the [IDP] camps” (Jasim 2017). In some cases, these initiatives were connected with international networks. Some of the international activists who have supported initiatives in opposition-held areas have also aided a network of local activists in Kurdishpopulated Kobanî. IS reportedly seized equipment and seeds during the

Comparative Study of Rojava and Syria  133 siege (2014–2015), forcing many to leave for Turkey. Once the siege was lifted, Syrian Kurdish activists went back to their hometown and set up the first plant nurseries.22 In Bîstanên Rojavayê, the main greenhouse project in the Cizîre/Jazirah canton, international eco-activists highlight the significance of cultivating “liberated” lands that were at “the front-line of the fighting when [former al-Qaeda affiliate] Jabhat Al Nusra came. […] When the YPG liberated the land, they gave it back to the people, to the society” (Interview by Cooperation in Mesopotamia 2016). In other words, meeting local needs through cultivation complements the process of liberation initiated by the military confrontation. In the dire conditions caused by conflict, local activists in both the DFNS and opposition-held territories treasured the importance of self-sufficiency and organic farming: first, because all the border crossings shared with Turkey are closed and Iraqi Kurdistan cyclically shut down the Semalka/ Faysh-Khabur passage due to political disputes with Syrian Kurdish authorities, and second, because of the Syrian regime’s politics of siege and starvation.23 It remains to be seen whether the sustainable solutions developed out of necessity in dire conditions will inform farmers’ choices after the end of the conflict (Al-Faham 2017) when chemical fertilizers and centrally subsidized seeds and irrigation water will become more easily available. Other environmentalist projects in Syria and Rojava have attempted to raise local awareness on sustainable agriculture, such as biomass-fueled irrigation in besieged Eastern Ghouta and the return to organic fertilizers in Kurdish-majority Girkê Legê-Maabadeh (Al-Faham 2017). After decades of Ba‘thist wheat monoculture, which depleted the soil and groundwater of the Kurdish-majority Northeast (Selby 2018: 7), activist-led initiatives today focus on diversifying agriculture and reforestation (Cooperation in Mesopotamia 2016). Agriculture officials in both the Kurdish-led DAAs and opposition-held territories appear to be unreceptive to agricultural sustainability, thus confirming the shared divide between grassroots activists and officials. This is partially due to older agricultural engineers viewing “organic agriculture as a luxury” or a good thing for Western societies only,24 and intending to “defend their authority by any means” (Jasim 2017). However, in some cases, these experiences of food sovereignty have served the purpose of bridging the gap between peasants and agricultural engineers (e.g., between the grassroots and experts) and paved the way for closer collaborations between them (Jasim 2017). Like what occurred with the council system, these initiatives managed to “reduce the separation between representatives and represented” (Hardt & Negri 2004: 250) in a vacuum left by the state. The abovementioned Europe-based eco-activist recalled (2018) three episodes in which she had the occasion to meet with Rojava officials: in Turkey in 2014 and 2015 (in the latter occasion as a delegation member from La Via Campesina, an international peasant movement for food sovereignty) and in Kobanî with the co-chair of the DAA agricultural committee in 2018.

134  Andrea Glioti Officials reportedly gave no importance to sustainable agriculture, to the extent of explicitly demanding pesticides and tractors in at least one episode. Even in the literature that is supportive of the Kurdish-led administration (Knapp, Flach & Ayboga 2016: 211–221), it is recognized that many more measures would be needed to address dire environmental conditions. Local authorities still seem to focus on wheat monoculture through subsidized chemical fertilizers and fuel-driven irrigation (Kobanî DAA’s agricultural commission Facebook page 2017 and 2018).25 On 22 October 2018, the agricultural commission in Kobanî announced its plan to “develop agriculture” and “transform the area into a green agricultural one” by cultivating wheat and barley.26 Having said that, it is worth noting that some militants are seemingly more committed to an ecological revolution in the DFNS, as emerges in the words of YPJ fighters and TEV-DEM-linked feminist organizations such as Kongreya Star.27 This is partially due to the strong influence of Ocalan’s political thought on YPG-YPJ and Kongreya Star unlike the DAA officials. Agriculture is a realm where the manifestations of the Syrian state are still visible despite its limited physical presence in the Northeast. The Syrian government still subsidizes these areas with seeds produced at the General Organization for Seed Multiplication (GOSM), to the extent that in January 2019 the Ministry of Agriculture announced that wheat and barley seeds had been planted across half of the province of al-Hasakah (SANA 2019). In summer 2018, the Syrian government announced its intention to import around 1.5 million tons of wheat from Russia and Eastern Europe due to the poor results of the last crop season in al-Hasakah, in which many farmers preferred selling their harvest to the DAA or traders in other areas (Al-­Hussein 2018; Ibrahim 2018). The farmers found it more convenient to sell their yield to the DAA, but if the Syrian government was to succeed in ­offering better business conditions – or in extracting concessions in the framework of the ongoing negotiations between Damascus and the Kurdish-­led administration – it could re-establish its monopoly over wheat monoculture and the consequent depletion of soil and water resources. The National Coalition interim government’s approach to agricultural policies is not particularly different from that of the Syrian government. Although the opposition’s GOSM is largely independent from the interim government in terms of funding, one of its main donors is the German Corporation for International Cooperation (MIZ), a ministerial organization that focuses on “high performance seeds produced by big multinationals that require the addition of chemicals and minerals to grow” (Jasim 2017). Hence, it is not surprising to see the availability of chemical fertilizers and pesticides promoted on the website of the opposition’s GOSM28 or to notice that their marginal projects, aimed at localizing the production of certain seeds, in fact copy those of the Syrian government. In early 2020, the parallel GOSM appears too similar to the original, and therefore hardly representative of localized grassroots initiatives. In both cases, the state’s

Comparative Study of Rojava and Syria  135 approach to intensive agriculture paradoxically influenced the newly established administrations, under which the activists’ efforts to achieve localized food sovereignty clash with the local officials’ “recidivist” tendency to keep farmers dependent on central suppliers. As the conflict raged on, everyday violence led people to be more concerned about their own plight and less willing to build up and express trans-ethnic solidarity. Further factors have hampered such solidarity processes. The Turkish blockade against the Kurdish-led administration since it came into existence in 2012 and the wall built by Turkish authorities between 2015 and 2018 have made it impossible for activists to cross into ­Kurdish areas from Turkey. This translated into fewer opportunities for Arab and Kurdish eco-activists to encounter each other and exchange experiences.29 Nevertheless, Idlib networks were reportedly still sending locally produced seeds to Rojava peasants in October 2018.30

Conclusion This chapter has shown how the two stateless experiences of self-­management in Syria overlap and differ by highlighting the dialectic between alternative, bottom-up modes of power co-existing with the multifaceted resurgence of the state. Both the Kurdish-led DFNS and the territories held by the Arab opposition have witnessed the emergence of horizontal structures of ­governance, which were to some extent inspired by two intellectuals who believed that it was possible to carve up autonomous polities, while they were also aware of the challenge represented by people’s enduring ties with state structures. The development of these horizontal structures was fraught with challenges posed by state and semi-state actors on multiple fronts. However, many local citizens are not accustomed to managing their lives in the absence of a state. The fact that several semi-state political bodies purport to represent these grassroots movements in international talks also proves that some movement members yearn for acting like a state rather than offering a stateless alternative. For example, both political entities attempted to pursue food sovereignty and break the cycle of dependence from central suppliers, yet they also mimicked the Syrian state’s approach to agriculture on a local level. Nonetheless, my aim here has primarily been to highlight the missed opportunities of encounter and exchange between two radical experiments of grassroots democracy. If activists from both sides had communicated more effectively, they could have benefited from their respective experiences in autonomous democratic administrations. Communication channels were actually open in the early phase of the upheaval against the Asad regime: the Al-Taakhi and Rukneddine tansiqiyyat and the leftist Syrian Revolutionary Youth collective were all examples of Arab-Kurdish solidarity (Hassan 2014).31 Indeed, if the course of military events has exacerbated divisions between the two fronts, there is still room for cooperation between

136  Andrea Glioti non-nationalist opposition elements – many of whom had to flee war-torn Syria – and their counterparts among DFNS supporters. Kurdish activist Dilar Dirik (in author’s interview 2018) said that “the [DFNS’] perspective of democratic nation is meant genuinely […] to reach out to […] progressive forces across national and cultural boundaries.” It is on these yet-­theoretical grounds that cooperation between progressive elements from both sides could still be possible. As I write in June 2021, a significant blow to the DFNS’ multi-ethnic credentials would be the loss of most Arab-majority territories, such as Tel Rifaat, Manbij, Raqqa, and the Deyr az-Zawr countryside, which could be handed over to other regional forces. Such a development would almost confine the DFNS model to Kurdish-majority territories. Some geopolitical factors might also impede a trans-ethnic project, as the reasons why Kurdish-majority forces might be compelled to withdraw transcend their capability of ruling inclusively over Arab-majority territories. Such geopolitical factors manifested themselves glaringly when Turkey invaded the DFNS territories in October 2019, facilitated by the partial withdrawal of US troops. Kurdish-led authorities called on Damascus to deploy the Syrian Arab Army in the area, with the aim of deterring further advances of the Turkey-backed Syrian opposition, mostly composed of Arab militants. The DFNS remains torn between unfruitful negotiations for local autonomy with Damascus and the constant threats of Turkish military expansion, leaving little hopes for long-term self-governance. In the least catastrophic scenario, the Kurdish-led authority might succeed in obtaining a certain degree of autonomy from the Asad government which, in turn, will remain heavily dependent on as-yet-to-materialize international pressures on Damascus. “If there were a few years of stability [in Manbij], [the grassroots experience] could be even more radical, because it would have the perspective of more nations, more languages,” according to Dirik (in author’s interview 2018). These words reveal the potential of a Rojava revolution and its truthfulness to Ocalan’s political thought, if it proved to be fully functioning in Arab-majority areas. Ultimately, both political experiences remain experimental projects that have made effective attempts at countering state hegemony. For the moment, their success has been undermined. While the Syrian Arab opposition has largely been swept away by Asad in most regions, the Kurdish-led DFNS physically preserved its partial sovereignty but needed to renegotiate its own presence and politics with the Syrian government at a high price while facing a new Turkish invasion. As I have shown, such temporary failures are indeed the product of an intimate interrelationship between state institutions and entities aimed at countering the state, which give rise to a complex assemblage of contradictory political effects, parts of the same “organizational terrain” (Mitchell 1991: 98). As a result, these alternative statehood projects cannot produce absolute autonomy, mirroring the limits of the official state itself (Mitchell 1991: 78). Even more so, shared spaces of encounter for these two political projects would have allowed both polities

Comparative Study of Rojava and Syria  137 to identify their respective capacities for social and political transformation vis-à-vis state hegemony, therefore paving the ground for an effective “post-ethnic” laboratory of direct democracy.

Notes 1 This chapter would not have been possible without the invaluable contribution of my partner Estella Carpi, who is definitely more versed than I am in relevant academic literature. 2 See https://bit.ly/3cC7a9Y. 3 Yet the number of Westerners who fought alongside the Kurds appears to be significantly smaller if compared with that of Western volunteers who served in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War (Preston 2016; Specia 2018). 4 On language barriers, see https://novaramedia.com/2017/02/01/a-real-­revolutionis-a-mass-of-contradictions-interview-with-a-rojava-volunteer/. 5 In a Qamishlo-focused research published on pro-opposition website Syria Untold in 2016, the achievements of the Rojava revolution have been largely ignored vis-à-vis the Syrian Arab revolution. See http://cities.syriauntold.com/citypdf/ Qamishli_en.pdf. 6 See in Arabic https://bit.ly/3vcs8CM. 7 For a brief history of Kurdistan and the Kurdish principalities on the peripheries of non-Kurdish ruling entities, see Sheyholislami, Jaffer (2008). Identity, Discourse and the Media: The Case of the Kurds. PhD dissertation, Ottawa, Carleton University, 162–166. 8 See https://henryjacksonsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/3053-PYDForeign-Fighter-Project-1.pdf. 9 See https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/09/10/syria-kurdish-led-administrationjails-rivals. 10 On 27 June 2013, I witnessed in Amude one of the worst crackdowns on dissidents since the outbreak of the Rojava revolution in 2012. See https://www. al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/07/syria-kurds-pyd-amuda-protest.html#. 11 Author’s conversations with Syrian Kurdish activists since 2011. 12 On the historical developments of this debate, see Cahm (1989: 31, 37, 49). 13 Interview with Dilar Dirik, a Kurdish activist and a researcher at Cambridge University (15 July 2018). 14 Interview with Abu Ahmad, a member of the Raqqa local council and one of the founders of the coordination committee. Interview by Lorenzo Trombetta, summer 2014, Beirut (Collettivo Idrisi, 2017). 15 Interview with Rima, a member of the Darayya tansiqiyya. Interview by Lorenzo Trombetta, summer 2014, Beirut (Collettivo Idrisi 2017). 16 Author’s interviews with Manbij residents, January 2019: https://www.bbc. co.uk/news/world-middle-east-46757767. 17 On the Arab limited support for the Kurdish-led council system, see Knapp, Flach and Ayboga (2016: 110). On the Arab lists’ scarce success in the elections held for the DFNS regional councils in December 2017, see Schmidinger (2018: 133). 18 See Reuters https://reut.rs/3iy927e. 19 “Canton” was the official term used for the three largest administrative units in Rojava. The borders of these units were subsequently renamed as “regions” in parallel with the military advances of the SDF. 20 Informal conversations with Duma local council members in Turkey’s Gaziantep in March 2017. 21 Interview conducted via Facebook Messenger audio call on 6 October 2018. 22 Author’s interview with Europe-based eco-activist, 2018.

138  Andrea Glioti 23 With the exceptions of the Aleppo and Idlib provinces who have often had access to Turkish crossing points. 24 Author’s interview with the Europe-based eco-activist (2018), referring to an interview she had with an agricultural engineer of the Syrian opposition (NCSORF) interim government. 25 See Smart News https://bit.ly/2PZ7i8l and shorturl.at/ajntM. 26 The official statement is available in Arabic at: https://bit.ly/2VBN5IJ. 27 Author’s interviews with YPJ fighters in Rojava, 2013, and with the Europe-based eco-activist, 2018. 28 Available in Arabic at: https://bit.ly/3bCANFD. 29 Author’s interview with Europe-based eco-activist, 2018, and conversations with Syrian Arab and Kurdish citizen journalists and activists since 2011. 30 Author’s interview with Europe-based eco-activist. 31 Also mentioned in the author’s interview with Europe-based eco-activist, 2018.

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140  Andrea Glioti Jasim, Ansar (2017). “Agriculture and Food Sovereignty in Syria.” Heinrich Böll Stiftung Middle East. Available at: https://lb.boell.org/en/2017/10/04/ agriculture-and-food-sovereignty-syria. Jongerden, Joost (2015). “Radicalising Democracy: Power, Politics, People and the PKK.” Anarkismo RSS. Available at: http://researchturkey.org/ radicalising-democracy-power-politics-people-and-the-pkk/. Jongerden, Joost (2017). “Reorienting the PKK: Rojava and the Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan.” LSE Middle East Centre. Available at: https://www.lse.ac.uk/ Middle-East-Centre/events/2017/reorienting-the-pkk. Khalidi, Suleiman al- (2021). “Eight Killed in Protests against Kurdish-led Forces in Northern Syrian City.” Reuters. Available at: https://reut.rs/3iy927e. Knapp, Michael, Anja Flach and Ercan Ayboga (2016). Revolution in Rojava: Democratic Autonomy and Women’s Liberation in Syrian Kurdistan, London: Pluto Press. Küçük, Bülent and Özselçuk, Ceren (2016). “The Rojava Experience: Possibilities and Challenges of Building a Democratic Life.” South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 115, No. 1, pp. 184–196. Kurdwatch, European Center for Kurdish Studies (2011). “Who Is the Syrian-­Kurdish Opposition? The Development of Kurdish Parties, 1956–2011.” Ekurd Daily. Available at: https://ekurd.net/mismas/articles/misc2012/1/syriakurd401.htm. Leezenberg, Michiel (2016). “The Ambiguities of Democratic Autonomy: The Kurdish Movement in Turkey and Rojava.” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 671–690. Lund, Aron (2016). “Bombers Over Hasakah: Assad Clashes with the Kurds.” Carnegie Middle East Center. Available at: https://carnegie-mec.org/diwan/64375. Marei, Ayham (2014). Al-Jarba Hakiman “li-Muqata’at al-Jazirah” (Al-Jarba [Elected as] Governor of “the Jazirah Canton”). Al-Akhbar. Available [Arabic] at https://al-akhbar.com/Syria/34522. Martínez, José Ciro, and Eng, Brent (2017). “Struggling to Perform the State: The Politics of Bread in the Syrian Civil War.” International Political Sociology, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 130–147. Middle East Online (2013). Hulm Dimuqrati Suri yatahaqqaq fi Dayr az-Zawr (A Syrian Democratic Dream Turns into Reality in Dayr az-Zawr) [online]. Available at: https://bit.ly/2Ss7yhT. Mitchell, Timothy (1991). “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics.” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 85, No. 1, pp. 77–96. Mora, Mariana (2015). “The Politics of Justice: Zapatista Autonomy at the Margins of the Neoliberal Mexican State.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 87–106. Munif, Yasser (2017). “Participatory Democracy and Micropolitics in Manbij.” The Century Foundation. Available at: https://tcf.org/content/report/ participatory-democracy-micropolitics-manbij/?session=1. Nassar, Alaa, Mohammad Abdulsattar Ibrahim and Madeline Edwards (2017). “Why Are Kurdish Authorities Shutting Down Dozens of Private Schools in Northeast Syria?” Syria Direct. Available at: https://syriadirect.org/why-arekurdish-authorities-shutting-down-dozens-of-private-schools-in-northeastsyria/. Neblo, Michael A., Kevin M. Esterling and David M.J. Lazer (2018). Politics with the People. Building a Directly Representative Democracy, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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142  Andrea Glioti Zaman al-Wasl (2013a). Maadan Tarudd ‘ala al-Mundhirin bi-Fawda al-Hurriyyah… (Maadan Responds to Those who Warn Against the Chaos of Freedom…). Available [Arabic] at: https://www.zamanalwsl.net/news/article/35824. Zaman al-Wasl (2013b). Majlis Mahalliyy Li-Qarya Hududiyyah bi-Rif Idlib (Local Council in a Border Village in the Countryside of Idlib). Available [Arabic] at http://syria.frontline.left.over-blog.com/article-115483745.html. Zerocalcare (2015). “Kobane Calling.” Internazionale 1085 (anno XXII).

6 Postcolonial State-ness and the Case of Rawabi Somdeep Sen

Figure 6.1  Views of the “disorganized” cityscape of Beit Jala (Photo by author).

DOI: 10.4324/b22870-7

144  Somdeep Sen On June 6, 2016, I met a young Palestinian engineer Bassam for dinner at his family home in Beit Jala, a town in the Bethlehem Governate of the occupied West Bank. At the time, he was looking to buy an apartment near Ramallah where he had recently found a job. After dinner, we made our way to the balcony to smoke. Bassam’s house was situated on a hill and so we had a clear view of Beit Jala below us. To the east, we could see Highway 60 and beyond it Gilo, an Israeli settlement. I asked Bassam, “What kind of place are you looking for?” He replied, “Not sure. Just a good neighborhood, clean streets. Maybe enough space for friends to visit.” Then, pointing in the direction of Beit Jala, he added: I don’t like the way we Palestinians live. You see the houses are all over the place. At night when you see all the lights in the city you can see that there is no organization. There is no planning. We just improvise. There is no system (Figure 6.1) I asked him, “Is there an ideal you have in mind? Some place you have seen that resembles the kind of environment you want to live in?” Bassam hesitated before continuing: I’m not proud of this but growing up in this house, I have somehow idealized how the settlers live. I know that our living situation is bad because the occupation makes our life difficult. But when I look out from this balcony, I prefer the way the streetlights in Gilo are all in order, in a straight line (Figure 6.2). That is what a normal state and normal city should be like. Compared to Beit Jala, it seems so much nicer and when I was a kid, I used to fantasize about walking around in Gilo thinking life must be very nice, clean and organized there and far away from the craziness of Palestine. Here in Beit Jala, you sometimes feel that we have so little space that we live on top of each other. Bassam then pulled out his phone and, as he looked through his pictures, said, “I’m thinking of a place like Rawabi for an apartment. It’s the only place that has this kind of organized way of living.” He then showed me an image of the aerial view of Rawabi on his phone (Figure 6.3) and added: Funnily, Rawabi looks like a fantasy world because it is our dream to live in a nice, clean and organized place like the settlers. In Palestinian cities you see piles of trash, dirt, too much traffic and you feel maybe we don’t know how to live normally in a civilized way. Maybe, that’s why we don’t deserve to be free. But Rawabi is like a dream. I imagine that when we are free this is what all our cities will look like. Rawabi is like our fantasy future city.

Postcolonial State-ness  145

Figure 6.2  View of “organized” Gilo (on top of the hill) from Bassam’s balcony (Photo by author).

Admittedly, Bassam’s enthusiasm for Rawabi, the first master-planned Palestinian city, is not generalizable. Rawabi is meant to eventually accommodate 40,000 residents. Yet, in December 2019, only 5,000 Palestinians reportedly lived in the city (Whitaker 2019). When I asked Bassam whether he considered the apartments in Rawabi affordable, he readily admitted, “It’s not for everyone. I have a good job. My family is well-off. Maybe my father will help me buy an apartment. But it is too expensive for most Palestinians.” That said, it is not mere happenstance that Bassam perceived Rawabi to be cast in the image of the liberated future and as an antidote to the “craziness” of occupied Palestine. The city was purposefully built with the future liberated Palestine in view and it intentionally looks past the realities of Palestinian life under the present-day Israeli settler colonial rule (Wolfe 2006, Collins 2012, Salamanca et al. 2012). This deliberate focus on the future is evident, for instance, in the “About Rawabi” section on the city’s official website. It makes no explicit reference to the Israeli military presence in the Palestinian territories. Instead, it simply bypasses this Palestinian present and, in futuristic terms, describes the manner in which Rawabi will incorporate Palestinian landscapes and architectural heritage

146  Somdeep Sen

Figure 6.3  A n aerial view of Rawabi from 2019 (Source: https://www.rawabi.ps/ tour/rawabiMap/index.php1).

into its modern and sleek cityscape (Rawabi 2018a). During an interview with Forbes, Rawabi’s benefactor, the Palestinian-American businessman Bashar Masri, similarly displayed little concern with the present-day trials of occupied Palestinians. He said, “The world sees the Palestinians and the Palestinian story as the victim, sometimes violent [sic]. This is the narrow look at a certain part of the Palestinian people of course.” With an eye on the future, and away from political condition that gives context to the Palestinian story of victimhood (and militancy), Masri added: We need to pass the message out to the world that we [Palestinians] are about construction. We are building a nation. We are developing a whole community. The world does not have the chance to build a nation every day.2 In another interview, Masri further specified that Rawabi is meant to signify that the “State of Palestine is underway” and pose as a microcosm of the future state where Palestinians can “live, work and grow”3 uninterrupted by the Israeli occupation (Sasso 2017). Here, one could consider Rawabi’s insistence on looking past the current Palestinian political context as an indication that its design and planning mirrors the “Gulfication” or “Dubaization” of cities seen across the Middle East. Often touted as a model for successful urban development in the region, “Gulfication” or “Dubaization” represents a form of neoliberal urbanism that draws inspiration from cities in the oil-rich Gulf States that

Postcolonial State-ness  147 strive for an urban form and aesthetic that is purposefully disconnected from the historical, cultural and political context of a place (cf. inter alia, Elsheshtawy 2004, Elsheshtawy 2008, Fuccaro 2001).4 The existent literature on Rawabi argues, however, that the consequences of such “context-free” urbanism (Elsheshtawy 2018: 17) is far more dire in a colonial political condition as it de-politicizes and normalizes Israeli violations of Palestinian rights and further entrenches Palestinians’ statelessness (cf. inter alia Dana 2014, Grandinetti 2015). But, while it is important to recognize that Rawabi is unable to “solve” the lack of a Palestinian state, it should not however be dismissed as just another neoliberal scheme. Rawabi also endeavors to affect a manner of urban life that is uninhibited by the realities of the Israeli occupation and allows someone like Bassam to feign living in the liberated future. In this chapter, I take this aspiration seriously. And drawing on my fieldwork in the occupied West Bank in 2016, I argue that in looking past the Palestinian occupied present, the first Palestinian planned city replicates a postcolonial brand of state-ness. For one thing, by simulating the unoccupied future, Rawabi echoes the postcolonial state’s enthusiasm with the “post” (in postcolonial) (Jacobs 1996). This enthusiasm, however, is not built on an assumption that the colonized have somehow rid themselves of the legacies of colonial rule. Instead, in the case of Rawabi at least, it represents the colonized’s attempt to conjure some sense of indigeneity from the colonial present. So, be it the national(ist) iconography that punctuates its urban landscape or the manner in which, during my fieldwork, one of the city’s architects described Rawabi’s “modern” amenities as being in service of the future Palestinian state, Rawabi is meant to be not just a futuristic city for Palestinians but a futuristic Palestinian city. However, just as the postcolonial state replicates the colonial legacies despite its struggle for indigeneity, Rawabi is not entirely successful in escaping Palestine’s colonized present either. As Bassam noticed, Rawabi is aesthetically very much reminiscent of the “modern” and organized nature of the colonizer’s spatial schemes in Israeli settlements. This is not without reason, since both its benefactor (i.e., Bashar Masri) and some of my interlocutors who were involved in the design and planning of the city insist that Rawabi is inspired by and is meant to replicate the spatial character of settlements and Israeli cities. Seen together then, I conclude that while Rawabi aims to personify a self-assured image of the future State of Palestine, it in fact replicates the confused existence of the postcolonial state (Lee & Lam 1996), as it too wavers between an enthusiastic struggle for indigeneity while also aspiring for a modern future embossed with the legacies of the colonizer.

Bringing Back the State in Rawabi’s Neoliberalism On December 12, 2007, Bayti Real Estate Development Company (Bayti), co-owned by Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Company (Qatari Diar)

148  Somdeep Sen and Bashar Masri-owned Massar International, announced plans to develop a new Palestinian city Rawabi (meaning “hills” in Arabic). In the first phase, Rawabi was to house 25,000 people and 5,000 apartments. The new city is “not intended to serve as a bedroom community.” Instead, it is meant to have a vibrant economy fueled by “services sector enterprises such as bank, IT companies, consulting and engineering firms and a variety of retail establishments” that will, in turn, serve as a source of employment for Rawabi’s residents (Rawabi 2007). On April 20, 2008, Bayti signed an agreement with the Palestinian Authority (PA) that committed the latter to building essential infrastructure and public facilities like schools and a hospital (Rawabi 2008a). On May 21, 2008, Bayti announced that Qatari Diar would increase its investment and that Rawabi would be now built at an estimated cost of more than $350 million (Rawabi 2008b). The next day, the plan to establish Rawabi was once again announced at the Palestine Investment Conference as a project that had the potential to trigger Palestinian economic growth. At the conference, Deputy Managing Director of Bayti Amer Dajani further noted that Rawabi addressed the “blatant absence of housing” in Palestine and provided alternatives “cheaper than regular housing” (PIC 2008: 22). By 2017, the total cost of building Rawabi had reached $1.4 billion. Construction has also been stalled several times because of cash-flow problems and delays by Israeli authorities with regard to the approval of permits, access roads and a stable water supply (Doucet & McMullen 2015). As I have mentioned earlier, the stated aspiration of the first planned Palestinian city is simple: to be a place where Palestinians can live, work and grow. Yet, its existence in a political context informed by a settler colonial condition and the Palestinian liberation struggle as well as its insistence on looking past this political context means that Rawabi is more than just a new place of habitation. From a regional perspective, Rawabi could be considered an extension of a neoliberal urbanism pioneered in/by the oil-rich Gulf States. This form of urbanism took shape in the rapidly transforming skylines of cities like Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha. These cities saw a proliferation of large shopping malls, luxury hotels, indoor ski slopes and indoor flower gardens and have “rejected the [pre-oil boom] past” (Strochlic 2019: 20). The scholar of architecture Yasser Elsheshtawy has described this as a form of “context-free” urbanism wherein the focus is not on the development of the historical (old) center of the city. Instead, a much more “visible…spectacular [part of the] city with high-rises, skyscrapers and new communities” transcends this past and poses as the new center that is entirely detached from the cultural, political and historical context that shaped the old city (Elsheshtawy 2018: 12). This manner of neoliberal urbanism, typically associated with cities in the Gulf States, is considered today a model for successful urban development in the Middle East. And the “Dubai model,” “Dubaization” or “Gulfication” is being replicated in, for instance, Cairo’s shift from the traditional center to a more spectacular

Postcolonial State-ness  149 (“context-free”) urban center (Elsheshtawy 2010, pp. 249–273), in the postwar urban development schemes seen in Beirut (Shwayri 2008, pp. 69–99) and in Istanbul’s knowledge-based urban regeneration megaprojects (Yigitcanlar & Bulu 2015, pp. 89–107). Since Rawabi is co-funded by Qatari Diar, it is not surprising that the Gulf model of “context-free” neoliberal urbanism is being replicated in the city’s urban form, as it too strives to escape the context of the Palestinian occupied present. Yet, as the existent literature critical of Rawabi’s neoliberal urbanism maintains, the city’s “context-free” urban landscape is particularly detrimental to the Palestinian liberation struggle. Tariq Dana, for instance, argues that Rawabi is representative of the growing political clout of an elite Palestinian economic class whose members, like Masri, have initiated “economic normalization projects.” Ostensibly, Rawabi may posture as a national(ist) initiative. However, Dana posits, such initiatives treat Israelis as “normal business partners rather than an occupying power.” Whether by accepting a donation of trees from the Jewish National Fund or by contracting ten Israeli construction companies, Rawabi normalizes the violation of Palestinian rights by Israeli authorities (Dana 2014). Similarly, Tina Grandinetti contends that Rawabi promotes a neoliberal idea of a Palestinian middle class. She argues that “market logic and capitalist reasoning” imbued in the spatial identity of the city is meant to efface the presumed “backwardness” of Palestinians and the accompanying “radicalism” of sections of the Palestinian population. Further, Rawabi encourages Palestinians to become capitalist, consumerist and business-minded and frames this as “a new form of resistance” that does not require a violent confrontation with Israel (Grandinetti 2015, pp. 63–64). Of course, Rawabi is only an extension of the brand of (neoliberal) state-building and peacebuilding currently prevalent in the Palestinian territories. It too offers Palestinians “[economic] growth and prosperity,” with the hope that a focus on economic progress would divert attention from the lack of a strategy for liberating Palestinians or combating the “parameters of occupation” (Khalidi & Samour 2011: 8). Such state-building processes are not concerned with securing the sovereign State of Palestine either. They may, almost in ritual terms, claim to be in service of the Palestinian struggle for liberation (Pace & Sen 2019). But, in effect, they create amiable Palestinian partners (Turner 2011, Sen 2015a) who are more concerned with schemes (like Rawabi) that look past the ever-diminishing scope for securing a sovereign Palestinian state in the face of an intransigent Israeli occupation. Toufic Haddad was therefore right to purport that Palestine – weighed under the mechanisms of “neoliberal peacebuilding and state-building” funded by the international donor community – had in fact become “Palestine Limited” or “Palestine Ltd.” This Palestine was indeed a (de-)limited version of the aspired for State of Palestine as it dispels the aspiration of “the river to the sea as a [Palestinian] homeland.” Instead, Palestine Ltd. sans “any emancipatory liberationist content” is characterized by the presence of neoliberal

150  Somdeep Sen “economic and political structures which enforce and deepen” the oppression of the Palestinian population (Haddad 2016: 8). While it is accurate to perceive Rawabi an extension of this “neoliberal turn” in Palestine (Dana 2015), such a critique of the city is premised on the continued statelessness of Palestinians. That is to say, Rawabi – or, for that matter, the neoliberal brand of state-building prevalent in Palestine – has been criticized because it does not “solve” Palestinian statelessness or secure the sovereign State of Palestine. My argument is that this accusation fails to recognize Rawabi as a state-building project because it focuses on whether or not a “real, sovereign state” exists.5 In reality, the state is equally a matter of “political practice” (Abrams 1977: 82). To this end, Timothy Mitchell notes that the state is an “empirical phenomenon” that is revealed in “visible, everyday forms, such as the language of legal practice, the architecture of public buildings, the wearing of military uniforms, or the marking out and policing of frontiers” (Mitchell 1991: 81). In Palestine, expectedly, the explicit sovereign state and its accompanying material accoutrement does not exist in a still stateless condition. But what a state is and does in Palestine is also an empirical phenomenon and comes to fruition in the state-ness – or the qualities of state – displayed through visible symbols and everyday rituals. In a sense, this state is not explicit (Sen 2015b). But through “symbolic languages,” it can speak like a state (Hansen & Stepputat 2001: 5–8) and gains a more implicit existence as a qualifier for political practice (Lund 2006: 689). So, for the critics of Palestine’s “neoliberal turn,” Rawabi may indeed symbolize the arrival of “Palestine Ltd.” But I would argue that despite its limited form, the state in Palestine should still be deliberated as a matter of political practice that reveals itself in everyday forms. And in the master-planned Palestinian city, I go on to specify, this practice of state-ness is not unlike that of the postcolonial state as it manifests through the pursuance of an indigenous futurism that is equally laced with the legacies of the colonizer.

Rawabi and Its Futuristic Postcoloniality If state-ness can reveal itself through political practice, Rawabi’s propensity to speak like a state is often evident in its futurism – specifically, in the way it performs the imagined, liberated, future Palestine through its spatial identity. Bassam recognized this identity when he identified the city as a “fantasy future city” and as a prototype of what he imagines cities in the liberated future State of Palestine would look like. A focus on the future is equally evident in the way Bayti’s website describes the making of Rawabi as an “opportunity to learn from best practices and to build a town, which will become a model for future development in Palestine” [emphasis added]” (Bayti 2018). Architect Malkit Shoshan also regarded Rawabi to be “beyond the twentieth century.” And, while hailing the city as “visionary,” he asserted that “it brings together a whole lot of optimism toward a peaceful future [emphasis added]” (Shoshan 2013: 52).

Postcolonial State-ness  151 The future was very much in the present during my visit to Rawabi as well. I called the Bayti office in Ramallah the day after my visit to Bassam’s home in Beit Jala in order to organize a tour of Rawabi. To my surprise, I was invited for a guided tour the very same day. When I arrived, I was instructed to wait at the visitor center and told that a representative of Bayti would come meet me shortly. While waiting, I looked around the premises of the center. It had maps, aerial pictures of the future Rawabi and the representative offices of banks offering loans to potential buyers. The receptionist at the center specifically recommended that I walk through what was in essence a miniature version of the city. There were miniature promenades, roads, shops and apartment buildings (Figure 6.4). I took a brief tour of this Rawabi, after which I met my tour guide Ahmed, a young Palestinian architect working for Bayti. We exchanged pleasantries and I asked him who had designed the miniature Rawabi. Ahmed replied, “I think it was the architects who designed Rawabi and then some artists helped them put up the exhibition. The main purpose is to give prospective buyers a sense of what Rawabi will look like.” Then, while smiling, he added, “We want people to experience the future.” We made our way to a car that had the emblem of Rawabi painted on its sides. When we entered the vehicle, Ahmed said: So, we are in the visitor center which is kind of in the middle of the city. But we will first drive out of Rawabi and then drive back in, so you get a holistic understanding of the city and the full experience of the vision behind the city. As we drove out, Ahmed began by listing some facts about the city – the size of the land, the budget, the number of residents. But curious to know more about what he termed as the “vision behind the city,” I asked, “What is the thinking behind building this city? I can see Ateret [a nearby Israeli settlement] right there. What is the vision for building such a city facing a settlement?” Ahmed replied: Of course, the settlers hate us. They don’t want us to be here. They know that we are the future, and they don’t want Palestinians to have a future. We have had major problems with the Israeli authorities as well. For example, we don’t have permits for permanent roads to bring construction material in. So, the trucks have to use this dirt road. We also have problems with water and because of this the project was delayed for two years. We have an agreement with the Palestinian Authority that they will build schools. But they are broke, so we have to pay for the schools in the city. In the end we have spent a lot more than we planned but this is not a profit-making project. This is a history making project. Actually, this is a future making project and we are creating a vision for what the future state would look like.

152  Somdeep Sen

Figure 6.4  Miniature Rawabi at the visitor center (Photos by author).

Postcolonial State-ness  153 At this juncture, Rawabi sounded like a scheme devised by the colonized – one that, despite its lofty aspirations, is marred by the realities of the colonial condition. Nonetheless, the future was very much at the fore. This became especially evident when we arrived at the Q Center, a business and retail area. Rawabi’s official website describes it as combining “the best of all worlds in a hip new urban core” and adds that Q Center is “a perfect blend of upscale residential housing, office space, shops, restaurants, cultural attractions and entertainment” (Rawabi 2018b). When we got out of the car, Ahmed said, “We call this place Q Center because Q stands for Qatar and they are our main funders.” Then, describing the purpose of the center, he added: I know this place is empty but imagine this as a business and shopping area. We want IT oriented businesses here and we have spaces for startups. So, this place will be a place of innovation. But this will also be a shopping area and we want to attract international brands – Kenneth Cole, Louise Vuitton, Hugo Boss. The main problem for Palestinians is that we don’t have the opportunity to buy high-end products. One option is to go to Jordan but that is very expensive because you have to pay for extra transportation and hotel. The other option is to get a permit for Israel but not everyone can get that. The Q Center tries to solve this problem. I interjected, “But, why is shopping so important? There are bigger issues aren’t there?” Ahmed responded, “Yes, but here we are looking beyond today’s problems. We are building the future Palestine. Rawabi can teach us how to do this.” The final noteworthy stop on my tour was Wadina, an open-air public recreation area. Ahmed said: As an architect I always think of this as the pièce de résistance. As you know our main philosophy is live, work and grow. We have modern apartment buildings for living. The Q center is for working. This is Wadina and it helps Palestinians grow. This is the valley of Rawabi, and we have taken the landfill from the rest of Rawabi and put it in here. It’s an entertainment venue and covers 135,000 square meters. We have a volleyball court, a pirate ship, a playground and the largest amphitheater in Palestine and one of the largest in the region. (Figure 6.5) We then walked inside the amphitheater and Ahmed continued, “There is space here for 15,000 people. We imagine that in the future there will be international concerts. So, we can have a normal living here, with

154  Somdeep Sen entertainment.” I asked him, “You mentioned something about Wadina contributing to Palestinians growing. Can you clarify what you mean by this?” He replied: We want to give Palestinians a new, modern way of living. That’s how Palestine will grow, and, in the future, we will become a real country. We will soon have a zipline over Wadina. This is something new that Palestinians have never experienced. You can sit here and just look at the nature. We don’t usually have the possibility to do this because either Palestinians don’t own the land, or we don’t care. Here we are teaching Palestinians to care for the land. There will be retailers, supermarkets, and families can enjoy normal life. We will also have safari trails. What we are doing is taking elements of good living from outside the country and bring it here so that in the future when we have a normal country. Rawabi can be a model for the rest of the country. It is of course not uncommon for an urban landscape to serve as a canvass, displaying the aspirations of a nation or a state (Sen 2021: 705–706). The hope of civilizing the indigenous population of Brazil’s Central Plateau was, for instance, written into the very character of Brasilia’s urban landscape. And as the new modern national capital attempted to replicate Le Corbusier’s “true geometric layout” of the ideal city (Holston 1987: 175), the design and planning of Brasilia was meant to prompt a “break” from the Central Plateau’s (indigenous) past and personify the Brazilian state’s modern future (Holston 1987: 20–21). Similarly, planned cities like Chandigarh, Bhubaneshwar, Cuttack and Gandhinagar in India were built not just to accommodate the country’s burgeoning urban population (Sen 2021: 715). But, by being supposedly egalitarian in their design and by providing a better quality of urban living, they were meant to symbolize a modern India, free from the maladies of its unmodern past (Shaw 2009; Datta 2015; Fitting 2002). Admittedly, during my tour of Rawabi, Ahmed only made the occasional reference to the Palestinian state. Instead, he often treated Rawabi (and spatial schemes) as a source of inspiration for devising a modern future for Palestinians in general, which would also include the eventual liberated Palestinian state. Nonetheless, by attempting to construct a synonymy between Rawabi’s futuristic aspirations and the future of Palestine (and Palestinians), the city (at least in the way it is described by its proponents) does evoke a certain state-ness. To be sure, Rawabi as a state-building project does not peddle in the institutions or bureaucracies of what would be considered the “real, sovereign state.” Instead, through the euphemism of the “future,” it is, in fact, speaking like the state and engaging in visible and everyday forms of state-ness that allow Palestinians (like Bassam) to feign an urban living that is uninhibited by the Israeli occupation – much as one would expect in the liberated State of Palestine. In this sense then, and not unlike Brasilia,

Postcolonial State-ness  155

Figure 6.5  View of and from the amphitheater in Wadina (Photos by author).

156  Somdeep Sen Chandigarh, Bhubaneshwar, Cuttack or Gandhinagar, Rawabi confirms that there exists a certain parallel between the urban milieu and the state. Of course, unlike the above examples, Rawabi, operating in a stateless condition, is reversing the relationship between the state and city, whereby it hopes to inspire the identity and character of the future Palestinian state (and not vice versa). More critically though, by being so focused on the future, Rawabi also replicates the postcolonial state’s enthusiasm with the “post” in postcolonial (Jacobs 1996: 24). Indeed, in some ways, the term “postcolonial” is time-bound and can be associated with the era after the dismantling of colonial rule (i.e., the era of the post-colony). Yet, in this chapter, I take a far more substantive understanding of the postcolonial and refer to the (formerly) colonized’s attempt to decouple from the legacies of colonial rule (cf. inter alia, Chatterjee 1993; Bhambra 2007). In this sense, the postcolonial state’s enthusiasm with the “post” is not premised on the assumption that the (formerly) colonized’s have moved “beyond colonialism” or have entirely effaced the legacies of colonial rule. On the contrary, it is about possibilities and refers to having the material ability as well as agency to attempt and sieve out a sense of indigeneity from a history of colonization. One could question the extent to which the “post” can indeed be achieved through such efforts. In some ways, history is not open to course correction in a manner that allows the legacies of the era of colonization to be simply erased (Ahmad 1992: 77). The pervasiveness of the impact of colonial rule is such that social, political, cultural and institutional remnants of the era of colonization are in a realistic sense unavoidable in the period after the flight of the colonizer (Sen 2020: 145). Yet, the very axiom of postcoloniality is that despite this reality, the effort to conjure an indigeneity out of the shambles of colonial rule persists. And efforts to conjure indigeneity often takes a spatial turn. In London, this involved the gestured “space clearing” and the making of Banglatown (or Brick Lane) in London – an area meant to spatially symbolize Bengali sovereignty in an urban landscape once owned by the colonizer (Jacobs 1996: 161–163). The violently implemented Fast Track Land Reform Program (FTLRP) in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe was equally meant to be a gestured clearing of the inequality in land ownership between black and white Zimbabweans that, while institutionalized under colonial rule, had persisted in the era of the postcolonial state (cf. inter alia, Scoones et al. 2010; Dekker & Kinsey 2011; Cliffe et al. 2011; Matondi 2012). Clearing the legacies of the colonial rule is also the motivation behind smart city’s urban renewal projects implemented by postcolonial states, wherein such initiatives are conceived as “fast-tracked” paths toward the postcolonial “dream” of swiftly assuming the title of a modern city and, by extension, a modern state (Watson 2009; Watson 2015). In the same vein, Rawabi’s focus past the colonized present and on the future of Palestine also displays a certain enthusiasm for the “post,” as it stands as symbolic of futuristic postcolonial possibilities of clearing the legacies of colonial rule. That Ahmed only implicitly refers to the Israeli

Postcolonial State-ness  157 occupation (without actually using the term “occupation”) when mentioning Palestinians’ lack of access to international designer brands or in regard to the delays while constructing Rawabi is without doubt evocative of the neoliberal subjectivity it hopes to instill in its residents. Here, one could argue, Ahmed looks past the colonized present and in doing so de-­ politicizes Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights. However, this ease with which Rawabi looks beyond the colonial present by creating an image of Palestinian urban living that is uninhibited by the structures of the Israeli occupation is also meant to symbolize postcolonial possibilities. The miniature model of Rawabi at the visitor center, for instance, simulated an urban life that made no reference to the Israeli occupation. Rawabi as a whole was described as a future-making project and a basis for the future Palestinian state. The economic activities at the Q Center were also meant to look past Palestine’s colonial present and provide a basis of Palestinian economic growth in the future. And Wadina, as a public recreation area, was meant to teach Palestinians a new, modern way of living – a way of living that, Ahmed conjectured, could serve as a model for the future Palestine. Of course, while still simulating these postcolonial possibilities with an eye on the future, Rawabi also ritually claims to be an indigenous Palestinian endeavor. In fact, it actively searches for indigeneity – albeit, in future tense. But in so doing, Rawabi again replicates the urban schemes of the postcolonial state. The landscape of a city, as James Duncan argues, often acts as an ideological repository (Duncan 1985: 182) of the state. This is all the more the case in the postcolonial city that struggles to conjure an indigenous identity – and even more so still when the postcolonial city is still in a heavily colonized country. Nihal Perara, for instance, describes the manner in which the new capital city of Sri Lanka Sri Jayawardenapura-Kottee was built as an alternative to Colombo, a city steeped in colonial history. This was done as a way of ensuring that an indigeneity underpinned the spatial identity of the national capital, one “that goes beyond the former colonial one [as seen in Colombo]” (Perara 1998: 189). Similarly, Brenda Yeoh’s writes that, through “toponymic inscriptions” into the urban landscape, the postcolonial state attempted “to foster a sense of ‘nation’ and ‘national identity’” free of colonial legacies (Yeoh 1996: 299). In Singapore’s post-­independence era, this included not just the re-naming of streets and places, but also the substitution of the terms “road” or “street” with the Malay words “jalan” or “lorong” (Yeoh 1996: 301). Toponymic schemes also served as a means of conjuring an indigenous identity, independent of the colonial past, in the South Indian city Madras as names of streets were changed from English to Tamil.6 Furthermore, statues of Tamil authors were erected and buildings constructed in the era after the dismantling of the British Raj drew on classical South Indian architectural traditions. Accordingly, Madras (renamed Chennai in 1996) both served “the needs of its contemporary city” and, while doing so, displayed its indigeneity as a Tamil city (Lewandowski 1984: 240).

158  Somdeep Sen In Rawabi, its indigeneity as a Palestinian city and not merely a city for Palestinians was repeatedly evoked in the manner in which it was positioned as a city in service of the future Palestinian state. Indeed, as was declared at the Palestine Investment Conference in 2008, Rawabi was conceived as an initiative that had the potential to both trigger Palestinian economic growth as well as address a Palestinian problem of accessing affordable housing. During my tour, Ahmed was insistent in impressing on the fact that Rawabi was fulfilling the promises made during the conference in 2008. While describing the (economic) potential of the Q Center, he had said: This place is about the future and we have a lot of difficulties attracting international businesses and brands because people think that because we have an occupation, we cannot do any business here. But we have already started contributing to the Palestinian economy. Today we are the largest employer in Palestine after the Palestinian Authority. All our workers and employees are Palestinians. So, we are not like a factory that can only employee people after it is completely built. But we already contributing to the Palestinian economy and providing employment for people. While driving past a block of apartment buildings, I had also asked Ahmed about the affordability of the apartments. Contradicting Bassam’s assessment, he said: We are of course not marketing our apartments as low-cost housing. But they are extremely affordable and 30 percent cheaper than any other place in Palestine. Our logic is that this is for Palestinians. We’re not building this for Israelis. So, normal Palestinians have to be able to afford Rawabi. Further, in Ahmed’s conception, Rawabi was also deeply Palestinian not just in terms of what it did for Palestinian but also in terms what it was unable to do. Concerning the city’s proximity to a nearby settlement, I had asked him, “How safe is Rawabi? Can settlers and soldiers simply come in?” Ahmed had said: We are not very different from other Palestinian cities. Settlers and soldiers can come in anytime they want. Right now, we have some security because we have construction machinery but when construction is done there will be no extra security and residents will have to deal with soldiers and settlers like Palestinians in all other Palestinian cities. The purported indigeneity of Rawabi was also meant to be displayed in its aesthetics. With regard to the construction material used to build the city, Ahmed said, “The stones are Palestinian. We have used what’s available here to make Rawabi. So, you can say that the city has grown organically.”

Postcolonial State-ness  159

Figure 6.6  Artwork at a roundabout in Rawabi (Photo by author).

In the same way, when we were at a roundabout during my tour, Ahmed told the driver of the car to slow down and while pointing to a sculpture on the road, said: That represents the way we are building Rawabi. We are hitting the ground hard because building a completely new city in a place like

160  Somdeep Sen Palestine is not easy. But because of our hard work something is growing out of the ground – as you can see there are plants coming out of the concrete. This is a metaphor for our struggle in Palestine and how hard we have to work to build this country (Figure 6.6)

Figure 6.7  Sculptures behind the visitor center in Rawabi (Photo by author).

Postcolonial State-ness  161 The final two prominent displays of Rawabi’s claim to Palestinian-ness were located in the vicinity of the visitor center. After my tour, I was waiting for a taxi in the lobby of the center, when the receptionist offered to give me a tour of the premises. I accepted, and we first walked over to the back of the building where there was a sculpture of two figures looking out toward the valley. The receptionist said, “This art piece is by Palestinian sculptors Suleiman Mansour and Nabil Anani. It is supposed to represent how in Rawabi, sitting on the hill, people can simply enjoy the landscape. We don’t usually have this opportunity to do this” (Figure 6.7). In a way, the sculpture echoes the way in which Wadina is also meant to help Palestinians take ownership of the Palestinian landscape, aided not least by the fact that Rawabi’s altitude (unlike most Palestinian cities that are located in the valley) allows visitors to see the landscape. However, the most dramatic display of Rawabi’s Palestinian-ness was a flag in front of the entrance to the visitor center. The receptionist said: This is the largest flag in Palestine. Below you can see that there is a sculpture of a family also made by Mansour and Anani. It is a Palestinian family, and they are protecting the nation. Rawabi is like that family. We are here protecting Palestinian land and taking care of it (Figure 6.8) I then said to her, “It is of course important that the flag is facing the settlement on the other hill.” She smiled and responded, “Yes. We like it this way.” Due to the nature of Israel’s settler colonialism, it is not surprising that the colonized, including the neoliberal economic elite among them, insist that their schemes contribute to the struggle for liberation. Works on settler colonialism in general have argued that the settler colonizer does not just exploit indigenous labor. The settler also denies the very existence of the indigenous community (Wolfe 2006, Veracini 2010, Veracini 2011). The effort to then materialize this myth of indigenous non-existence in Israel-­Palestine, for one, results in the biological elimination of Palestinians; a form of elimination that was exemplified by the ethnic cleansing and mass expulsion of Palestinian communities that occurred alongside the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 (Masalha 2012, Khalidi 1992, Pappe 2006). But the indigenous are also erased when Israelis claim Palestinian cultural artifacts as their own or when Palestinians are absent in the exhibits at museums that recount the history of the Israeli “War of Independence” (Sen 2020, pp. 28–29). To be sure, as Nadera Shalhoum-Kevorkian writes, these efforts of the settler are premised by the founding myth of the State of Israel, namely that it is “a land without a people, for a people without a land.” Further, she adds, this myth does not only present the land as “terra nullis.” It also insinuates that the indigenous inhabitants are “not people” (Shalhoum-­Kevorkian 2015: 5). It is then only expected that as the indigenous face erasure at the

162  Somdeep Sen

Figure 6.8  P  alestinian flags and sculpture of the Palestinian family (Photos by author).

Postcolonial State-ness  163 hands of the settler in this manner, they underline their existence as a people in a way that looks past the colonized present and simulates a future in which they exist and flourish. This said, such feigning of an indigenous future or an enthusiasm for the “post” is happening in a still-persistent settler colonial condition. So the question remains: what happens to the colonial in Rawabi’s postcolonial state-like enthusiasm for the “post”?

Futuristic Rawabi and Its Colonial Legacies Unsurprisingly, Rawabi is unable to efface the reality that the settler colonial condition continues to punctuate all aspects of Palestinian life. This was palpably evident when Ahmed admitted that Rawabi was indeed like all other Palestinian cities, in that it is surveilled by the Israeli military and is vulnerable to attacks by settlers. However, despite performing like a Palestinian city, Rawabi has also been criticized for colluding with the occupation. For one thing, as many have argued, it normalizes the occupation’s violations of Palestinian rights because, in its futuristic aspirations, it does not challenge the foundational parameters of the occupation. But this narrative of Rawabi’s collusion with the colonizer is also amply supported by the extent to which the first planned Palestinian city resembles Israeli spatial schemes. After all, Bassam considered Rawabi as coming closest to replicating the urban planning and design of a settlement like Gilo. This however is not a coincidence. Before designing Rawabi, Bashar Masri met Israeli Canadian architect Moshe Safdie, who conceived the city plan for the Modi’in7. Afterwards, Safdie took Masri on a tour of the city. With regard to his visit to Modi’in, Masri had said, “When searching for a model, we first looked at cities next door. Modi’in has similar topography and a similar climate to Rawabi” (Miller 2014). As I have argued earlier, it is not unusual that the colonial is replicated by those enthused by the possibilities of the postcolonial. For instance, deeming it a pitfall of national consciousness, Franz Fanon noted that the indigenous political elite often speaks the language of nationalism. Yet, they have no relationship with the masses of the national polity and are largely concerned with transferring the privileges enjoyed by the former colonizer into the hands of the new postcolonial elite. They are also unconcerned, Fanon argues, with building the newly liberated national community. Instead, their primary vocation is to stay part of the “racket” of leadership at the helm of the postcolonial state (Fanon 1963: 148–150; cf. pp. 13–17, this volume). Rawabi also speaks the language of nationalism. But by attempting to “look like” Modi’in, one could (from a Fanonian perspective) then question the extent to which it is truly concerned with building the national community. However, that Rawabi claims to have a national character while also aspiring to “look like” the colonizer is not just a matter of political collusion or a “pitfall” of national consciousness. It also reflects a deeply postcolonial character or, as Lee and Lam specify, a form of confused identity that fundamentally defines the urban landscape in postcolonial states. They go on to define this as an identity that is modern but “scored by the

164  Somdeep Sen claws of colonialism, left full of contradictions, of half-finished processes, of confusions, of hybridities and liminalities” (Lee & Lam 1996: 968–969). The “claws of colonialism” were unmistakable during an interview with a Palestinian engineer formerly involved in the planning of Rawabi. We met at a café in Ramallah and he agreed to an interview on condition of anonymity. Eager to know more about Rawabi’s resemblance to Israeli cities and settlements, I asked him, “Many have criticized Rawabi for looking like a settlement. Would you say this was intentional? Was Rawabi supposed to look like a settlement?” My line of questioning made my interviewee uncomfortable. He said, “This is a difficult question. Please make sure that I am anonymous.” He then continued: Of course, when we were working on Rawabi and we were looking for inspiration, we didn’t want to go to New York or London. We wanted to be inspired by something local. But you have to also remember that I’m Palestinian. We have been under occupation all our lives. Our parents can’t travel. We can’t travel. So, where else are we going to get inspiration for something modern. So, our ideas of what a modern city that fits our environment looks like came from Israelis. He paused for a few moments and then said: If I am honest, they have pioneered urban living in the West Bank. Modern settlements are good places to live they have all the amenities that are required for their residents and it’s a civilized way of living. I understand that this might sound bad but Palestinian cities are not modern, so we need to think about a new way of living. That’s why Rawabi is inspired by many of the settlements here. Just like settlements it is built on a hill. Its roads are organized, clean. You will not see piles of trash. Everything will be planned, and it will be modern. I then asked, in a provocative manner, “Don’t you think building a Palestinian city to look like an Israeli settlement is somehow problematic? Aren’t you giving legitimacy to settlements that are illegal by international law?” He replied: That is a matter of legality. That is a political matter, and I am not concerned about this. I understand where you are coming from politically. But you have to understand that all that we are trying to find the best way of living in a city in the West Bank and so we have drawn inspiration from settlements. This intentional replication of the (spatial) schemes of the colonizer in Rawabi was also evident in the economic aspirations of the city. For instance, the economic activities visualized for the Q Center were meant to

Postcolonial State-ness  165 be in service of the future Palestine. But the inspiration was the colonizer and, after we left the Q Center during my tour of Rawabi, Ahmed had said: We want to replicate what Israel is doing here in Rawabi. Today Israel is known all over the world as an IT hub and as a center of innovation. We want to become like Israel, and we want the Q center to be a place for innovation. We want Rawabi to become like Tel Aviv. Finally, inspiration from the colonizer was also implicit in the way the receptionist at the visitor center described Rawabi’s relationship to the landscape around it. When I noted how impressive the views were from visitor center, she had said: Yes, this is one of the reasons why I love working here. It is quite a unique place for a Palestinian city and very soon I will buy an apartment here so that I can enjoy these views all the time. You know Palestinian cities have a lot of visual pollution. We don’t have such views of the landscape like settlements. They [the settlement] are usually up on a hill, so they can enjoy looking out of the window. Rawabi is now giving us these things that we don’t have. There is a certain irony here, seeing as it was the Palestinian city Jaffa that pioneered modern urbanism in the area before the Nakba. The enduring settler colonial myth of terra nullis (Yiftachel 2017) purports that – just like the State of Israel – neighboring Tel Aviv too was built on empty space in the “middle of the desert” and was thus the generator of the modernity in the region (LeVine 2005: 122). However, what this claim entirely ignores is that long before the “arrival” of modern Tel Aviv, the port city of Jaffa was a hub of Palestinian commerce, industry, cultural life and at the forefront of regional processes of “development, prosperity and modernization” (Radai 2016: 126). As LeVine writes, much of the Jaffa’s early development took place under the governorship of Muhammad Abu Nabut between 1807 and 1818. Travelers at the time noted the highly organized and systematized ­nature of commercial life. Equally, Jaffa’s status as a pioneer of modern urbanism, reclaiming the desert – a century before Tel Aviv claimed to do the same – was reflected in its physicality. The city’s rebuilt walls, new mosque, marketplace, fountains, public squares and commercial buildings were material representations of the power and status of the city (LeVine 2005: 31). Beginning in the 1880s and continuing after the establishment of Tel Aviv in 1909, new neighborhoods outside the city’s walls were built with straight streets, free-standing homes and other signifiers of “modern” planning and architecture, while the official town plan commissioned by the Municipality in 1945 was designed to make Jaffa one of the most modern and well-laidout cities on the Mediterranean (cf. LeVine 2005: 176–178).

166  Somdeep Sen Indeed, as Jaffa continued to grow, it came to occupy the Palestinian (­ national) imagination as a place of youth, dynamism and cosmopolitanism (LeVine 2005: 123; Sa’di-Ibraheem 2022: 662). But the Nakba represented “the abrupt abortion of Palestine’s urban modernity” in coastal cities like Jaffa and Haifa as well as Jerusalem. In part, this abrupt abortion was material as well as demographic as the landscape was fragmented under Israeli, Jordanian and Egyptian authorities and the urban population that lived through the Nakba was forced into exile. In this sense, just as Palestine was truncated, so too was the trajectory of modern urbanism cut short in Palestinian cities (Taraki & Giacaman 2006: 1). But, as Fanon expounds, the experience of colonialism as well as postcoloniality is marked by a sense of self-alienation. And since the colonized find themselves alienated from their indigeneity and sense of self, they look to the colonizer envious of their prosperity, modernity and metaphorical whiteness (Fanon 1952). It then not entirely unexpected that a scheme devised by the colonized in its aspirations for a modern form of urban living grasps at ideals that are deeply embossed with legacies of the colonizers. After all, truncated and alienated from the indigenous modern urbanity, it is the colonizer’s brand of modern urban life that is the most easily accessible ideal that they can aspire for. For this reason, Bassam pined for a form of modern living that (he presumed) was prevalent in Gilo, Rawabi’s benefactor chose to be inspired by Modi’in, Ahmed wanted Rawabi to become like Tel Aviv and the receptionist aspired to enjoy the Palestinian landscapes like the settlers in the West Bank. Meaning, this is not just a form of collusion with the colonizer. Instead, what Rawabi displays is a deeply postcolonial state-ness. And not unlike the postcolonial state that both strives for indigeneity as it also aspires for a modernity scored by colonial legacies, Rawabi personifies this liminal status as it too wavers between its aspiration to be a Palestinian city while also drawing inspiration from Israeli (perceived as modern) urban schemes.

Conclusion The particular political context in which the first Palestinian planned city resides makes its existence deeply problematic. Part of the problem, many would argue, is Rawabi benefactor’s willingness to cooperate with an occupying force. When asked about his decision to contract Israeli companies, Masri insisted that this cooperation was deliberate. He said to The Times of Israel: We buy from whoever gives us the lowest price. It makes no difference to us if the company is Israeli, Italian or German. We have no choice but to cooperate with Israel and Israelis, but we also want to do so. It is a mistake to separate our economy from Israel’s. Projects like this bring our peoples closer together: Israelis come to the site, they are exposed

Postcolonial State-ness  167 to Palestinians, and they realize there’s no risk in coming here. There is a sense of comfort. (Miller 2014) It is in view of such (perceived) collusion with the Israeli occupation that The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC) severely condemned the construction of Rawabi becoming a means of “blatant economic normalization” of relations with an occupying force. Moreover, seeing that Masri also consulted an architect who built an Israeli city and consulted businessman Dov Weisglass who had, with regard to the blockade of the Gaza Strip, once said, “the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,” the BNC demanded that Masri “end all normalization activities with Israel and its complicit institutions, beyond the bare necessity that all Palestinian businesses in the occupied territory must reckon with” (BNC 2012). The problems associated with Rawabi is not just a matter of its collusion with the colonizer. To what extent, one may also ask, does the city truly cater to – as Ahmed insisted – normal Palestinians? It indeed seemed that it was not meant to be home to Palestinians from all walks of life when a Palestinian acquaintance Khalil, who works as a taxi driver in Jerusalem, visited Rawabi on my recommendation. Before his visit, he had said, “I’m so tired of living in Jerusalem. The craziness is too much. It is not good if you have a family. Maybe I can find a place in Rawabi.” But after his visit, Khalil seemed far less enthusiastic about the prospect of living in Rawabi. He said: Of course, I want to live in the West Bank. It is after all our own land that Israelis took away from us. Why shouldn’t we build there. But I’m not sure if Rawabi is a place for me. They were quite rude to me and kept reminding me that most people who live there are Palestinians from America or England. They are rich people. I felt that maybe me being from Jerusalem is a problem. And I’m also a taxi driver. When I told them this, they were surprised and in a rude way said, “Oh, you will be the first taxi driver living in Rawabi.” To be honest I don’t think they want people like me living there. Rawabi’s (perceived) collusion with Israeli authorities and exclusion of Palestinians like Khalil may indeed explain why so few, in Bassam’s words, “normal” Palestinians have chosen to live in the first master-planned Palestinian city. Yet, these “problems” associated with Rawabi’s existence (and positionality) do not efface what the city intends to do, that is, allow its residents to look past their occupied present and feign a form of futuristic urban living that is uninhibited by the schemes of the colonizer. Taking this aspiration seriously, in this chapter I term Rawabi’s futurism as a postcolonial brand of state-ness. I acknowledge that in its design and planning, Rawabi echoes a form of neoliberal urbanism inspired by urban development

168  Somdeep Sen schemes pioneered in the oil-rich Gulf States that decouples the urban landscape from the historical, political and cultural context of a place. To this end, Rawabi is only an extension of the widespread neoliberalization of the Palestinian national struggle that hopes to cultivate a new subjective identity of Palestinians that is concerned with economic growth rather than the violations of the Israeli occupation. This, scholars have argued, does not just normalize the occupation but also entrenches Palestinian statelessness. But a study of the state should not just be contingent on whether or not it exists. The state also comes to fruition through symbols and rituals and as a manner of political practice. Accordingly, I have argued, Rawabi’s practice of state-ness is not unlike that of the postcolonial state. For one thing, in its impulse to look beyond the Palestinian colonized present in order to simulate what the future Palestine would (and should) look like, it replicates the postcolonial state’s enthusiasm with the “post” in the postcolonial. This enthusiasm, I have argued, is not based on the assumption that the colonial legacies have been expunged. Instead, it is premised on the colonized (or formerly colonized) having the agency and material wherewithal to cultivate a sense of indigeneity out of a colonial past. In Rawabi, this enthusiastic cultivation was evident both in the manner in which the amenities of the city were described as being in service of the future Palestinian state and the prevalence of Palestinian national(ist) iconography in the urban landscape. In a sense, there is an insistent effort to characterize Rawabi as not just a modern city for Palestinians but a modern Palestinian city. But, not unlike the postcolonial state, the Rawabi also replicates the colonizer’s legacies. Be it the fact that Rawabi’s urban design is inspired by an Israeli cities and settlements or that, for its proponents, it replicates a desired form of modern urban living that is perceived to have been pioneered by the occupying force – Rawabi, it would seem, is indeed meant to replicate the colonizer’s (urban) schemes. I thus conclude that the first master-planned Palestinian city personifies the pathologies of the postcolonial state despite being in colonial condition – a form of “confused” identity as it wavers between cultivating a futuristic indigeneity of the colonized while also grasping at a form of modernity that is shaped by the colonizer’s legacies.

Notes 1 In the 2016 version of this picture, Rawabi was not as built-up. Nonetheless, as is evident in Bassam’s description of the city, the “organized” design of urban landscape was apparent even then. 2 The entire interview is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMNj_ l9s85w. 3 This is the official motto of Rawabi. 4 This is not surprising since, as I discuss later in this chapter, Rawabi is co-owned by a Qatari investment company.

Postcolonial State-ness  169 5 Of course, from the ideological perspective of a liberation struggle, such a binary conception of the existence state is expected. 6 Changing of the names of streets and cities from English to vernacular languages has been a common practice across India. 7 A part of the city is classified as a West Bank settlement (see Coren 2012).

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7 Lebanon’s Wadi Khaled and the Challenge of Sovereignty Jamil Mouawad

Introduction With the eruption of violence in the aftermath of the post-2011 uprisings, the “crisis of the Arab state” emerged as a key issue within both policy and scholarly circles (Hudson 2015; Ahram & Lust 2016). A salient feature of this so-called crisis that received considerable renewed attention1 was that of the borders, which have always been the subject of an “obsessive focus” in the Arab world (Salameh 2017). Indeed, the violence that followed the popular mobilizations put the territorial integrity of these states under serious pressure, whether by “eliminating” already established borders through the declaration of the Islamic state (IS) or by establishing “quasi-states” such as the “Federation of Northern Syria” created by the Kurds in March 2016 (Del Sarto 2017). In fact, recent literature reveals two main trends. On the one hand, traditionally rigid state borders softened and became very porous and permeable without dissolving altogether. On the other hand, borders have come under the control and governance of non-state actors. These new realities collide with the state-centric understanding of territoriality, sovereignty, and the monopoly of violence. Interestingly, at the same time as the “erosion” or “resilience” of borders (Harling & Simon 2015) because of war and conflict (Iraq-Syria; Tunisia-Libya…) has received widespread attention, other borders have become consolidated when they were historically contested and extremely permeable. This is the case of the northern Lebanese border with Syria. This article examines the case of the Wadi Khaled region in the far north of Lebanon, on the border with Syria.2 The area includes 23 villages and farms that are currently represented by nine municipal councils.3 It covers approximately 40 km² and administratively belongs to the governorate of Akkar with a total population of approximately 30,000 Lebanese residents, the vast majority of whom are Sunnis.4 In fact, since the first signs of war in Syria in late 2011, the Syrian regime strategically placed mines and sandbags close to the border with Wadi Khaled, effectively blocking the circulation of both fighters and citizens. Later in 2013 and for the first time in its history, the Lebanese army manned the northern border. As a result, the

DOI: 10.4324/b22870-8

174  Jamil Mouawad border gradually closed and became far more rigid than it historically had been. The border and the state, according to some analysts, were hence “rediscovered” (Trombetta 2016) by the local community in the area of Wadi Khaled, giving rise to a “re-bordering” (Andreas & Biersteker 2003) process and the hardening of cross-border flows. In this chapter, by focusing on the economic transformations of Wadi Khaled from peacetime to wartime due to the fluctuation of the bordering and re-bordering process, I explore how state borders between Syria and Lebanon came to materialize despite being historically contested, fluid, or even non-existent. Taking the cue from Mitchell’s argument about “state effect,” I aim to re-politicize borders in this area not as a reflection of the dominant understanding of “state sovereignty” (inside/outside), but as a set of practices resulting from everyday mobility and exchange. As a result, I question the determinist interpretation of both Syrian/Lebanese borders as non-existent, controlled by a regime of power, or one that frames the Wadi residents as Syrians and not Lebanese. Theoretically, interdisciplinary efforts have been deployed over recent decades to conceptualize borders not as fixed and singular lines separating states according to international law (Kinnvall & Svensson 2014), but rather as constructed entities and institutions. Borders continuously move through society and space as part of a continuous re-bordering process (Rumford 2006). Borders undeniably impact the lives of people who live in borderlands, what can be defined territorially as the physical space along both sides of borders. Moreover, borders and borderlands are mutually constituted such that the physical attributes of borders, including checkpoints or walls or the lack thereof, affect the daily practices of local inhabitants. This chapter does not strictly deal with borders as a construct or a metaphor. Rather, it borrows the trope of “suture” from Mark Salter, which is defined “as a process of knitting together the inside and the outside together and the resultant scar – better evokes the performative aspects of borders” (Salter 2012: 734). The suture of Lebanese/Syrian borders, despite being porous or unfelt, sometimes by local dwellers, do indeed create a “state effect” separating both Lebanese and Syria. The suture is where states are defined and redrawn. In other words, despite the fact that borders are a construct when they sometimes disappear or vanish, they simultaneously do appear, erupt, and crystalize at times of crisis. During the ongoing wars in the Arab world, the borderlands of countries neighboring those in the midst of extreme violence or civil war have been visibly impacted. For instance, with the war in Syria, Turkish borderlands have become “zones of transnational circulation” and have expanded to reach other cities such as Istanbul and Izmir, in what is called the formation of border depth whereby the periphery is no longer separated from the center but becomes a hub of cross-border circulation (Montabone 2016). In this way, borderlands can become “more connected to the core” through unprecedented political attention and funding, specifically by the

Lebanon’s Wadi Khaled  175 international community (Vignal 2017a; 2017b). Alternatively, when borders disappear yet remain internationally recognized, they become zones of power struggle and influence, like the border between Syria and Iraq under the control of the IS (Rey 2015). I am interested in how the Lebanese border with Syria in Wadi Khaled, to follow the argument of Leïla Vignal (2017), has acted as “spaces and orders of peace” (conteneur de guerre) while at the same time have provided changing economic “opportunities and agency” for the borderland (Dereje & Hoehne 2010). I am inspired by a methodology that takes a historical reading of borders and their changing significance as central to understanding contemporary changes (O’Dowd 2002). Instead of tackling the impact of the Syrian war on Wadi Khaled as unfolding in a vacuum without historical precedents, it looks at the historical mutations and transformations of economic life in the area in both times of war and peace. Steven Heydeman argues that wartime economic governance does not radically differ from that of peacetime. Despite the descent into civil war in countries such as Libya, Syria, and Yemen, some economic norms and practices of their pre-war economies have prevailed (authoritarian, criminal, predatory, etc.) and have been redeployed to serve wartime requirements (Heydemann 2018). In the case of Wadi Khaled, while economic practices have persisted, they have been reconfigured by the ongoing process of “re-bordering” and its myriad effects on the economic life of the Wadi. I argue that economic daily life always relied on the border with Syria, whether it was permeable or not. Indeed, while economic livelihood in the Wadi depended on the porosity of the borders and the difference between the Syrian and Lebanese economic systems before the war, the consolidation of the border since late 2011 led the Wadi dwellers to become reliant on Syrian refugees with whom new boundaries were shared, that is, it took part of the characteristics of a host community and refugees. In this way, the area shifted from being economically reliant on Syria to dependent on the Syrians who sought refuge in the Wadi Khaled borderland. Hence, while the area historically enjoyed prosperous economic and social interrelations with Syria, the Syrian war radically altered the Wadi Khaled borderland to become a zone economically governed by “the power of aid” (Duffield 2001). The war economy and specifically international aid brought previously non-existent infrastructure to the area, yet unintentionally weakened “the potential for local agency” (Dereje & Hoehne 2010). In the Wadi, war has always taken place outside the area (the Lebanese Civil War, the 2006 July War, and the ongoing war in Syria). At the same time, however, it has been central in defining the role and the functioning of its local economy. In fact, conflict at a distance disrupts existing forms of economic activities but also contribute to the emergence of new ones. These activities – new or old – in the case of the Wadi revolve around two constants: a “creative process of adaptation” (to use Teresa Beck’s terminology) (Beck 2012), and the prevalence of rooted complementarity between Syria and Wadi Khaled and by extension Lebanon. These economic transformations

176  Jamil Mouawad and their impact on the everyday life can be best captured by the process of “adaptation” to new situations and “accommodation” to the war’s rule that change social and political structures. My argument proceeds as follows. I first lay out the intricate geographical, economic, and social characteristics of Wadi Khaled, specifically with regards to its position betwixt and between Lebanon and Syria. Next, I analyze the transformation of economic life in the Wadi until 2012, during which time the border was practically non-existent. Finally, the third section illuminates the sudden impact of the Syrian war on the local economy and its growing reliance on the Syrian refugees along with the transformation of power relationships.

Wadi Khaled: Geographically in Lebanon, socially and economically in Syria With the declaration of the State of Greater Lebanon in 1920, Wadi Khaled along with Akkar and Tripoli became part of the Lebanese territory. Since then, three main elements shaped Wadi Khaled’s social, political, and economic identity. The first one is the state’s long-standing refusal to grant Wadi Khaled residents Lebanese nationality until 1994. The second one is the tribal origins of society, which did not disappear with state formation. The third one is the area’s geographical location on the Syrian border and the consequent ease of border crossing. Combined, these elements reinforced what Elizabeth Picard calls the “uncertainty principle” (Picard 2016: 89), according to which it became very difficult to differentiate between Syria and Lebanon in some regions. Thus, Wadi Khaled was always considered as geographically in Lebanon and economically in Syria. Despite living in the area before the establishment of the Lebanese state in 1920, Wadi residents were only naturalized in 1994.5 In 1921 and 1932, French Mandate authorities conducted a general population census throughout the Lebanese territory and granted its inhabitants Lebanese nationality. The Wadi residents presumed that the goal of the census was to recruit youngsters into the army and, therefore, fled committees authorized to conduct the census, and did not register themselves in the official state records. Another account holds that since Wadi residents fought against the French colonial presence and wanted to join the Arab revolution, the French punished them and did not include them in the census. Consequently, they did not acquire the Lebanese nationality, and only 5% of the Wadi Khaled Arabs who registered their names in the state records acquired it. In 1958, Lebanese authorities granted Wadi Khaled residents “Citizenship under Consideration” (qayd ad-dars) (Maktabi 2000: 146) cards, which are individual identification cards issued by the Lebanese General Security that allow their holders to travel within Lebanese territory and to obtain travel permits. This card does not allow its holder to vote or to hold official state positions. Such legal status made Al-Wadi residents legally and

Lebanon’s Wadi Khaled  177 politically vulnerable and distanced them from the Lebanese state and its official institutions. Additionally, it further buttressed their representation in the mainstream discourse as “not Lebanese.” This legal vulnerability pushed Muammar Al-Gaddafi in 1993, owing to transnational tribal networks and his eccentric character, to offer Wadi residents Libyan citizenship, which they refused. He then supported them financially by building a school in Al-Knaysa. Toward the end of the 1960s, as recalled by the locals, an ordinary distressed man from the Wadi occupied the police station and issued “Communiqué Number 1,” thereby declaring a coup against the Lebanese government. The government replied by bombarding the area. In fact, throughout the years, the residents of Wadi Khaled continued to call on the Lebanese government to grant them the Lebanese nationality (An-Nahar 1974). Already in 1974, six Lebanese parliamentarians drafted and submitted a law to grant “the Arabs of Wadi Khaled” the nationality, but this law presented by Sunni leaders and a secular pan-Arab politician6 did not see the light in order not to upset the demographic sectarian equilibrium in the country between Muslims and Christians. In 1994, the Wadi residents, who numbered around 20,000 at the time, were granted Lebanese citizenship by Decree No. 5247. The law considered them as non-Lebanese by origin and as naturalized citizens, since the Lebanese nationality had been granted to them rather than restored. In the mainstream Lebanese discourse, they were considered “naturalized Arabs” (Hourani 2011). Despite being contested by some Lebanese political parties as a law that “was unconstitutional and that granted citizenship to unentitled persons” (Hourani 2011), the Wadi residents were nevertheless singled out as the only ones among others to “deserve it” (Al-Afkar 1997). While the 1994 decree gave them immediately the right to vote and obliged them to join the military service, it did not allow them to hold official state positions before ten years (2004), including military ones (soldiers), which significantly delayed their integration in state institutions (Nasser & Maria 2017).

A Cross-border Tribal Society Wadi Khaled’s social fabric is made up of tribes and its residents are known as “the Arabs of Wadi Khaled” to denote their tribal Arab origins along with their tribal values, customs, and traditions. Most of the Wadi residents belong to two main tribes, the “al-Ghannam” and “al-Aatiq.” Elderly tribesmen narrate that their ancestors moved to the region as a result of tribal disputes in the Arabian Peninsula. To date, they continue to praise their ties and relationships to tribes in Kuwait, Syria, and even Saudi Arabia. They boast that the former Kuwaiti oil minister Abdulrahman Salim al-Ateeqi is related to the people of the valley. Tribal customs have always defined Wadi Khaled’s social and political system. The shuyukh, clan elders or tribe leaders, played a major role in

178  Jamil Mouawad the social and political configuration of the area. They held high status in society and were the main authority to represent Wadi residents through customary law (‘urf ). In addition, they had the final say in resolving conflicts in matters of murder, revenge, theft, or marriage. While these customs prevailed over decades, after the naturalization of Wadi residents in 1994, the tribes agreed to abide by the state’s laws. The tribal origins of society along with the state’s refusal to grant Wadi residents Lebanese nationality led to a near-total absence of political parties in Wadi Khaled.7 In fact, as argued by Dawn Chatty et al., the lack of recognition by the state reinforced the tribal identities of Bedouins throughout Lebanon (Chatty, Mansour & Nasser 2013a). Effectively, this contributed to the formation of the “collective memory” of the Wadi dwellers, of which the territory makes up an essential part. Like other social groups, they “represent the past through place in an attempt to claim territory, establish social boundaries and justify political actions” (Till 2003: 289). As such, and perhaps to compensate for this state abandonment and marginalization, the Wadi locals stress and emphasize that they have been living in Wadi Khaled for more than 500 years, attributing the region’s name to “Khalid Ibn Al-Walid” (592–642)8 and who passed through the region and camped there before conquering Homs. However, with the rise in the rate of education in the Wadi since the early 1990s and the fundamental changes in the relationships of the Wadi residents to other Syrian and Lebanese big cities such as Aleppo, Tripoli, Homs, and Tel Kalakh, the tribes’ roles diminished gradually and their customs no longer governed everyday social conflicts. Yet, although tribal governance no longer holds in the Wadi, its residents continue to cherish their tribal belonging and values. Moreover, they continue to pride themselves in their culture of “hospitality” (Carpi 2016) and sheltering the persecuted,9 which made hosting the displaced Syrians an “obligation” for Wadi Khaled residents.

Geographical Contiguity with Syria Geographically, the area of Wadi Khaled straddles the Syrian hinterlands. According to one observer, the area of Wadi Khaled “has more continuity with the Syrian territory… But it is from Akkar and only from there, that we can reach Wadi Khaled… However, we do not see Lebanon well from Wadi Khaled” (Trombetta 2016: 230). Despite being separated from Syria since 1920, the Wadi Khaled residents maintained cross-border connections that transcended both nation-states. Due to its geographical configuration, the residents of the area used to cross the Great River that separates Syria from the Wadi by foot to move between the two countries. This fostered economic and social bonds as well as familial affinity between the area and Syria. It equally facilitated the mobility of people and goods between Lebanon and Syria, in addition to access to medical and educational services in Syria. These interconnections were

Lebanon’s Wadi Khaled  179 also a result of the proximity of the Syrian city of Homs to Wadi Khaled, which is a half hour drive. By contrast, the nearest Lebanese city, Tripoli, is a two-hour drive from Wadi Khaled. Some elderly residents of the Wadi see Homs as a natural extension and destination, while they have never visited or known Tripoli, the second largest Lebanese city. This fostered social relationships between Syria and Lebanon (marriages) and established strong bonds between Wadi Khaled and Syria (seeking leisure in Homs). At the same time, this straddling allowed some Lebanese from Wadi Khaled to actually reside and own property in many neighboring villages inside Syria, such as Hit, and gave rise to the existence of entire villages along both sides of the border, such as Bouqai’a, Ouwasyshat, and al-­ Mousharafiyeh, known as the “Lebanese villages in Syria.” As such, the region historically relied socio-economically on Syria, and this was further reflected in the very limited economic and social exchange with neighboring Lebanese villages and towns, such as Qobayat, which is only 16 km away from Wadi Khaled. Until the breakout of the Syrian war, the borders remained extremely fluid and practically non-existent. The first official crossing point in the area between the two countries was inaugurated in 2009 following the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon.10 Yet, and before 2011, the borders remained porous and commuters did not have to submit official papers to enter Syria and vice versa: “all attempts to control the borders were artificial, whether through the official crossing or through the sandbags put by the Syrians,” according to a trader from the Wadi.11 Resistance by the Lebanese state to acknowledge the affiliation of Bedouins to Lebanon has marginalized these communities and led them to live in informal settlements, specifically in the Beqaa Valley (Chatty, Mansour, and Nasser, 2013b). While this is also true for the Wadi Khaled dwellers, one can note that through their confinement in a well-delimited geographical area, they have played a major role as an economic junction between Syria and Lebanon. In fact, the economic life of the Wadi moved through three essential periods: from nomadism to pastoralism, then to trade, and finally to smuggling. This reveals that there is a complete absence of sustainable and safe economic infrastructures, which was clearly manifested with the closure of the border. As succinctly captured by a journalist, the Wadi dwellers moved from being “Nomadic Arabs, to Traders, to Jobless.”12

Toward Economic Stability As mentioned, the residents of Wadi Khaled were nomadic Arabs. Nomadic pastoralism was their main mode of subsistence, moving herds from one pasture to another between Lebanon and Syria. At a later stage, following the formation of the nation-state, colonial powers sought to bring Arab Bedouins under centralized authority (Thomas 2003). In the early 1960s, the landlords (beys) of the Akkar area, and in order to subsidize their expensive

180  Jamil Mouawad way of life in Beirut and Tripoli, began to sell their lands (Gilsenan 1996). The peasants in Akkar then purchased these lands from these landowners, eventually replacing the previous sharecropping arrangements. In this vein, the Bedouins of Wadi Khaled purchased plots of land from the beys of Al Dandash family and started to cultivate it themselves. As a result, Wadi Khaled residents no longer were in need for peasant cultivators, who headed to neighboring villages near the border inside Syria in what would later become known as the “Lebanese villages in Syria.” With time and owing to its geographical position as well as the stateless legal status of its residents, which excluded them from state public employment, the local economy gradually shifted from agro-pastoralism to trade. In fact, after the dissolution of the Syro-Lebanese Customs Union in 1950, Lebanon undertook its way toward liberalization (trade and financial regime). Despite the efforts by the Syrian government to establish import restrictions, Lebanon’s liberal economy continued to affect the economy in Syria (Chaitani 2011). Effectively, the merchants in Beirut could easily circumvent Syrian customs policies (Neep 2017). Accordingly, Lebanon’s Wadi Khaled would form a link between two different economic systems starting in the 1960s: the Syrian state with a socialist interventionist economy and the Lebanese state with a liberal market economy. It is in this context specifically that the people of Wadi Khaled straddling Syria and Lebanon transformed their area into a key hub for goods legally imported in Lebanon that would later enter Syria through smuggling. This economy was reliant primarily on the rail line that linked Beirut to Tripoli, reaching Wadi Khaled at the train station created by the French army as the final stop on the Lebanese territory before continuing to Homs in Syria. Until today, one can easily spot the big hangars built next to the train station in order to display the goods. This geographical position granted the people of the Wadi relative prosperity, as they took advantage of this border position in order to play a role in providing the Syrians what they lacked in terms of household and consumer goods. From the 1960s onwards, while the Syrian government exerted strict import control, informal networks transformed the Wadi into a black market where products, which were otherwise not available in Syria (such as television sets, radios, videos, coffee, sugar, building material, Western cigarettes, electrical and household appliances, clothes and shoes) were sold.

Al-Buqay’a, Wadi Khaled’s Marketplace While Wadi Khaled remained relatively immune to the violence of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), it nonetheless experienced its economic repercussions. Indeed, with the outbreak of the civil war, Syria extended military control over Akkar and the Bekaa. As a result, Wadi Khaled, along with its major economic activities, came under the direct influence of Syria. For instance, its main market, Al-Buqay’a, which was called the “Hong-Kong of

Lebanon’s Wadi Khaled  181 the Middle East,” a name that was also granted to “downtown” Beirut after the Civil War, operated according to the whims of the Syrian regime and its secret services. In other words, the market would open and eventually shut down when it no longer served the interests of the Syrian economy. During the early 1980s, the Wadi dwellers transformed the Al-Buqay’a plain into one of the largest markets in the Middle East (Abdallah 2012). In fact, Wadi Khaled’s marketplace was a favorite destination for Syrian families, with prices given in “Syrian pounds that the merchants later changed to dollars.”13 Al-Buqay’a relied on the international road connecting the Syrian towns of Homs and Tartus, which passed through Lebanon for 7 km (Picard 2016). The market sold different goods (household appliances, electrical appliances…). Up to 800 shops were opened in the area and they served as a commercial linking point between Syria, Lebanon, and also Turkey. Businessmen from the Wadi started to develop their trades and won “exclusive dealerships with international brands from China, Indonesia, Russia” (Abdallah 2012). This economic activity contributed to the prosperity of Wadi Khaled, such that “it was estimated that an average person in the Wadi earns about $200 per month compared to the national minimum wage of $30 per month” (Reuters 1989). The economy prospered. In fact, the Wadi Khaled merchants set up shops on both sides of the border, linking Homs in Syria to Tripoli in Lebanon in what would become a transnational market. The borderland of Wadi Khaled nearly became a “city-market” (ville-marché), characterized by its role as a mediator of the flow of capital, goods, and people (Bennafla 2002). Eventually, the market was shut down and the shops were destroyed before the mid-1990s by a decision of the Syrian state; the international road was diverted to pass exclusively through Syria and no longer through Lebanon. This decision was primarily owed to the gradual opening-up policy of the Syrian government throughout the 1990s or “economic pluralism,” which sought to expand imports to meet local demand for consumption and to follow up on trade liberalization policies in a market socialist model that aimed at a more integrated regional and international trade (Abboud 2009: 1–86). The Wadi Khaled merchants fell victim to this abrupt transition. Many of them lost their businesses and subsequently got involved in smuggling (tahrib) and cross-border trade (tijarat al hudud). The difference between the two activities is a “matter of scale” and varies according to the kinds of good exchanged and by whom (Hüsken 2017: 907). The former is considered locally more legitimate and a natural activity given the geographical location of the Wadi; the later involves mafia-like smuggling and involves actors related to the Syrian regime.

Smuggling as a Way of Life After the closure of the market, economic life in Wadi Khaled came to revolve around smuggling and cross-border trade along with other economic

182  Jamil Mouawad activities for survival. For instance, transport emerged as a crucial commercial activity. Young men started to buy mini-buses to drive and transport people from the Wadi through Halba in Akkar to Tripoli and Beirut. The Wadi came to be known as the “republic of the buses.” A prominent local businessman who made his fortune from smuggling was the dealer of one of the mini-buses brand and facilitated their purchase by these young men through cheap, long-term payments. While this facilitated access of young people to Tripoli and other cities and created jobs for them, “border-trade” continued to be integral to the everyday livelihood of Wadi dwellers. Indeed, smuggling was tolerated by both the Syrian state and the Lebanese one. As recalled by one informant: we used to cross the borders freely and we never talked about politics. We did not have the Syrian nationality and we did not need it. What was more important to have is the Baath party card, if problems emerged, the so-called allegiances would help us.14 Smuggling was profitable and discouraged the Wadi dwellers from seeking jobs in Lebanese institutions, namely public ones, and particularly after they were granted this right following naturalization. In fact, the percentage of public employment in the Wadi did not exceed 8.29% in 2005 (The Council for Development and Reconstruction 2005: 152). Smuggling made the border separating the two countries almost non-existent and further weakened the attachment of the Wadi dwellers to the Lebanese state. Smuggling at the behest of an emergent merchant class occurred with the collaboration of the Syrian regime and intelligence and expanded to include other Arab and foreign countries. It is reported that one member of Wadi Khaled’s new elite paid a large sum of money to the head of Syria’s security apparatus in Lebanon in order to add his name to one of the Northern electoral lists that was allied with Syria during the 1996 parliamentary elections. According to one informant, “We introduced the practice of electoral bribery and seat-buying on the main electoral lists.” In this context, Wadi Khaled came to be represented for the first and only time in the parliament by two members of this new merchant class: Jamal Ismail and Mustafa Yehia. Everyday smuggling by small-scale “smugglers” was widespread. These latter would often buy household goods including diesel and gasoline from Syria and use them for local consumption or sale in Lebanon. Diesel oil was at least 60% cheaper in Syria than in Lebanon prior to the outbreak of the war in 2011. Smuggling further provided job opportunities for many young men in various fields, such as transportation or currency exchange. One smuggling day reaped between “$200 to $300 for the ‘smuggler’, while the daily income of the Wadi dweller did not exceed $30.”15 As such, the economy of the Wadi was transformed, and the large profits reaped from smuggling led the Wadi dwellers to relinquish the agricultural

Lebanon’s Wadi Khaled  183 sector, although al-Buqay’a plain is classified as the third largest plain in Lebanon, according to the Lebanese Territory Master Plan (2005). Wadi Khaled also enjoyed abundant water supply necessary for agriculture. In 2005, the agricultural sector in the Wadi made up about 29% of its general income (The Council for Development and Reconstruction 2005: 152). Ultimately, smuggling created shared sovereignty between the (trans-) local populations and states in Lebanon and Syria. The virtual absence of state institutions in the Wadi Khaled area, with the exception of two public schools and one public health center inaugurated in 2000, and the structural and geographical interdependence between Wadi Khaled and Syria contributed to the co-dependence of the Wadi’s local economy on Syria. In fact, as recounted by one local mayor, “in 2006, during the July war, the Lebanese state asked us to secure diesel oil from Syria in order to meet the needs the army and other institutions.”16 In addition, Wadi Khaled played a crucial role in securing through Syria goods for North Lebanon during the 2007 Nahr al Bared War when the main souks of Tripoli closed for more than a month. Whether due to its geographical location or to its economic role, Wadi Khaled linked Akkar region to Syria more than it separated Lebanon from Syria. Smuggling facilitated a rather prosperous economic life for the Wadi dwellers. This prosperity was nevertheless precarious due to its dependence on the permeability of the border with Syria and an overall absence of sustainable infrastructure for agriculture or a productive economy. With the Syrian war in the post-2011 context and the gradual closure of the border, the economy of the Wadi would radically shift and transform. With the outbreak of the Syrian crisis in late 2011, Wadi Khaled experienced three crucial and decisive changes. First, it saw the gradual and complete closure of its border with Syria, with the consequent suspension of everyday smuggling activities, except for some routes that remained open for arms and human trafficking. Nonetheless, everyday mobility was suspended as a result of bombs and bullets fired by the Syrian army and pro-regime militias (shabbiha) from the other side of the border. Second, it witnessed an unprecedented influx of Syrian refugees into the area and sustained extreme pressure on its already feeble infrastructure. Third, it received previously unknown attention by the international humanitarian aid and development community in support of the Syrian refugees and host communities. These changes weighed heavily on Wadi Khaled, leading the local population to become increasingly economically reliant on the Syrian refugees.

Influx of Refugees and Dislocated Boundaries With the first signs of war in Syria, Wadi Khaled would unsurprisingly be the first destination for the Syrians fleeing the violence. Around 2000 people crossed the border into Lebanon and temporarily settled in the area during the early days of the war (UNHCR 2011). Over time, Wadi Khaled came to host around 30,000 Syrian refugees, adding to the approximately 30,000

184  Jamil Mouawad Lebanese dwelling in the area (UNDP 2015). The majority of the Syrians in the Wadi live in houses or shelters, but not in camps.17 Like in the rest of the country, the municipalities refused to build camps for “security reasons,” asserting that it is easier to monitor Syrians living in neighboring houses than in camps, which are difficult to enter and eventually control. Despite their discourse of sheltering the weak and oppressed, the Wadi dwellers did not initially host the Syrians coming from Talkalakh, which is a very poor area compared to Homs or Qusayr, for instance. The municipalities encouraged them to leave the Wadi because “their customs and traditions are very different than ours,” according to one mayor.18 An aid worker saw this as an “arrogant attitude” by the Wadi dwellers.19 Despite previously existing economic and social relations, there is nowadays a clear social separation between Syrians and Lebanese in the Wadi. In fact, both communities rarely mingle in the Wadi, except for some noticeable interactions in business. They mainly interact and collaborate through newly emergent business partnerships (local restaurants, etc.). Very few men from the Wadi marry Syrian women, a practice that has been explained by economic reasoning: “the mahr [dowry] for a Lebanese woman is way more expensive than for a Syrian… let alone her demands for housing and other consumption needs.”20 As for the economic daily life, the Syrian crisis has had negative consequences for the Wadi dwellers. Not only did the closure of the routes to Syria negatively affect trading and smuggling, many of the Wadi dwellers also lost their properties in neighboring Syrian villages. One trader reported that he lost his shops and goods on the first day of military operations in Syria (2011): “I was unable to save my shop or bring the goods into Lebanon.”21 According to another trader who owned a shop in Syria, “Shops have been looted and are no longer accessible. The Wadi traders have lost at least 30 USD million because of the war in Syria.”22 Although the border has been closed and daily trade has ceased, many of the Wadi dwellers insist that smuggling has not completely stopped but is now limited to three businessmen who have close ties to the Assad regime and some of its key members. This smuggling is from Lebanon into Syria and includes iron, wheat, and diesel. Some believe that suspicious smuggling is, in effect, equipping pro-Syrian regime militias with ammunition. According to one observer from the Wadi: the trucks that are making it into Syria are in fact Lebanese trucks with Lebanese license plates, which is a new phenomenon in the history of border trade between the two countries. In the past, goods were unloaded on the border into Syrian trucks23 In addition, the only limited mobility that has given rise during the war is related to large-scale smuggling from Lebanon into Syria, in what Leïla Vignal calls “the economy within the war” (Vignal 2018), where crossing

Lebanon’s Wadi Khaled  185 international borders is easier for some than crossing internal ones. In fact, Syrian refugees in the Wadi Khaled enjoy very limited mobility outside the Wadi toward other Lebanese villages, due to issues related to their vulnerable legal status fearing arrests at checkpoints (Favier 2016).

Dependency on Syrians With these transformations on the borders, a structural reliance on the displaced Syrians in Wadi Khaled has developed. This is visible in the rising cost of rent and land as well as the changing local workforce. At the outset of the Syrian crisis, many international organizations rushed into the area and offered financial assistance to the Wadi dwellers to rehabilitate and fix their houses and shelter the displaced Syrians. As a result, many locals were able to build new rooms or rehabilitate old ones in order to reap financial benefit. As narrated by one local resident: a Swiss organization offered to rehabilitate my house. They covered the rent for 9 months in order to shelter a Syrian family. They paid USD 200 per month and stopped. I now have to kick out the family or keep housing them, but they do not have the money to pay24 This led some 170 families to be kicked out of their accommodation in 2012 alone, and pushed the cost of rent in the area up such that the average monthly rent in 2017 was between USD 100 and 200, according to one mayor.25 According to an employee of one of the international organizations in the region, some of the Wadi dwellers are either criticizing the Syrian presence or exploiting it economically (for instance, through increased child labor) as a result of the current situation. Many of the Wadi observers, however, claim that the Syrians are more active in the workforce than the Lebanese since the former are amenable to working for a cheap wage (USD 10 a day). The Lebanese do not accept such wages, particularly because their income was higher during the smuggling period. Accordingly, the local workers who can be found in the area are now largely Syrians, which is ultimately benefiting their Lebanese employers. A clear example of this reliance on the Syrians is the example of one of the politically influential figures of the Wadi, who often defended the right of the Lebanese to find jobs and not enter into competition with the cheaper Syrian labor. This person has left his medical clinic and rented it out to a Syrian young doctor coming from Homs.26 This attests to the complementarities between Syrians and Wadi Khaled dwellers. Due to the shifting and worsening economic situation, some of the Wadi dwellers have gradually resorted to selling their land to Syrians. Purchasing lands by the Syrian is implicit and takes place under the name of their Lebanese acquaintances in the Wadi, and this is a disturbing new phenomenon

186  Jamil Mouawad for many. Syrians with family links inside the Wadi are purchasing land and have begun building housing units. Most of these purchases have been made in areas where there is no water abundance, such as the Hnaider and Al-Knaysa areas. Accordingly, the price of land has risen dramatically over the past two years. “An acre of land in Hnaider was priced at $800, but has now reached $ 10,000,” according to one local.27 Around 180 housing units are said to have been built. This growing sale of land to Syrians worries the Wadi dwellers, but for some this remains the only option for economic survival. This concern is partly due to the fear of Syrians staying in the Wadi and turning the housing units into villages over the coming years. In addition, the Wadi dwellers fear that the collective memory of their forefathers settling in the area specifically by purchasing plots of lands in the 1950s and 1960s is being threatened. Yet the sale of land has undoubtedly contributed to securing a large income for the locals at a time when there are very few other sources of income in the Wadi. The current situation in Wadi Khaled and the local economy’s dependency on the Syrians was exemplified by one of the mayors in the area: “Syrian displacement has put tremendous pressure on Wadi Khaled, and their exit will put even more pressure on the area.”28 Although Wadi Khaled’s economy flourished in the years prior to the closure of the border, it was nevertheless vulnerable due to low public-sector employment.

The Impact of Aid? The arrival of the international community in late 2011 into Wadi Khaled coincided with the establishment of the first municipal councils, who would become its first and primary interlocutors. In fact, due to their late naturalizations, the Wadi residents elected municipal council for the first time in their history in 2011. Most of this international aid is directed toward relief for the refugees and host communities as well as support for the Lebanese state and specifically its border protection through the comprehensive Integrated Border Management (IBM) scheme funded by the EU (Tholens 2017). The international aid response continues to operate according to an “emergency mode.” In most cases, governance by international humanitarian and development organizations is led from a distance. The organizations have offices either in neighboring Qobayat or Halba in Akkar, since Wadi Khaled is considered risky or classified as a “Red Zone.” Until today, major employment-generating development projects have not been implemented in the Wadi. According to a program manager in one of the INGOs, “it is not impossible to work on long-term projects. These people are used to fast money due to their history in trade, unlike other areas in Akkar where we work.”29 Meanwhile, a popular discourse on unemployment and lack of economic opportunities is circulating, with some citing the unemployment rate as high

Lebanon’s Wadi Khaled  187 30

as 95%. Of course, in an area that has never known formal jobs, this discourse can be associated with the will of residents, and specifically the councils, to depict a worsening economic situation in order to attract more state or international aid and development projects. In 2014, when the UNHCR revised and reduced its list of beneficiaries and the Arab Gulf states significantly decreased their aid in the region, the area saw several protests by both Lebanese and Syrians. This economic precarity is poignantly illustrated by one former mayor from the Wadi. Back in 2012, he stated: As a newly elected mayor, I want to put Wadi Khaled on the development map in Lebanon. At first, we used the very limited resources of the municipality to help the Syrian (faxes, telephones…). Now with the presence of the international community, I hope to secure jobs for the Wadi – to generate employment opportunities.31 By 2017, his discourse had radically shifted: During my mandate, I had no work. I left on the boat with Syrian refugees to Sweden. I was not happy there at all. I was miserable. I came back and was unemployed for months. Recently, I found a part-time job as an accountant in Tripoli. It takes me two hours to get their daily and another two to return. I spend my entire salary on transportation.32 Moreover, relief projects face major criticism by all parties involved. On the one hand, representatives of the international community blame municipalities who seek to influence implemented projects by employing their close circles. According to a representative of one of the INGOs working in the region: “it is not a surprise that during the first mandate of the municipalities [2012–2015], the mayors were either doctors or teachers. Today, the majority of the newly elected mayors are contractors.”33 For him, this reflects their eagerness to attract more projects as heads of municipal councils, while at the same time benefiting from these projects by imposing themselves as the main contractors to implement and execute these projects. On the other hand, and more recently, the Wadi dwellers have been resisting some projects in order to put pressure on international institutions and to reap greater benefit at the expense of Syrians. This is the case of a free medical center which was planned and designed by an international NGO but was ultimately not established. In fact, pressure was exerted by “four private doctors in the area because the center would negatively impact their business.”34 It should be noted that the international community played a major role in the strengthening of the municipalities as representatives of the area and indirectly accelerated the weakening of the tribal elders. This was aptly captured in the words of one tribal leader: “I cannot submit a proposal for funding, the municipality can.” He further explained that politics requires

188  Jamil Mouawad money and resources: “the mayor can take the car of the municipality to visit a minister or international organizations, while I need to pay out of my own pocket to make any political visit.” This prompted some tribal elders to strongly criticize the municipal experience, stating that “elections have damaged the social cohesion of Wadi Khaled” and calling for the “complete dissolution of municipalities and the return to the tribal way: tribes govern by consultation and consensus, whereas democracy leads to discrimination and conflict.”35

Conclusion This article presents a historical reading of the major transformations of economic life in the Lebanese area of Wadi Khaled on the northern border with Syria. In contrast with the tendency in border studies to emphasize the spatial over the historical, this article shows that “rebordering” or the closure and consolidation of the border and its impact on the borderland cannot be detached from the historical context of the areas in which the border is reconfigured. In the case of Wadi Khaled, the article shows that the area is inextricably entangled with Syria whether or not the border is porous. This attests to the historical complementariness between Syria and the Wadi. Similar to other borderlands in Lebanon, marginalization remains a key feature in the governance of the border areas, despite the presence of a variety of new international and national actors, such as Syrian refugees, international NGOs, UN agencies, and the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF). The response of the Lebanese government and international organizations to the Syrian crisis has reinforced the marginalization of these border areas within the Lebanese space. This is evident in the absence of development projects on the one hand, and the establishment of mechanisms of dependency on foreign aid on the other hand. Since the war erupted, the area of Wadi Khaled is reliant on the Syrian refugees through aid. While many in the Wadi are hopeful that the reconstruction process in Syria will soon lead to the opening of the border and the renewal of cross-border exchange, this article shows that economic life of the Wadi will continue to be precarious and dependent on the Syrian state more than on the Lebanese one. Elizabeth Picard contends that “it is on the border, within the Syrian-­ Lebanese borderlands, that state-building is tested” (Picard 2016: 89). With regards to the Syrian-Lebanese border at large, which has historically been ill-defined and permeable or otherwise controlled by the Syrian army and intelligence, the “rediscovery of the border” in Wadi Khaled along with the deployment of the Lebanese army does not indicate a clear separation between the Lebanese state and the Syrian state but at the same time demonstrates complementarity at times of mobility or idleness. This is undoubtedly true, where the intensification of wars and borders closure has led to a rediscovery of “stateness” and belonging for the Wadi residents to Lebanon, while at the same remaining dependent on Syria. The “suture” of

Lebanon’s Wadi Khaled  189 Lebanese Syrian borders acts as a reflection of harmony and incongruousness. If we fail to see this dynamic as complimentary and only focus on the border as a tangible and hard line, we fail to grasp the reality of the political life at the border.

Notes 1 See for instance the special issues: Karine Bennafla (Ed.) (2017). “La frontière Dans Tous Ses Etats [Special issue].” Confluences Méditerranée, Vol. 101, No. 2; Raffaella A. Del Sarto (Ed.) (2017). “Contentious Borders: The Middle East and North Africa post-2011 [Special issue].” International Affairs, Vol. 93, No. 4. 2 Jamil Mouawad is a lecturer in Politics at the American University of Beirut. The research for this article was made possible (in part) through the support of the Arab Council for the Social sciences by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author. 3 The nine municipal councils are: Wadi Khaled, Al-Hicha, Mqaybleh, El-Fard, Al-Awada, Khat al-Petrol, Bani Sakhr, El Rama, and Al Amayer. 4 Another group is the Alawites, who are registered in the Wadi but live in Syria. 5 Presidential Decree 5247/1994 of June 20, 1994. 6 The six MPs are Rachid Karami, Amin el-Hafez, Saleh el-Kheir, Talal el-­ Morabi, and Najah Wakim. An-Nahar, 12, 7, 1974. 7 It should be noted that some local organizations were established such as the “Youth Group of Wadi Khaled” (Tajamou’ Shabab Wadi Khaled) in 1985. 8 Khalid Ibn Al-Walid is one of the greatest Generals of Islam who won over the Christian Byzantines in Syria in the renowned Yarmouk Battle (August 636). 9 The Arab customs led in the mid-1950s the family of Obeid from the Baalbeck region to seek refuge after local and tribal feuds with the Nasereddine family, three years after they bought the lands from the Alawites who moved inside the Syrian territory. Hnayder now is the only Shia area in the area which is majority Sunni. 10 The crossing was on the bridge of Jisr Qmar which was closed down in 1982 in order to prevent smuggling. 11 Interview, Wadi Khaled, October 6, 2012. 12 This expression is borrowed from as-Safir journalist Najla Hammoud. 13 Interview with a trader and member of a municipal council, Wadi Khaled, March 10, 2017. 14 Interview, Wadi Khaled, March 16, 2017. 15 Interview, Wadi Khaled, September 5, 2012. 16 Interview, Wadi Khaled, September 5, 2012. 17 There only are around 30 dispersed camps in Wadi Khaled. 18 Interview, Wadi Khaled, March 12, 2017. 19 Interview, Wadi Khaled, March 13, 2017. 20 Ibid. 21 Interview with a trader and member of a municipal council, Wadi Khaled, March 10, 2017. 22 Interview with a trader, Wadi Khaled, March 15, 2017. 23 Interview, Wadi Khaled, March 14, 2017. 24 Interview, Wadi Khaled, April 13, 2013. 25 Interview, Wadi Khaled, March 14, 2017. 26 Interview, Wadi Khaled, March 14, 2017. 27 Interview Wadi Khaled, March 13, 2017.

190  Jamil Mouawad 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Interview with a Mayor, March 16, 2017. Interview, Tripoli, October 15, 2014. Interview, Wadi Khaled, March 22, 2017. Interview, Wadi Khaled, September 3, 2012. Interview, Wadi Khaled, March 22, 2017. Interview, Skype Call, January 20, 2018. Interview with a school teacher, Wadi Khaled, March 18, 2017. Interview with a tribe leader, Wadi Khaled, March 16, 2017.

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192  Jamil Mouawad Till, Karen (2003). “Places of Memory.” In John Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell and Gerard Toal, eds. A Companion to Political Geography. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 289–301. Trombetta, Lorenzo (2016). “Liban, l’État retrouvé. Le cas du territoire de Wadi Khaled à la frontière avec la Syrie.” In Anna Bozo and Pierre-Jean Luizard, eds. Vers un nouveau Moyen-Orient? États arabes en crise entre logiques de division et sociétés civiles. Roma: Roma Tre Press, pp. 227–240. UNDP (2015). “The Wadi Khaled Development Declaration: By the Wadi Khaled Municipalities” – A Booklet Supported by the United Nations Development ­Program – UNDP, 2015. UNHCR (2011). “UNHCR Works with Lebanon to Help Thousands Fleeing Syria Violence.” Available at http://www.unhcr.org/4dd66d3e6.html. Vignal, Leïla (2017a). “Ordres de paix et ordres de guerre à la frontière syrienne.” L’Espace Politique, Vol. 33, No. 3. ——— (2017b). “The Changing Borders and Borderlands of Syria in a Time of Conflict.” International Affairs, Vol. 93, No. 4, pp. 809–827. ——— (2018). “Producing, consuming and living: Economic Everyday Practices in Wartime Syria (2011–2018).” Critique Internationale, Vol. 3, pp. 45–65.

8 Egyptian State and Culture1 Ted Swedenburg

Introduction The struggles over Egypt’s Ministry of Culture in May and June 2013 serve as a useful window into the complex character and workings of the post-­ uprising Egyptian state. During the final round of presidential elections, on June 17, 2012, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) transferred to itself much of the powers previously assigned to the presidency. SCAF stripped the presidency of its role as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, bestowed upon itself veto power over any presidential decree, and appointed one of the commander-in-chief’s assistants as the president’s Chief of Staff. That is, right before Mohammed Morsi was elected, SCAF imposed severe limitations on his presidential power (Fahmy 2017: 49–50). And so, when President Morsi announced his cabinet in August after concluding negotiations with SCAF, executive power was unevenly split, with Commander-in-Chief Field Marshal Hussain Tantawi retaining the post of Minister of Defense, as other ministers from the outgoing SCAF-appointed cabinet retained other key posts (Interior, Foreign Affairs, Finance). Members of the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP; the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm) took four positions of lesser importance, including education and information. The Supreme Council’s plan after the 2011 uprising, El Amrani (2012) argued in January 2012, was to contrive a form of reinstitution of civilian rule that protected the military’s political and economic privileges from civilian superintendence. Neither the SCAF nor the security apparatus, therefore, conceded control over the organs of the so-called “deep state” to Morsi and the FJP, instead only turning over to Morsi the administration of what I call, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the “shallow” or “superficial” state. As for the Culture Minister, Morsi retained another holdover from the SCAF-appointed Ganzouri government, Muhammad Saber Arab. The result of this unequal division of labor was that, over the course of the following year, struggles over the Morsi government’s policies and its attempts to assert control over the levers of the power were often focalized on the “lesser” ministries. Once it assumed power, the Brotherhood focused

DOI: 10.4324/b22870-9

194  Ted Swedenburg on trying to forge a partnership with the military and the security institutions and meanwhile concentrating on efforts at a religious transformation of Egyptian society in the media, culture, and education fields (Kandil 2015: 1138). Control over the “shallow” state institutions may therefore have somewhat suited the Muslim Brotherhood’s (MB) purposes. One result of this state of affairs was that the Ministry of Culture emerged as a significant zone of dispute and controversy. On May 7, 2013, Morsi replaced Minister Muhammad Saber Arab with Alaa Abdel Aziz, who was aligned with but not a member of the FJP. Abdel Aziz received his doctorate at the Higher Institute of Cinema, a state school, where he was an instructor. He also wrote film criticism and was assistant film director of short films produced by the High Institute of Cinema and National Cinema Center, a state institution. Abdel Aziz had published articles in the FJP newspaper criticizing opposition to Morsi as “counter-­ revolutionary” and condemning its arguments as “fabricated” (Ahram Online 2013). Upon taking office, Abdel Aziz quickly undertook initiatives that provoked opposition from entrenched cultural actors. On May 12, he removed Ahmed Megahed, head of the General Egyptian Book Organization (GEBO), publisher since 1993 of numerous classic “enlightenment” (tanwir) texts at cheap prices. In protest, GEBO workers launched a strike, and the chief editor of GEBO’s cultural magazine, al-Majalla, quit in protest. The minister cancelled his scheduled opening of a new gallery at Hanager Arts Centre when he learned that protesters would be present, but then protestors learned that Abdel Aziz was eating dinner at a downtown restaurant, and trapped him inside. Eventually he exited through the back, only to encounter the demonstrators who egged his car (Saad 2013a). That same day, Sameh Mahran, head of the Egyptian Academy of Arts, a Culture Ministry institution, hosted a conference to protest Abdel Aziz’s appointment and demand his removal. The previous year, Abdel Aziz participated in a campaign against Mahran that charged him with financial and administrative corruption. At the conference, Mahran made mention of a CD (that he had not seen but about whose contents he had been informed) that reportedly contained evidence of an illicit relation between the minister and one of his students. Meanwhile, the recently founded Egyptian Freedom of Creativity Front announced a campaign for the culture minister’s removal, to be launched with a march on the Ministry (Saad 2013b). The opposition picked up steam on May 28, when Abdel-Aziz dismissed Enas Abdel-Dayem, head of the Cairo Opera House, the day after cashiering Salah al-Miligi, head of the Fine Arts Sector. In response, the cast of Verdi’s Aida cancelled their scheduled performance at the Opera House, appeared onstage hoisting anti-Brotherhood signs, chanted for Morsi’s downfall, and declared a three-day strike. Other dissenting artists cancelled scheduled concerts, ballets, and operas at the venue. The next day, May 29, Saeed Tawfik, Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council for Culture, joined the protests by resigning.

Egyptian State and Culture  195 Because Egypt’s police had vanished from the streets in the last months of Morsi’s presidency (Hellyer 2016: 129), it was easy on June 3 for dozens of artists and intellectuals to break into the Ministry of Culture in the ­Zamalek district and launch a sit-in set to last until Minister Abdel Aziz was replaced. Meanwhile, Abdel Aziz had dismissed the head of the Egyptian National Library and Archives and three to four other senior officials who worked there. He defended the removals by stating that he was liberating the ministry from the clutches of a tiny elite and giving culture back to the Egyptian people. Among the significant cultural players involved in the sit-in were Egypt’s most celebrated leftist novelist Sonallah Ibrahim, singer Azza Balbaa (wife of poet Ahmed Fouad Negm), and journalist and blogger Bassem Sabry. Protesters carried anti-Morsi placards, organized poetry readings, and were entertained by the likes of pop star Ahmed Saad, “indie” music group Eskenderella, and “the voice of the Revolution” Ramy Essam. On June 11, supporters of Morsi marched on the Ministry in protest against the sit-in and clashed with the occupiers. Meanwhile, the Tamarod (“Rebellion”) movement, launched on April 28, was gaining momentum, garnering support from opposition groups like Kifaya and April 6th Youth Movement, collecting a reported millions of signatures on a petition calling for Morsi’s resignation, and organizing for a demonstration to be held at Tahrir Square on June 30. On the day of the rally, several thousand actors, filmmakers, musicians, visual artists, and writers gathered at the Ministry of Culture to march through Zamalek and across the Nile and link up with the enormous gathering at Tahrir (Metwaly et al. 2013). While the Tamarod movement did express widespread popular disaffection with the Morsi presidency, it was at the same time the product of a wide-ranging plot to bring down Morsi, involving powerful state, private, and international actors. The three young men who launched Tamarod, “unaccomplished [media] freelancers” with no organizing experience, were, it is now clear, put up to the task and guided by members of the intelligence services in coordination with the armed forces and the Ministry of Interior (Stacher 2020: 51). They developed strong connections with the opposition National Salvation Front (NSF) and their petitions were printed and circulated by anti-Islamist parties. Billionaire Naguib Sawaris funded the production of a slick video to promote Tamarod and broadcast it on his satellite network. Supreme Constitutional Court Judge Tahani el-Gabali provided the group legal advice and éminence grise Muhammad Hassanein Heikal, an ally of Minister of Defense and Commander-in-Chief Abdel Fattah alSisi, offered coaching. The UAE funneled millions of dollars to the campaign through the Egyptian Defense Ministry (Kirkpatrick 2018: 216–218; Letourneau 2019: 209). Members of the NSF were well aware by early 2013 that Egypt’s intelligence agencies were working secretly to take down the president in collaboration with powerful NSF-aligned businessmen. Meanwhile the police declined to provide security for the MB and FJP offices

196  Ted Swedenburg that were being attacked and torched around the country (Kirkpatrick 2018: 198–199; Armbrust 2019b: 222). On July 3, three days after the massive Tamarod demonstrations, the military, led by army chief al-Sisi, deposed Morsi in a coup d’état. The following day, the police reappeared on the street and the gas lines and blackouts that plagued the latter period of Morsi’s rule quickly ended (Kirkpatrick 2018: 251). The coup received wide support from the intellectual and artistic class. In its wake, leftists and liberals were seized by a wave of nationalist “militarophilia” (Ayad 2013) and an anti-Islamist “mania” (Kirkpatrick 2018: 257). Kirkpatrick notes for example, that when on July 8 soldiers killed over 60 unarmed pro-Morsi protesters at the Republican Guard headquarters, there was no liberal or left protest or response (Ibid; Armbrust 2019b: 2011). One broadcaster Lamis el-Hadidi, a former assistant reporter in the New York Times Cairo Bureau, even claimed on air that Brotherhood members had deliberately killed each other on July 8 in order to gain public sympathy (Kirkpatrick 2018: 257–258). When backers of the deposed president launched a mass sit-in at al-Rabaa al-Adaweya Square near the presidential palace, many cultural actors urged that they be dispersed, a position that dovetailed with widespread mass media claims that the MB had always been “terrorists” and never “real” Egyptians, and that the tents at Rabaa were full of Syrians, Palestinians, and other “infiltrators” in the pay of Q ­ atar (ibid.: 258–259). When the cabinet of the SCAF-appointed government ­discussed how to respond to the pro-Brotherhood sit-ins, reappointed Minister of Culture Saber Arab reportedly took a leading role in arguing for the use of maximum force to break up the protests (Naji 2014). On August 5, a significant group of artists and intellectuals, including noted writers Bahaa Taher and Sonallah Ibrahim, released a statement asserting that the Brotherhood was a non-nationalist organization; that it had sided with the British colonialists against the nationalist movement during the 1930s and the 1940s; and that it was engaged in terrorism (Colla 2014). Other prominent progressive voices from across the cultural milieu who expressed support for the coup included revolutionary poet Ahmed Fouad Negm (Awad & Talon 2013) and Mohamed Hashem, founder of respected independent publishing house, Dar Merit (Shenker 2016: 377) as well as political satirist Bassem Youssef, known internationally as the “Jon Stewart” of Egypt (Fisher 2014). On August 14, the military moved to clear Rabaa al-Adaweya Square, in the course of which it killed, by Human Rights Watch estimates, 817 demonstrators. Other sources estimate that at least a thousand lost their lives – casualty figures comparable to those at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Egypt’s intellectual and cultural circles largely supported the army’s repression of the sit-in and the subsequent suppression of the Brotherhood (El Shimi 2013). Actress Elham Shaheen, attacked in 2012 as a “prostitute” by a Salafi shaikh on a Salafi TV network (discussed below), opined of the Brotherhood: “They’re not Egyptian, they’re not Muslims, they are pretending to be” (El Shimi 2013). Interviewed in October 2013, Ibrahim asserted that there had been no “massacre” at al-Rabaa Square and that due to the

Egyptian State and Culture  197 dangers Egypt faced from the US and the Brotherhood, no one should criticize al-Sisi – Egypt’s Defense Minister and the country’s real power – and they should, instead, stand with him (Lindsey 2013). Why were the overwhelming majority of Egypt’s cultural figures, including many associated with the left, so opposed to the Muslim Brothers’ takeover of the Ministry of Culture that they would support a military coup against a government brought to power through democratic elections? And why would so many defend and justify the security force’s violent suppression of the sit-in at al-Rabaa al-Adaweya Square at the cost of hundreds of lives?

State, Culture, Enlightenment To make sense of their positions, it is useful to examine the relation of Egypt’s liberal and secular intelligentsia (including cultural figures) to the state and its mission. Today’s cultural actors are the inheritors and advocates of the Nahda (“Awakening”), an important intellectual trend and cultural movement that emerged in Egypt in the late 19th century. Nahda discourse advocated the bringing of enlightenment (tanwir) and modernity to the country and the elimination of ignorance and stagnation. One of its chief targets in the fight to bring “light” to the darkness, to eliminate the backwardness characterizing the lives of the masses, particularly in rural areas, was the “obscurantist” forces that prevailed in the domain of religion. At least as early as the 1920s, Kandil argues, educated urbanites who embraced enlightenment values regarded religious scholarship as “hopelessly reactionary” (2015: 124). Armbrust has shown how, in the official discourse of Egyptian modernity, culture figures aligned with the state were meant to play a critical role in bringing enlightenment to a benighted citizenry (1996: 190–194). Although liberal intellectuals and cultural actors did advocate for individual freedoms, at the same time they willingly embraced the state as a partner in the effort to urge open-minded and rational culture onto the reluctant masses. The liberal position, Abdel Meguid and Faruqi (2017) argue, was at its root statist, one that granted absolutist power to the sovereign when it came to the advancement of m ­ odernity and progress. The liberals’ statist position served to warrant their positive relation to Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s “authoritarian modernism.” Nasser’s regime (1954– 1970) vastly expanded the commanding and interventionary role of the Egyptian state in the domain of culture, in its concerted effort to elevate the cultural level of the mass of the Egyptian populace for the sake of social equality and national progress as well as to direct and to rally intellectuals and cultural workers (Jacquemond 2008: 15–16; Winegar 2009: 190). Between 1956 and 1965, the Nasser government established a Higher Council for Arts and Letters, a Ministry of Culture, and state television and nationalized the press and an important segment of the film industry (Jacquemond 2008: 15–16).

198  Ted Swedenburg The Sadat era (1970–1981) of “liberalization” of the economy, however, witnessed state withdrawal from administration, support, and control of culture. The government closed most of the state literary and cultural journals in 1971, dismissed over 100 journalists and writers in 1973, and in 1980 shut down the Ministry of Culture (Kendall 2006: 196). President Hosni Mubarak’s government (1981–2011), by contrast, largely restored the old Nasserist state cultural institutions. In fact, the Mubarak era witnessed increased government cultural activities and institutions, which served as a kind of compensation for the continuation of Sadat’s infitah project of removing the state from key sectors of the economy. An expanded national arts policy, the cultural handmaiden to economic neoliberalism, was particularly necessary due to the regime’s authoritarian nature and the thin façade of its democratic institutions. Support for the arts as well permitted Egypt to project an image of civilization, modernity, and friendliness to the outside world, with the aim of promoting Egyptian exports and attracting foreign investment and visitors. It was supposed that the presence of art in the country, especially of the modernist and avant-garde sort, would be viewed as an insignia of progress and also offer a welcoming atmosphere to potential investors and tourists who might otherwise be spooked by political Islam (Winegar 2006: 142; Mehrez 2008: 3, 210).2 The Mubarak government’s expanded support for culture was also motivated by its concern to counteract and channel the growing Islamization of society and to counter intensified political competition from the MB. During the 1990s, the state was able to win to its side, in the course of the campaign, an array of cultural actors, including earlier critics or active opponents of the regime. Liberal, Marxist, Nasserite, and independent secularist intellectuals and cultural actors, virtually all took up the critique of political Islam for its “obscurantist” and “totalitarian” tendencies, asserting the necessity of embracing the tenets of enlightenment, modernity, and secularism in the fight against “extremism” and intolerance, against the “dark” forces of anti-enlightenment Islamists (Abaza 2010: 34). During the 1990s, such figures came to occupy the key sectors of the state-funded cultural establishment, its institutions, journals, and publishing entities to such an extent that few intellectuals of any standing were operating independently of the state system (Jacquemond 2008: 46; Abaza 2010: 34; Al-Ahnaf 2011: 1130–1132). By 1999, Faruq Hosni, Minister of Culture since 1987, was able to declare with some justification that all of Egypt’s intellectuals, with one or two exceptions, had joined ranks with the regime (Jacquemond 2008: 26). Egypt’s culture figures then were not merely allies of the state, they were embedded within it, constituting an important and as yet largely under-researched space of permeability in the borders between the state and society and the interpenetration between them (another space is certainly the Central Authority for the Censorship of Works of Art [CACWA], for which well-known artists have worked at the highest levels).

Egyptian State and Culture  199 The alliance of intellectuals and cultural actors with the state did not, however, immunize them against verbal pressures as well as violent attacks by religious conservatives, including those located both inside and outside the state apparatus. Among the prominent victims of extremist violence (actual or threatened) during the 1990s were celebrated novelist Naguib Mahfouz, who in 1994 survived an assassination attempt by partisans of Shaikh Abd al-Rahman who had issued a fatwa against the writer; secularist commentator and author Farag Foda, accused of blasphemy by some al-Azhar clerics and assassinated in 1992 by members of al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya; feminist writer and activist Nawal El Saadawi, who departed for the US in 1993 after some self-appointed judges put on a mock heresy trial in response to her book Gannat wa Iblis (Gannat and the Devil) and called for her punishment for heresy (cooke 2015: 219–220); and professor Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, a Qur’an scholar, declared an apostate in 1995 by a Shari’a court and forced to seek refuge in Europe. In addition, there were censorship struggles, due to pressure from state and non-state actors. It was routine practice for the Islamic Research Academy at (state-funded) al-Azhar University to review books published by the (state-funded) GEBO and to recommend the removal of those titles it considered inappropriate. In such cases, governmental approval of restrictions was virtually guaranteed. During the early 1990s, the process became less automatic as the regime sought to curry favor with the secular intelligentsia (Jacquemond 1994). The presence of MB members in parliament between 2000 and 2008, plus the broader Islamization of society, spelled continued pressures on state-sponsored cultural projects labeled objectionable on moral grounds. A study of Brotherhood deputies’ submission of questions to government in the 2000–2005 parliament found that 80% dealt with culture, media, and education, as MB deputies pushed for tighter state media controls and for censorship of cultural work considered offensive to religion and conservative social mores (Wickham 2013: 137).3 Calls for censorship of “scandalous” films were quite common (Skovgaard-Petersen 2017b), but complaints landed on books as well. In 2001, for instance, an MB deputy raised objections to three books published by the General Organization for Cultural Palaces (GOCP), an organization within the Culture Ministry, that he deemed pornographic. Culture Minister Faruq Hosni proceeded to cashier the two heads of Literary Voices, the GOCP series that published the volumes, while Prime Minister Atef Ebeid fired the GOCP head and ordered the books in question confiscated (Ghazoul 2001; Mehrez 2008: 14–15). That members of the Muslim Brothers participated with the “revolutionaries” on Tahrir Square in January–February 2011 (largely without the open approval of the leadership) did not allay the secular intellectuals’ fears about the Brothers that had built up over the years. Nervousness grew as the Brotherhood and other Islamists took advantage of the new freedoms of the post-Mubarak era to mobilize politically in more vigorous and public

200  Ted Swedenburg ways than in the past. In a March 2011 rally in Cairo’s Imbaba neighborhood, a member of the MB Guidance Bureau, Sa’d al-Husseini, discussed “preparing society for Islamic rule.” Soon thereafter, another Guidance Bureau member, Mahmoud ‘Ezzat, stated publicly that he anticipated the implementation of hudoud punishments for crimes like robbery, adultery, and murder. As Wickham (2013: 186) notes, by this time the Brotherhood was an organization with a wide spectrum of competing opinions, and so it was not possible to know whether such statements represented the organization or were simply one person or faction’s opinion within the group. Nonetheless, many in the left/liberal camp took such statements as official, heralding what was to come if Islamists came to power. Additional suspicions arose when at the July 29, 2011, demonstration at Tahrir, the first major mass protest since the uprising, many speeches, particularly from Salafis, called for an Islamic state (Wickham 2013: 194). When religious parties (the Brotherhood-established FJP plus allied and Salafist parties) won the majority of seats in the first post-uprising parliamentary elections, concluded in January 2012, more alarm bells went off. In December 2011, shortly after the FJP had won around 50% of assembly seats in the first two stages of the elections, the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie posted on the group’s official website that they were close to realizing their founder Hassan al-Banna’s “ultimate goal,” the establishment of a “just and reasonable regime.” This project, Badie proclaimed, would commence with the foundation of a sound government and end with the institution of a righteous Islamic caliphate (Halawa 2011). The emergence in June 2011 of the Salafi al-Nour Party and its substantial electoral gains, states Ottoway (2017: 150, 154), both surprised and terrified liberals, as it meant the appearance in corridors of power of Islamists wearing long beards and advocating niqabs for women and literal interpretations of Islamic law. More worries were raised when the FJP candidate for president, Mohammed Morsi, won the election in June 2012. Opposition to Morsi’s rule emerged quickly, heavily vocalized in much of private and state media, including the chief state vehicle al-Ahram, normally a stalwart government backer (Elmasry 2017: 196). Morsi’s declaration in November 2012, asserting that court rulings could not overrule presidential decrees, prompted heightened worries about a trend toward Islamist authoritarianism. Morsi eventually rescinded the declaration, but the damage was done, and for many Morsi opponents this was the final straw (Hellyer 2016: 123; Kirkpatrick 2018: 178 Armbrust 2019b: 208). The heightened sectarian tensions during Morsi’s rule and his seeming unwillingness to curtail them also provoked serious concerns. The discourse and practice of the Brotherhood and other Islamists raised Copts’ apprehensions that their position in the country was threatened. After a spate of violence in al-Khusus village in Qalyubiyya Province left several Copts dead and a subsequent mob attack on mourners at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Cairo in April, many Christians were infuriated when the president

Egyptian State and Culture  201 failed to make a strong statement against anti-Copt violence (Al-Anani 2018: 36–37). The period was also marked by substantial hate speech and some violence against Shi’ites, mostly by Salafis but also some Brotherhood figures. One occasion was a June 2013 rally in support of the Syrian uprising, where Morsi shared the stage with extremist preachers who condemned Shi’ites. A few days later, four Shi’ites were lynched by a mob at a village in Greater Cairo (Carr 2013; Human Rights Watch 2013; Hellyer 2016: 139; Armbrust 2019b: 209). There also was a growing sense among cultural actors of heightened ­Islamist intolerance toward state-sponsored as well as private-sector secular culture. Such expressions were heard frequently from the Islamist majority during the first post-uprising parliament (January–June 2012). Nour Party (Salafi) MP, Gamal Hamed, for example, blasted ballet as the “art of nudity” during a televised parliamentary session, raising concerns that ballet might be banned from the Cairo Opera. Salafi figures also voiced condemnation of the display of statues, asserting that Islam frowned upon the depiction of human bodies (Amin 2013). In February 2012, popular comic actor Adel Imam was sentenced to three months in jail for offending Islam in some his best-known films in a case brought by an Islamist lawyer; but Imam won his court appeal and was cleared in September. Shaikh Abdullah Badr, on his program on a Salafi TV network, regularly attacked Egypt’s film stars. After he called film actress Elham Shaheen a “prostitute” and an “infidel” and accused her of being “promiscuous, naked, and lascivious,” she filed a lawsuit, and Badr was convicted and sentenced to prison for three years and payment of a fine (Amin 2013, N.A. 2013). In January 2012, respected progressive journalist Hani Shukrallah was forced out as editor of Ahram Online, Egypt’s largest English-language news website, by the new Ahram chairman, a recent appointee and Brotherhood backer. It was in this atmosphere that members of the opposition raised the slogan that the Morsi administration was engaged in the “Brotherhoodization” (akhwana) of the country and society. By June 2012, however, there was no Parliament, and Morsi’s levers on state control remained limited. But in line with the akhwana framework, all kinds of claims, many outrageous and ludicrous, were raised repeatedly throughout mass and social media (Elmasry 2017). The policies of the Brotherhood threatened, it was claimed, to turn Egypt variously into Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iran, or Gaza under Hamas and to usher in a hisba regime with strict enforcement of orthodox Islamic doctrine (Gonzalez-Quijano 2013; Salama 2013). MB loyalties lay not, it was asserted, with the Egyptian nation, but with the transnational Islamic project of installing a caliphate. Another common charge was that the Brotherhood had a foreign agenda: that it desired close ties with Hamas and Hizbollah. UAE-based satellite network Sky News Arabia, Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiyya, and Emirati-linked Egyptian media were prominent among those asserting that the Brotherhood was under the thumb of the US and that US Ambassador Ann Patterson had pressured the government to

202  Ted Swedenburg rig the election on Morsi’s behalf in order to forge closer Egyptian ties with Israel (Kirkpatrick 2018: 208). Little wonder that Tamarod, recipient of millions in covert funds from the UAE, complained in its petition that Morsi’s Egypt was under US control (Norton 2013: 342; Kirkpatrick 2018: 218). An Egyptian court in May 2013 asserted that the prison breakout in January 2011 freeing Morsi and 33 other MB leaders was carried by the Brotherhood in collaboration with Hamas and Hizbollah (in fact, the military released them) and media outlets published false stories that the Brotherhood and Hamas had collaborated in the killing of hundreds of Egyptians during the uprising (Miller 2013; Elmasri 2017: 183). Claims circulated as well that Morsi planned to sell off the Suez Canal and the Sinai Peninsula to foreign interests, while Tawfiq ‘Ukasha, a popular broadcaster notorious for spinning wild conspiracies, accused the president of selling off the Pyramids (Elmasri 2017: 184; Armbrust 2019a: 214–215). Celebrated comic Bassem Youssef mocked the Brothers and the President relentlessly on his massively popular TV show al-Bernameg, attacking them as “merchants of religion” (Pratt & Rezk 2019: 244). The widespread anti-Brotherhood discourse of the Morsi era is essential to understanding the positions and actions taken by Egypt’s cultural and intellectual actors. Secularist art workers typically contended that any MB claim that they supported the arts was a ruse, or if they acknowledged MB involvement in art, they believed that any work produced by someone affiliated with the Brotherhood was, prima facie, aesthetically backward and unworthy of consideration (Pahwa & Winegar 2012). Brotherhood opponents routinely claimed that MB hegemony over the culture field would inevitably result in the destruction of Egyptian culture itself (Reuters Staff 2013) and produce an art scene akin to the prevailing atmosphere in Somalia under Al-Shabab or Taliban-controlled Afghanistan (Salama 2013). AUC History professor Khaled Fahmy’s view was typical: commenting on the Ministry sit-in, he affirmed that “Brotherhood artists and intellectuals do not actually exist” (2013).4 These attitudes also characterized artist and intellectuals’ judgments of Culture Minister Abdel Aziz, who they regarded as an “artistic nobody” (Nasralla 2013). Freedom of Creativity Front head Abdeljalil Chernoubi described the minister as someone “completely unknown in the Egyptian intellectual and artistic world,” who had “never accomplished anything notable in the cultural domain” (France 24, 2013). Pratt and Rezk (2019: 244) argue that “nominally non-state actors” (youth activists, human rights and women’s rights activists) along with the (state-embedded) cultural milieu (artists, writers, media personalities), in fact, played a prominent role in orchestrating the discursive construction of the Ikhwan as a dangerous threat. They show how these actors drew on tropes about the Brothers dating back to the Nasserist regime and that tagged them as secretive, prone to using violence, traitorous, illegal, and working in a manner contrary to the norms of modern politics (Ibid; Wickham 2013: 121).5 Renowned novelist Alaa Al Aswany, author of The

Egyptian State and Culture  203 Yacoubian Building, “the first best-selling Arabic novel ever published, not only in Egypt and the Arab world, but also in translation abroad” (Jacquemond 2008: 232), was a leading voice. Like many other liberals and leftists, Al Aswany supported Morsi in the presidential run-off against Ahmed Shafik of June 2012, preferring an MB candidate over a Mubarak holdover. But soon after Morsi assumed office, Al Aswany emerged as a major critic, blasting away at the president and his organization in his weekly column in the newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm, where he labeled the Brotherhood as fanatics and fascists who desired to turn Egypt into a “Taliban-like emirate.” As for culture, he wrote: whenever the Brothers talk about art they demonstrate their disdain for it as well as their ignorance of its meaning…Like all fascists, the Muslim Brothers want art to act as propaganda in the service of their ideology… They do not comprehend the meaning of art and they don’t derive pleasure from it, because they are extremists. (Al Aswany 2015) Al Aswany defended the killings at al-Rabaa Square (Lindsey 2016), calling the Ikhwan “a group of terrorists and fascists” (Kingsley 2013). Novelist Gamal al-Ghitani, longtime editor-in-chief of the state-sponsored and respected literary magazine Akhbar al-Adab, declared to the media during May and June of 2013 that MB rule amounted to a “foreign occupation” (Elmasry 2017: 182–183). The army’s repression at al-Rabaa Square Ghitani called “excellent actions that need to be extended to all levels” (Shenker 2016: 377–378). Shortly after the massacre, novelist Sonallah Ibrahim justified the crackdown on the Brotherhood with the claim that the organization was backed by the US, which had given them $4 billion (Lindsey 2013). Independent newspaper publisher and human rights advocate Hisham Qassem avowed that without army intervention, the only choices for Egypt under Morsi were between a failed state (like post-Qaddafi Libya) or a theocracy (like Hamas-ruled Gaza) (Ayad 2013). Meanwhile, extremist discourse, including sectarian attacks on Christians that was endemic on the stages of Rabaa Square and broadcast nonstop on Al Jazeera Egypt, had fed and fueled the pervasive anti-Brotherhood discourse (Hellyer 2016: 161–162). Several scholars, however, have pointed out that the Muslim Brother’s views on the state and its relation to culture were, in fact, quite similar and not entirely antithetical to those of the liberal secular intelligentsia. Both traditions grew out of the Nahda’s intellectual lineage, a position seeking to contest Eurocentric views of the East and to demonstrate that Islam was compatible with science, rationality, and material advancement. Both trends shared a statist position favoring the sovereign’s unchallenged power (Abdel Meguid & Faruqi 2017: 254–255). In particular, the Brotherhood considered the state to be the key agent in the project of raising the educational and consciousness levels of the ignorant, illiterate, and backward

204  Ted Swedenburg masses, a view very much in line with that of liberals and Nasserist policies. If liberals in the pre-Nasser period had condemned popular cultural and religious practices like Sufi saint festivals and insisted that the state put a halt to them (Abdel Meguid & Faruqi 2017: 259), so too did the Brotherhood. Hassan al-Banna’s 1947 letter to King Faruq (Al-Banna 1947) provides a useful summary of Ikhwan views on the guiding role of the state in promoting lofty cultural values. The state, al-Banna writes, should shutter “morally undesirable” dance halls and prohibit dancing. It should “inspect” cinemas and theaters and ensure a “rigorous selection” of their scripts. It should censor songs and “rigorously” inspect and select them. It should be equally rigorous in the selection of songs and programs broadcast on radio and should ensure “the use of radio broadcasting for the education of the nation in a virtuous and moral way.” Finally, the state should confiscate “provocative” books, stories, and newspapers that “disseminate immorality and capitalize indecently on lustful desires.” It is important to note that al-Banna called not for the prohibition of cinema, radio, books, or newspapers, but for the state to regulate and employ these media for the sake of raising citizens’ cultural level. The Brotherhood did, in fact, in its first two decades of existence (1930s and 1940s) engage seriously with culture, for instance, by publishing film reviews, short stories, and literary criticism in its magazines and staging plays known as “Islamic drama” (Mitchell 1969: 292–293). But the organization’s involvement with the arts ended when the organization was suppressed by Nasser in 1954. When it reemerged in the 1970s and the 1980s, it often adopted censorious attitudes toward the arts, cinema in particular (Skovgaard-Petersen 2017b). As a whole, the Brothers were quite suspicious of secular artists and their motivations. Islamists of all tendencies tended to regard the secular intelligentsia as harboring a covert fantasy of turning Egypt into a branch of Europe (Al Ahnaf 2011: 1138; Kandil 2015: 127). The secularists’ focus on the defense of freedom of creativity, the MB believed, led them to defend any attacks on Islam and its values. Such views, so thought Islamists, proliferated in particular among “modernist” novelists and poets, whom they regarded as promoters of debased morals and libertinism (Al-Ahnaf 2011: 1138). During the 1990s and aughts, a countervailing Islamist trend emerged to challenge the negative and disapproving MB position with regards to the arts. This tendency advocated a renewal of the organization’s concern for culture, arguing that the arts were an uplifting and important means through which to worship God (Skovgaard-Petersen 2017b). During this period, the Ikhwan supported self-designated “Islamic” theater troupes, and a field of “Islamic literature” (poetry and novels) emerged (Pahwa & Winegar 2012). Winegar documents (2016: 187) how in 2010, “Al-Warsha,” the largest student club (1,200 members) at the state-funded Cairo College of Fine Arts, was dedicated to the promotion of Islamic values through the production of art. In addition, two popular TV preachers of the aughts, Amr Khaled and Moez Masoud, encouraged the production of “purposeful art” (al-fann

Egyptian State and Culture  205 al-hadif ). Art, they maintained, was vital to Islam, a means through which humans could get closer to God (Winegar 2008: 28). Khaled and Masoud regarded art as an instrument of progress and as a mechanism to be used to combat the “ignorance” of the mass of the population, who, they maintained, possessed minimal levels of culture, views, of course, very close to those of Egyptian liberals promoting tanwir. While neither Khaled nor Masoud belonged to the Brotherhood, their attitudes were very much in line with those MB members pushing for greater cultural efforts.6 After the 2011 uprising, members of the Brotherhood in Egypt undertook a number of cultural initiatives, but without clear ideas about what sorts of art and culture they should produce or how to produce it (SkovgaardPetersen 2017a: 162). On the one hand, the FJP party program’s position on culture was defensive, representative of the traditional MB post-Nasser position that stressed the distinction between Egyptian culture, which is inherently religious, and foreign culture, which is alien to Egypt and corrupting. On the other hand, the party program rejected state interference in the arts, and expressed the desire that the country’s creative sector agree on a code of honor respecting the religious values upon which society was based. The FJP program urged the development of TV and film programming that spread “lofty values” and would prohibit “low works that excite the instincts” (Skovgaard-Petersen 2017a: 156). The Brotherhood wiki presented the subject of art as being of great consequence but – at the same time – as a domain of potentially great threat to Egyptian society and the ummah (Skovgaard-Petersen 2017b). In January 2012, when parliamentary elections produced an Islamist majority, the newly elected body established a cultural committee headed by Mohamed al-Sawy, an independent MP. A somewhat surprising choice, Al-Sawy was a leading cultural entrepreneur, who in 2003 founded the El Sawy Culture Wheel in Zamalek, an important performance space which, among other things, offered Egypt’s “underground” musical artists a stage on which to perform and develop their skills and repertoire. Some of these played significant roles in the 2011 uprising. The parliamentary committee discussed reforming and decentralizing the culture ministry and changing it from a culture producer and censor to a culture funder and catalyst, proposals very much in line with global neoliberal thinking about the appropriate relationship between the state and the culture industry. FJP involvement in the committee was not substantial (Skovgaard-Petersen 2017a: 157), but it did its work with FJP permission and encouragement. The proposals of the committee, moreover, were not far removed from what many liberals interested in reform of the ministry might have recommended. Committee work was cut short, however, when SCAF closed Parliament in June 2012. The Morsi government also shepherded the writing of a new constitution, hastily approved in referendum in December 2012. Part Two, Chapter Two guaranteed freedom of opinion, freedom of creative activity and information, and freedom for the media in general and only allowed for limited imposition of censorship at times of general mobilization and war. Part Two,

206  Ted Swedenburg Chapter Two also called for the state to play a leading role in promotion of “the sciences and the arts and letters” and for it to sponsor “creators and inventors” and protect their “creations and innovations.” In addition, the constitution stated that the State would take measures necessary to preserve “the nation’s cultural heritage” and to spread “cultural services.” Other Chapters, however, prohibited any insult or abuse of religious “messengers or prophets” and assert that it is the state’s duty to “safeguard ethics, public morality and public order, and foster a high level of education and of religious and patriotic values, scientific thinking, Arab culture, and the historical and cultural heritage of the people” (Skovgaard -Petersen 2017a: 158; 2012 Constitution). While allowing for censorship, on the question of culture the Morsi constitution was not, in spirit and in substance, much distinguished from previous constitutions. The post-revolution period saw the launch of several Islamist cultural and artistic initiatives. Independent of the Brotherhood, young Islamist cultural actors established a film production company, Rihab, and an art production group, al-Nahda, named after the enlightenment movement to which liberals claim exclusive title. The Brothers themselves established a theater troupe, Teatro Yanayir (“January,” after the month the 2011 uprising was launched) and a TV station, Misr 25 (for January 25, the day the insurrection started), which commenced broadcasting in September 2012. Misr 25’s program, “Art, Seriously” (al-Fann bi-jadd), hosted by the youthful Hamid Musa, promoted the idea that art should be committed (multazim) – employing the term favored by the secular left to describe politically engaged art (Di Meo 2016) – and emanate from the heart (Skovgaard -Petersen 2017b, 2017a: 162).7 Although during Morsi rule the secular intelligentsia and arts actors strongly felt along with the broader liberal/left public that their backs were against the wall due to the unfolding plan for “Brotherhoodization,” many observers note that the situation was rather more complicated. During the period of Brotherhood government, free speech positively flourished in Egypt (Lindsey 2016) and “[a]nyone could tell that there was no censorship under Morsi” (Kirkpatrick 2018: 172). As noted above, much of the mass media, including the state-controlled organs, was relentless in its criticism of Morsi and the Brotherhood. Moreover, Skovgaard-Petersen shows, the three film censorship cases that transpired during Morsi’s term suggest that the MB did not exercise control over the cultural scene. In two cases, films whose licenses were initially denied were eventually allowed to be screened. Both (La Mu’akhadha [No Objection] and The Jews of Egypt) dealt with the subject of communal and religious intolerance of non-Muslims, and both blamed Islamists for prevailing chauvinism. The film whose release was denied, Al-Taqrir (The Report), was produced by a young Brother with the aim of defending Islam and showing Egyptians responding to the notorious anti-Islamic short film “Innocence of Muslims” (Skovgaard-Petersen 2017a: 161). It was in part due to MB frustrations over Al-Taqrir’s censorship that led to the appointment of Abd al-Aziz as Culture Minister.8

Egyptian State and Culture  207 Supporters of the Brotherhood likewise felt that they were under constant attack in the Morsi era, especially due to the negative mass media campaigns. Private media outlets, for the most part owned by supporters of the ancien regime, routinely charged Morsi and the MB of taking over the state in order to further their own narrow interests, of menacing the country’s identity by importing “foreign” notions about religion, and of employing “militias” against demonstrators (Elmasry 2013; Pratt & Rezk 2019: 245). The state-owned media was likewise full of anti-MB invective. The MB experienced violent acts at the hands of Morsi opponents as well. As of June 2013, a reported 30 Brotherhood offices had been set alight or destroyed in a campaign that began in May. On March 22, protests organized outside the MB headquarters in the Muqattam district erupted in clashes between opponents and supporters, and Brotherhood spokespeople claimed that their supporters suffered many casualties – 176 injuries, 26 of them serious, and one fatality (Elmasry 2013). A key figure in the al-Muqattam protests, activist Ahmed Douma, stated on several occasions prior to March 22 that burning down MB offices was a “revolutionary act” (Elmasry 2013). Secular activists were quick to protest Morsi’s move to institute a new constitution in late 2012. Prior to the referendum, thousands of opponents launched a sit-in at the Ettihadiya presidential palace in early December. Violence erupted when Morsi supporters tried to clear them, resulting in 11 deaths and hundreds injured. New York Times reporter David Kirkpatrick was on the scene and reports that the fact that the dead were, with the exception of one journalist, Morsi supporters indicates that the president’s opponents, many of whom he witnessed carrying firearms, were better supplied with weapons (2018: 189). The event, in turn, produced credible claims by opposition members that Brotherhood members had detained and tortured them. MB leader Muhammad El Baltagi went on to inflame liberal opinion further by stating on national television that most of the anti-Morsi protesters were Christians (Hellyer 2016: 117). Liberal and leftist organizations and individuals in general did not distinguish themselves by mounting vigorous defenses of the institutions of democracy against the depredations of the military or the judiciary, when these impinged on elected MB officials or members. They declined, for instance, to protest the SCAF’s systematic undermining of the political process – its curtailing of presidential powers, its retention of “deep state” ministries and control over the army, its dissolution of the Islamist-majority lower house of parliament in June 2012. Parliament remained closed, in fact, during the entire period of Morsi’s presidency, with the tacit consent, it would appear, of leftists, liberals, and Mubarak backers (Fahmy 2017: 50). As Norton observes, moreover: Within the gargantuan [state] bureaucracy there were many centers of opposition, not just to Morsi but also to democratic rule…These centers within the security sector and other bureaucratic fiefdoms, as well as the

208  Ted Swedenburg foreign ministry and the state-controlled press, persistently sought to thwart the Morsi presidency (2013: 341) Nathan Brown (2013: 51) noted that following the al-Rabaa massacres: virtually every sin with which the opposition charged the ­Brotherhood— using force against protestors, trying to purge judges, denying and even applauding security-force abuses, harassing media—was a sin that the opposition embraced with unseemly enthusiasm in July 2013.

Autonomy or Heteronomy? The relation of Egypt’s secular artists and intellectuals to the modern state and the positions they have frequently taken when the state exercised its most violent functions renders any notion of artistic “autonomy” rather illusory. In fact, the history of cultural actors vis-à-vis the state has generally been one of close alignment. If culture workers supported the Nasser era state project to raise the cultural level of the masses in order to bring about social equality, during the Mubarak era they backed the project of cultural uplift so as to do battle with religious intolerance and extremism (Winegar 2009: 190). Moreover, as Mubarak’s government expanded state investment in the cultural field, it employed and supported numerous cultural workers in state-funded enterprises. Thousands of employees ran thousands of ­public programs in the Culture Palaces spread throughout the country (Winegar 2009: 192) as part of an army of civilian employees of the state that numbered over six million in 2010 or about 20% of the civilian workforce (Kirkpatrick 2018: 13). Writers published novels, short stories, and verse in state-sponsored book series and produced fiction and criticism for state-funded journals and magazines. In the Mubarak era of enhanced state support for the arts, authors enjoyed additional opportunities to circulate their work at state-sponsored book fairs and win newly established prizes, scholarships, and competitions. Performances of theater, folklore, classical and international music, and ballet were supported at the Opera House and other state-funded venues. Visual artists displayed their work at newly established biennials and could even be sent abroad to represent Egypt in competition and exhibits in Europe (Winegar 2006; 2009). In addition, the artists’ union, funded in part by the state, expanded benefits for members (Winegar 2006: 154). Less state support, however, went to the fields of popular music or cinema, which were more independent as they could rely more on private venues and markets as well as, often, European state funding. Nonetheless, Egyptian artists in general considered the state to be the caretaker of culture, a kind of guarantor of protection from the market, keeping them from having to cater to foreign or local bourgeois artistic predilections. Artists also viewed the state as a central and somewhat impartial

Egyptian State and Culture  209 body that helped level the playing field for artists through its provision of resources and institutions (Winegar 2006: 141, 152, 157). Even artists with flourishing careers in the private sector, therefore, maintained ties to the state. That state-backed media conceded space for figures in the art world to make robust criticisms of the Ministry of Culture and its activities also buttressed the ideal of the state as chief national patron of culture (Winegar 2006: 165). The perceived threat of Islamism from below and in the halls of Parliament also served to cement the alliance between secular cultural actors and the state. Rather than seeking autonomy from the central authority, Mehrez observes (2008: 17), “cultural figures have sought [its] protection”; instead of being the driving forces of government criticism, “they have demonstrated compliance.” Secular cultural actors were therefore positioned in a complex but quite intimate relation to the state. On the one hand, they frequently voiced opinions in support of free expression and against acts of censorship by the CACWA under the Ministry of Culture’s authority. But such standpoints were not consistent, nor were artists and intellectuals always shielded by their patron, the state. For one, secularists were not the only intellectuals linked to and embedded in the state. It is important to recall that the state supports an expansive religious hierarchy, with the Grand Shaikh al-Azhar and the Academy of Islamic Research at its pinnacle. This vast institution, in turn, encompasses its own multitude of intellectuals, many trained at or instructors at al-Azhar University, which Nasser nationalized in 1961. (The secular intelligentsia would not, of course, consider these true intellectuals.) The state promotes and favors intellectuals pushing for a “moderate” Islam, but at the same time, there are dissident factions, ulema, and professors within the state religious apparatus. Both pro-establishment and dissident elements employed by the state voice their opinions in state-funded religious journals and newspapers like al-Liwa al-Islami or ‘Aqidati (Ismail 1998: 199; Al-Ahnaf 2011: 1137). In addition, the GOCP retains, at Palaces throughout the country, state-trained and state-certified sheikhs who train citizen participants in GOCP programs in Islamic practices that are both “cultured” and state-approved (Winegar 2009: 195). As Jacquemond notes, the Mubarak state played the intelligentsia’s liberal and religious factions off against each other, thereby consolidating the government’s hold over both (2008: 27–28). As discussed above, the Academy of Islamic Research enjoyed wide leeway to call for censorship of writing they considered inappropriate or blasphemous, and the Culture Ministry frequently acceded to their demands. Moreover, secular cultural figures’ own ideas of what freedom of expression meant in practice were rather circumscribed. Novelist Naguib Mahfouz’s views were characteristic of broader state mandarins’ opinion. Mahfouz distinguished between “thought,” which should be “free” but shared only within a limited elite circle of compatriot artists and intellectuals, and “expression” (artistic), whose mass audience was vastly larger than that of “thought.” Given that the

210  Ted Swedenburg general public consumed artistic “expression,” it was essential for Mahfouz that this domain of art for the masses be characterized by decency, taste, and courtesy (Jacquemond 2008: 38). The pressures that emerged when 17 MB representatives entered parliament in 2000 and began to voice opinions on culture reinforced the tendency of many cultural actors to advocate with Mahfouz for “responsible freedom of expression” (Mehrez 2008: 20; my emphasis). So, while artists and intellectuals often remonstrated against specific cases of artistic censorship, their demands typically called for artists’ management of censorship, not the censor’s abolition (Jacquemond 2008: 41). Secularists and progressives in fact were quite as disposed to appeal for censorship as were religious intellectuals (Jacquemond 2008: 44). Mahfouz, premier international symbol of Egypt’s artistic talent, for instance, favored the censorship and boycott of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (Jacquemond 2008: 58). All this to say that the notion that the “autonomous” or “pure” artist possesses the greatest amount of cultural capital is difficult to maintain in the instance of Egypt (see Bourdieu [1993] on Europe). As Jacquemond suggests, the ideal for Egyptian artists is to be at once free or “autonomous” and “committed” or politically engaged to practice a synthesis of (political) commitment and artistic creativity (Jacquemond 2008: 101, 169; DiMeo 2016). In her definitive account of the Egyptian contest between the political and the cultural fields, Mehrez holds up novelist Sonallah Ibrahim as the paradigmatic honorable artist, someone fiercely independent, artistically innovative, and courageously outspoken in his relations with the fields of power. Ibrahim earns his badge of honor, in particular, for his performance at the Second International Conference on the Arab Novel award ceremony in Cairo in 2003, where he was to be conferred the Arab Novel Award, with a prize of 100,000 LE. The honoree proceeded to give a speech before assembled dignitaries and state officials, which he concluded by turning down the prize because it was to be conferred by a government that lacked any credibility in awarding it (Mehrez 2008: 72–75). It was precisely because of his reputation as a quintessentially independent artist in a cultural domain where the state enjoys substantial hegemony, because of his status as, Colla (2014) puts it, “the most politically and aesthetically autonomous writer working in Egypt” that Sonallah Ibrahim’s support for the military coup against Morsi and for the violent suppression of his backers at al-Rabaa Square was so remarked upon, and for many observers, surprising and even shocking (Lindsey 2013; 2016; Colla 2014). But a foreshadowing of Ibrahim’s stance in relation to the MB and the state occurred when the state-backed literary journal Akhbar al-Adab published his highly regarded novel Sharaf (Honor), and was subsequently published in book form in 1997 by the state-sponsored publishing house Dar al-Hilal. Sharaf’s publication marked the first time that Ibrahim had released his novels with a state entity. As Mehrez explains, this move was related to the alliance forged in the 1990s between the state and liberal/

Egyptian State and Culture  211 leftist cultural and intellectual figures and against the Islamists (2008: 25, 36). In addition, publishing with Dar al-Hilal turned out to be more profitable than publishing with an independent venue (Mehrez 2008: 36), another mark of the state’s continued importance in the cultural domain. As with so many other Egyptian secular cultural actors, when it came to Morsi and MB’s challenge to their hegemony in the domain of culture, Ibrahim’s “commitment” to a particular vision of the nation and the state trumped support for freedom of expression. Someone like Culture Minister Abdel-Aziz, who had worked in film production for a state-sponsored cinema institution and who, in a (mostly ignored) conversation with Reuters, stated that his cinema tastes ran to Kurosawa, Iranian and French films, and US director Terrence Malick (Badlands, Days of Heaven), and that his favorite film was Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (Nasralla 2013), could, on the basis of being an “Islamist,” be simply dismissed out of hand as an ­artistic nobody. Prevailing stereotypes made it widely believed in secular cultural circles that there simply were no MB or Islamist artists or intellectuals. Perhaps, part of this thinking is due to the fact that the Brotherhood’s recent ventures into the cultural fields, were, as we have seen, rather meager, underdeveloped, and in their infancy. In addition, given secular actors’ hegemony in the cultural field, it is hard to imagine that there was any space for an ambitious Islamist artist to gain recognition there (see Bourdieu 1993: 50). Within the realm of contemporary Egyptian poetry, for instance, it appears there is only a single Islamist poet of note, Abdul Rahman Yusuf, son of prominent Islamic scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who supported the Islamist arts-friendly trend of the 1990s and aughts and was close to but not a member of the Brotherhood (Elliott Colla, personal communication, ­December 2019). When Abdel Aziz asserted that the Culture Ministry needed a shakeup – arguing that a small elite had been in control and that culture needed to be returned to the people in order to provide “cultural services throughout Egypt, not financial benefits for a few intellectuals” (Nasralla 2013) – such arguments could have and, in fact, had been made at various times by many secular critics of the ministry. But the source of the criticisms and plans was one that the vast majority of secular intellectuals and artists had ruled illegitimate, out of court. Both Islamist and secular intellectuals and artists were statists, as we have seen. Both supported a preeminent role for the state in the domain of culture and both backed the notion that state held the chief responsibility for education for the purpose of raising the cultural, moral, and civilizational level of the masses. Both factions were essentially corporatist, both highly interested in and motivated by the goal of securing for themselves positions and benefits from the state-sponsored cultural institutions as well as seeking leading roles in the state’s cultural mission (Jacquemond 2016). In the post-Mubarak era contest over culture, the secular left/liberal faction would seem to have come out on top, as virtually the entire secular culture sector – both the older generation, closely allied to a Nasserist view of the

212  Ted Swedenburg relation between culture and the state, and the younger generation, which in the aughts distanced itself from the state and from politically engaged art – were united in the struggle to topple Morsi from power (Jacquemond 2015).

Conclusion Since the 2013 coup and the election of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as president in 2014, the cultural figures who so strongly backed the toppling of Morsi by the military have not all prospered, and some have even recanted. Alaa Al-Aswany was barred from writing his column in Al-Masry al-Youm and from making appearances on state television, and his famous monthly seminar, launched during the late Mubarak era and which attracted luminaries from across the cultural and political arenas, was shut down by security officials in December 2015 (Lindsey 2016). More recently, Al-Aswany took up residence in the US, and in March 2019 was reportedly being sued by the military prosecutors for insulting the president, the armed forces, and the judiciary based on passages from his 2018 novel (banned in Egypt) The Republic, As If and his columns for Deutsche Welle Arabic. Sonallah Ibrahim backed off from his former support for President Sisi, and testified in court in 2015 on behalf of novelist Ahmed Naji, on trial for obscenity and offending public morals after a chapter of his book was published in the statesponsored journal Akhbar al-Adab, where Naji was a writer and editor (Lindsey 2016). Also testifying on Ahmed Naji’s behalf were major figures entrenched within the state cultural bureaucracy: novelist Gaber Asfour, head of the Supreme Council of Culture during the Mubarak era, who played a leading role along with Minister of Culture Faruq Hosni in enlisting the intellectual elite in the state’s cultural endeavors (Al-Ahnaf 2011: 1132) and who served as Sisi’s first Culture Minister (May 2014–March 2015), and Mohammed Salmawi, head of Egyptian writers union, spokesperson for the committee charged with rewriting the 2012 constitution after the coup (Awad & Talon 2013). Dar Merit, Mohamed Hashem’s publishing house and bookstore, has faced frequent police raids, harassment, and arrests of personnel. Other prominent culture actors have fared better, taking up similar positions in the Sisi regime to those they occupied under Mubarak, including novelists Gamal al-Ghitani and Bahaa Taher and journalist Salah Eissa, all of whom were reappointed to Egypt’s Supreme Council for Culture in 2014 (Saad 2014). It is worth noting too that the religious establishment and its massive bureaucracy of intellectuals and functionaries are strong backers of the Sisi government as well (Hellyer 2016: 82–84). Struggles over the Ministry of Culture and its wider context suggest that additional studies of the Arab state and the domain of culture are in order. The literature on Egypt indicates the subject is seriously understudied, rarely attended to by social scientists who make the state their specialty. Scholars of culture too rarely see their object of study as a practice integral to state functioning, with the rare exception of literary critics like Richard Jacquemond and Samia Mehrez who have focused on the relation of the

Egyptian State and Culture  213 production of literature to state institutions rather than concentrate narrowly on the analysis of texts and anthropologists like Jessica Winegar who has examined the production of the fine arts in relation to the state apparatus rather than, like most anthropologists, investigating cultural practice in opposition to the state or from the vantage point of its margins (Das & Poole 2004). Examination of Islamists and the field of culture is also sparse, but there are some exceptions (Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, Sonali Pahwa, Jessica Winegar). If, as Wendy Brown (1995: 174) argues: the state is at once an incoherent, multifaceted ensemble of power relations and a vehicle of massive domination… a significantly unbounded terrain of powers and techniques, an ensemble of discourses, rules and practices cohabiting in limiting, tension ridden, often contradictory relations to each other then the contemporary story of culture and the Egyptian state is an excellent illustrative case. The difficulties that the Morsi administration faced in exerting control over the vast state cultural apparatus; the ways in which the Mubarak government played off its employees in its massive Islamic network against its secular artists and intellectuals employed in the statefunded culture industry; the fact that the secular culture actors in the state culture bureaucracy allied with the Mubarak regime were not always protected from conservative attacks from within the larger state body; that cultural censorship of state-produced artistic work was exercised by state cultural employees; the fierce attacks on the executive, Morsi, from state media; the Islamic state bureaucracy with its cleavages between those backing “moderate” and dissenting positions regarding Islam, expressed in state-funded religious publications: all point to the incoherent and multifaced character of “the state.” Finally, as we have tried to underscore here, the state is not just the deep state, not just the political, legal, economic, and security apparatuses, the “shallow” or “superficial” state is eminently worthy of attention as well.

Notes 1 Thanks to Elliott Colla for suggesting that I write on this subject; to Josh Stacher for comments on the draft; and to Sune Haugbølle and Mark LeVine and everyone else who read and discussed the first iteration of this paper at Roskilde. 2 This move was consonant with global neoliberal trends. In the US, state support for culture was expanded in the 1990s partly in response to the reduction of all social services and served purposes: providing a new mode of elite legitimation; creating new jobs; boosting cultural tourism; and generating profits for national and local state entities (Yúdice 2003: 11–12). 3 No study exists for MB 2005–2008 parliament interpellations. 4 MB elites were generally more highly educated than other parties’ elites. Two thousand members held doctoral degrees and 3,000 were professors, overwhelmingly in the natural sciences, almost none in the social sciences or humanities (Masoud 2014: 94).

214  Ted Swedenburg 5 Armburst (2019B: 165–179) analyzes one important example, popular Ramadan serial al-Gama‘a, broadcast in summer 2010. A depiction of the life of MB founder Hasan al-Banna, it is full of misleading and negative material, presented as “history.” 6 Masoud is also known for his composition and performance on several successful pop songs and as coproducer of Clash (Eshtebak), selected to represent Egypt in the 2017 Oscars Best Foreign Language Film competition. 7 On morally “committed” art, Van Nieuwkerk (2013); on “commitment” in Salafi discourse and practice, Schielke (2015: 128–148). 8 On censorship in the early post-revolution period, Schwartz et al. (2013).

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9 How Diplomatic Practices Make the Fuzzy State of Palestine Visible Michelle Pace

Introduction In their introduction to this edited volume, Haugbolle and LeVine open up the space for a more thorough engagement with the iconic work of Timothy Mitchell (1991a) on the effect and limits of the state. Mitchell’s work – on questions of representation – is highly influenced by Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Michel Foucault’s (1995) Discipline and Punish, Said’s (1978) Orientalism and Jacques Derrida’s (2016) work on deconstruction. In his Colonising Egypt, Mitchell (1991b) handles questions of representation and how they relate to the colonial project. Two years before this seminal work, Mitchell published an article entitled “The World as Exhibition.” This piece depicts how we can go about unpacking a system of representation and thereafter show the particular manner in which it is built up – out of certain sets of devices and material practices and ways of arranging and organizing the world. Mitchell’s core argument here, which he developed further in Colonising Egypt, is that there is not the separation we imagine between realms of “representation” and the “reality” to which they refer. Thus, in the gaze of the European curator, the Egyptian exhibit is meant to present an accurate depiction of medieval Cairo. The careful curation of this exhibition was meant to depict Cairo as medieval, dirty, haphazard and chaotic. But the question remains: To what end does such an exhibit serve? The object of this European curiosity, for the purposes of this present contribution, is not limited to the gaze of Europeans. The exhibition is part of a broader “theatrical machinery” or “the Parisian phenomenon of le spectacle,” wherein the world is set up as a picture (Mitchell 1989: 220). In a sense, this picture claims to be an accurate representation of the world outside. Yet, seeing as the Egyptian delegates became just as much part of an exhibit as the exhibits themselves, the world outside becomes an extension of the exhibition. The world, as a picture, constitutes reality in a way that represents the assumptions, purposes and values of the curators of this exhibit. Building on this work, Haugbolle and Levine (see Introduction to this edited volume) present a conceptualization of “the state” as never quite

DOI: 10.4324/b22870-10

220  Michelle Pace stable and always in the making. As contributors to this volume, we are thus encouraged by the editors to focus our attention on the relationship between those occupying the realms of power and the people they seek to govern. This chapter focuses on how representations of a Palestinian state are embodied in diplomatic representations and to what effects. In doing so, it brings the conceptual work of Mitchell in conversation with the work of Iver B Neumann. Neumann’s work on the visual modalities, practices and strategies of diplomacy highlights how effects of the state are produced through embodied everyday diplomatic interactions and practices as well as representations. By focusing on the case of Palestine, this contribution also speaks to the existing literature on the particularity of the Palestinian state in the wider Arab context, including the works of Dawisha and Zartman (1988), Salamé (1987), Hinnebusch (2009), Lewis (1992), Young (2018), Robson (2017), Turner (2019) and Eyal (2006), amongst others. These authors agree that legitimate political representation begins with the Palestinian people – as the entity that continues to be represented by and attached to the idea of “a Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel.” This calls for a (brief) historical reminder of where the Palestinian people’s claims for their self-determination stem from.

The Emergence of the “Fuzzy” State of Palestine In the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, European powers carved out a number of territories in the Middle East under French or British mandates. Under Turkish rule, the inhabitants of the territory that became known as Palestine were Ottoman citizens. Once detached from the Ottomans, Palestine was separated from constructed Arab states – Trans-Jordan (as it was then called), Syria and Lebanon. Nationalities in these countries became well entrenched. Nationality is important because it represents a legal bond between individuals and a specific territory; in other words, it constitutes a connection between citizens and a specific territory. But the boundaries of Palestine and Palestinians’ connection to this land remain an unfinished project due to the United Nations partition of the land in 1947. The tragedies of the Holocaust and of the dispossession and occupation of Palestine brought about a resumption of claims to the same territory. So, although Palestinian nationality was established in relation to a specific piece of land, the contestation of this same land since 1947 to date brings to question the notion of what I call the “fuzzy” state of Palestine. In 1948, thousands of Palestinians had to flee from their homes in – what after May 15, 1948, was recognized by the United Nations and much of the international community as – the State of Israel and became refugees. This dispossession of the Palestinian people continued during 1967, when Israel launched an ostensibly “preventive” war on its Arab neighbors and which, in turn, resulted in the occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Apart from Palestinian refugees that were displaced during 1948 and 1967,

Diplomatic Practices & the State of Palestine  221 there are also internally displaced Palestinians who remained within the areas that became the state of Israel. In terms of this author’s own ethnographic work in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) over the years, it has been observed that for many informants, especially the 1948 and 1967 generation, the notion of a Palestinian state remains an abstract concept in their everyday life. Therefore, in this present chapter, I draw upon the concept of fuzziness as this has been used in anthropology and specifically upon Fuzzy Set Theory (FST) as presented in the work of Lotfi Zadeh (1965) and Laughlin (1993). Laughlin builds a case for how Zadeh’s FST can offer some important insights to the ethnology of what he calls “native categories.” For Zadeh, FST “implies … a theory in which everything is a matter of degree or … everything has elasticity.” I draw upon this conceptualization of fuzziness in order to understand what Palestinians’ experience of the imagined State of Palestine is like and what this experience tells us about Timothy Mitchell’s observations on the two axes of the idea of the state, namely the material force and the ideological construct, which, when combined, produce a paradox. As Mitchell (1999: 169) explains: The network of institutional arrangement and political practice that forms the material substance of the state is diffuse and ambiguously defined at its edges, whereas the public imagery of the state as an ideological construct is more coherent. Moreover, in response to Foucault’s discourse on power relations, Mitchell rightly asks: [H]ow does one define the state apparatus and locate its limits? At what point does power enter channels fine enough and its exercise become ambiguous enough that one recognizes the edge of this apparatus? Where is the exterior that enables one to identify it as an apparatus? (Ibid) I do not have the space in this chapter to delve into the academic debate on citizenship, citizenship rights and in particular on what it means for a Palestinian to live in a space where he or she does not practice full citizenship (as we know it elsewhere, where a state has obligations towards its citizens and, in turn, its citizens expect certain rights to be fulfilled by their state). It is a contradiction in terms to even imagine referring to Palestinian citizenship of the OPT. Having said this, the concept of citizenship is an important marker of the fuzziness of the idea of a Palestinian state precisely because it uncovers what the discursive practice of a Palestinian State is not. In Laughlin’s work, the fuzzy logic or possibility theory he nuances helps explain alternative states of consciousness, which when applied to the focus of this present chapter refers to the life-worlds of Palestinians. I therefore

222  Michelle Pace apply Laughlin’s notion of fuzziness and focus on Palestinians’ direct experience of the idea of a Palestinian state. In other words, I adapt anthropologists’ notion of fuzziness to reflect on the informed everyday experience of “statehood” by Palestinians. Laughlin also describes how fuzziness is a result of a number of factors, including memories of experiences and different levels of meaning in experiences. In the case of the present chapter, this could, for example, be depicted in the Danish-Palestinian poet Yahya Hassan’s (2013) “Poems of rage” (and the significant role of poetry in native artistic expressions). But due to space limitations, this chapter does not explore these criteria of fuzziness. Conjuring up the notion of a Palestinian state refers to a fuzzy category which is not specific like when we refer to fuzzy numbers such as “lots” or “loads.” The question that underpins my notion of a fuzzy state is what can approximate a Palestinian state? When we say Israel, Germany and so on is a state, what does that mean? We usually take Max Weber’s definition of a state to refer to a polity that maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Even at this level, there is no Palestinian state to speak of, as the representative of the Palestinian people – the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)/Palestinian Authority (PA) – does not hold any monopoly over the use of violence; Israel does. Consequently, there is no way in which a Palestinian state can even approach the Weberian notion of a state. Therefore, in the present case, fuzziness refers to ambiguity, incompleteness. When the concept of a Palestinian state is used, it produces an oversimplification of the reality experienced by Palestinians. It is therefore the task of this chapter to explore the meaning that Palestinians themselves confer to the concept of a Palestinian state and by doing so a degree of fuzziness becomes amply apparent. According to the organization Al-Awda (2021), more than half of the Palestinian refugee population lives in Jordan. Approximately 37.7% live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, comprising about 50% of the population in those areas. About 15% live in almost equal numbers in Syria and Lebanon. About 355,000 internally displaced Palestinians reside in present-day Israel. The remaining refugee population lives throughout the world, including the rest of the Arab world. Of the 4.3 million refugees registered with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), 33% live in UNRWA’s 59 refugee camps throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Thus, I conceptualize the Palestinian nation as a ruptured demos/people whose lifeworlds are somehow connected to an imagined state of Palestine. After the turbulent events of 1948, the 150,000 Palestinians in Israel were eventually granted citizenship. Yet, they were subjected to military rule until 1966. After the 1967 conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel began its military control over Palestinians living in the OPT. Following Israel’s occupation of the rest of historic Palestine, it started building settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip where Jewish settlers were allowed to carry weapons under the protection of the Israeli army. In 1987, after 20 years of brutal military occupation, the First Intifada, a sustained series of

Diplomatic Practices & the State of Palestine  223 Palestinian protests, was set in motion. One year later, the PLO accepted the UN resolutions 242 and 338, recognizing the state of Israel.1 Despite this ruptured demos, the first three agreements of the Oslo peace process (from 1993 through 1995) established the Palestinian Authority as a semi-autonomous, non-sovereign governing apparatus administered by a Palestinian state meant to be administered by a Palestinian leadership which would, in turn, administer the Palestinian population in the OPT. The PLO – which was founded in 1964 with the purpose of the “liberation of Palestine” – is recognized as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people” (supposedly wherever they happen to reside in the world) by 138 states with which it holds diplomatic relations and has enjoyed observer status at the United Nations since 1974. And in trying to put to practice its assumed representativeness, the PLO engages in diplomatic practices at a global level in order to bring to fruition the imagined state of Palestine – but only after it relinquished any claims to most of the Palestinian territory. The rest of this chapter focuses on these diplomatic practices that attempt to make the fuzzy state of Palestine visible for the gaze of all those who observe this exhibit. By so doing, I establish the modalities of diplomacy in the continuous representation of the state of Palestine. Thus, building on the work of Mitchell and the way this body of work is interpreted in this present volume, this chapter focuses on the representation of the fuzzy state of Palestine via diplomatic practices. I will now present the groundwork for the study of how the notion of a “fuzzy” state of Palestine is constituted. First, I establish the modalities of diplomacy, that is, how diplomatic practices make the fuzzy state of Palestine visible, and how diplomats spread the notion to wider audiences. Second, I interrogate how diplomatic narratives sustain a fictitious notion of a state of Palestine. Third, I draw attention to the importance of the policies that sustain a Palestinian state in its fuzzy constellation. In conclusion, I draw up a taxonomy of the three strategies used for this purpose – a hegemonic and Western strategy (mainly led by the US with the EU following suit), a regional strategy (mainly led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia), and an internal strategy (mainly the Hamas-Fatah rivalry) – that constitute the key explanatory factors for why constructions of a Palestinian state are unstable and why such constructions have reached their limits.

The Modalities of Diplomacy: Representing the Fuzzy State of Palestine Thanks to Fadwah Khawaja, Chairwoman of the Jerusalem Centre for Women in East Jerusalem, I met Mohammad Shtayyeh on 27 October 2016 at his strikingly large office in Ramallah. Back then, he was a member of the Fatah Central Committee; specifically, minister in charge of the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction (PECDAR) and adviser to President Mahmoud Abbas. Mohammad Shtayyeh, a long-term Palestinian politician, was named prime minister by President Mahmud

224  Michelle Pace Abbas on Sunday 10 March 2019. When we met at his Ramallah office, he introduced himself telling me that he was born in the city of Nablus in the West Bank in 1958 and that he was nine years old when Israel seized the territory during the Six-Day War. He studied at Birzeit University in the West Bank, completed a PhD in development at Sussex University in Britain and then returned to the Palestinian territories in the late 1980s. Since then, he has spent much of his life working alongside Abbas, with whom he clearly has a close relationship. He was part of US-brokered “negotiations” with Israel in 1991 and again in 2013–2014, led by the then US Secretary of State John Kerry. Fadwah had described him to me as a political moderate and a strong supporter of the two-state solution. Because of this, I really wanted to interview Dr Shtayyeh. I was particularly interested in Dr Shtayyeh because not only did he serve as minister in a Palestinian “government” as well as having a major role in economic development initiatives, including PECDAR. Dr Shtayyeh is also an academic and has taught at Birzeit. The reason for my visit to the West Bank at that time was the writing of my co-authored book on the PA in the West Bank (Pace & Sen 2019). Many of our interviewees back then were apprehensive, questioning our focus on the PA and quizzing us as to why we were not instead focusing on the Israeli occupation. I therefore explained to Dr. Shtayyeh upfront that my sympathies remain with the Palestinian national cause and that I am also very interested in studying how the PA is such a core symbolic statement of what to me is and remains the fuzzy state of Palestine. I told him: “When I look around your office – it is very ‘stately’” (adorned as it was with a large Palestinian flag and large picture frames of the President (Abbas) and the former President (Yasser Arafat)). “But where is the ‘state’ of Palestine?” In an article he wrote for the New York Times on 26 October 2016 (Shtayyeh, 2016), a day before I met him at his Ramallah office, Shtayyeh claimed: Time and again, the United States lobbied against Palestinian diplomacy to protect the two-state solution from the efforts of the Israeli prime minister to destroy it once and for all. … Many promises were made, including a partial freeze of settlements, a release of some political prisoners, and discussions on the borders of a future Palestinian state. None of these was fulfilled. Consequently, under Mr. Obama’s presidency, the very idea of a two-state solution has come into question. The Democrats won’t even use the words ‘settlements’ or ‘occupation’ in their party platform; the Republicans have deleted references to the two-state solution altogether (my own emphases) (Shtayyeh 2016) I told him I was intrigued by his belief in the two-state solution when what I see around me on the ground in the OPT indicated very clearly that the

Diplomatic Practices & the State of Palestine  225 two-state solution has long been dead (and it’s worth noting here that the possibility became even more remote under the Trump Administration and, as of the time of writing, has shown no signs of being revivified under his Democratic successor). Dr. Shtayyeh responded by telling me that to end the Israeli occupation that began in 1967 and to establish a sovereign Palestinian state require the kind of international engagement that the (then) Obama administration brought to negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. “Any­ thing short of that will be yet another failure.” So why, I asked, would the PLO continue to insist on the international recognition of Palestine as a country when a real state is far from fruition? He responded: Mr. Obama should, as 138 other countries have done, recognize Palestine as a country with the borders as they existed before Israel began its military occupation in 1967. That one act would irreversibly put Israelis and Palestinians back on track toward an end of conflict and lasting peace. I reminded Dr. Shtayyeh that those countries that do not recognize Palestine as a state (namely Israel, the United States, Switzerland, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and most of the European Union, among others) generally support some form of a two-state solution to the so-called “conflict,” but they take the position that the establishment of a Palestinian state can only be determined through direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). So, my point was: Surely the whole conception of a Palestinian state is a fuzzy concept in reality that is extremely challenging to bring about in the real world? During our conversation, Dr. Shtayyeh seemed perturbed by a realization that (the conceptual separation of) representations of the state of Palestine and the real conditions that Palestinians have to live under (that is settler colonialism as a consequence of the fuzziness of this same state) triggered some uncomfortable reflections. We went on to discuss how once crossexamined with the theoretical concept of political representation, it becomes apparent that representation is dictated by practices across relationships (between various audiences that convey legitimacy). Within such a framing, the discrepancy between internal and external audiences has to be addressed, and deeply entrenched perceptions regarding the representation and legitimacy of the PLO had to be taken into account in order to identify the root of the problem at hand. We agreed that moving forward will rely on redefining the function ascribed to the PLO and unifying the Palestinian national movement. The above narration highlights Mitchell’s engagement with the notion of the state as a discursively produced effect. To this work I would like to add Iver B. Neumann’s on diplomatic practices and the preconditions for those actions to critically investigate the ways in which the fuzziness of Palestine,

226  Michelle Pace discussed above, is represented and sustained. In his work “The evolution of visual diplomacy,” Neumann (2020) outlines how diplomacy is constituted by the visual. His core question is: What does being seen like a state entail? For Neumann, diplomacy’s visual modalities include unacknowledged, inevitable and inevitably contested modalities, performing to multiple audiences. Neumann also highlights the constitutive role of the visual in a key diplomatic genre – accreditation – and the practices involved in making the visual visible (hiring photographers, disseminating images, etc.). His focus, it should be noted, is mainly on Western hegemonic (US), national (Republic of Mongolia) and anti-hegemonically spiteful (e.g. the Islamic Republic of Iran) state strategies for accreditation. In what follows, I combine Mitchell’s and Neumann’s works to capture the importance of the visual in Palestinian diplomacy for the maintenance of a state of Palestine, as this is represented through the active practices of Palestinian officials.

Diplomatic Narratives: Sustaining a Fictitious Notion of a State of Palestine For Neumann accreditation – as a key diplomatic genre – involves important practices that make the visual visible. On 18 May 2019, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh announced that his government would appoint commercial attaches to join Palestinian embassies in various countries in a bid to develop Palestinian economic ties with countries around the world and promote national products (olive oil, cement, shoes and tobacco) in international markets. Although not much progress has been made to date, efforts to appoint commercial attaches in Palestinian embassies were initiated in 2005. In August 2017, Riyad Malki (Palestinian Foreign Minister) appointed several commercial attaches who joined embassies in the US, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, the UK, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. This latest initiative came in the midst of yet another financial crisis that gripped the PA since 25 June 2018 when the US completely froze its civil assistance to the PA. The PA’s financial challenges were compounded in mid-February 2019 when Israel’s security cabinet approved the deduction of $138 million from the tax revenues it collects on behalf of the PA under the Oslo agreement. But while the PA makes symbolic gestures to disengage itself from Israel’s hold, it faces a real challenge – Palestinian goods lack an international barcode, a key marketing ploy that makes doing business much more efficient for companies. Barcodes provide a method to track and store information about goods, from individual items to large stocks of thousands or even millions of items. They serve an important role and provide advantages compared with manually entering information. The Palestinian National Economy Ministry had submitted a number of requests over the years to the GS1 (General Specifications Standard, a nonprofit organization that

Diplomatic Practices & the State of Palestine  227 develops and maintains global standards for business communication headquartered in Brussels) to obtain an international barcode for Palestinian products. But in 2015, the GS1 rejected these requests on the basis that it does not recognize Palestine as a state. This harks back to Neumann’s point about standard diplomatic functions, namely that as an international institution and a social form, the key practice is mutual recognition. With Palestine not being recognized by the GS1 and by Israel – which controls the commercial crossings that affect the PA’s ability to conduct trade, since the majority of Palestinian exports enter the Israeli market – not to mention the lack of recognition of Palestine by the United States, Switzerland, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and most of the EU, among others – all these efforts remain highly performative and reflect the production of a staged and highly visual practice of appointing commercial attaches. It is an instantiation of how meaning is conveyed to the notion of a (fuzzy) state of Palestine, when in reality such a state continues to be a representation. The key issue here is that, as Neumann argues, the accreditation performance(s) crystallizes and is predicated on mutual recognition between states on the basis of equality, which in the case of Israel and the OPT does not exist.

Sustaining the Performance of a State of Palestine In turn, this performative act is sustained via a hegemonic Western strategy, a regional strategy as well as an internal strategy. A hegemonic Western strategy is sustained via America’s Middle East policy, no matter who holds the US Presidency. Presidency after Presidency, there is evidence of near-total complicity of the United States in Israeli annexation, colonization and cleansing programs in the occupied West Bank. This complicity continues to the present day, with international actors’ (speakers, experts and diplomats) performances at UN Security Council meetings on Israeli Settlements addressing the illegality of Israeli settlements, the economic and human rights impact on the Palestinian people and the stated design of the entire settlement enterprise to eliminate the possibility of a viable and contiguous Palestinian state. This echoes the argument (Pace 2018) that the donor-funded state-building mechanism prevalent in the OPT has little to do with securing Palestinians sovereign statehood or resolving the conflict, let alone with Palestinian rights. For its part, the EU (as ostensibly a central player in Israel/Palestine diplomacy) lacks the collective will to politically confront the US, to which it continues to be subordinated in spite of rhetorical US-EU disagreements and differences of political perspectives on the so-called Palestine issue. On 27 March 2019, the then US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman revealed three key elements of President Trump’s Middle East peace plan known as the “deal of the century.” Friedman made his remarks during a presentation at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)

228  Michelle Pace conference in Washington that was being held that same week. He told his audience that the plan would give Israel full security control over the occupied West Bank. The deal reveals what sustains the hegemonic Western strategy on (the fictitious notion of) a Palestinian state. Even former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo remarked that the deal is impossible to execute. The objective is clearly the erasure of any notion of Palestine forever, a concept that is now replaced with the idea of a “New Palestine.” The details in the newspaper Israel Hayom revealed more land grab: Israel will annex all the West Bank settlement blocs. “New Palestine” will consist of Area A (about 3%) and presumably most of Area B (around 24%) to make “statehood” even remotely plausible. In sum, Palestinians will be left with around 12% of their stolen homeland. Thus, practically speaking, there will be no real change from the present situation; the “deal” will ratify Israeli settlements and land grabs in a new pseudo-legal arrangement. Israel will continue to oversee the security of this New Palestine, thereby leading to no real substantial change except a slightly semantic one. The deal proposes that the West Bank and Gaza be connected by a highway to be funded by China and some contributions from South Korea, Australia, Canada, the US and the EU. Egypt will be involved through the lease of land to New Palestine for the construction of an airport and an industrial zone in Sinai. Other infrastructural and administrative costs will be covered by oil-producing Gulf States, the United States and the EU. In these and all related plans, Palestinians will have no say in their own affairs and will remain open to intimidation by those powers withholding financial grants. As Sam Bahour puts it, these diplomatic blunders – put together by former President Trump’s questionable team composed of his son-in-law, a former bankruptcy lawyer (turned US ambassador) and a real estate lawyer (Jason Greenblatt) promising billions of dollars disguised as “investments” to better Palestinian living conditions – will not be accepted by Palestinians in exchange for their right to self-determination. Nor will they brush aside the entanglement of their regional neighbors in this diplomatic performance. Therefore, it is also important to understand the regional strategy that sustains the fuzzy notion of a state of Palestine. What does this regional strategy entail? Neighboring “brotherly” countries from the Arab region, not least Egypt and Saudi Arabia, deceptively continue to engage in diplomatic relations with the Palestinian peoples’ settler colonial power, framing their practices as always being in the interest of ensuring “peace” between Israel and the Palestinians. Of course, the 1979 Camp David Accords between Egypt, which were hailed as a preeminent example of US diplomacy at its best, produced the framework for the Egyptian-­ Israeli peace treaty while denying the Palestinians self-­determination and statehood (Anziska 2018). What is crucial in the context of the present discussion is how these Egyptian-Israeli interactions, in fact, played out and produced outcomes that are detrimental to the Palestinian cause. As the Cairo-based Dr. Mohamed Soliman contended: the Sisi-Netanyahu

Diplomatic Practices & the State of Palestine  229 relationship has been a powerful symbol of a “full partnership, an unbreakable alliance and diplomatic completion” between the two countries. It is therefore important to understand the creation of such diplomatic settings in order to nuance the preconditions for action or rather inaction on the Palestinian issue. What Sisi clearly cares about, first and foremost, is to consolidate Egypt’s relationship with Israel in order to ensure that his country becomes a regional energy hub (Saleh, Srivastava and Ward 2018). Similarly, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has made a number of diplomatic moves to publicly extend a hand of peace to Israel. In 2002, during an Arab League meeting, the League approved the Saudi-led Arab Peace Initiative as the basis for any relationship with Israel. This initiative stipulates the creation of a Palestinian state on 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, adopting a just solution for refugees and Israel’s withdrawal from the Syrian Golan Heights and occupied Lebanese territories in return for Arab recognition of Israel. This regional peace plan marked a turning point in the Saudi outlook. In February 2019, Saudi Arabia announced its plans to modify the Arab Peace Initiative in order to better align it with the Kingdom’s warming of relations with Israel. Arab countries did not however commit to the terms of the deal, pointing to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt’s overt normalization with Israel and the covert normalization of many other countries. The main modification sought was to make relations with Israel optional so that those countries that wish to establish ties with Israel don’t feel embarrassed to do so. In April 2018, during an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) announced that he recognizes the right of the Jewish people to have a nation-state of their own next to a Palestinian state. As Goldberg notes, no Arab leader has ever acknowledged such a right. In Neumann’s terms, the performances of MbS go far to show the extent to which diplomats put into planning, executing and disseminating their performances. It is also symbolic in terms of how MbS wants Saudi Arabia to be seen. For Neumann, such visual modalities tend to be unacknowledged by diplomats discursively even if they consume large resources, practically speaking. And “Given that these face-to-face meetings bring different aesthetics into contact, the visual remains inevitably contested” (Neumann 2020). For Neumann, another related visual modality of such diplomatic acts is the presence of multiple audiences to any one diplomatic visual performance. In the case of the diplomatic performance above, MbS is performing not only for other diplomats, but also for his home audience (which he represents) as well as for third parties, not least Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Given that this performance did not go down very well with Palestinian audiences, diplomatic performances remain contested. Yet they carry real consequences with them for Palestinians living under settler colonialism with no state of their own to speak of. But there are also internal political actors that actively impede Palestinian liberation from Israel’s settler colonialism.

230  Michelle Pace Finally, there is an internal strategy that sustains a fictitious notion of a state of Palestine. In a September 2018 report to the Ad Hoc Liaison committee (AHLC), the World Bank highlights the collapsing economy in Gaza which has been suffering from a 13-year long blockade and where aid flows are no longer enough to stimulate growth. It adds that every second person in Gaza lives in poverty and the unemployment rate for its overwhelmingly young population is over 70%. In a separate report published in April 2019, the World Bank states that the Palestinian economy is now facing a severe shock in terms of public finances: The Palestinian economy has witnessed low growth rates that are not able to keep up with the growth in population, resulting in an increase in unemployment and deteriorating living conditions. The absence of growth in the past year is mainly attributed to the steep deterioration in Gaza, where more than half of the population is unemployed and economic activities contracted by 7 per cent in 2018—the deepest economic downturn Gaza has witnessed that is not a result of a conflict. However, growth in the West Bank has also slowed below its recent trends. At a time when the Palestinian people are struggling with economic hardship and when salaries have been cut in Gaza, it has been revealed that the PA decided on a 67% pay raise for its ministers (BBC News 2019; Khoury 2019 and The Palestine Chronicle 2019). Meanwhile, in Gaza, demonstrations erupted during March 2019 in reaction to Hamas’ economic mismanagement, price hikes and tax increases. Hamas has been ruling Gaza since 2007 after a very violent civil war against its rival, the Fatah movement. No elections have been held since and dissent is not tolerated. Since 2012, Hamas has received over $1 billion from Qatar alone to pay the costs of fuel, humanitarian aid and civil-servant salaries. Yet, civil servants are only paid 35% of their salary and the reason they are told is because of the “blockage.”2 In fact, many Gazans who are educated up to tertiary level are leaving the enclave in search of a secure job in Qatar. Therefore, what lies beneath the façade of a state of Palestine (as designed through an intricate web of state-building terminology of the Oslo Accords) is a PA on the one hand and a Hamas movement on the other hand that covet and disseminate a national project (based on negotiations from the PA’s side) and an Islamic project (based on resistance from Hamas’ side) respectively. This situation sustains the internal disunity, strengthens the settler colonial enterprise and as a result does much more harm to Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. In this manner, the internal strategy of Fatah/the PA and Hamas sustains the “imagined state” at the expense of Palestinians in the OPT. There is, in effect, no project to even talk about (whether national or Islamic), let alone conceive of when those that deem to represent the Palestinian people on the ground in the OPT have only their own personal power position to protect. But the art of diplomacy serves a

Diplomatic Practices & the State of Palestine  231 very good purpose for PA and Hamas stakeholders, who are fully aware that their political and financial investments are part of the theatrics that enable them to perform Palestinian stateness.3 While the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza orchestrate the details of the internationally determined script, Palestinians have been coerced in this duplicity, whether or not they are in agreement with the PA’s or Hamas’ authoritarianism. Interviews held by the author with a number of PA and Hamas officials in the West Bank and Gaza respectively reveal that the dynamics of these substantial political and diplomatic acts have more to do with international impositions than the Palestinian national struggle. Thus, the disunity between Fatah and Hamas is sustained because they are entangled in the Oslo script that made no explicit reference to a Palestinian state as a result of “negotiations.”

Prevention is Better than Cure: The Diplomatic Representation of Palestinian Stateness Continues Unabated There has been a very vibrant academic and policy debate about the merits or otherwise of the Oslo Accords (Mansour 1993; Said 1993; Abu-Amr 1994; Roy 1999; Milton-Edwards & Crooke 2004; Gordon 2008; Turner 2011; Parsons 2012; Bouris 2014; Dabed 2014; Haddad 2016). These debates, amongst others, have meticulously exposed the ways in which the Oslo Accords and its resultant PA have served to undermine the Palestinian national struggle and its aspiration for a sovereign Palestinian state. Waage (2008), a key Norwegian critical voice, stated that the Accords raised a false hope for peace in the Middle East. Although many of these authors are correct in arguing that the PA was never designed to be later, at some stage, transformed into a sovereign Palestinian state, this representation of the Palestinian people through the PA still exists. Moreover, the PA continuous unabatedly to engage in performances of stateness. My concern here is on the effect of this performed statecraft. Stateness in the case of Palestine continuous to be staged, an active deception by particular international, regional as well as Palestinian social actors, as the earlier sections of this contribution have depicted. In fact, from the birth of the Oslo Accords (and even before that), this train of events was a calculated deception rather than one that led to nowhere. In line with Mitchell’s work on representation and this volume’s focus on the effects of stateness, I argue that this fuzziness is intended and is an active agenda through which specific actors engage in this deception. The main concept behind the theatrics surrounding the original 1993 “Declaration of Principles” that began the Oslo process and the ensuing agreements through 1998 was to establish a framework of transitional self-governing arrangements for Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip over a five-year period. The agreement stipulated that negotiations on a permanent solution would commence in the third year. The concept behind the Oslo Accords had its origins in the 1978 “Framework for Peace in

232  Michelle Pace the Middle East,” one of the primary documents of the Camp David Accords, signed in Camp David by then Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and brokered by the then US President Jimmy Carter. Since then, the idea crystallized as the basis of Israeli and US policies and as the cornerstone of the numerous peace initiatives that followed, adding or diluting some aspects or provisions depending on the prevailing circumstances. But, as already mentioned above, the most essential aspect – the Palestinian people’s inalienable rights of self-determination and national ­independence – does not get any mention in the 1978 “framework” document. Nor did this “framework” acknowledge the reality of the Israeli settler occupation or the urgency to end it. Moreover and importantly, it did not define a final outcome, leaving the matter completely in the hands of the stronger party and the occupying power – Israel. In fact, critics of the Oslo accords agree that the Accords have failed by every measure, precisely because they ignored the existence of Palestinians as a people (Eid 2013). It was, in fact, the famous diplomat, active Zionist and fourth Prime Minister of Israel (and the first woman to hold the title) Golda Meir, who in a New York Times (1976) article stated that: “There is no Palestine people. There are Palestinian refugees.” The Oslo Accords were staged with much pompousness. This “peace process” was diplomatically narrated and performed as a “great opportunity” and a “break-through” and as a pathway that would at some point in the future lead to Palestinian self-determination and an independent state. Or not so if the Palestinians rejected it (Hasten 2018), a conscious distortion of reality, claimed in order to prepare Palestinians for yet more concessions. In other words, it was the Zionist dream come true: For many ordinary Palestinians the Oslo plan was dead on arrival and failed to address their key grievances from the get-go. The two-state solution was pushed on the Palestinians as a compromise after having lost most of their homeland. …. It was solidified as the only solution by the Oslo Peace Accords which attempted to stage the process of Palestinian statehood.4 This convoluted, bureaucratic and deceptive nature of the Oslo Peace industry and the new phase of Israeli settler colonization that it inaugurated in 1993 has been described by Palestinians interviewees in the West Bank and Gaza as one of living in a “postcolonial colony” – largely defined by the paradox of living in a state without sovereignty in the West Bank or Gaza under the guise of a diplomatic process leading toward a “two-state solution.” As one Palestinian interviewee who works for an international organization in Ramallah put it: Under this regime, the PNA, established in 1994 as an outcome of the now unpopular Oslo Peace Accords, did not gain full sovereignty for

Diplomatic Practices & the State of Palestine  233 itself or the Palestinian people it “represents.” Rather, it became the middleman of the Israeli Occupation, managing security and repressing Palestinian dissent on behalf of Israel through its own internal military and intelligence apparatus, helping to intensify Israeli colonial strategies of spatial segregation and economic control. At the same time, despite its increasing unpopularity the PNA has continued to act as the internationally recognised representative of a state-to-be in international diplomacy…. This is sadly our reality. Thus, the Oslo Accords were designed to reap impunity for the PA and its representatives. As our interviews with PA officials have shown (Pace & Sen 2019), the entire infrastructure consolidated by the Oslo framework resulted in an intricate web where, despite the obvious awareness of complicity, it is still possible to isolate the political actors depending on the required opportunism, strategy or allegiance. And diplomacy serves a very good cover for such performances. While PA elites benefit, the majority of Palestinians suffer political, economic and social consequences. Palestinian NGOs contend with a human rights discourse and due to the failure to protect Palestinians’ human rights, PA public service employees navigate necessity and morality, and Palestinian people themselves suffer as unwilling participants in all the charade. The only space left where challenges to the script/alternative narratives to the main script persevere is in the arts and in research. As one Palestinian PhD researcher, who is completing her studies at the Université de Lorraine in France, expressed: How are we to think about a museum that represents a people who not only do not exist on conventional maps but who are also in the process of resisting obliteration by one of the most brutal military complexes in the world? What is, and what can be, the role of a museum in a violent colonial context compounded by the twin effects of imperialism and capitalism? Whom does the museum speak for in such a context? And what can or should it say to a transterritorial nation while physically located in a supposed state-to-be, that has no real prospect of gaining control over its land, water or skies through current international diplomatic channels? The role carved out in the Oslo Accords for the PA has necessitated its participation in cultural diplomacy and top-down identity formation in an attempt to rebrand the image of Palestinians as non-violent and modern global citizens residing within the 1967 borders. These processes are key to understanding how and why the Palestinian Museum has, from its inception, had to think about representing the story of the Palestinian people outside the limits of the diplomatically sanctioned but long defunct twostate solution.

234  Michelle Pace Yet, as Mitchell and Neumann’s works show, this is as far as the limits of the Palestinian state go: Palestinians can represent their imagined state through the narratives of their people across time and space, in museums, through diplomatic practices. The reality on the ground, the lived experience of the every day of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and in diaspora reveal a “fuzzy” state that is unstable and precarious precisely because it has been constructed with no sovereign power in sight. Moreover, this fuzzy state’s representatives – by way of the PA/PLO, its structure and leadership – are not recognized by the Palestinian demos yet tolerated by international actors who need interlocutors in their continued performance of the State of Palestine.

Conclusion In this contribution, I put forward the idea of how the “fuzzy” State of Palestine continues to be represented through diplomatic practices (international, regional and local) up to this day. I have defined the concept of a fuzzy state as an imagined state with ruptured demos. Building on the conceptualization of stateness, as theorized in this edited volume by Haugbolle and Levine and on the iconic work of Mitchell, I added Newmann’s insights into visual modalities, practices and strategies of diplomacy in order to show how Palestinian stateness is staged via active deception by particular political actors. I would argue that the case of Palestinian stateness as understood in this contribution is rather particular and cannot be easily generalizable to other states in the Middle East. This is due to the fact of how historically Palestine was erased from the geographical imagination, first via colonial violence and from 1948 via the birth of the State of Israel. In terms of its added value to existing academic debates on stateness, this chapter sheds light on the importance of representations and performances in the study of states. In social science research, when representation is analyzed in the context of political actors, institutionalized political structures or institutions embedded in social structures, the performance of political actors, institutions and structures is often overlooked, taken for granted, undervalued. In concluding, I would argue that overlooking the performative practices of stateness opens a gap in our study of stateness, in particular in the case of Palestine. For sure, the claim to represent is common in politics, especially in diplomacy. In theater studies, performances claim to stand in for or enact reality, sometimes presenting it directly or in a condensed and framed version, but even then are unable to shake off their relation to mimesis, the representation of reality that Plato considered a mere copy of a copy. Beyond such theater settings, performance frames a reality which it is not, and yet also is, in a double-time that Herbert Blau (1982) has captured so eloquently. In the case of Palestine’s stateness, what I tried to capture in this chapter is the abiding tension between modes of performance that privilege representation and

Diplomatic Practices & the State of Palestine  235 presentation in itself as evidence of the imbrication of representation in all diplomatic performances.5 As Mitchell rightly points out, the limits of the state are always fuzzy and hard to pin down. This chapter has drawn upon anthropology’s notion of fuzziness and combined this with Mitchell’s and Neumann’s work to shed light on how diplomatic performances reveal the true limits of the construction of the State of Palestine. It would therefore be of great benefit if we open up the space for a more engaging discussion between our study of the political and what we can learn from theater studies in conceptualizing the state in political science.

Notes 1 More precisely, on 15 November 1988, the PLO declared the establishment of the Palestinian state from Algiers. The proclaimed “State of Palestine” has never actually been an independent, sovereign state. The declaration was generally interpreted as the PLO having recognized Israel within its pre-1967 boundaries and its right to exist. Following this declaration, the US and many other countries recognized the PLO. 2 Confidential interview with interviewee 1 from Gaza, 28 May 2019. 3 Interviews held by the author in Gaza, October 2014, and in the West Bank, May, June and October 2016. 4 Author interview with a Palestinian academic, Ramallah, October 2016. 5 See Derrida, 2016, and Mitchell, 1989.

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236  Michelle Pace Foucault, Michel (1995). Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, New York, NY: Vintage Books. Goldberg, Jeffrey (2018). “Saudi Crown Prince: Iran’s Supreme Leader ‘Makes Hitler Look Good’.” The Atlantic, April 2. Available at https://www.theatlantic.com/ international/archive/2018/04/mohammed-bin-salman-iran-israel/557036/ Gordon, Neve (2008) Israel’s Occupation, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Haddad, Toufic (2016). Palestine Ltd.: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory, London, UK: I.B. Taurus. Hassan, Yahya (2103). Digte, Copenhagen, DN: Gyldendal. Hasten, Josh (2018). “Deconstructing the Oslo Accords 25 years later: Was It a Gift or a Curse?” Jewish News Syndicate, September 5, Available at https://www.jns. org/deconstructing-the-oslo-accords-25-years-later-was-it-a-gift-or-a-curse/. Hinnebusch, Raymond (2009). “The Politics of Identity in Middle East International Relations.” In Louise L’Estrange Fawcett, ed. International Relations of the Middle East. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Second edition, pp. 148–169. Khoury, Jack (2019). “Leaked Documents Show Palestinian Authority Cabinet Received Secret Pay Raise.” Haaretz, June 7. Available at https://www.haaretz.com/ middle-east-news/palestinians/leaked-documents-show-palestinian-­authoritycabinet-received-secret-pay-raise-1.7339109. Laughlin, Charles (1993). “Fuzziness and Phenomenology in Ethnological Research: Insights from Fuzzy Set Theory.” Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 17–37. Lewis, Bernard (1992). “Rethinking the Middle East.” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 71, No. 4, Fall, pp. 99–119. Mansour, Camille (1993). “The Palestinian-Israeli Peace Negotiations: An Overview and Assessment.” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 5–31. Meir, Golda (1976). “Israel’s Reality.” The New York Times, January 14. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/opinion/con-meir.html. Milton-Edwards, Beverly and Alistair Crooke (2004). “Elusive Ingredient: Hamas and the Peace Process.” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 39–52. Mitchell, Timothy (1989). ‘The World as Exhibition.’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 217–236. ——— (1991a). “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics.” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 85, No. 1 (March), pp. 77–96. ——— (1991b). Colonising Egypt, Berkeley: University of California Press. ——— (1999). “Society, Economy, and the State Effect.” In George Steinmetz, ed. State/Culture: State-Formation After the Cultural Turn. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 76–97. Neumann, Iver (2020). “The Evolution of Visual Diplomacy.” Diplomatic Tenses: A Social Evolutionary Perspective on Diplomacy. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Pace, Michelle (2018). “Norway’s Ambiguous Approach Towards Israel and Palestine.” Global Affairs, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 65–76. Pace, Michelle and Somdeep Sen (2019). The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The Theatrics of Woeful Statecraft, Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2019. Parsons, Nigel (2012). The Politics of the Palestinian Authority: From Oslo to alAqsa, New York, NY: Routledge.

Diplomatic Practices & the State of Palestine  237 Robson, Laura (2017). States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Roy, Sara (1999). “De-Development Revisited: Palestinian Economy and Society Since Oslo.” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 64–82. Said, Edward (1978). Orientalism, New York, NY: Pantheon Books. ——— (1993). “The Morning After.” London Review of Books, October 21. Available at https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n20/edward-said/the-morning-after. Salamé, Ghassan (1987). The foundations of the Arab state, London, UK: Routledge. Saleh, Heba, Mehul Srivastava and Andrew Ward (2018). “Israel bolsters Egypt ties with $15bn Gas Deal.” Financial Times, February 19. Shtayyeh, Muhammad (2016). “How to Save Obama’s Legacy in Palestine.” The New York Times, October 26. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/27/ opinion/how-to-save-obamas-legacy-in-palestine.html. The Palestine Chronicle (2019). “Abbas Approved Secret Pay Rise for PA Officials despite West Bank Economic Crisis.” June 6. Available at http://www.palestinechronicle.com/abbas-approved-secret-pay-rise-for-pa-officials-despite-westbank-economic-crisis/. Turner, Mandy (2011). “Creating Partners for Peace: The Palestinian Authority and the International State-Building Agenda.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 1–21. ——— ed. (2019). From the River to the Sea: Palestine and Israel in the Shadow of ‘Peace’, Lanham: MD: Lexington Books. Waage, Hilde (2008). “Postscript to Oslo: The Mystery of Norway’s Missing Files.” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 38, No. 1, pp. 54–65. World Bank (2019). “Palestine’s Economic Update – April 2019.” April 1. Available at https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/westbankandgaza/publication/ economic-update-april-2019. Young, Crawford (2018). “The Heritage of Colonialism.” In John W Harbeson and Donald Rothchild, eds., Africa in World Politics. Constructing Political and Economic Order. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 9–26. Zadeh, Lotfi (1965). “Fuzzy Sets.” Information and Control, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 338–353.

10 Daesh and the “Effect of the State” Michael Degerald

For roughly six years, Daesh (the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State) functioned as a close approximation to if not in reality normal state rather than a “state with qualifiers” (i.e., an incomplete, proto, semi, or other exceptional political entity). While its shocking violence and seizure of sizable chunks of territory drew the world’s attention, scholars have argued about whether Daesh in fact formed a new state as ostensibly defined by political scientists, questioning its territorial stability, economic management, and recognition in the system of nation-states. Part of this confusion stemmed from uncertainty and disagreement among scholars about what constitutes a state and how to separate it from society. Inside the territories of Iraq and Syria, Daesh built on the existing institutions of two states to erect its own distinct state. Yet, just as with other states, much of what Daesh did to acquire new recruits and goods more broadly requires intermediaries and smugglers working unofficially outside its territory. These facets highlight the blurred edges of the Daesh state, which continued fluctuating in temporal and spatial dimensions until all territorial control was lost. Using Timothy Mitchell’s work, this chapter starts with the fuzziness on the edges of the “state” erected by Daesh in Iraq and Syria to explore its nature. By focusing on Mitchell’s concept of the “effect of the state” and the way Haugbolle and Levine develop it in this volume, we can see how Daesh deliberately overinflates this discursive “state effect” with its hyperviolent media production to present itself as a finished and stable state. Daesh was constantly and clearly in the process of state-making, but as Mitchell shows us, so are other states. In this sense, Daesh was not incomplete or moving toward a point where it would finally meet some standard of control to be a state; rather, it was in the process of making and remaking itself just like existing states.1 This chapter will focus on several key aspects of this political geography to explore how Daesh needed people and networks exterior to its state-inthe-making to effectively engage in trade, receive new recruits/members, procure key parts to develop its own weapons, and carry out attacks outside of its controlled territories.2 To sketch out this argument, the chapter begins by looking at key events that helped the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) grow

DOI: 10.4324/b22870-11

Daesh and the “Effect of the State”   239 into the Daesh state as well as how scholars have conceived of the nature of Daesh as an entity. I address some important points about state-society relations to consider in relation to Daesh. From there, the chapter moves to supply chains and their integral role in both supporting the Daesh state but also blurring its boundaries. Finally, I explore the use of mass media by Daesh in order to analyze its role in trumpeting the discursive effect of the state. In July 2012, ISI carried out a series of attacks on Iraqi state prisons to liberate several hundred men detained on charges of terrorism. The Iraqi state stood in the way of ISI’s growth. Al Qaeda in Iraq had declared a state in 2006, changing its name to ISI, but failed to erect such a state in anything more than mere councils with little to no impact on governance (al-Tamimi 2015a: 118). In the subsequent years, ISI managed to inflame populations more than subdue them with its violent and oppressive presence in a smattering of territories in western Iraq, leading to the uprising of tribes against the then ISI. This Sahwa or “awakening” was joined by the USA with a surge of troops, a combination which pushed ISI to the brink of death and forced it into retreat. By the summer of 2012, US troops were no longer around, having finished their phased departure in late 2011 and Iraqi authorities now had clear, sovereign control over Iraq’s territory and justice system, which held hundreds of jihadis. Eight different prisons were attacked, and in at least two cases, experienced jihadis from earlier ISI operations were freed (Lewis 2013). Named “Breaking the Walls,” the campaign was a success in expanding ISI’s ranks and preparing the then organization for territorial conquests to come. The “Breaking the Walls” campaign not only exposed holes in Iraq’s sovereign control, but further weakened the Iraqi state.3 US officials estimated that several hundred of the escapees joined ISI, with a handful assuming key leadership roles (Arango & Schmitt 2014). In March 2013, Raqqa fell out of Syrian government control to a myriad of opposition groups, including the Free Syrian Army and the Al-Nusra Front. Supposedly acting as an arm of ISI, the Al-Nusra Front rejected Abu Bakr alBaghdadi’s call to merge with ISI to form Daesh in April 2013; the groups went their separate ways. The newly named Daesh came to establish a presence in multiple parts of Syria, including Aleppo, Raqqa, and Deir Ez-Zour by June 2013 (Lister 2015: 119). In this key period of the second half of 2013, Daesh started to transition away from a network of violence (to draw on Samer Abboud 2016) toward a state form, controlling territory and enforcing law. It would not be the last such tension inside Daesh, highlighting the unstable nature of the entity and the ongoing possibility of future splits. Key territorial seizures established the Daesh “state” before it was announced officially. Daesh seized Falluja in Iraq and Ar-Raqqa in Syria in January 2014, gaining momentum for its eventual seizure of Mosul in June 2014. If the organization’s expansion had avoided broader attention, their capture of Mosul put an end to any deficit in world attention and cast the spotlight of global media square on this growing web of territory under

240  Michael Degerald Daesh control. A network of violence had grown into something more like a state. This chapter argues that Daesh became a state once it could produce the discursive effect of a state, and that this took place in conjunction with the seizure of territory and the promulgation of law Daesh would enforce. Those two factors came together at the latest in early 2014 called wathiqat aliman issued in Ar-Raqqa, laying out laws for Christians in the city (ankawa. com). Issuing laws predated Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s announcement of the “caliphate,” which should be understood as making the state’s existence official rather than marking its beginning. This combination of territorial sovereignty and a regime of truth enshrined in law is generative of what Timothy Mitchell calls the “effect of the state” (Mitchell 1991: 77–96). Those laws shifted over the next few years, with a series of wathiqat al-madina issued in at least Mosul (June 2014), Raqqa (September 2014), and Hit (Revkin 2016: 6–7).4 Until it lost the last of its territory where it implemented the law, Daesh produced a discursive effect like other states, and it deliberately inflated that discursive effect with its media apparatus to sell its statehood. The subsequent four-and-a-half years since Iraqi sovereignty cracked open have been characterized by extreme violence, instability, and the systematic exercise of power by Daesh to reshape conditions on the ground. The blob of territory controlled by Daesh expanded and receded in waves as other militias, the armies of Syria and Iraq, and foreign forces sought to crush it underfoot. An uprising in Mosul was the most visible form of internal strife for Daesh, in which an aide close to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi apparently tried, and failed, to carry out a coup against Daesh leadership (Rasheed 2016). The geography of the region largely determined the shape of Daesh territory, as vast desert to the west and south and inhospitable mountains to the east effectively channeled the movements and expansion of Daesh forces into a swath of the Euphrates stretching north and west from its seizure of Raqqa and Mosul. This geography not only shaped the realistic limits of the future Daesh state but continued to set the routes through which goods and people could most efficiently reach the “caliphate” throughout its existence. The imagined geography of Daesh, of course, saw no such limits. They formed new “provinces” (wilayat) in various regions of the world from sub-Saharan Africa to the Sinai Peninsula to the Philippines. Each new wilaya came to exist in weak spots exploited for the lack of state control. Internet and communication technology allowed for the spread of ideas far beyond the territorial limits of the state at a speed that collapsed the relationship of distance and time. This collapsing was key to the idea of the spread of the “caliphate” and the mushrooming of various wilayat in farflung parts of the world without military conquest. Indeed, Daesh was the first state to announce its sovereignty in this digitally aided manner. Daesh was able to transport the discursive effect of its state around the world rapidly, shocking the world and presenting the threat that its sovereignty could potentially reach anywhere. The physical manifestation of the “caliphate” collapsed completely with the loss of Baghouz in Syria in March 2019, and

Daesh and the “Effect of the State”   241 the always-in-flux state ceased to exist, collapsing once again into a terrorist organization. With it, the discursive effect of the state withered but the media that disseminated this effect of the state continues, just as it preceded the state’s formation. Today, that same media carries echoes of the state that Daesh erected, and indeed the effects of the state haunt and continue to animate the terrorism carried out by its remnants.

Describing and Theorizing the “Islamic State” Much of the best empirical material covering how Daesh governed and exercised control comes from journalistic sources. These pieces are understandably light on theory and heavy on empirical details, explaining how Daesh established ministries, collected taxes, and legislated morality. Academic analyses and theorizations of Daesh state-building and power have been emerging over the last several years, wrestling with the form and categorization of the political entity Daesh had formed. Mona Alami wrote a two-part investigation on Daesh governance in December 2014, focusing on taxation and social services (Alami 2014a, 2014b). Alami emphasized Daesh policy failures in the health sector as well as the backlash its harsh policies caused. Mara Revkin focused on the social contract she argues Daesh had established with the citizens living under its rule (Revkin 2016). She lays out taxation practices and their bases in Islamic law but emphasizes that these taxation practices represent an exercise of power and had much more to do with state-building than religion. Revkin points to the issuance of a series of laws promulgated in what Daesh called wathiqat al-madina, literally “documents of the city” (ibid.). With the adequate provision of services and the enforcement of property rights, Daesh could get citizens to enter a social contract and willingly comply with its taxation if they felt the group held up its end of the social contract. Yet, Revkin documented how citizens in Deir Ez-Zour grew angry and attempted to rebel against the brutal conditions in that city (ibid.). Due to territorial losses, Deir Ez-Zour was cut off from food, medicine, and other vital supplies. The breakdown in the social contract Daesh established with the residents of Deir Ez-Zour underscores the importance of circulation of goods and people to the health and prosperity of the state Daesh established and the society over which it sought to rule. Quinn Mecham evaluated Daesh in early 2015 on six different measures, namely tax/labor acquisition, defining and regulating citizenship, international relations/security, domestic security, social services, and economic management (Mecham 2015). He evaluated Daesh as best at taxation and domestic security, but still saw gaps, giving Daesh 7/10 and 6/10 respectively. All other measures were 5/10 or lower, showing how far he argued the group was from a functioning state. State-building has been at the center of other valuable academic works. Ariel Ahram’s “Sexual Violence, Competitive State Building and Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” presents compelling arguments about state-building that

242  Michael Degerald resonate with those advanced by this chapter (Ahram 2018). Ahram argued that state-building is a distinctly gendered practice. “As rebel state-­builders struggle to imitate and appropriate the normative components of sovereign statehood,” Ahram explains, “the impetus toward hyper-masculinity and the creation of ethnic hierarchies becomes more pronounced” (Ahram 2018: 5). Furthermore, he stresses, sexual violence functioned as a tool of both tearing down and later reinforcing forms of domination inherited from the old order (ibid.: 5–6). Across these accounts, the outlines of what Daesh is capable of in terms of governance become clear, even if the authors have slightly different evaluations of what each factor means. Scholars have made numerous arguments about how to conceive of the entity Daesh became while it controlled territory, dancing around the question of whether it constituted a state like others in its governance of territory and implementation of law. Many scholars also tried to account for this process of change in their arguments, as the changes and expansion of territorial control under Daesh rule were obvious for the world to see. Mona Alami argued Daesh had “operated as a semi-state,” but that the resentment building because of its tactics of rule would cause Daesh problems (Alami 2014a). Mecham does not question the boundaries of the state or state discourse, except in his discussion of notions of citizenship, although he does imply that the state-building process was advancing and that Daesh remained in flux (Mecham 2015). He thus offers a series of nuanced appraisals of what he calls the “Islamic state group” and its “stateness” (Mecham 2015). He argues that it had many but not all the characteristics of a state and was on a trajectory toward becoming a state tout court. Mecham makes a point similar to Alami’s that attempts to degrade Daesh will almost inevitably degrade the institutions and services people under its rule rely on. Ahram contends that “from its arrival in 2011 until its collapse in 2017, ISIS was a state in many senses of the word” (Ahram 2018: 2). His argument about Daesh statehood is comparatively under-developed alongside his focus on state-building, and such a vague definition does not help us understand when Daesh transitioned from a rebel group into a state. Ahram’s argument is also not all that different from Mecham’s, even though it was published several years later. Simon Mabon argued that Daesh was engaged in “state-building” and that Daesh sought to “establish a new form of political organization” in Syria and Iraq (Mabon 2017: 971). Mabon separately analyzes authority, territoriality, and citizenship in regards to Daesh, doubting how effective Daesh control could manage to be if borders remained in flux.5 David Kilcullen argues that Daesh met four basic requirements to be a state, namely that it must control territory, that territory must be populated, that population must owe allegiance to the government, and that the government must be able to enter into relations with other states (Kilcullen 2015: 61). The third qualification is arguably false, for it confuses political legitimacy or the presence of a social contract as a qualification for being a state, and Kilcullen’s definition of the state is oversimplified, missing

Daesh and the “Effect of the State”   243 the discursive element of statehood this chapter emphasizes. Fawaz Gerges lines up with Kilcullen but develops his position, referring to Daesh as either a “rudimentary functioning state,” “nascent state,” or a “rump state” (Gerges 2017: 41–42). He cites local residents who described how Daesh was acting like a state through its provision of basic security and argued that the ambitions of Daesh went far beyond existing non-state actors in the region, “presenting itself as a more authentic, identity-driven alternative to the Middle Eastern state system” (ibid, 43). Daesh provided key services like bakeries, identity cards, day care centers, garbage collection, maintained clean and well-run hospitals, and filled its schools with teachers, “even though the quality of those services is neither stellar nor free,” in Gerges’ description (ibid, 265). Gerges also strongly emphasizes the social base of the group in disaffected Sunni communities in Iraq and Syria as being key to its lasting power (ibid, 262). Gerges’ work in a full-length book stands out from the others in much shorter, journal article forms. Semati and Szpunar take a different route, arguing theoretically that Daesh: never posed a threat to any state but managed to project a threat on a global scale, pointing to its ontological status as a creature, a byproduct and an effect of an assemblage, made up of vectors of communication media, spectacles of violence, technological agency, non-human agency and processes, bodies both mortal and capable of violence, networked and affective publics (Semati & Szpunar 2018: 2) While interesting, this argument does not effectively account for the state “DNA” that Daesh inherited from the collapse of state control in both Syria and Iraq, nor whether this assemblage bore any resemblance to a state. It was not just that Daesh posed a threat to the states of Iraq and Syria, but that Daesh facilitated their partial collapse and swallowed their remains. Entire state institutions and much of their human capital transferred to Daesh control, and those institutions will carry traces of their seizure and control by Daesh for years to come. Tamimi and Whiteside both have periodized the growth and changes of the group into a state in significant detail. Aymenn al-Tamimi charted the changes in ISI in 2006 until its Daesh form as of summer 2015. Al-Tamimi’s contribution comes primarily in the empirical details and documents he obtained, as he does not offer a definition of a state and instead posits that Daesh was consolidating into a state by 2014 after increased conflict with other Syrian rebels, arguing that “with the consolidation of territory and strongholds also comes the emergence of more state-like institutions” (alTamimi 2015a: 121–122). After the declaration of the “caliphate,” al-Tamimi argues that various diwans (administrative units) and their relationship to

244  Michael Degerald higher authority had reached a level of uniformity he implies is consistent with other states. Yet he stops short of declaring Daesh a state, instead settling for it being “like a state” (ibid.: 123–125). The implication from his argument is that lack of territorial contiguity and uneven implementation of state rule prevented al-Tamimi from classifying Daesh as a state before mid-2014. Yet all states around the world have varying degrees of state presence and control in their territories, especially in the post-colonial world. A more exact definition of the state, which al-Tamimi does not provide, is needed to wrestle with the form of a state in these circumstances. Similarly, Craig Whiteside analyzed “the Islamic State Movement” from 2002 to 2016, arguing it implemented Maoist principles of guerilla warfare in phases described as “building” (2002–2005), “expansion” (2005–2007), “preserving” (2008–2011), “expansion 2” (2011–2013), and “decisive” (2013–2016) (Whiteside 2016b: 8). Brynjar Lia draws on several dozen examples of what he calls “jihadi proto-­states” from 1989 to 2015, evaluating them in terms of whether there was territorial control, civilian institutions, and foreign fighters. He is most interested in the question of why these “proto-states” “sacrifice state-­ building on the altar of ideological purity” by engendering more conflict than they can survive by implementing extreme punishments (Lia 2015: 36– 37). The answer, according to Lia, is that rebel rivalry and dependence on external constituencies both push these “proto-states” away from pragmatic compromise, the former because other militias will denounce them for going soft and the latter because foreign jihadis have multiple choices about which militia to join, and thus need to be convinced of the group’s ideological bona fides (ibid.: 37). What Lia’s work here does not answer or offer an argument for is when a militia becomes a proto-state and when a proto-state becomes a state tout court. The work of Joel Migdal on state-society relations can be of value here to the analysis. Migdal developed his own definition of the state, emphasizing what he called its “image,” its perception by those inside and outside of its claimed territory (Migdal 2001: 16). Migdal argues that this image of the state has two different forms of boundaries, namely those that separate it from other states and those between the state and those subject to its rules (Ibid.). Migdal is building on but very explicitly moving past Weber’s oft-cited definition of the state as the organization that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Migdal’s image of the state comes tantalizingly close to Mitchell’s state effect, but Migdal never describes it as discursive in the manner that Mitchell does of the state effect. This nuance makes sense given Migdal’s Weberian leanings in contrast to Mitchell’s Foucauldian approach. Yet, Migdal’s image of the state and Mitchell’s state effect need not be understood as incompatible. Migdal also emphasizes the constant changes in any state, what he refers to as “­ becoming,” and so aligns with the idea that every state is a state-in-the-making.

Daesh and the “Effect of the State”   245 Migdal’s work is valuable for thinking about the domestic-international linkages and dynamics of states. His statement that “[T]he role and effectiveness of the state domestically is highly interdependent with its place in the world of states” is highly relevant for Daesh (Migdal 1988: 21). To wit, the Daesh state-in-the-making was arguably the result of decades of covert support of extremists by multiple nation-states at different times for varying geopolitical ends. Once Daesh grew beyond merely being a militia into a state-in-the-making, its domestic reality remained highly interdependent with its place in the world of states. Migdal argues that states which have more successfully dealt with domestic issues to shore up compliance with law, participation in institutions, and legitimacy are in a better position internationally as well. Yet, what differed for Daesh from other states was the extreme levels of hostility it faced both internationally and domestically and its own savagery and brutality directed in all directions. Society under Daesh rule was partially comprised of many new arrivals from around the world, be they fighters, skilled professionals, or their families. The Daesh state reportedly privileged these settlers over locals whom the state had subdued to its rule. Those whom Daesh expected to be of suspect loyalty were immediately targeted and obliged to formally “repent” for their work with the previous governments in Syria or Iraq (Dosky 2014). Afterward, they were expected to carry around a “repentance card” to prove their fealty to Daesh. Daesh began a process of education that sought to shape children as Sunni Muslims shaped by the Daesh variant of salafi-jihadism, and they forced such classes on citizens deemed not Islamic enough. Six years, however turbulent, were not long enough to smooth over the splits from the outside world, especially those of nationality and native language. Hardly surprising then that many Daesh battalions were organized by language and nationality rather than trying to force jihadis of different cultural backgrounds to communicate and fight together effectively. Fractured along these lines, society under Daesh was in constant flux, as civilians died, fled, and were replaced by new arrivals. Any static definitions of state and/or society fail to capture this dynamism and constant change that characterized the Daesh state. Some critical thinking about the presence of a “center” or a “periphery” in Daesh territories can be helpful. Given the short period of time that the Daesh state-in-the-making existed, and the fact that it carved territories out of two pre-existing states, the question of center and periphery is not so clear. Daesh arguably took something of a duo-nodal form, with bases in Raqqa and Mosul. Keeping the two nodes connected with contiguous territory proved difficult, however. Accordingly, the maps of Daesh territory looked more like a spider web than a blob, and certainly were not angular. Large open spaces existed where Daesh had little to no presence, save for a key route that connected other important territories. Peripheries of its territory were constantly spaces of extreme violence, being challenged by state armies or militias. Additionally, the expansionist character of Daesh meant

246  Michael Degerald that areas beyond the group’s direct control came under frequent Daesh attack. This expansionist approach reshaped society under Daesh, driving many civilians from these newly conquered areas abroad and forcing those who stayed to comply with Daesh dictates. Daesh was thus arguably far more preoccupied with peripheral areas than most other states, and vigorously sought to ensure its full sovereignty over them. Daesh had to fight to maintain this circulation of goods, not merely for the sake of holding territory, but for the sake of continued access to the outside world, with new recruits and new goods streaming in. Daesh is thus not limited to comparison alongside other jihadi groups, but is comparable to other states around the world in the manner in which it built its institutions and consolidated territorial control while creating the discursive effect of a state. The territory did not need to be contiguous, nor did the rule need to be even, for all states have such lumpiness, or places where its rule is stronger or weaker. The uneven geographies of trade and movement of supplies that shaped the lumpiness of the Daesh state are the subject of the next section.

Supply Chains For the Daesh state, circulation was life. Unhindered movement of goods and people from outside its territories and the effective circulation of supplies inside its territories were crucial for its ability to fight a war against multiple nation-states while building its own state apparatus. The global embargo against Daesh complicates its attempts to carry out vital trade to export its own wares and purchase necessary supplies from outside, forcing Daesh to rely on smuggling. Established smuggling networks predate the establishment of the Daesh state, but persist and shift as necessary (Massi & Sender 2015). Arms, Drones, IED parts, and even cigarettes have been smuggled into the self-described caliphate while escapees, artifacts, and oil are smuggled out. Indeed, Daesh controlled most if not all the artifacts and oil but escapees are getting smuggled precisely to avoid being caught by Daesh. Most of this trade/smuggling was facilitated by extra-state networks and individuals, with the Turkish border with Syria as the de facto entry point for all jihadis and most of its wares. Arriving to the Turkish border could take multiple forms, but various routes exist by land from Europe or by sea from North Africa to various Turkish ports, where security is lax (ibid.). Daesh in Libya deliberately provoked the movement of refugee populations with its attacks and had unofficial representatives in the people smuggling routes who coerced payment from those needing to be smuggled to safety. The price to be smuggled across the Sahara was typically $800–$1,000 so that refugees could reach Libya, and a subsequent $1,500– $1,900 to be smuggled across the Mediterranean to Europe (Walt 2016). For some time in 2014, Daesh successfully controlled multiple points along the northern border between Syria and Turkey, and during these periods Daesh

Daesh and the “Effect of the State”   247 representatives could carry out these functions. The New York Times interviewed one such female Daesh member of the al-Khansa’ women’s brigade, who explained how she would meet new female recruits at the border and usher them in. Daesh also developed the ability to make Iraqi and Syrian passports with machines it seized from both of those states during the war. On the surface, a fatwa was issued by the hayat al-buhuth wa al-ifta’, an arm of Daesh, in February 2015 banning the sale of passports, as travel outside of Daesh territory was denounced as travelling to the land of disbelief and was tantamount to apostasy (Al-Tamimi 2015b). Yet, Daesh figures would indeed leave and return to carry out attacks, documented in multiple jihadi profiles, highlighting how what seemed to be ideological controls were not followed by leadership, and instead were mechanisms of control for populations under Daesh rule. The same was true for smoking cigarettes, a practice Daesh banned to the chagrin of many under its rule, but Daesh continued to play a role in smuggling cigarettes into its territory so it could profit from the trade (Hawramy 2016). Such rules outlawing practices but reserving them for the government are common in other states, not just Daesh.6 The flow of oil out of the ground and into trade networks out of Iraq and Syria provided a sizable portion of Daesh state revenue. As with antiquities, the trade in oil could not happen without key intermediaries and networks external to the Daesh state-in-the-making. Some of this oil traveled outside of the region, while much of it was purchased by the Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad, as indicated by observation of key trade routes (McKernan 2017). Yet the transactions of Syrian oil were more complex than the Syrian government purchasing oil from Daesh, as the case of a middleman named George Haswani shows. Haswani was placed on a list of international sanctions for his activities to facilitate the sale of Daesh oil, as his company, HESCO, proved integral to the transactions between the Syrian state and Daesh. One HESCO plant in Tabqa, Syria, was believed to be jointly run by Daesh and Syrian state officials (Bertrand 2015). Similarly, the French cement company Lafarge SA continued to operate its existing cement plant in Syria while the war raged and had to strike unsavory bargains to do so. Lafarge violated oil sanctions and financially supported Daesh in Syria, leading to charges from French legal authorities that Lafarge was guilty of supporting terrorism (Alderman 2018). From another angle, citizens under Daesh rule in Syria had the opportunity to drive the large trucks shipping the crude oil Daesh wanted to sell to the Syrian state, making about $130 a trip. This trade between Daesh and the Syrian state grew after coordinated efforts to cut off the existing trade routes that Daesh was using to get oil out to Turkey and further afield (Solomon & Mhidi 2017). Some citizens reportedly looked negatively on the cooperation between Daesh and the Syrian state, and Friday sermons needed to tell them it was alright (ibid.). No wonder if Syrian citizens forced to repent for any such ties to the Syrian state found this hypocritical, even if, from an economic standpoint, such activities to trade in oil were to be expected. In this way, Daesh fit

248  Michael Degerald into existing conditions, and various non-state actors collaborated with the Daesh state. Whether foreign corporations, local conglomerates, or Syrians on the ground willing to drive an oil transport truck, the edges of the Daesh state blurred into multiple other societies. Financial transactions outside standard banks to avoid detection were important to Daesh and continue to be so for many others in the region. NGOs use them to move money for projects, and they provide families living in the diaspora a way to transfer much-needed cash to their relatives back home. The aforementioned brothers who managed to procure drones and drone parts for Daesh used the Hawala system as part of their operation. There was a “Rawi Network” originating in Iraq that utilized the Hawala system to help fund Daesh, and its activities caught the attention of the US Treasury Department (US Treasury Department 2019). Senior members of this network first began developing connections in the 1990s when international sanctions targeted the Iraqi government controlled by Saddam Hussein (ibid.). The network outlived Hussein and the collapse of the Iraqi state. Turkey functioned as a key locale for the network, just as it was key to Daesh logistics more broadly. As the Hawala system is entirely independent of Daesh, it both predates the rise of the Daesh state and likely continues to help Daesh finance itself and move money now that Daesh has lost its territory (Kenner 2019). The arms captured in Daesh possession displayed their own complex histories. Perhaps no part of Daesh membership or resources was more globalized than its weaponry, and the supply chains involved were far from simple. Chinese- and Russian-manufactured arms made up more than half of the weapons and ammunition found in the possession of Daesh, while former Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe made up most of the remaining weapons and ammunition, measured at more than 30% of the total (Conflict Armament Research 2017: 6). These manufacturing origins are misleading, however, as well over half of the weapons found in Daesh possession were manufactured before 1990. Since the Cold War, they had been circulating in and out of different conflict zones. The origins of weapons found in use by Daesh in Syria and those in use in Iraq differed notably, broadly indicating different supply chains, but also that they must have been seized from each country’s respective government forces. Conflict Armament Research (CAR), a body funded by the EU and the German government, was able to identify at least four conflict zones from which weapons made their way to Syria and Iraq: Libyan national weapon stockpiles, weapons and ammunition used in Somalia that were provided by the USA, rockets used by Daesh that have matching lot numbers with weapons in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, and finally weapons/ammunition from South Sudan that were apparently supplied to groups there by the Sudanese government (ibid.: 65). It is important to note that any actor can sell and transfer these weapons after their initial production and sale, so their original provenance does not necessarily accord with the party or government involved in their recent sale.

Daesh and the “Effect of the State”   249 Indeed, CAR found that EU-produced rockets of very recent vintage were common in Daesh possession, and that the USA had sold just such weapons to Syrian rebels before their diversion to Daesh (Ibid.: 6). Complex supply chains and power dynamics external to its state had been crucial to putting Daesh in a position to fight and grow. On top of this, Daesh actively developed its own arms to meet its needs on the battlefield. Daesh arms manufacturing was similarly dependent on multifaceted supply chains that stretched outside the territories under its control. The Daesh state-in-the-making developed an industrial scale weapons program, which produced weaponized drones, IEDs, mortars, and more. Key to building this capacity was the seizure of territory with key cities and military facilities for an extended period (Rassler 2018: 5). Documents found by Iraqi forces in Mosul detail the actions of the Committee of Military Manufacturing and Development and its centralization of this weapons production (ibid.).7 From procurement, to development, and finally to flying the drone missions themselves, employees were required to produce extensive documentation (Rassler, al-‘Ubaydi & Miranova 2017). A report from 2016 explains how 50 different companies from 20 different countries were part of the supply chains that helped bring component parts for IEDs to Daesh, including fertilizers from Turkey, detonator cords from India, and microprocessors from the USA (Conflict Armament Research 2016: 7–11). Only two of the companies involved were end users in Iraq, with all others being part of the extended supply chains reaching as far as China and Brazil. All these key ingredients have valuable non-military uses and are not subject to export controls. Drones and key parts for drones were similarly sourced from all over the world, and two brothers with a background in information technology were at the center of Daesh efforts to procure drones abroad. The two brothers used shell companies just as many in the capitalist world do to avoid taxes, though the brothers were using them to avoid legal scrutiny for arming Daesh. Each step in the supply chain they built involved different companies and aliases, creating the impression that different actors were purchasing the drones, when it was, in fact, functioning more like a money laundering operation (Gault 2018). Companies in the operation shipped key items for weaponization of drones in December of 2014 to Sanliurfa, Turkey, where they were close to the Syrian border town of Tel Abyad, then controlled by Daesh. From there, moving the goods through areas of Daesh control for their use on the frontlines was simple (Rassler 2018: 12). This was only one such pattern. Other drones were purchased for Daesh from Lebanon, Kuwait, Uzbekistan, and India, in addition to drones purchased in Turkey itself (ibid.: 15). Such licit and illicit flows took advantage of existing pathways and legal mechanisms in the global economy, a repeated theme in the different reports on the subject. Yet, not all the routes are otherwise legal. Indeed, “There is no such thing as a terrorist group whose routes for moving weapons, soldiers and money are not shared with criminal organizations

250  Michael Degerald that have already secured those routes for drug trafficking,” insists journalist Roberto Saviano (Saviano 2015). Finally, there was nothing unique about this use of drones by Daesh. State and non-state military actors have used such tactics in Iran, Palestine, Israel, Egypt, Mexico, Colombia, Germany, Spain, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Japan, and the USA (Rassler 2018: 20). Daesh wanted to sell the perception that it represented a reversion to “glory days of Islam” from the first four caliphates, but in its weaponization of drones, complex supply chains for its weapons and its use of media, Daesh was as modern as can be.

Media and the Limits of the Daesh State It is hard to overstate the importance of digital media for Daesh. From its early form as the Jama‘iyat al Tawhid wa al Jihad (JTwJ) until its form as a state-in-the-making, Daesh utilized media to spread its ideas and to appeal to potential recruits and present their version of events (Stern & Berger 2016: 101–112). This jihadi media use was not original or groundbreaking. Nonstate militia and jihadi groups used media to their advantage in Chechnya as well as in Lebanon by Hizbullah in their fight against Israel. These cases served as inspiration for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2003 on how to use new media in warfare (Whiteside 2016a: 6). Indeed, ISI expanded media efforts from 2011 to 2014 and founded multiple new outlets (Ibid.: 18–19). These outlets included Al-Naba’ magazine, Amaq News Agency, Telegram channels, and the al-Bayan radio station. Alongside the growth in the number of platforms, the content produced by Daesh and its affiliates changed as time went on. In al-Naba’, the weekly Arabic magazine of Daesh, we can see that attempts were made to display the most basic element of statehood: the monopoly over the coercive use of violence. The overwhelming majority of the content in al-Naba’ depicted violence or reports on the carrying out of violent punishments and attacks. Infographics in al-Naba’ demonstrated state capacity to collect taxes, to regulate vice through its al-hisba branch, and to run shari‘a courts. Similar infographics about education and health services attempted to paint a smooth picture of services working for citizens, not a public sector shot through with holes from defections unable to meet the needs of the populace. Daesh emphasized its paternal role in not only protecting but caring for its citizens, but could not show them the full reality, only a stage-managed version (Degerald 2017a). In an overarching sense, Daesh used digital media to inflate the discursive effect of the state throughout its digital platforms. The global and corporate nature of the internet facilitated Daesh from the group’s beginnings into its statehood. Media functioned to not only champion the capacity of the Daesh state, but also to make up for the state’s shortcomings. Early in the Iraq War, a member of JTwJ named Abu Maysara repeatedly frustrated American attempts to censor the internet content he created by using the latest web technologies from Silicon Valley internet

Daesh and the “Effect of the State”   251 companies (Whiteside 2016a: 8). Initially, he merely uploaded content to multiple websites based in various countries, thwarting efforts to take the sites down. Later, he adopted use of a new file-sharing service, YouSendIt, compressing the file sizes to make them easier to copy. These simple tactics were enough to both make it too difficult to delete and to ease the duplication of the video, ensuring its spread. Since the growth of Daesh’s presence in social media and other digital spaces, largely following the formation of the Daesh state, corporate internet platforms like Twitter and Facebook have largely kept their platforms free of jihadi content, shuttering accounts in droves. For Twitter, Daesh adopted several successful strategies, including creating waves of new accounts and attempting to recreate the bases of followers necessary to build an audience for Daesh content. Atwan (2015: 22) demonstrated how Daesh supporters primed their social media audiences for an upcoming release, encouraged them to set up multiple accounts in case one or more got suspended, and used justpaste.it to host multiple copies of the video or pdf being released. Such tactics on Twitter only lasted for so long, as Daesh content was largely eliminated from the platform. Instead, newer encrypted messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram became Daesh favorites. Telegram largely edged out WhatsApp because messages on WhatsApp can be traced after the fact while Telegram cannot (Bloom & Daymon 2018: 373). It would be a mistake to think that these digital spaces were peripheral to Daesh. Telegram became Daesh’s most important platform for propaganda and recruitment after it lost the battle to stay on other platforms (ibid.). Telegram was also crucial to Daesh weapons research and development, as members solicited and received advice on the platform about how to modify drones and address engineering problems in those processes (Rassler 2018: 8). Scholars have explored Daesh media qualitatively and quantitatively from dozens of angles, as there is a striking volume of content produced in at least half-a-dozen languages. In their study of Daesh content on Telegram, Bloom and Daymon found that approximately 40 new pieces of propaganda were generated per day, and that Daesh frequently linked to other publications and videos found off Telegram as well (Bloom & Daymon 2018: 377–378). Daesh also provided its own versions of digital pop culture such as emojis, stickers, gifs, and memes (ibid.). Daesh themes have arguably already appeared in pop culture in the form of Daesh-themed trap music, much of which is made and listened to by other internet users (Degerald 2017b). One of the five key themes that Bloom and Daymon identified in Daesh content on Telegram was state-building which they argue was done at least partially to create an attractive image for potential immigrants as well as trumpeting their transition from an insurgent group toward a state (Bloom & Daymon 2018: 379). These images demonstrated building infrastructure, digging wells, electrification of villages, and images of hospital care, among others (ibid.).

252  Michael Degerald The so-called Dark Web played a role in the Daesh digital media scape, but one that remains unclear. TOR, or “The Onion Router,” is necessary to access the Dark Web and was developed in cooperation with the US government in the 1990s. TOR allows users in authoritarian countries to communicate in a manner that is almost impossible to hack but also allow terrorists, drug traffickers, and other criminals using TOR to escape law enforcement. Gabriel Weimann argues that Daesh increasingly turned to the Dark Web after the November 2015 attacks in Paris, because corporate media spaces took down dozens of sites and accounts tied to Daesh (Weimann 2016: 41). Other facets of the Daesh media apparatus like al-Hayat Media and Daesh Telegram channels shared links to calls and instructions for supporters to migrate to the Dark Web and access Daesh content there (ibid.). The links took users to a cache of Daesh propaganda material, but the Dark Web facilitates much more, especially in the realm of financing. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can be traded, and Dark Web marketplaces allowed Daesh to solicit donations, buy and sell weapons as well as arrange transactions for smuggled oil and antiquities. For example, a Daesh cell apparently purchased the guns used in the Bataclan attack on the Dark Web (Ibid.: 42–43). As the Dark Web was built to escape the watchful eyes of nation-states, Daesh used it for just this purpose. Yet, rather than trying to monitor crime on the Dark Web, the Daesh state was participating. Daesh use of the Dark Web represents still another way in which key facets of the Daesh state are external to it, and the “state boundary” can only be drawn discursively. However unstable Daesh found these platforms, its digital reach remains and adapts to the changes. It is premised on members having access to digital devices like phones, tablets, laptops, or desktop computers that interface with the Internet, just as it is premised on sufficient connection speeds to upload, download, and participate in real time. Those connection speeds depend on government infrastructure and private networks around the world. Daesh saw this connection speed as an issue and implored its supporters with fast connections to download videos and archive/mirror it on other sites to ensure its spread (Atwan 2015: 22–23). Media scholars have proposed different ways to think about Daesh media, some of which are germane to the theorizations of Daesh as a state discussed earlier. Marwan Kraidy bridges discussions of media and statehood by putting forth an argument that Daesh should not be thought of as a state but rather as a “war machine” building on the thought of Deleuze and Guattari (Kraidy 2018: 170–176). Kraidy proposes using the concept of hypermedia events that he defines as “contentious episodes of political turbulence and social fragmentation.” If media events are centrally planned, top-down exercises, hypermedia events are “contentious, emergent, fragmented, bottom up” (Ibid.: 171). These hypermedia events are key to understanding Daesh as a “war machine” with spatio-geographic, arithmetic, and affective aspects instead of a territory-controlling state, an idea Kraidy

Daesh and the “Effect of the State”   253 argues that the November 2015 Paris attacks debunked (Ibid.: 172). The series of hypermedia events of each beheading video, new issue of Dabiq, alNaba’, and the like chain together to create what Kraidy argues is a global event chain fueled by the Daesh war machine rather than a territorial state in the traditional sense. This global event chain approach highlights how Daesh operated in spaces geographically remote from its “caliphate” and over which it had no territorial control. Kraidy bolsters this by arguing that Daesh was not interested in territorial control per se, but rather in creating the effect and affect of control. In a different article, Kraidy develops the argument that Daesh media functioned like a projectile, seeking global networked affect. Because its hyperviolent images and gore were meant to instill fear, Kraidy posits, the authenticity of the images is less important than how the images convey sentiments and power. In this sense, Daesh media images did not seek to enter into any conversation or “war of ideas” and effectively preclude rebuttal. This reading highlights that any reproduction of the images does not further debate but arguably disseminates the global networked affect Daesh sought in the first place. Kraidy adds to these arguments in a third article about the hypermedia space or the communicative space formed by interconnecting digital media technologies with multiple access points that is necessary to grasp the linkage of bodies that ultimately shape this space and the affect that it facilitates (Kraidy 2017: 167–168). Other media scholars have built on Kraidy’s argument. In her work on ruins and Daesh, De Cesari shows how media spectacles of the destruction of archeological heritage serve as a marker of Daesh visual identity. For De Cesari, the destruction was more than a mere religious iconoclasm, and instead was part of a politics of symbolic destruction and reconstruction (De Cesari 2015: 23–24). Taking De Cesari’s argument a step further and linking it to the central argument of this chapter, such acts served to spread the discursive effect of the Daesh state. Semati and Szpunar have developed the point that Daesh was ontologically a “creature” and not a state. Analyzing Daesh media and its relation to global media structures, they characterize Daesh not so much an external threat to states and existing media, but rather as a product of those systems (Semati & Szpunar 2018: 5). Unlike other states, Daesh formed in a different period of world history with fundamentally different conditions, most specifically in terms of communication technologies and media. Arguably any new state to emerge and form in the contemporary era at the behest of neighboring states would look strikingly similar. Daesh statehood extended its domain through cyberspace and physical territory; Indeed, Daesh was forced to fight on separate yet interlinked fronts. The two fronts (real and digital) interact dialectically with mutual influence on each other with no directional causality. If hypermedia space is the fusion of platforms and communication technologies, then Daesh hypermedia space emanated from its territorial base. Hypermedia space was crucial to spreading the discursive

254  Michael Degerald effect of the state, as Daesh videos and propaganda materials ping throughout the corporate Internet and the Dark Web alike.

Conclusion As this chapter has demonstrated, earlier iterations (JTwJ, AQI, ISI) of the terrorist group that grew into Daesh engaged in a protracted battle to establish itself at the expense of other rebel groups and the Iraqi and Syrian states. There was nothing predetermined about the struggle. The growth of ISI into Daesh and its consolidation of a state apparatus has been shown here to be a standard process of state formation. By outlining the existing literature on Daesh as a state, I have shown the various contributions and hesitations of different scholars to understanding and recognizing Daesh as a state. Of course, recognizing that Daesh was a state-in-the-making in this manner is not tantamount to granting it legitimacy. Rather, it is necessary for academic study as well as to cast away an idea that something exceptional has taken place. What Timothy Mitchell’s valuable work on the limits of the state helps us understand here is that there is no clean boundary between state and society for any state. Joel Migdal’s state-in-society approach supports this conclusion from a different angle. Thus, looking for such a boundary or its characteristics in attempts to define or reject Daesh as a state is bound to mislead, and many analyses, including my own, missed that Daesh did not need to be called a “proto-state” or a “limited state” or an “incomplete state.” Indeed, an earlier work on Daesh media and statecraft I published in 2017 advanced such an argument that Daesh was an “incomplete state” because of its inability to produce its own recognized passports for its citizens and the lack of a recognized unique currency.8 Without these important facets, I argued then that Daesh could never reach the level of other sovereign states and would remain dependent on others for these functions, namely using foreign currencies and printing fake Iraqi and Syrian passports. The empirical details have not changed, but the way I think about them has. My earlier argument compared Daesh to an impossible and frankly Western state archetype.9 Others have argued that Daesh was a creature, a war machine, or merely a terrorist group. Instead, taking a lead from Mark Levine and Sune Haugbolle in their use of Timothy Mitchell, this chapter sees no need to qualify the Daesh state. Evidence from Daesh governance, media, and supply chains all highlight important factors to understanding Daesh as a state-in-the-making as all states are. The Daesh state formed relationships with informal entities and individuals outside its territorial control to provide itself with crucial supplies and maintain the flow of new arrivals to its territory. The establishment of Daesh institutions was crucial to this author in moving away from these other classifications, as they not only brought state DNA into Daesh from Syrian and Iraqi state structures as well as human capital, but affixed Daesh to territory. If Daesh avoided

Daesh and the “Effect of the State”   255 institutional development and standardized record-keeping, we could understand Daesh as something closer to a machine. This was not the case; detailed archival records have been smuggled out of Daesh territories and others have been seized after Daesh abandoned territories it had governed for some time. The post-Baghouz manifestation of Daesh as a terrorist organization from March 2019 until the present is more than a mere reversion to its original form. Daesh moves into the future carrying the ongoing state effect created by the last six years of its history. It now has a whole different historical dimension to its claims to be a state, ready to inform its discursive presentations of itself and the world. How that discursive effect will be used by Daesh, once again a terrorist organization, is impossible to predict. What has already taken place is a visible split in Daesh, wherein some have vocally challenged Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s erstwhile leadership. One author, under the generic pseudonym of “Abu Muslim al-Iraqi” attacked al-Baghdadi for breaking agreements with those who formally “repented” for having previously worked for the Syrian or Iraqi states,10 for killing Muslim civilians fleeing Mosul, and for taking a Yezidi woman as a sex slave despite her family having converted to Islam (al-Tamimi 2019). Such dissent presents the distinct possibility of contestation about who represents the Daesh state legacy now that it has collapsed. Al-Baghdadi’s suicide in the face of imminent capture by US forces in late October 2019 has forced the organization to reform its top leadership; not long after, a key Daesh figure named Nasser al Qardash was arrested in Iraq (Middle East Monitor 2020). Abu Ibrahim al Qurashi, the successor to al-Baghdadi, remains at large.

Notes 1 Many of the ideas for this chapter, if not the literal text, were developed at a Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) symposium on ISIS Media held by Dr. Marwan Kraidy and Marina Krikorian through CARGC at University of Pennsylvania in May 2017. Without their funding and intellectual influence, I would not have developed this chapter as you read it today. Similarly, I must thank Mark LeVine and Sune Haugbolle for extending the opportunity to publish my work in this volume. 2 See Sune Haugbolle and Mark Levine’s introductory chapter in this volume. 3 The approach Daesh took was not foolproof; there were means the Iraqi state could have used more effectively to retain control. Lewis argues that VBIEDs were particularly effective at overwhelming Iraqi security forces. 4 I cite Revkin’s account of issuing the wathiqat al-madina for Hit here, but I have been unable to locate the document or pin down its exact date. 5 Mabon uses Ibn Khaldun’s ‘asabiyya concept alongside securitization to explain Daesh identity construction in a manner this author does not find convincing. Why does one need the concept of securitization to explain sectarian hate by Daesh? Similarly, the author places agency in shaping ‘asabiyya with Daesh, yet elides explaining how the concept was never deliberately formed or controlled in Khaldun’s theorization. Both seem concepts and the theories behind them seem forced in the analysis.

256  Michael Degerald 6 There is reason to believe Daesh did the same for captagon pills, an amphetamine used by fighters to avoid sleep, but this researcher has yet to locate hard evidence of Daesh producing captagon, only accusations of this made by outsiders. 7 The original Arabic was hay’at al-tatwir wa al-tasni‘a al-‘askari. 8 Yes, Daesh has tried to produce and circulate its own coins made of gold, silver, and copper, but their role and use has been highly uneven and they never came anywhere close to replacing Iraqi and Syrian dinars. Instead, they seem to have been part of a bait and switch by Daesh officials to vacuum more stable currencies out of circulation and flee the territory with them. 9 See Sune Haugbolle and Mark Levine’s introductory chapter in this volume. 10 For more on the question of repentance imposed by Daesh, I outlined details of this policy and its consequences in a public talk at the University of Washington in late 2016; see video number two here: https://historyxisis.wordpress. com/2017/02/23/islamic-statecraft-little-explored-details-of-isis-rule/.

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Daesh and the “Effect of the State”   257 Bloom, Mia and Chelsea Daymon (2018). “Assessing the Future Threat: ISIS’s Virtual Caliphate.” Orbis, Vol. 62, No. 3, pp. 372–388. Conflict Armament Research (2016). “Tracing the Supply of Components used in Islamic State IEDs: Evidence from a 20-Month Investigation in Iraq and Syria.” Conflict Armament Research, February. https://www.conflictarm.com/reports/ tracing-the-supply-of-components-used-in-islamic-state-ieds/ ——— (2017). “Weapons of the Islamic State: A Three-Year Investigation in Iraq and Syria.” Conflict Armament Research, December. De Cesari, Chiara (2015). “Post-Colonial Ruins: Archaeologies of political violence and IS.” Anthropology Today, Vol. 31, No.6, pp. 22–26. Degerald, Michael (2017a). “Where Media Meets Statecraft: Daesh Promotion of Governmental Competence through Its Media.” Global-e, Vol. 10, No. 68, October 19. Available at http://bit.ly/30ND6QT. ——— (2017b). “Daesh Lives on… in Trap Music?” Medium, November 25. Available at http://bit.ly/2EALl9v. Dosky, Abdel-Khaleq (2014) “ISIS Has Opened a Mosque for Repentance.” Niqash. org. Available at https://www.niqash.org/en/articles/politics/3464/ (Last accessed June 14, 2014). Gault, Matthew (2018). “How the Islamic State Gets Its Drones.” Vice, July 13. Available at https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gy3bzx/how-the-islamic-stategets-its-drones. Hawramy, Fazel (2016). “Islamic State Turns to Cigarette Smuggling to Fund Itself.” Al-Monitor, November 27. Available at https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/ originals/2016/11/cigarette-smuggling-mosul-isis-terrorism-fund.html. Kenner, David (2019). “All ISIS Has Left Is Money. Lots of It.” The Atlantic, March 24. Available at https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/03/isiscaliphate-money-territory/584911/. Kilcullen, David (2015). Quarterly Essay (58) Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State, Melbourne, Australia: Black. Kraidy, Marwan (2017). “Revisiting Hypermedia Space in the Era of the Islamic State.” The Communication Review, Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 165–171. ——— (2018). “Terror, Territoriality, Temporality: Hypermedia Events in the Age of the Islamic State.” Television and New Media, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 170–176. Lia, Brynjar (2015). “Understanding Jihadi Proto-States.” Perspectives on Terrorism, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 31–41. Lister, Charles R. (2015). The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Evolution of an Insurgency, New York: Oxford University Press. Lewis, Jessica D. (2013). “Al-Qaeda in Iraq Resurgent, Breaking the Walls Campaign, Pt.1.” Middle East Security Report, September. Available at http://www. understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/AQI-Resurgent-10Sept_0.pdf. Mabon, Simon (2017). “Nationalist Jahiliyyah and the Flag of the Two Crusaders, or: ISIS, Sovereignty, and the Owl of Minerva.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Vol. 40, No. 11, pp. 966–985. Massi, Alessandria and Hanna Sender (2015). “How Foreign Fighters Joining ISIS Travel to the Islamic State Group’s ‘Caliphate’.” IB Times, March 3. Available at https://www.ibtimes.com/how-foreign-fighters-joining-isis-travelislamic-state-groups-caliphate-1833812. McKernan, Bethan (2017). “ISIS Ramping up oil sales to Bashar al Assad’s Syrian Regime, say Western Officials.” The Independent, January 20. Available at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/

258  Michael Degerald western-officials-say-syrian-regime-assad-buying-more-oil-gas-isis-a7537851. html. Mecham, Quinn (2015). “How Much of a state is the Islamic State?” Washington Post Monkey Cage Blog, February 5. Available at https://wapo.st/2McqH63. Middle East Monitor (2020). “Iraq Confirms Arrest of Top Ranking Daesh Member Nasser Al-Qardash.” Middleeastmonitor.com, February 20. Available at https:// www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200521-iraq-confirms-arrest-of-top-rankingdaesh-member-nasser-al-qardash/. Migdal, Joel (1988). Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ——— (2001). State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Reconstitute One Another, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, Timothy (1991). “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics.” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 85, No.1, pp. 77–96. Rasheed, Ahmed (2016). “Exclusive: Islamic State Crushes Rebellion Plot in Mosul as Army Closes in.” Reuters, October 14. Available at https://www.reuters.com/ article/us-mideast-crisis-iraq-mosul-exclusive-idUSKBN12E0Z0. Rassler, Don (2018). “The Islamic State and Drones: Supply, Scale, and Future Threats.” Combatting Terrorism Center, July. Available at https://ctc.usma.edu/ islamic-state-drones-supply-scale-future-threats/. Rassler, Don, Muhammad al-‘Ubaydi and Vera Miranova (2017). “The Islamic State’s Drone Documents: Management, Acquisitions, and DIY Tradecraft.” Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point, January 21. Available at https://ctc. usma.edu/ctc-perspectives-the-islamic-states-drone-documents-management-­ acquisitions-and-diy-tradecraft/. Revkin, Mara (2016). “Does the Islamic State Have a Social Contract? Evidence from Iraq and Syria.” University of Gothenburg, The Program on Local Governance and Development. Working Paper No. 9. Saviano, Roberto (2015). “The Role of Drug Trafficking and Money Laundering in Fighting ISIS.” New York Times, February 23. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/11/20/draining-isis-coffers/ the-role-of-drug-trafficking- and-money-laundering-in-fighting-isis. Semati, Mehdi and Piotr Szpunar (2018). “ISIS Beyond the Spectacle: Communication Media, Networked Publics, Terrorism.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, Vol. 35, No.1, pp. 1–7. Solomon, Ericka and Ahmad Mhidi (2017). “Isis Finds Escape Route for the Profits of War.” Financial Times, August 23. Available at https://www.ft.com/content/ b2f616d4-8656-11e7-8bb1-5ba57d47eff7. Stern, Jessica and J.M. Berger (2016). ISIS: The State of Terror, New York: Harper Collins. U.S. Department of the Treasury (2019). “Treasury Designates Key Nodes of ISIS’s Financial Network Stretching Across the Middle East, Europe, and East Africa.” April 15. Available at https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm657. Walt, Vivienne (2016). “ISIS Makes a Fortune from Smuggling Migrants Says Report.” Time, May 19. Available at http://time.com/3857121/isis-smuggling/. Weimann, Gabriel (2016). “Terrorist Migration to the Dark Web.” Perspectives on Terrorism, Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 40–44.

Daesh and the “Effect of the State”   259 Whiteside, Craig (2016a). “Lighting the Path: The Evolution of the Islamic State Media Enterprise.” International Centre for Counterterrorism, The Hague. ICCT Research Paper, November. ——— (2016b). “New Masters of Revolutionary Warfare: The Islamic State Movement (2002–2016).” Perspectives on Terrorism, Vol. 10, No. 4. Available at: http:// www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php/pot/article/view/523.

11 Conclusion The Westphalian State Effect Jillian Schwedler

The contributions to this volume have taken inspiration from Timothy Mitchell’s “The Limits of the State” (1991), reflecting on its continued relevance in light of the Arab uprisings that erupted 20 years after its publication and have continued, with a few ups and too many downs, in the decade following. As Mitchell observed 30 years ago, the conceptual apparatus in the field of political science in particular was ill-suited to understanding the elusive but still real distinction between the cluster of practices and institutions we call “state” and “society.” As articulated in more detail in the introduction to this volume (and in several chapters), Mitchell argues that the closer we look to distinguish where the state ends and society begins, the more elusive that boundary becomes. But rather than a problem to be solved—identifying where the state begins and ends—the elusiveness of the boundary should be understood as providing clues to its nature and powers. Mitchell suggests an alternative approach, one that accounts for the simultaneous salience of the state and its elusiveness: State-society boundaries are shown to be distinctions erected internally, as an aspect of more complex power relations. Their appearance can be historically traced to technical innovations of the modern social order, whereby methods of organization and control internal to the social processes they govern create the effect of a state structure external to those processes. (1991: 77) Why should we concern ourselves with understanding the elusiveness of the state-society boundary? Because understanding how that line is drawn internally within the “network of institutional mechanisms” brings into view the techniques through which social and political order is maintained (1991: 78). Understanding those techniques enables us to understand which, if any, of those complex processes were disrupted or reshaped by the Arab uprisings and which were more seamlessly reproduced or reinforced. In this concluding chapter, I argue that Mitchell’s unpacking of the appearance of a state-society binary provides an insightful model for illuminating

DOI: 10.4324/b22870-12

Conclusion  261 the elusiveness of boundaries between nation-state units, a condition that is reflected in many of this volume’s contributions. In what I am calling the “Westphalian state effect,” I leverage Mitchell’s approach in his 1991 article as well as his subsequent work for thinking about regional and global interconnections between supposedly sovereign and territorially bounded states and between those states and other ostensibly non-state actors. I show the utility of this approach through an examination of Jordan through the period of the Arab uprisings, leveraging insights from the contributors to this volume to explore this Westphalian state effect and how the processes of ongoing state-reproduction can work to shore up regime stability even in the face of routine and ongoing challenges. While the period of the uprisings appeared as a rupture to an otherwise stable status quo—a condition widely discussed in political science as one of robust, durable, or resilient authoritarianism (Heydemann 2007; Bellin 2012)—the contributors all show ways in which powerholders (political, social, and economic) all work tirelessly to shore up their authority, and that they do so in part by projecting the image of a territorially bounded state that obscures the complex interconnections with regional and global powers and practices, of the sort Mitchell identified at the elusive state-society boundary. Following Mitchell, the takeaway is not that individual states do not exist separate from each other, but rather that the difficulties in identifying where one state begins and another ends is a central feature of how power functions within and across the global political imaginary.

National Spatial Imaginaries Mitchell’s intervention focuses on the elusiveness of the state-society boundary within states, showing how the dominant existing definitions of the state within political science (anthropology has advanced more analytically rich approaches for decades, as discussed in the Introduction to this volume) focus on institutions while offering little to help reveal how state power functions. In the decades since its publication, Mitchell’s work has influenced a whole generation of scholars, including the contributors to this volume. But “statist” approaches remain dominant in political science (e.g., see Przeworski 2007; Laitin & Christensen 2019; for a critique of this tendency, see Wedeen 2019). While the 1990s focused on civil society as non-state actors that might pressure the state to democratize, the 2000s saw a flood of scholarship on robust or resilient authoritarianism, or what Steven Heydemann calls authoritarian upgrading (2007). Yet this Westphalian spatial imaginary obscures connections between states and treats them as bounded, standalone units. In much of the literature on the Arab uprisings, analyses focused on explaining variation between cases and the success or failure of individual uprisings (Schwedler 2015). This sort of approach has been described as a kind of methodological nationalism (Wimmer & Schiller 2002), a statist approach in which

262  Jillian Schwedler the states are treated as coherent, independent units and the boundaries between individual states are never called into question. In his “Limits of the State” article, Mitchell did not explicitly attend to boundaries between states, but his analysis suggests that understanding “domestic” politics and the distinction between state and society entail attention to connections and practices that extend regionally and globally. Mitchell writes of the entanglements between Saudi Aramco, the Saudi state, and the US government and, indeed, the US taxpayer: After World War II, the Saudis demanded that their royalty payment from Aramco be increased from 12% to 50% of profits. Unwilling either to cut its profits or to raise the price of oil, Aramco arranged for the increase in royalty to be paid not by the company but by U.S. taxpayers. The Department of State, anxious to subsidize the pro-American Saudi monarchy, helped arrange for Aramco to take advantage of a loophole in U.S. tax law whereby the royalty was treated as though it were a direct foreign tax, to be paid not from the company’s profits but from the taxes it owes to the U.S. Treasury. This collusion between government and oil companies, obliging U.S. citizens to contribute unaware to the treasury of a repressive Middle Eastern monarchy and the bank balances of some of the world’s most profitable multinational corporations, does not offer much support for the image of a neat distinction between state and society. (1991: 89) The elusiveness in determining the boundary between state and ostensibly non-state actors is, he argues: itself a mechanism that generates resources of power. The fact that Aramco can be said to lie outside the formal political system, thereby disguising its role in international politics, is essential to its strength as part of a larger political order (ibid.: 90) Mitchell develops further examples that illustrate the elusiveness of the boundary between the actions of one state and other in his Rule of Experts (2002). In a chapter titled “America’s Egypt,” for example, he shows how the United States and the World Bank are deeply involved in Egypt’s economy, but are able to act in ways that advance US and global financial interests over the well-being of the Egyptian people. Even more—and unlike in “The Limits of the State”—the state actors and World Bank themselves misrecognize the interconnection and thus misdiagnose Egypt’s fiscal problems as internal to its “domestic” economy as if the territorial borders were effective boundaries on Egypt’s economy. This misrecognition and misdiagnosis, in Mitchell’s view, is not about incompetence or even necessarily

Conclusion  263 willful blindness to deep connections. The cult of the expert sees “expertise” applied to discrete “cases” that stand apart, much as a chemist manipulates compounds but remains outside of the experiment itself. This Westphalian state effect shapes the “technical” solutions to “Egypt’s” problems, when in reality, aspects of Egyptian economic practices are intertwined with those of the United States and international institutions like the World Bank. As Mitchell notes in “The Limits of the State”: The relationship between major corporate banking groups, semipublic central banks for reserve systems, government treasuries, deposit insurance agencies and export-import banks, and multinational bodies such as the World Bank, represent interlocking networks of financial power and regulation…The appearance that state and society are separate things is part of the way a given financial and economic order is maintained. (1991: 90) This insight can be extended to examine the ways in which that same financial and economic order is also maintained through the spatial imaginary of a global system of individual units with discrete histories, capacities for repression, and so on. This nationalist spatial imaginary is the one reflected in the resilient authoritarianism literature and in most analyses of the Arab uprisings. Instead, we might explore how power works in ways that move through and across individual states, sometimes skipping from node to node, creating spaces of intense investment and surveillance in certain spaces while paying little mind to others. This alternative spatialization directs more attention to the “regional” and “international” dimensions of Mitchell’s provocation, that is, not just the elusive boundary between state and society, but to the equally elusive boundaries between states themselves. Here we would attend to the role of colonial and imperial power in drawing those boundaries, but also recognize state-making as an ongoing project in which drawing boundaries between states—boundaries that are encoded in international law—is itself a technique of power that obscures those very interconnections of neo-coloniality. Throughout the 20th century, but particularly with the embrace of neoliberal austerity and structural adjustment reforms beginning in the 1980s, Middle Eastern states have become not newly but differently interconnected with “foreign” states and economic and fiscal practices. Of course, as Mark LeVine and Sune Haugbolle note in their introduction to this volume, neoliberalism is only one way in which power has evolved in recent decades. Just as revolutionary practices travel across borders, other entanglements are difficult to parse in terms of boundaries between states. These entanglements include interconnections of trade and investment as well as security alliances and cooperation across security agencies. An important dimension of security alliances, for example, is the upgrading and learning that

264  Jillian Schwedler follows a logic of counterinsurgency/counterrevolution; these practices have naturally intensified since 2011. The Westphalian spatial imaginary never really exists in congruence with practices of economic and political power; rather, it gives way to an archipelago (Amar 2013) of American military bases across the Middle East, to Jordanian training centers for counterterrorism built by the US Department of Defense and run by US independent contractors, to Gulf and Chinese ownership of substantial agricultural land in Africa and ports belonging to other supposedly sovereign states, and to free trade zones and qualified industrial zones that function as spaces of legal exception “inside” sovereign territorial states (to provide just a few of the many examples of this phenomenon). Indeed, as Jamil Mouawad and Somdeep Sen demonstrate in their contributions to this volume, the Westphalian state effect obscures the entanglements between states as a means of facilitating the dominance of certain forms of political and economic power functioning in the region and globally. Angela Joya shows, for example, how the Middle East has become increasingly integrated into the global political economy. As a result, the socio-­economic basis of the post-colonial authoritarian regimes has begun to erode. The structural adjustment policies that characterize the era of neoliberalism were pushed by the United States and international agencies such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in alliance with local capitalists and state actors that stood to benefit financially as well as in terms of shoring up their political authority. The trajectories of “individual” uprisings were shaped by these very entanglements, as multiple foreign agencies or state had vested interest in maintaining the institutionally robust capitalist states that they helped to create and in which they were intimately involved in supporting. Similarly, Sophie Chamas shows that in Lebanon, neoliberal globalization has “eroded those functions of the Weberian state that were once its defining feature.” Like in most other contexts, neoliberal development has relied both on state involvement in the economy through manipulation of interest rates and monetary tinkering and simultaneously on the abdication of responsibility in other spheres of governance, such as welfare provision and the administration of public space. Elusive State Boundaries As with the elusive boundary between state and society in Mitchell’s “state effect,” the Westphalian state effect is characterized by seemingly straightforward boundaries—lines on a map—whose apparent “fixedness” becomes equally elusive when one tries to pin it down. Jordan offers an illustrative case for parsing such entanglements.1 In much of the literature on state-making in Jordan, the Hijazi Hashemite emir Abdullah is described as carving a new nation from former Ottoman territories, enabled by British colonial ambitions and its desire to ensure that the new regional order is

Conclusion  265 allied with the west. Hashemite rule over the fledgling state was consolidated only with the help of British forces, which used violence to put down rebellions. By the 1940s, so goes the conventional narrative, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan was consolidated as a territorial nation-state, and with the departure of the British officers in 1956, the young nation became fully independent. This telling sees the emergence of a Westphalian spatial imaginary of a bounded territorial state over which a (domestic) power exerts a monopoly on the use of force in that territory. In subsequent decades, King Hussein was seen to have survived multiple challenges, but the Jordanian state is a taken-for-granted political territory. Since ascending to the throne in 1999, King Abdullah II has deepened the global aspirations of his father, striving to connect Jordan regionally and globally to specific economic and security systems. His vision for a new Jordan imagines the kingdom as a regional center for finance and as a destination for foreign direct investment and high-end tourism. The regime enjoys the financial and military backing of the United States, but Jordan—like Egypt in Mitchell’s analysis—is treated as an independent state in a global system of nation-states. Mitchell’s insights caution us to be skeptical of such apparent boundaries. Besides Jordan’s complex connections between state and society akin to Mitchell’s elusive boundary (Schwedler 2022), the case of Jordan illustrates the elusiveness of boundaries between independent sovereign states in a supposedly post-colonial context. While Jordan was always deeply entangled with foreign powers and reliant on foreign aid, since the 1980s Jordan has become connected to regional and international geographies of neoliberal investment, regional and global trade, labor flows, and—crucially—­ networks of securitization. Spaces of exception and foreign prerogative render the spatial imaginary of a sovereign territorial state a fiction, and the king’s aspirations for a new Jordan deepen rather than lessen Jordan’s de facto lack of independence. In particular, the relationship “between” the United States and Jordan proves to be more than one of alliance between two sovereign states. The United States supports the Hashemite regime with $1.5 billion in economic and military aid annually. Such foreign aid is often imagined as transfers from one state to another, flowing spatially across a territorial as well as administrative boundaries, like transfers from bank to bank, treasury to treasury, or military to military. But the United States is deeply involved in Jordanian “domestic” politics. Indeed, Pete W. Moore goes so far as to characterize Jordan as a US protectorate, with the Hashemite regime effectively unable to make budgetary decisions without approval from Washington (2014). In many instances, the United States transparently asserts a kind of prerogative power in Jordan, ignoring or at least failing to pretend to recognize the boundaries between the states. In July 2015, for example, US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter landed at a Jordanian air base without a civilian Jordanian official waiting to greet him, having not informed the regime of his arrival. The move was an embarrassing violation of protocol,

266  Jillian Schwedler as the Hashemite regime theoretically should know and approve of all arrivals into its territory. More than a diplomatic faux pas, the incident underlines the extent to which the US government has conceived of Jordanian territory as well as its economy and military/security/intelligence apparatus as an extension of its own (cf. Moore 2018). The Jordanian example is far from an exception. As Jamil Mouawad shows in this volume, Lebanon provides an additional example of an ambiguous state boundary. On paper, national boundaries can be highly permeable in practice without dissolving altogether and can come under the control of non-state actors. Scholars have theorized borders in recent years not as fixed boundaries separating states according to international law, but as entities and institutions constructed through a variety of practices. Through his study of an area between Lebanon and Syria called Wadi Khaled, Mouawad show how this area that is “geographically in Lebanon and economically in Syria” remember and even praise their long-standing relationships to tribes in Kuwait, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Residents engaged in trade with Syrians who traversed a road that passed briefly into Lebanese territory. When that road was closed, they turned to smuggling and other “cross-border” economic activities. With the Syrian civil war, international agencies arrived in Wadi Khaled in late 2011, directing aid toward refugee and host communities but also to assist Lebanon with border protection via the comprehensive Integrated Border Management (IBM) scheme funded by the European Union. The question of international boundaries is of course acute in the Palestinian-­Israeli context, in which the State of Israel has no established borders, given its designs on absorbing the remaining Palestinian territories and rendering a sovereign Palestinian state an impossibility. Somdeep Sen’s contribution explores how a planned community on Palestinian territories illustrates entanglements across state boundaries, including questions of aesthetic and global trends in urban planning. He examines Rawabi, a planned community in the West Bank, established by a development company coowned by a Qatari real estate investment company and Palestinian-owned investment company. Rawabi “ritually claims to be an indigenous, Palestinian endeavor,” Sen notes, even as it replicates the urban schemes of the postcolonial state. The planned community echoes a Gulf form of neoliberal urbanism, one that aims to create a new nation through urban landscape that has been severed from any historical, political, or cultural context. In Michelle Pace’s examination of representations of the Palestinian state, she shows how international, regional, and internal actors have engaged in a range of practices that have produced and reproduced a “fuzzy” Palestinian state. From failed efforts to obtain a Palestinian barcode for local products to Israeli control of Palestinian lands, the absence of the Westphalian state effect for Palestine has upended its ability to fully come into being, enabling a “quantum” level of Israeli control over the Palestinian economy and territory that makes resistance that much more difficult (cf. LeVine 2009; 2016).

Conclusion  267 Yet, diplomatic narratives continue to advance the idea that a state of Palestine remains possible, if only the Palestinian Authority could reach a peace agreement with Israel. The Palestinian state is simultaneously called into being and erased, its fate negotiated in its complete absence. The so-called Deal of the Century imagines heavy foreign involvement in this fuzzy state, including a highway connecting the West Bank and Gaza to be funded by China and some contributions from South Korea, Australia, Canada, the United States, and the European Union. Even an imagined Palestinian airport would not be on historic Palestinian lands, leased instead from Egypt and located in the Sinai. As Swedenburg notes, Palestinians themselves will have no say in their own affairs. Finally, Michael Degerald examines Daesh’s attempt to set up a borderless state and one that simultaneously views the Westphalian spatial imaginary in the region as an illegitimate colonial relic. Daesh sought to take on the function of a conventional territorial state—service provisions, creation of a legal system and courts, internal policing and external security, and so on. But it could function only via the intermediaries and smugglers “outside” its territory who could bring in goods, weapons, and new recruits. Degerald sees these facets as the blurred edges of the Daesh state, boundaries that “fluctuated in temporal and spatial dimensions until all territorial control was lost.” Deep Entanglements What these elusive borders obscure are the deep entanglements of foreign and regional powers in the “domestic” politics of states, not only around trade and financial entanglements, as discussed above, but also around securitization and military cooperation. To return to Jordan, the United States is present and active inside the Hashemite territorial state. The Department of Defense, for example, has deep involvement in Jordan in a number of areas. The United States and Jordan have held joint military exercises since the 1990s under the name Infinite Moonlight, and Jordan has hosted Eager Lion, a two-week military exercise organized by the United States and including some dozen militaries worldwide since 2010. But a key dimension of the regime’s elusive boundary with the United States is its major role in training security forces from the region as well as globally. Jordan’s Government Intelligence Directorate (secret police or mukhabarat) has long had a close relationship with the US Central Intelligence Agency, but all branches of Jordan’s armed forces engage in training and exercises on Jordanian soil with the United States, multiple Arab states, and other states globally. Multiple military training centers in which the United States is deeply involved are located across Jordan. One of them is the King Abdullah II Design and Development Bureau (KADDB, pronounced “cad-bee”), a military-­ industrial division of the Jordanian Armed Forces established in 1999. The land on which KADDB is located is owned by Mawared, a massive property

268  Jillian Schwedler developer owned by the army (not the state). Like in Egypt, the army runs property development like a private industry that produces revenue for the army, creating new zones of exception from state authority even as it blurs the state-society boundary. The KADDB free zone industrial park operates as just such a space of exception, exempt from building and land taxes, import fees, customs duties, and corporate income taxes. It is the first free trade zone in the region to specialize in military production and was created with assistance from the United States. Even deeper entanglements emerge in Jordan’s training center for domestic repression and counterterrorism, the King Abdullah II Special Operations Training Center (KASOTC). This center was also built on land privately owned by the army, and indeed it was designed by the US Army Corps of Engineers and built by a US construction firm with $99 million in the Department of Defense funding. The center is owned by KADDB but run by a US private business ViaGlobal. Jordanian government officials have denied that Jordan has any military training centers. But as Benjamin Schuetze argues, “while KASOTC is indeed formally not a US army training center, in its day-to-day operation it comes close to one” because ViaGlobal operates, manages, and maintains the center (2017: 435). Still another army-owned space of exception is the US-funded Jordan International Police Training Center (JIPTC, pronounced “gypsy”). From 2005 to 2010, US Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton served as the chief of the Office of the US Security Coordinator (USSC) for Israel and the Palestinian Authority, overseeing the training of Palestinian Authority forces at JIPTC by private contractors from Dyncorp along with Jordanian forces from various agencies. Jordanian troops trained during that period came to be known by Jordanians as “Dayton’s Forces”; so, the Jordanian forces reputed to be the most brutal are named for a US military officer. Together, these entanglements call into question the Westphalian spatial imaginary, or the way in which bio- as well as necropolitics are deployed and individuals and even whole categories of people are placed along the continuum of life and death within the jurisdictional, political, bureaucratic, and effective limits of the nation-state and the networks of power that flow through it (Agamben 2005; Foucault 2010; Mbembe 2019). The sovereign boundary between Jordan and the United States is elusive, to use Mitchell’s terms, in these military training centers. Similarly with other zones of exception like free trade zones and qualified industrial zones, territorial spaces on Jordanian lands function under different laws than the rest of the country. Jordan’s Qualifying Industrial Zones (QIZ) are exemplary of neoliberal spatial and legal logics. While these zones are touted as providing much-needed jobs, in practice the turnover of employees is high and South Asian workers are often deemed more reliable workers than Jordanians. Anyone Jordanian can legally open a QIZ in Jordan with the right permission, but that includes permission from Israel and the United States—permission that was written into the 2004 Wadi Araba Peace Accord signed between

Conclusion  269 Jordan and Israel. Mark LeVine has shown as well how QIZs were likewise part of the neoliberal heart of the Oslo Accords (2009). As a result, these “private” enterprises again bring into view the elusive boundary between state and society as well as a Westphalian state effect between ostensibly distinct states. Those applicants for establishing free trade zones who are closest to the regime are the first to receive permission, and their zones have been the most successful. The period of the MENA uprisings is also illustrative of the Westphalian state effect. Most analyses of the uprisings treat individual countries as standalone units, examining the trajectory and outcome of each uprising (Schwedler 2015). Why did some protests escalate to revolutionary levels while others did not? The case of Jordan brings into view the appearances of boundaries between the uprising in one state and another, boundaries that are elusive when one examines more closely. As the uprisings spread across the region in 2011, the Obama administration talked up democracy promotion (after avoiding using the term during most of the 18 days of the 2011 uprising in Egypt) but maintained its support for its repressive regional allies, including Jordan, Egypt, and Bahrain, among others. The Egyptian and US militaries’ relationship remained unchanged through the uprising and afterward, as did US relations with other regional allies, particularly Bahrain, where the racialized and sectarian repression was particularly intense among American allies. Talk of democracy promotion quickly gave way to maintaining the established regional order, and Jordan was ready to play the part repressing pro-democracy protests at home and abroad. Not surprisingly, this dynamic continued under Trump and, whatever its rhetoric, under the Biden administration as well. During Bahrain’s uprising in March 2011, Jordan sent a contingent of several hundred gendarmerie forces rumored to have received bonuses for the assignment. Bahrain is, of course, the home of the US Fifth Fleet, the logistics hub for the US Navy in the region. The Saudi army moved tanks— many manned by Pakistani nationals in Saudi uniforms—across a causeway into the capital city Manama to buttress Bahrain’s brutal crushing of its peaceful and cross-sectarian uprising. Rumors circulated in Jordan at the time that Jordan’s gendarmerie had suggested to the Bahraini regime that it should dismantle the Pearl Roundabout statue, a colossal act of erasure of the symbol of the revolution. Bahrain subsequently urged Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states to step up their aid to Jordan. The GCC even dangled the possibility that Jordan and Morocco—the two surviving Arab monarchies outside of the Gulf—might be invited to join the GCC. GCC membership was never extended, but aid to Jordan steadily increased over the next years, particularly as Syrian refugees flowed into Jordan and the UAE and Saudi Arabia became increasingly involved in supporting rebel groups fighting in Syria. As Moore put it, even before the Syrian refugee crisis, Jordan had already become “Washington’s Bahrain in the Levant” (2012).

270  Jillian Schwedler Jordan also joined the US-led campaign to shape the direction of the Syrian civil war, which resulted in a dramatic escalation of US investments in Jordan. In 2018, the countries signed a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding to provide $6.375 billion in bilateral foreign assistance over five years, much of which was to be spent on the US-built zones of exception discussed above. In 2019 alone, of the more than $1.5 billion Washington provided in aid, $1.082 billion was through USAID while $425 million comprised Foreign Military Financing. An additional $1.5 billion was intended to assist with refugees since the start of the crisis in Syria and $8.6 million aimed to help mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Jordan’s military and economic entanglements with “other” states further illustrates the Westphalian state effect discussed above: the appearance of distinct boundaries between independent sovereign states that disappears upon closer examination. Jordan is better understood through a lens of neo-coloniality that calls into question the Westphalian spatial imaginary through US engagement in “Jordanian” military training and economic zones of exception (Schwedler 2022). Identity and Belonging But the Westphalian state effect has a final impact: seemingly determining, in an unambiguous manner, who “belongs” to a state and/or is deserving of citizenship. Estella Carpi and Andrea Glioti’s contribution brings to light the extent to which states work to establish national boundaries that reinforce national identity, even as those boundaries remain elusive and are manipulated to shore up the ruling class’s political power. Examining the case of the UAE, they show how the regime strives to diminish the role of people of Persian, Baluch, Africa, and Indian descent in the ongoing state-making project. To diminish those connections, they advance a narrative of state-making through local ingenuity, with “local” intended to signify “Arab” as opposed to “foreign” even as Iranians and Emiratis of Iranian descent loom large in Emirati heritage, economy, and art. Indian and Persians are dominant in the souk and migrants commute across the Arab-Persian Gulf, having become accustomed to this mobile lifestyle. The granting and stripping of citizenship is part of the regime’s effort to create the Westphalian state effect. The regime buys Comorian citizenship for its own Bedouins and the Comorian authorities welcome it for the cash, while Qatar is accused of naturalizing citizens from the other regional countries as a means of “intervening” in the politics of other states, amending its nationality law to provide citizenship to the children of Qatari women married to Bahrainis, Saudis, Emiratis, and others. Meanwhile, the UAE has stripped citizenship for alleged membership in certain groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. As we see in Leyla Dakhli’s contribution, examining the archival process brings the Westphalian state effect into view by examining archives as

Conclusion  271 sites of knowledge production. Archives work to create the image of standalone states free of foreign influence but include information and evidence of those very entanglements to foreign or external forces (cf. Stoler 2013). The Iraqi archives relating to its occupation of Kuwait are illustrative. The “Kuwait Dataset,” as it came to be known, was directly formed in 1991 by the UN-sanctioned Coalition forces led by the United States. This “war treasure” was removed from Iraq and privatized, given to the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank associated with Stanford University. Then, following the Iraq War in 2003, an archive of Baath party records was relocated to Qatar but ultimately transferred to the private Iraq Memory Foundation in Washington DC, a group that worked as an American defense contractor in Iraq. Finally, Ted Swedenburg examines the response of Egypt’s liberal cultural producers to the period of rule of the Muslim Brotherhood and the coup that removed them from power in July 2013. While the coup appears as a domestic political affair, foreign actors are intimately involved. The anti-Brotherhood movement called Tamarod was ostensibly launched by three “unaccomplished [media] freelancers” with no organizing experience by a group of intelligence officers in coordination with the Ministry of the Interior and the armed forces. The Ministry of Defense channeled millions of dollars to the anti-Brotherhood campaign provided to Egypt by the Brotherhood-phobic UAE. Ironically, part of the campaign spread rumors that the Brotherhood itself had a foreign agenda, in turn advancing Hamas or Hizbollah agendas or else under the thumb of the United States and desiring closer relations with Israel. The latter rumors were prominently spread by the Emirati Sky News Arabia and the Saudi Al Arabiyya networks. Other rumors circulated that President Mohammad Morsi planned to sell off the Suez Canal and the Sinai Peninsula to foreign interests. In sum, the campaign that escalated anti-Brotherhood sentiments itself used covert foreign funds to spread rumors that Morsi and the Brotherhood were under foreign influence.

Conclusion “Limits of the State” and Mitchell’s other work have provided scholars with much analytical grist to chew on over the past 30 years. For many of us, particularly those working in the discipline of political science (more than anthropology or history), bounded, territorial states in the Weberian sense stubbornly remain at the center of many analyses. More than a “sticky” concept that endures because of its analytic value, Mitchell and scholars, including Lisa Wedeen (2016), Ido Oren (2003), and Paul Cammack (1998), show us that the Westphalian state effect is politically productive—and (particularly American) political science has always been directly implicated in imperial projects of knowledge production. Those of us eager to expose how power works in complex ways to advance capitalism and empire

272  Jillian Schwedler at the expense of most of the seven billion people on this planet find this critical work inspiring and illuminating. For those embracing the fiction of a democratic liberal tradition that can liberate and enrich all of humanity, Mitchell’s work is maddening and “useless” precisely because it calls into question the conceptualization of bounded states that lie at the heart of empire and neoliberalism. As millions across the Middle East have taken to the streets since 2011—and I stress that they are continuing to do so—altered states have been realized affectively if not yet materially.

Note 1 These arguments are developed further in Schwedler (2022).

References Agamben, Giorgio (2005). The State of Exception, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Amar, Paul (2013). The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bellin, Eva (2012). “Reconsidering the Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East.” Comparative Politics, Vol. 44, No. 2 (January), pp. 127–149. Cammack, Paul (1998). Capitalism and Democracy in the Third World: The Doctrine for Political Development, Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press. Foucault, Michel (2010). The Birth of Biopolitics, New York, NY: Picador. Heydemann, Steven (2007). “Upgrading Authoritarianism in the Arab World.” Saban Center Analysis Paper no. 13 (October). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Laitin, David, and Darin Christensen (2019). African Politics since Independence: Order, Development, and Democracy, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. LeVine, Mark (2009). Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989, London, UK: Zed Books. ——— (2016). “The Quantum Mechanics of Israeli Totalitarianism.” State Crime Journal, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 9–31. Mbembe, Achille (2019). Necropolitics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mitchell, Timothy (1991). “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics.” American Political Science Review, Vol. 85, No. 1, pp. 77–96. ——— (2002). Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Moore, Pete (2012). “Washington’s Bahrain in the Levant.” Middle East Report Online, May 23. https://merip.org/2012/05/washingtons-bahrain-in-the-levant/ ——— (2014). “The Arab Bank and Washington’s Protectorate in the Levant.” Middle East Report Online, September 25. https://merip.org/2014/09/ the-arab-bank-and-washingtons-protectorate-in-the-levant/ ——— (2018). “The Fiscal Politics of Rebellious Jordan.” Middle East Report Online, June 21. Available at https://merip.org/2018/06/the-fiscal-politics-ofrebellious-jordan/.

Conclusion  273 Oren, Ido (2003). Our Enemies and US: American’s Rivalries and the Making of Political Science, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Przeworski, Adam (2007). “Capitalism, Democracy, Science.” In Gerardo L. Munch and Richard Snyder, eds., Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 465–503. Schuetze, Benjamin (2017). “Simulating, Marketing, and Playing War: US-­Jordanian Collaboration and the Politics of Commercial Security.” Security Dialogue, Vol. 48, No. 5, pp. 431–450. Schwedler, Jillian (2015). “Comparative Politics and the Arab Uprisings.” Middle East Law and Governance, Vol. 7, No. 1 (April): 141–152. ——— (2022). Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Stoler, Ann (2013). Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wedeen, Lisa (2016). “Scientific Knowledge, Liberalism, and Empire: American ­Political Science in the Modern Middle East.” In Seteney Shami, ed., Middle East Studies for the New Millennium (pp. 31–78). New York: Social Science Research Council. ——— (2019). Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgement, and Mourning in Syria, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wimmer, Andreas, and Nina Glick Schiller (2002). “Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration, and the Social Sciences.” Global Networks, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 301–334.

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” refer to end notes. Abbas, Mahmoud 223–4 Abdel Aziz, Alaa 194, 195, 202, 211 Abdel-Dayem, Enas 194 Abdul Wahhab, Muhammad ibn 26 Abdullah, Hashemite emir 264–5 Abdullah II, King 265, 267 Abrams, Philip 59 Abu Dhabi 27, 28, 29, 36, 148; and migrant charities 37, 38–9, 40 Abu Nabut, Muhammad 165 Abu Zayd, Nasr Hamid 199 academic study of the state 102; see also Foucault, Michel; Mitchell, Timothy Academy of Islamic Research, the 209 accreditation and Palestinian diplomacy 226, 227 accumulation into global capitalism by dispossession 103–4, 107, 111, 114, 114n7 Adorno, Theodor 13 AFLPA (Armed Forces Land Projects Agency), the 107 Agamben, Giorgio 10 agrarian transformation in Egypt 104, 113 AHLC (Ad Hoc Liaison Committee), the 230 Ahram, Ariel 241–2 Ahram Online (news website) 201 Ahwaz Arab People’s DemocraticPopular Front, the 35 Ahwazi Arabs of Iran, the 35 aid agencies and “good governance” 5, 186–7, 270 AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), the 227–8

‘ajami, the 31 Akhbar al-Adab (magazine) 203, 210, 212 al-Ahram (newspaper) 200 al-Ahwazi, Mahmoud 35 al-Amiri, Sara 29–30 Al Arabiyya TV network 201, 271 al Aswany, Alaa 202–3, 212 al-Ateeqi, Abdulrahman Salim 177 Al-Awda 222 al-Aziz, Abd 206 al-Baghdadi, Abu Bakr 239, 240, 255 al-Banna, Hassan 200, 204, 214n5 al Batal, Saeed 90–1 al-Bayah radio station 250 al-Bernameg (TV show) 202 al-Budayriyya library, Jerusalem, the 77 Al-Buqay’a market, Wadi Khaled, Lebanon, the 180–1 al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya 199 al-Gana’a (TV show) 214n5 al-Ghitani, Gamal 203, 212 al-Hamadi, Sheikh ‘Ali 35 al-Hasakah province, Syria 134 al-Hayat Media 252 al-Husseini, Sa’d 200 al-Jarba, Shaykh Humaidi Daham 132 al-Khalidiyya Library, the 76–7 al-Khansd women’s brigade, the 244 al-Liwa al-Islami (newspaper) 209 al-Majalla (magazine) 194 al-Miligi, Salah 194 al-Naba’ (magazine) 250, 253 al-Nahda (art production group) 206 al-Nour Party, the 200, 201 Al-Nusra Front, the 239

Index  275 al Nusra, Jabhat 133 al-Otabi, Mubarak 26 Al Qaeda 239 al-Qaradawi, Yusuf 211 al Qardash, Nasser 255 Al-Qasimi, Sultan bin Muhammad 29 al-Qasimi, Sultan Souud 33 al Qurashi, Abu Ibrahim 255 al-Rahman, Shaikh Abd 199 al-Sawy, Mohamed 205 al-Sisi, Abdel Fattah 195, 196, 197, 212, 228–9 Al-Taakhi, the 135 al-Tamimi, Aymenn 243–4 Al-Taqrir (film) 206 Al-Walid, Khalid Ibn 178, 189n7 “Al-Warsha” student club, the 204 al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab 250 Alami, Mona 241, 242 Ali, Muhammad 79 Ali, President Ben 2 Aljafari, Kamal 91 Allan, Diana 88 AlMutawa, Rana 33 Althusser, Louis Pierre 4 Amaq news agency, the 250 American University of Beirut, the 80 Anani, Nabil 161 anti-globalization protests, the 85 anxiousness to act in lobbying the state 68 AOI (Arab Organization for Industrialization), the 107 April 6th Youth Movement, the 195 ‘Aqidati (newspaper) 209 Arab Image Foundation, the 81 Arab League, the 229 Arab nationalism and Kurdish separatism 121 Arab Novel Award, the 210 Arab Peace Initiative, the 229 Arab socialism 102–3 Arab Thermidor: The Resurgence of the Security State, The (book) 11–12 Arab Uprisings of 2010–2013 (Arab Spring), the 2–3, 11, 12, 67, 75, 84–5, 94, 100, 114, 261; in Bahrain 98, 269; in Libya 1, 74, 98, 175; and the military coup in Egypt 98, 193, 195–7, 210; in Syria 86–7, 90–1, 98, 120, 173, 174, 183, 270; in Tunisia 1, 88; see also Kurdish separatism in Syria Arafat, Yasser 224

archival process as knowledge production, the 76, 270–1 archives see contemporary art as archive; independent archival collections; state archives Aretxaga, Begoña 61–2 Armbrust, Walter 197, 214n5 arms supplies to Daesh 248–50 Arsal, Lebanon 51 art and culture in Dubai 32, 33 artistic independence in Egypt 208, 210–11 ‘asabiyya’ concept and Daesh identity, the 255n5 Asad regime of Syria, the 122, 127, 136, 173, 184 Asfour, Gaber 212 assistance provision in Abu Dhabi 36–40 Atlantic, The (magazine) 229 “authoritarian modernism”and culture in Egypt 197–8 authoritarianism and the origins of the Arab state system 11–13, 99, 101–2, 114n1; and neoliberalism and economic liberalization 98–101, 103–5, 110, 113–14, 264; in the postcolonial state 110, 123, 263 autonomy in revolutionary practices 76, 109, 125, 210–11, 223; and co-existential autonomy of society with the state 121–2, 123, 125–6, 135, 136–7 Awwad, Nahed 91 Ayoub, Ghiath 90–1 Ayubi, Nazih 13, 17–18, 101 Aziz, Omar 123, 124, 125–6, 127, 130, 131–2 Ba’ath archives of Iraq, the 81–3, 93, 271 Badie, Mohamed 200 Badr, Shaikh Abdullah 201 Bahour, Sam 228 Bahraini uprisings 98, 269 Baladi, Lara 89, 90 Balbaa, Azza 195 Banglatown (Brick Lane), London 156 barcodes 226–7, 266 Bastakiyya neighborhood, Dubai 32 Bataclan attacks, Paris (November 2015) 252, 253 Batatu, Hanna 114n3 Baumann, Hannes 49 Bayat, Asef 113

276 Index Bayti Real Estate Development Company 147–8, 150, 151 Beaugrand, Claire 36 Beck, Teresa 175 Bedouin heritage of the UAE 26, 28 Bedouins of Lebanon, the 179–80 “Before the 14th” (exhibition) 88–9 Begin, Menachem 232 Beinin, Joel 105 Beirut Madinati campaign, the 47–8, 51, 52, 53, 54, 62–5, 66, 67, 68–9 Beirut municipal election (2016), the 47, 48, 70n3 Beit Jala, West Bank 143, 144, 145 Bekdache, Nadine 59–60 Bellin, Eva 12, 100 Benjamin, Walter 126 Berlusconi, Silvio 1 Berri, Nabih 71n11 Biden, Joseph 269 bidouns, the 34, 42n33 biopolitics and necropolitics 14 Blau, Herbert 234 Bloom, Mia 251 BNC (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) National Committee, the 167 “bodies on the line” in the post-uprising environment 20 Boëx, Cécile 88 Bookchin, Murray 125, 128 bordering and rebordering in the Wadi Khaled region, Lebanon 173–5, 179, 184, 188–9, 266 bottom-up structures in a direct democracy 123, 124 Bouazizi, Muhammad 1 boundaries and national identity 270; and state-society boundaries 260–2, 263, 264–5, 266, 268; see also bordering and rebordering in the Wadi Khaled region, Lebanon Bourdieu, Pierre 4, 18, 219 Brasilia urban design, Brazil 154 “Breaking the Walls” campaign, the 239, 255n3 British governance of the “Trucial States” 24–5 Brown, Nathan 208 Brown, Wendy 213 CACWA (Central Authority for the Censorship of Works of Art), the 198, 209

Cairo and neoliberal urbanism 148–9 Cairo as depicted through exhibits 219 Cairo College of Fine Arts, the 204 Cairo Opera, the 194, 201, 208 Cambanis, Thanasis 47 Cammack, Paul 271 Camp David Accords, the 228, 231–2 capital 14, 18, 106–7, 108; and accumulation of by dispossession 103–4, 107, 111, 114, 114n7; and class fractions theory 107, 108–9; see also global capitalism capitalism and sectarianism in Lebanon 67 captagon pills 256n6 Capua, Yoav di 77 CAR (Conflict Armament Research) 248–9 Carpi, Estella 37, 40, 270 Carter, Ashton 265 Carter, Jimmy 232 censorship in Egypt 198–9, 204, 206, 209, 210 Chamas, Sophie 264 charity initiatives among migrant groups in the UAE 37, 38 Chaudhry, Kirin Aziz 110 Chernoubi, Abdeljalil 202 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), the 267 citizenship rights 221, 222; in the UAE 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33–6, 37, 42n31, 270; in Wadi Khaled, Lebanon 176–7 civil disobedience in Lebanon 70 Clash (film) 214n6 class fractions theory of capital, the 107, 108–9 class structure in Arab societies 102–3, 108; and Arab state power 18, 105–6, 114n3 Coalition forces in the 1991 Gulf War 81, 95n21, 271 coexistence of domination and repression, the 8 Colla, Elliott 210 collective ownership and state archives 75 colonialism and the appropriation of archives 76 Colonising Egypt (book) 7, 219 commercial attaches in Palestinian embassies 226 “Committee to Document the 25th of January Revolution,” the 79, 93

Index  277 community organizing in Beirut, Lebanon 47–9, 51–9, 62–7, 68–9 Comoros Islands and UAE citizenship, the 34, 270 conformity and the automatization of power 31 conservative paternalism and social protection 108 Construction Law (1940, Lebanon), the 60–1 contemporary art as archive 89–91; see also independent archival collections; state archives Coptic Church, the 200–1 corporate and state cooperation 9, 110–11 council communism 126–7 council systems in DFNS and Syrian Arab opposition territories 120, 125, 128–32 COVID-19 270 Creative Memory of the Syrian revolution, The (website) 90 cryptocurrencies 252 cultural homogeneity in the UAE 33, 36 culture and the arts in Egypt 197–9, 202–6, 208–10, 211–13 currency issuance and Daesh 254, 256n8 DAAs (Democratic Autonomous Administrations) of Syria, the 130–1, 132, 133, 134 Daesh and the “effect of the state” 238– 41, 245–50, 254–5, 267; and financing 248, 252, 254, 256n8; and social contracts and Islamic law 241–3, 245 Dajani, Amer 148 Dakhli, Leyla 19 Dana, Tariq 149 Dar al-Hilal publishers 210, 211 Dar al-Kutub (National Library), Egypt 79 Dar al-Watha’iq, Egypt 79 Dark Web, the 252 Daymon, Chelsea 251 Dayton, Lt. Gen. Keith 268 De Cesari, Chiara 25 De Soto, Hernando 110, 112 “deep state,” the 5, 8, 9, 193, 207, 213 Degerald, Michael 267 delegation of power, the 9 deletion and erasure of archives, the 87–8, 93 Deleuze, Gilles 7, 252

demarcation of the borders and the economy 13 “democracy deficit,” the 12 democracy in web-based archives 85, 92 democratic autonomy and the PKK 125 democratic confederalism 126 democratization and economic liberalization 99–100, 102, 105, 114n1 Derrida, Jacques 94, 219 Deutsche Welle Arabic (news service) 212 DFNS (Democratic Federation of Northern Syria) (Rojava) 120–1, 124, 125, 126, 127, 130, 132, 135, 136; and self-governing councils 128–30, 131 digital media and Daesh 250–3 diplomacy and visual modalities 226, 229, 234 direct democracy and political opposition in Syria 120, 122–4, 132, 137 Dirik, Dilar 131, 136 Discipline and Punish (book) 7, 219 disclosure rules in national archives 78 domestic industrial capital 106–7 Douma, Ahmed 207 drones 249–50, 251 Dubai 26, 28, 29, 32, 43n36, 148; as neoliberal urbanism 146, 148; and oilbased economy of 27, 31 Dubai Community Development Authority, the 38 Dubai Law No. 12 (2017) 38 Duncan, James 157 Dunqul, Amal 90 East India Company, the 25 EBA (Egyptian Businessmen’s Association), the 108 Ebeid, Atef 199 eco-agricultural decentralization in Syria 122–3 economic liberalization in the 1990s 11; see also democratization and economic liberalization economics of wartime governance, the 175–6 Efrîn invasion, the 132 Egypt: and the 2013 military coup 98, 193, 195–7, 210; and agrarian reforms and transformation 104, 113; and artistic independence in 208, 210–11; and the arts and culture 197–9, 202–6, 208–10, 211–13; and

278 Index authoritarianism in 101–2, 197–8; and censorship 198–9, 204, 206, 209, 210; and economic and fiscal policy 107–8, 111–14, 262–3; and industrial unrest 104–5, 106; and the intelligentsia 197, 198–9, 203, 206, 209; and Islamization of 199–205, 209; and media criticism in 206–7, 209; and parliamentary and presidential elections (2012) 193, 200, 202, 205; and state archives 74, 75, 79 Egypt-Israel diplomatic relations 228–9 Egyptian Competition Authority, the 112 Egyptian constitution and referendum (December 2012) 205–6, 207 Egyptian Freedom of Creativity Front, the 194 Egyptian military and global capital, the 107–8, 109 Eisenstadt, Shmuel 4 Eissa, Salah 212 El Baltagi, Muhammad 207 el-Gabali, Tahani 195 el-Hadidi, Lamis 196 El Saadawi, Nawal 199 El Sawy Culture Wheel, the 205 electoral authoritarianism 114n1 Elsheshtawy, Yasser 148 Emirate of Sharjah, the 29 Emiratization of the job sector 37–8 epistemic perspectives 15 eras of modern capitalism 14 Eskenderella 195 Essam, Ramy 195 Ettihadiya presidential palace sit-in (December 2012) 207 EU (European Union), the 225, 227 Evolution of Political Society, The (book) 102 export-oriented capital in the Global South 106–7 ‘Ezzat, Mahmoud 200 Fahmy, Khaled 79, 202 Fairuz, Jawad 35 false historical narratives in the UAE 28–30, 32–3 Fanon, Franz 163, 166 Faruqi, Daanish 197 Fatah movement, the 230; Central Committee 223 FECC (Federation of Egyptian Chambers of Commerce), the 108 Federation of Northern Syria, the 173

FEI (Federation of Egyptian Industry), the 108 Ferguson, James 69 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 25 finance capital 106, 107 First Intifada, the 222 Fisher, Mark 69 FJP (Freedom and Justice Party, Egypt) 193, 194, 195–6, 199, 200, 205 Foda, Farag 199 food sovereignty in opposition-held areas of Syria 132–5 Forbes (magazine) 146 formaldehyde poisoning 55–6 Foucault, Michel 2, 4, 19, 31, 93; and state power relations 5, 7–8, 9, 10, 219, 221 “Foundational Pages for the Idea of Local Councils” (essay) 125 founding of the State of Israel, the 161, 220, 234 “Framework for Peace in the Middle East” (document) 231–2 Frankfurt School, the 13 fraudulent elections 98 Free Patriotic Movement, the 65 free speech in Egypt 206; see also censorship in Egypt Free Syrian Army, the 127, 239 French colonial mandate in Syria, the 122 French Mandate population census in Wadi Khaled 176 Fried, Morton 102 Friedman, David 227–8 Fromm, Erich 13 FST (Fuzzy Set Theory) and abstract concepts of a Palestinian state 220–2, 223–30, 234–5, 266–7; and the state-building narrative performance through the Oslo Accords 230–4 FTLRP (Fast Track Land Reform Program), the 156 Gaddafi, Muammar 1, 74, 93, 98, 177 Gaddafi, Seif 1 Gambetti, Zeynep 123 Gangs of New York (film) 211 Gannat wa Iblis (book) 199 “garbage crisis” in Lebanon, the 47, 70n1 Gargash, Anwar Mohammed 30 Gaza Strip, the 167, 201, 203, 220, 222, 228, 230–1, 232, 234

Index  279 GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council), the 32, 269 GEBO (General Egyptian Book Organization), the 194, 199 Geddes, Barbara 11 gender and feminist studies 16–17 gentrification in Mar Mikhael, Beirut 53–4, 57, 63, 71n12 Gerges, Fawaz 243 Ghazala, Abu 107 Gill, Stephen 104 Glioti, Andrea 31, 270 global capitalism 69, 98, 99, 102, 105–8, 109–10, 264; and accumulation by dispossession 103–4, 107, 111, 114, 114n7 GOCP (General Organization for Cultural Palaces), the 199, 209 Goebbels, Joseph 81 Goldberg, Jeffrey 229 Goldstone, Jack 12 GOSM (General Organization for Seed Multiplication), the 134 governance and state-craft in the UAE 24–6, 27–9, 31–41, 270 Government Intelligence Directorate (Jordanian secret police), the 267 Gramsci, Antonio 4, 17, 18 Grand Shaikh al-Azhar, the 209 Grandinetti, Tina 149 Greenblatt, Jason 228 Grosfoguel, Ramón 15 GSI (General Specifications Standard) 226–7 Guattari, Felix 7, 252 Gulf War, the 81, 95n21 Haddad, Toufic 149 Hamas 202, 230–1, 271 Hamed, Gamal 201 Harrington, James 115n11 Harvey, Penny 51 Hashem, Mohamed 196 Hashemite rule in Jordan 264–6 Hassan, Yahya 222 Haswani, George 247 Haugbolle, Sune 67, 219–20, 238, 254, 263 Hawala system, the 247 Hegel, Georg 4 Heikal, Muhammad Hassanein 195 Hermez, Sami 57, 66, 70n6 Hertog, Steffen 11 HESCO 247

Heydemann, Steven 12, 100, 175, 261 Hibou, Beatrice 4, 5, 8–9, 17, 20 Higher Institute of Cinema, Egypt, the 194 Hinnbusch, Raymond 12 historical accounts and state archives 77, 93 Hizbollah 202, 250, 271 Hoover Institution, the 81, 271 horizontal governance structures in Syria 135 Horkheimer, Max 13 Hosni, Faruq 199, 212 hudoud punishments 200 Hussein, King 265 Hussein, Saddam 82, 248 hybridity and understanding power relations 49 hypermedia events and Daesh as a war machine 252–3 hypermedia space and the Daesh territorial base 253–4 IBM (Integrated Border Management Scheme), the 186, 266 Ibrahim, Sonallah 195, 196–7, 203, 210–11, 212 Idlib networks, the 135 Ikhwan, the 202, 204 Imam, Adel 201 IMF (International Monetary Fund), the 103, 104, 110, 264 “imperial debris” and neoliberalism 19 independent archival collections 83–4, 91–2; see also contemporary art as archive; state archives independent news coverage in Syria 87 Indian Cultural Center, Abu Dhabi 38 indigenous populations and international law 15–16 industrial unrest 104–5, 105, 106 Indymedia 85 informational capital 18 infrastructure and enchantment 51 INGOs (international NGOs) 187, 188 Institute for Palestinian Studies, the 81 intellectual and cultural classes of Egypt, the 196, 198–9, 202, 204, 210, 211 intelligentsia of Egypt, the 197, 198–9, 203, 206, 209 international aid to Wadi Khaled, Lebanon 186–7

280 Index international diplomatic recognition of the state of Palestine 225, 227 international eco-activists in Kurdish Syria 132–3 intersectionality and the decolonial approach to the state 15 Iran-UAE relations 27–33 Iranian investment in the UAE 32, 270 Iraq and ISI 238–9 Iraq Memory Foundation, the 82 Iraq War (2003), the 271 Iraqi archives, the 81–3, 93, 271 IS (Islamic State) 19, 120, 129, 130, 132–3, 173, 175 ISI (Islamic State in Iraq) 238–9, 243, 250, 254 Islah (Muslim Brotherhood group) 43n6 Islamic jurisprudence 2 Islamic Research Academy, al-Azhar University, Egypt 199 Islamist capital 108 Islamization in Egypt 199–205, 209 Ismail, Jamal 182 Israel Hayom (newspaper) 228 Israeli B-movies 91 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the 81 Israeli occupation of Palestine, the 156– 7, 220–1, 222, 225, 227, 232–3, 266; as settler colonialism 151, 161–3, 232 Jacquemond, Richard 209, 210, 212–13 Jaffa, Israel 165–6 Jew of Egypt, The (film) 206 Jewish National Fund, the 149 JIPTC (Jordan International Police Training Center), the 268 joint ventures between the Egyptian military and global capital 107–8, 109 Jongerden, Joost 120 Jordan 114n1, 261, 264–6; and the Arab uprisings 269–70; and military exercises and training 264, 267–8; and Palestinian refugees 222; and relations with the US 265–6, 267–70; and state-society boundaries 264–5; as Trans-Jordan 220 Jordanian army, the 267–8 Joya, Angela 12, 264 JTwJ (Jama’iyat al Tawhid wa al Jihad) 250, 254 KADDB (King Abdullah Design and Development Bureau), the 267–8 kafil (temporary guest workers) 29 Kafka, Franz 69

Kandil, Hazem 197 Kant, Immanuel 4 KASOTC (King Abdullah Special Operations Training Center), the 268 Kerry, John 224 Khaldun, Ibn 255n5 Khaled, Amr 204–5 Khalifa, Ali 33 Khawaja, Fadwah 223 khodmuni Iranians, the 31 Kifaya 195 Kilcullen, David 242–3 Kingdom of Hormuz, the 27 Kirkpatrick, David 196, 207 KNC/ENKS (Kurdistan Kurdish National Council), the 129 knowledge production and the archival process 76, 270–1 Kobane Calling (book) 120 Kongreya-Star 134 Kraidy, Marwan 252–3 Kropotkin, Pyotr 123–4 Kurdish separatism in Syria 120–1, 124–5, 127–30, 173 Kurdish women’s movement, the 129 “Kuwait Dataset,” the 81, 95n21, 271 La Mu’akhadha (film) 206 labor reforms in the Arab world 104 Lafarge SA 247 land purchases by Syrians in Wadi Khaled, Lebanon 185–6 Laughlin, Charles 221–2 Le Corbusier 154 Lebanese elections (2018) 65 Lebanese National Archives, the 80 Lebanese post-civil war economy, the 49–50 Lebanon: and the civil war 70n3, 80, 92, 180; and political cynicism theory 57–8, 59; and the state 50–1, 56, 58, 59–60, 67–8, 70; and urban planning 53–4, 57, 60–1, 68, 70n2; see also Wadi Khaled, Lebanon Leenders, Reinoud 100 Legal Agenda (NGO) blog, the 60–1, 63 LeVine, Mark 165, 219, 238, 254, 263, 269 Lia, Brynjar 244 liberal and secular statism in Egypt 197, 198, 202–4, 206–7, 211–12, 271 liberal state theory and Weber 4, 5, 114n9

Index  281 Libya: and the civil war 98, 175; and labor regulations 1, 2 Libyan state archives 93 limitations to state control 17, 20, 221, 254 “Limits of the State, The” (article) 7, 8, 260, 263, 271 “live history” and simultaneous transition from action to archive 84, 86 Lowenthal, Leo 13 Luciani, Giacomo 11 Luxemburg, Rosa 81, 126–7 Mabon, Simon 242 Mahfouz, Naguib 199, 209–10 Mahran, Sameh 194 Makiya, Kanan (Samir al-Khalil) 82, 83, 95n27 Malki, Riyad 226 Mallick, Terence 211 Mansour, Suleiman 161 manuscript preservation 76–7 Mar Mikhael neigborhood, Beirut see community organizing in Beirut, Lebanon Marx, Karl 104, 114n6 Marxian approach to the state and capital, the 109 Marzouki, Moncef 78 Masoud, Moez 204–5, 214n6 Masri, Bashar 146, 147, 163, 166–7 Mawared (property developer) 267–8 Maysara, Abu 250–1 Mbembe, Achille 8, 14 Mecham, Quinn 241, 242 media criticism in Egypt 206–7, 209 Meguid, Abdel 197 Mehrez, Samia 210–11, 212–13 meiosis and the Emirati state 24 Meir, Golda 232 Memorial (organization) 83–4 memory and archives 80–1, 83, 87–8 MGRK (People’s Council of Western Kurdistan), the 128, 131 Middle East plan of President Trump, the 227–9 Migdal, Joel 6, 244–5, 254 migration 1; and migrant communities in the UAE 24, 25, 26–8, 29, 30, 36–7, 270 military coup in Egypt, the 98, 193, 195–7, 210

military exercises in Jordan 267 militias and state-building 244 Ministry of Culture, Egypt, the 193, 194, 195, 197, 202, 209, 211 Mitchell, Timothy 4, 10, 13, 14, 26, 75, 122, 150; and boundary between the state and society 260, 261, 262, 264, 265; and Foucault 2, 18, 19, 221; and limitations of the State 7–8, 9, 121, 260, 263, 271; and representation and reality 219, 220, 225, 231, 234, 235; and the “state effect” 67, 121, 174, 240, 244, 254, 264 MIZ (Corporation for International Cooperation), the 134 MNCs (multinational corporations) 103–4 Moawed, Jamil 20 mobilization of emotions through archives, the 88 modes of governance 17–18 Moghadam, Dr Amin 31 Mohammad, Haidar 33 Moore, Pete W. 265, 269 Morsi, Mohammed 193, 196, 200, 201, 203, 206, 271 Mosireen (media collective) 85 Mossallam, Alya 91 Mosul uprising against Daesh 240 Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the 84 Mouawad, Jamil 49, 264, 266 Mubarak, Hosni 102, 108, 115n12, 198, 208 municipal councils of Wadi Khaled 173, 186, 187–8; see also self-governing councils (al-majalis al-mahalliya) under Rojava Musa, Hamid 206 Muslim Brotherhood, the 85, 213n4; and culture and media in Egypt 196–7, 198, 206–8, 210, 211, 271; and the FJP 193–4, 195, 199, 200, 205; and Islamist capital 108, 109; and the Islamization of Egypt 198, 199–202, 203–5; in the UAE 35, 43n36, 270 Naameh garbage landfill, Lebanon 70n1 Nadjmabadi, Afsaneh 29 Nahda (“Awakening”), the 197 Naji, Ahmed 212 Nakba, the 165, 166 Nakba Archive, the 87–8 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 197, 204, 209

282 Index national bonds to territory 220; see also territorial seizure and the formation of a state National Institute for the History of the National Movement, the 78 national security 20 National Security Service (Egypt), the 74 naturalization processes in the UAE 26, 31, 33 Navaro, Yael 50, 51, 59 Nazif, Ahmed 111, 112 NCSROF (National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces) 128–9, 130, 132, 134 Negm, Ahmed Fouad 195, 196 neo-Weberian School, the 4 neoliberal authoritarianism and economic liberalization 98–101, 103–5, 110, 113–14, 264 neoliberal transformation across the MENA 10–11, 13, 17, 110–11, 263–4 neoliberal urbanism in Palestine 146–7, 148, 149–50, 163, 167–8, 266 neopatrimonialism and neopatriarchy 4 ‘networks of privilege’ in Egypt 100 Neumann, Iver B. 220, 225–6, 227, 229, 234, 235 new ethnographies 5–6 “New Palestine” and the peace deal of the century 227–8 New York Times, The (newspaper) 196, 207, 224, 232, 247 NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) in the UAE 37, 38, 39 Norton, Augustus Richard 207–8 Nowruz (Persian New Year) 31 NSF (National Salvation Front), the 195 NSPO (National Service Projects Organization), the 107 Nucho, Joanne 58 Obama, Barack 224, 225 Obeid, Michelle 17, 51 Ocalan, Abdullah 121, 123, 124–6, 128, 131, 136 oil discoveries in the Gulf 27 oil revenue for Daesh 247–8 Ong, Aihwa 8 OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territories), the 221, 222, 227 oral history initiatives to preserve testimonies 78 Oren, Ido 271

Oslo Accords, the 223, 226, 230, 231–3, 269 Ottoman Empire, the 3, 18, 80, 93, 115n11, 123, 220, 264 Outline of a Theory of Practice (book) 219 Over-stating the Arab State (book) 17 PA (Palestinian Authority), the 148, 151, 222, 223, 224, 226, 230–1, 234, 268 Pace, Michelle 266 Pahlavi dynasty, the 27 Pakistan floods, the 39 Palestine: and diplomacy and accreditation 226, 227; and international trade 226–7, 266 Palestine Investment Conference, the 148, 158 Palestinian archives, the 81, 87–8 Palestinian cities and construction in a stateless Palestine 143, 144–6, 145, 146, 150–4, 152, 155, 156–65, 159, 160; as neoliberal urbanism 146–50, 163, 167–8, 266; and urban design as national inspiration 154–6, 157, 165–6 Palestinian economy, the 230 Palestinian flags 161, 162 Palestinian Museum, the 233 Palestinian nationalism see FST (Fuzzy Set Theory) and abstract concepts of a Palestinian state Palestinian political representation and claims to self-determination 220–1; and the two-state solution 224–5, 229 Palestinian refugees 220–1, 222 Paris Commune, the 123 patrimonialism and Third World politics 4–5 Patterson, Ann 201–2 PECDAR (Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction), the 223, 224 Perara, Nihal 157 Picard, Elizabeth 176, 188 PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) 120, 121, 125, 129, 131 PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), the 81, 222, 223, 225, 235n1 PNA (Palestinian National Authority), the 225, 232–3 political cynicism theory in Lebanon 57–8, 59 political other, the 40

Index  283 political prisoners 36 political repression 98, 101 political transformation across MENA 98 Pompeo, Mike 228 post-colonial state, the 5–6; and archive preservation 76–7, 78, 93; and authoritarianism of 110, 123, 264; and recultivating indigeneity 156, 157, 166; and replication of colonial legacies 147, 150, 156, 157, 163, 164–6, 168 post-structuralist theories of the state 49 post-uprising plots to take down the Egyptian president 195–6 power mechanisms between individuals and institutions 3 power to “bind and loose,” the 8 private property rights 110, 111, 112 privatization 9, 17, 104 Protection of Competition and Prevention of Monopolistic Practices Law (Egypt), the 112 protests by artists and intellectuals in Egypt 194–5, 207–8 Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France, 1973–1974 (book) 8 Public Works research and design studio, Beirut 59, 60 PYD (Democratic Union Party), the 121 Qassem, Hisham 203 Qatar and naturalization of non-citizens 35 Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Company 147–8, 149 Qawasim, the 25 Qawasim Shaikhly clan, the 29 QIZ (Qualifying Industrial Zones) in Jordan 268–9 Quijano, Anibal 14 Raad, Walid 90 Rabaa al-Adaweya Square massacre, Cairo (August 2013) 196–7, 203, 208, 210 Raqqa, Syria and IS 239 Rawabi, Palestine 144–57, 146, 152, 155, 158–61, 159, 160, 163–7, 266; and perceived collusion with Israel 163, 166–7 “Rawi Network” of banking, the 248 reconciliation process in Tunisia, the 78 reform in Egypt 100, 104, 113

regulation of social gatherings in the UAE 37, 39 rent laws in Beirut 54, 59–60 rentier state, the 11 representation of reality through exhibition 219; see also FST (Fuzzy Set Theory) and abstract concepts of a Palestinian state Republic, As If, The (book) 212 Republic of Fear, The (book) 82, 95n24 resistance dynamics 20 Revkin, Mara 241 revocation of citizenship rights, the 34, 42n31 revolution as statemaking 7; see also Arab Uprisings of 2010–2013 (Arab Spring), the Rihab (film production company) 206 Rojava 120–1, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128; Charter of the Social Contract 127; and self-governing councils (al-majalis al-mahalliya) 120, 125, 128–32; see also DAAs (Democratic Autonomous Administrations) of Syria, the Rukneddine, the 135 Rule of Experts (book) 262 Rushdie, Salman 210 Saad, Ahmed 195 Saber Arab, Muhammad 193, 196 Sabry, Bassem 195 sadaqa (charitable acts) 36 Sadat, Anwar 198 Safdie, Moshe 163 Said, Edward 76, 219 salafi-jihadism 245 Salafis, the 200, 201 Salamé, Ghassan 11 Saleh, President Ali Abdullah 29 Salman, Mohammed bin 229 Salmawi, Mohammed 212 Salter, Mark 174 Sama Dubai (TV channel) 33 SAPs (structural adjustment programs) 103, 104, 110 Sartre, Jean-Paul 89 Satanic Verses, The (book) 210 Saudi Arabia-Israel diplomatic relations 228, 229 Saudi Arabian army, the 269 Saudi Aramco 262 Saviano, Roberto 250 Sawaris, Naguib 195

284 Index SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) of Egypt, the 193, 196, 205, 207 Scheutze, Benjamin 268 sculptures in Rawabi, Palestine 160, 162 SDC (Syrian Democratic Council), the 130 SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces), the 130 Second International Conference on the Arab Novel, the 210 secrecy and sensitive archives 79 Sehnaoui, Nicolas 65–6, 71n12 self-governing councils (al-majalis al-mahalliya) under Rojava 120, 125, 128, 129, 130; see also municipal councils of Wadi Khaled Semalka/Faysh-Khabur passage, the 133 Semati, Mehdi 243, 253 Sen, Somdeep 264, 266 Senous Monarchy, the 93 settler colonialism 161–3, 222, 225, 227, 228, 229, 230, 232 “Sexual Violence, Competitive State Building and Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” (article) 241–2 Sfakianakis, John 100 Sha’biat (cartoon) 33 “shadow state,” the 5 Shafik, Ahmed 203 Shaheen, Elham 196, 201 Shalhoum-Kevorkian, Nadera 161 Shammar tribe, the 132 Shapiro, Nicholas 55–6 Sharabi, Hisham 4 Sharaf (book) 210–11 shell companies and tax avoidance 249 Shi’a Amal Movement, the 71n11 Shi’ites of Egypt, the 201 Shoshan, Malkit 150 Shtayyeh, Dr Mohammad 223–5, 226 Shukrullah, Hani 201 shuyukh of Wadi Khaled, the 177–8 Signs of Conflict Archive (website) 92 Six Day War, the 222, 224 Sky News Arabia 201, 271 Sloterdijk, Peter 59 smuggling: and the black market in Wadi Khaled, Lebanon 180, 181–3, 184–5; and Daesh 246–7, 252 social class and Arab state power 18, 102–3, 105–6, 108, 114n3

social contracts and Islamic law under Daesh 241–3, 245 social media and technology 86 social paranoia and false historical narratives 28–30 sociology of the post-colonial state 5–6 Soliman, Dr. Mohamed 228–9 Somali Social and Cultural Center, the 38 Sorbera, Lucia 16, 17 sourcing of component parts for arms, the 249–50 Soviet archives 83–4 Spanish Civil War, the 120 spatial imaginaries of the “Westphalian state effect” 261–3, 264–5, 267–8, 270 “Speak, History” (workshop) 91 Sri Jayawardenapura-Kottee, Sri Lanka 157 stability of Arab states, the 3 state, the 2, 7, 13–15, 102, 213; and co-existential autonomy within society 121–2, 125–6, 136–7; and formation of 3, 13, 122, 176, 239–46, 251, 254, 267; and limitations to its control 17, 20, 221, 254; and power 2, 8, 12, 18, 20, 26, 121, 213, 271–2 state archives 74–6, 78, 92, 94; and archival process as knowledge production 76, 270–1; Ba’ath archives of Iraq 81–3, 93, 271; and deletion and erasure of 87–8, 93; disappearances and theft of 81–4; and memory 80–1, 83, 87–8; preservation of in the post-colonial state 76–7, 78, 93; and simultaneous transition to from “live history” 84, 86; and social revolution 74–5, 78, 79, 84–5; as source for historical accounts 77, 93; as war booty 81–2, 271; see also contemporary art as archive; independent archival collections; webbased archival projects state borders see bordering and rebordering in the Wadi Khaled region, Lebanon state-centric language 5 state effect, the 67, 121, 122, 174; and Daesh 238–45, 248, 252, 254–5, 256n8, 267; and Timothy Mitchell on 238, 240, 244, 254, 264; and the Westphalian state effect 261–3, 264–5, 267–8, 269, 270, 271–2

Index  285 state financing of investment projects 110, 111–12, 114n7, 115n12 state fragmentation and the preservation of memory 80 State of Greater Lebanon, the 176 State Security Investigation Service of Egypt, the 74, 79 state-society boundaries 260–2, 263, 264–5, 266, 268 state transformation and Egyptian economc policy 111–14 stateless non-sovereign state, the 150 stateless structures 126, 135 “Still Recording” (documentary) 90–1 Stoler, Ann 19, 76 subaltern epistemic perspectives 15 Suleiman, fadwa 87 Sultan Al Nahyan, Sheikh Zayed ben 30 Sunni Muslim communities of Iraq and Syria 243, 245 supply chains and the Daesh state 246–50 Supreme Council for Culture (Egypt), the 212 sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty in Kurdish Syria 133–4 Swedenburg, Ted 267, 271 Swyngedouw, Erik 68 Sykes-Picot Agreement, the 123 symbolic capital 18 Syria: and Arab opposition in 122, 123, 125, 128, 130, 136; and civil war 98, 174, 175, 180, 266, 270; and political opposition and direct democracy 120, 122–4, 132, 137; and transethnic solidarity networks 121, 125; and uprising in 86–7, 90–1, 98, 120, 173, 183 Syria Untold (website) 85–7, 137n5 Syrian refugees 269, 270; in Wadi Khaled 175, 183–4, 185, 186 Syro-Lebanese Customs Union, the 180 Szpunar, Piotr 243, 253 Taher, Bahaa 196, 212 Tahrir archive, the 89 Tahrir Square rally, Cairo, Egypt (June 2013) 195 Tahrir Square uprisings, Cairo, Egypt (July 2011) 90, 113, 199, 200 Taif Agreement, the 80 Tamarod (“Rebellion”) movement, the 195, 202, 271

Tantawi, Hussain 193 Taussig, Michael 59 Tawfik, Saeed 194 tawhidi movement, the 26 Teatro Yanayir 206 Tel Aviv, Israel 165 Telegram social media channels 250, 251, 252 Temimi Foundation for Research and Information, the 78 tenure reform 104, 114n5 territorial seizure and the formation of a state 239–41, 242, 243–4, 245–6, 267 TEV-DEM, the 120, 123, 128, 134 ‘Tiananmen-Cairo Courage in Cairo’ (YouTube video) 89–90 Tilly, Charles 13, 14 Times of Israel, The (newspaper) 166–7 toponymic schemes in post-colonial states 157 TOR (“The Onion Router”) 252 tracing forensics for missing persons 84 Traïni, Christophe 88 trans-ethnic solidarity networks in Syria 121, 125 transitionology 5 Treaty of Sevres, the 123 tribal allegiances in the Syrian council system 132 tribes of the Gulf 26 trope of “suture” and borders, the 174 “Trucial Sheikhdoms,” the 24, 27 Trump, Donald 32, 227, 228, 269 Truth and Dignity Commission (Tunisia) 78 Tunisia 98; and the 2010 coup 1, 88; and state archives 75, 77–8 Turkish interests in Kurdish Syria 136 Twitter 251 two-state solution and the Palestinian nation state, the 224–5, 229 UAE (United Arab Emirates), the 30; and Bedouin heritage 26, 28; and citizenship rights 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33–6, 37, 42n31, 270; and cultural homogeneity 33, 36; and false historical narratives 28–30, 32–3; and funding of Tamarod 202, 271; and governance and state-craft 24–6, 27–9, 31–41, 270; and Iranian influence 27–33, 270; and the migrant

286 Index community 24, 25, 26–8, 29, 30, 36–7, 270; and NGOs 37, 38, 39 ‘Ukasha, Tawfiq 202 UMAM D&R (Documentation & Research) project, the 80–1 UN, the 223 UN Security Council, the 227 UNCTAD (UN Conference on Trade and Development) 112 UNESCO 80 UNHCR, the 187 UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency), the 222 urban design as national aspiration 154–6, 157, 165–6 urban planning in Lebanon 53–4, 57, 60–1, 68, 70n2 Urvolk and the “primitive people” 25, 33 US and the Middle East, the 264; and involvement in the Palestine-Israel question 223, 224, 226, 227–8, 231–2; and Jordan 265–6, 267–70; and perceived involvement in Egypt 201–2, 203; and troops in Iraq 239 US Army Corps of Engineers, the 268 US Department of Defense, the 264, 267, 268 US federal corporate tax code, the 9 US military training in Jordan 267–8 US Navy, the 269 US suppression of pro-democracy protests 269 US taxpayer funding of Saudi Aramco royalty payments 262 US Treasury Department, the 9, 248, 262 USAID to Jordan 270 USSC (Office of the US Security Coordinator), the 268 valet companies in Beirut 71n11 VBIEDs 255n3 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 84 ViaGlobal 268 Vignal, Leïla 175, 184 visual modalities and diplomacy 29, 226, 234 voting rights in Lebanon 70n3 Waage, Hilde 231 Wadi Araba Peace Accord (2004), the 268–9

Wadi Khaled, Lebanon 175–6, 266; as Arab tribal society 177–8, 188, 189n9; and bordering and rebordering 173–5, 179, 184, 188–9, 266; citizenship and voting rights 176–7; and economic and social bonds with Syria 178–80, 186, 188; and impact of the Syrian uprising on 183–5; and INGOs and aid 186–7; and municipal councils 173, 186, 187–8; and smuggling 180, 181–3, 184–5 Wadina amphitheater, Rawabi, Palestine 153–4, 155, 157 “Wayn Al-Dawla?: Locating the Lebanese State in Social Theory” (article) 49 weapons manufacturing for Daesh 249, 251 web-based archival projects 84–7, 90, 92 “web-like state,” the 4 Weber, Max 4, 9; and the Weberian ideal of the state 51, 56, 67, 222, 244, 264, 271 Wedeen, Lisa 4, 10, 17, 33, 271 Weimann, Gabriel 252 Weimar Republic, the 127 Weisglass, Dov 167 West Bank, the 91, 144, 220, 222, 224, 227, 228, 230–1, 232, 234, 267; see also Rawabi, Palestine Western left persepctives on the Syrian uprising 124 Westphalian state effect, the 261–3, 264, 269, 270, 271–2 Whatsapp (social media platform) 251 wheat monoculture 133, 134 Whiteside, Craig 243, 244 Wiki-Gender in Arabic 86 wilayat (provinces) created by Daesh 240 Winegar, Jessica 213 Wood, Ellen 102 Wood, Neal 102 workers and trade unions in Egypt 113 “World as Exhibition, The” (article) 219 World Bank, the 104, 110, 111, 230, 262, 263, 264 World Development Report 1997 (World Bank report) 110–11 WTO (World Trade Organization), the 104

Index  287 Yacoubian Building, The (book) 202–3 Yazigi, Sana 90 “Year of Giving,” the 38 Yehia, Mustafa 182 Yemeni state archives 75 Yemeni uprisings 98 Yeoh, Brenda 157 YouSendIt (filesharing service) 251 Youssef, Bassem 196, 202 YPG (Kurdish People’s Protection Units), the 127

YPJ (Kurdish Women’s Protection Units), the 127, 134 Yusuf, Abdul Rahman 211 Zadeh, Lotfi 221 zakat (alms-giving) 36 Zapatista movement, the 122, 124, 126, 130 Zeidan, Mahmoud 88 Zerocalcare 120 Zimbabwean land reform 156 Zizek, Slavoj 59