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Paper short abstract:

This paper shows checkpoints to be sites of encounter, challenge, and negotiation, with various actors generating bordering practices, often pertaining to appropriately gendered behaviors, deployed both in alliance with and opposition to the surveilling imperatives of the securitizing state.

Paper long abstract:

Siwa is the eastern-most outpost of the Amazigh community extending across North Africa, and it is Egypt’s western-most oasis, at the territorial and linguistic margins of the Nile-based, predominantly Arabic-speaking Egyptian nation. In the post-2011 era, the Egyptian regime has heavily securitized this border area, including via aerial surveillance and spatial lockdown. Movement to and from the oasis is subject to military regulation, requiring passage through up to six military checkpoints. Using data from 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork and the documentation of 201 checkpoint interactions, I take checkpoints as sites of ethnographic analysis. I ask, what do interactions at checkpoints reveal about the bordering practices that take place within national territory, and across the scales of state- and community-sanctioned norms for regulating mobility? I demonstrate how checkpoints interpolate Siwans as subjects of a broader national body, while simultaneously producing a host of distinctions. I examine the unwritten patriarchal pact between Egyptian soldiers and Siwan men stipulating soldiers not address Siwan women, speaking only with their male guardians. I show checkpoints to be sites of encounter, challenge, and negotiation, with various actors generating bordering practices, often pertaining to appropriately gendered behaviors, deployed both in alliance with and opposition to the surveilling imperatives of the securitizing state. This work has broader implications for understanding projects of (uneven) territorialization within nation-state territory. Analyzing checkpoint encounters generates analytical perspectives that center the day-to-day experiences of those forced to navigate them, while foregrounding internal and scalar dynamics at a distance from international borders.

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This paper follows Asma's journey as she repatriates her deceased brother's body from Lebanon to their beseiged hometown in Syria. It explores the fluid border regimes of Syria-Lebanon, connecting not-quite-legal cross-border journeys and the shared cultural and moral ideas of propriety.

Paper long abstract:

In the last decade, the rapidly changing border regimes of Syria and Lebanon have given rise to a fertile ground for increasingly accepted yet not-quite-legal modes of mobility. This is particularly evident among predominantly undocumented Syrians who cross the border between the two countries. Not within the law, yet not exactly illegal, some of the regulations governing cross-border mobility have been informal, shaped by shared values and norms that either underlie or fall outside official border policies.

This paper traces the story of Asma, a displaced Syrian woman in Lebanon, as she embarks on a cross-border journey to repatriate her deceased brother's body to their besieged hometown in Syria. The narrative unravels the challenges faced by Asma as she navigates through various restrictions on her mobility—from evading identification at checkpoints to ensuring safe transportation options and negotiating paperless border crossings. Through Asma’s journey, the paper sheds light on the fluid border regimes between Lebanon and Syria, establishing a connection between Syrian women's precarious border crossings and the shared moral imperative of respectful encounters with women and the deceased. The legitimacy of Syrians' informal border crossing practices, I argue, stems from the invocation of shared cultural and moral notions of propriety. These are particularly manifested through gendered, generational, and after-life modes of acceptable encounters. Ultimately, I contend that it is within these dynamic processes that border-crossers and regulatory border regimes actively shape and reformulate the landscape of transnational mobility.

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In this paper I explore everyday forms of the securitization of bodies and borders through a focus on male Syrian mobilities across the region during the last decade. How have Syrians navigated various and overlapping security regimes in order to find ways to move, to migrate, and to live?

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I draw on thinking in the anthropology of security, war, and conflict to explore everyday forms of the securitization of bodies and borders through a focus on male Syrian mobilities and migrations across the region during the last decade. How have Syrian men strategized around and navigated various and overlapping security regimes in order to find ways to move, to migrate, and to live? Based on in-person research undertaken in Lebanon and Qatar as well as the engagement of remote research methods, I show how being mobile across a highly securitized warscape – on roads, at transnational border crossings, in airports -- crystallizes the masculinized forms of duress and diminishment experienced throughout the course of Syria's protracted conflict: the stresses of the male provider struggling to eke out a living in a destroyed economy, the threat of conscription for military age males, and the exodus from the country of men seeking out both ways to provide and ways to escape military service. It is also through these experiences that we see how people demonstrate the skills and practices they have cultivated amid these conditions that involve identifying openings and opportunities and taking certain risks that push back against the livelihood and life-course disruptions of the conflict. Through an analysis of these skills and practices, I show in this paper how strategies around and navigations of everyday forms of securitization have been a key aspect of Syria's wartime political economy.

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The paper traces expectations, hopes and experiences of trans-regionally expansive communities of support that undergird the flow of information, finances, bodies and abilities to adapt for migrants, returnees and the repatriated through a focus on Afghan migration

Paper long abstract:

The World is Alive in Hope, an Afghan proverb states. Yet, the current realities—economic breakdown, authoritarian leadership, large-scale displacement and securitized regional migration regimes—seem to contradict this premise, making hope a precarious business. But despite the expectation of despair, the light ethnographic research on migration and repatriation has cast into the hidden world of insecurity, doubt, fear and failure reveals a picture rich with enacted hope, an enduring world of familial and communal obligations animated by individual ambitions embodied in hopes that propel action. The bodies of migrants, returnees as well as those ultimately repatriated for burial, are imbued with individual and communal expectations. Tracing trans-regionally expansive communities of support that undergird the flow of information, finances and abilities to adapt, this paper foregrounds social relations that enable migration, return and repatriation. The inclusion of both the Living and the Dead, and their expansive networks of responsibility and support, opens vantage points on bodies, narratives, attachments, and rights, as well as forensic, bureaucratic and religious traditions as they cross national boundaries and question belonging. How is the body of the migrant, the returnee, the repatriated—in its material reality as well as its immaterial configurations—handled and cared for as communities navigate legal, bureaucratic and healthcare regimes? How do boundaries and borders travel with the body, inscribed in a movable body-politics of exclusion?

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Paper short abstract:

How are the deceased in Gaza commemorated when relatives in the West Bank are unable to fulfill mourning rites? Taking the case of a Palestinian Romani family, this paper looks at symbolic action as spiritual strategy when earthly ritual becomes impossible under war and security/borderland regimes.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines grieving of the deceased in Gaza by family members in the West Bank who, in times of war, are unable to fulfill traditional funeral and mourning rites. Taking the case of a Palestinian Romani family who lost members in Gaza during Israeli bombing, this paper asks how relatives in Ramallah might compensate for an inability to fulfill mourning responsibilities by turning instead to a symbolic universe of political procession. Commemoration as such, I argue, is a rejoining of the Antigone-like morass between kinship duty to family and political duty to the state or nation. Although the improvisational ethos of “going around” from one checkpoint to another, the taking of alternate routes to compensate a road block, and other such strategies have been a feature of Palestinian life since at least the leviathan growth of the Israeli security state in the early 2000s (Hammami 2019)—often theorized under the rubric of everyday spatial tactics (De Certeau 1984)—this paper looks instead at improvisation of another kind: symbolic action as spiritual strategy when earthly practice becomes impossible. As such, this paper contextualizes long-term ethnography with Romani families in the Jerusalem/Ramallah area with the anthropological literature on grief and commemoration, the literature on the Israeli security state, and the theology of martyrdom in Palestine.

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Paper short abstract:

Sanctions might have "nuclearized" Iranians’ money, but their goal to globally isolate Iran’s national economy had the opposite effect: it pulled Iran, more than ever, into a regionally networked economy. This presentation, traces that ‘sanction economy’ across Turkey and Iran.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 2012 sanctions dis-embedded the Iranian economy from global markets, contraband commerce has become highly contested in Iran. Iranians have come to regard sanctions as enforced by both international powers and their own state officials, who criminalized certain kinds of cross-border trade but not others. Although Iranian state actors distinguish between traders—praised for contributing to the economy—and traitors—denounced for undermining its integrity—what blurs the line between them is their shared struggle with a devaluing currency that some Iranians call not a “soft currency” but a “nuclear” one.

With a growing and young population’s ever-increasing demand for consumer goods, sanctions have produced new configurations of exchange—characterized by not only nuclear rials but also ‘golden shoes’ and silver apartments.’ Sanctions might have nuclearized Iranians’ money, but their goal to globally isolate Iran’s national economy had the opposite effect: it pulled Iran, more than ever, into a regionally networked economy. This presentation, draws upon ethnographic research conducted in two stretches over a decade in Iran and Turkey, and traces that ‘sanction economy’ across Turkey and Iran. In bringing into the same analytical frame a cross-border traffic in money and land as experiments in mitigating the impacts of sanctions, that broader project chronicles how those movements transform the very terms and forms of currency, mobility and security under sanctions.

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Paper short abstract:

The forms of governmentality under the Islamic Republic (through regimes of affects, values, political topographies of the public space) sheds light on the 2022 uprisings as a moment where “walls of fear” crumbled, “red lines” were crossed and their crossing performed as acts of resistance.

Paper long abstract:

A genealogy of State violence in the Islamic Republic of Iran enlightens the present in at least two ways. First the technologies used to institute State control over society since the 1979 revolution helps to better understand the economy of repression today: its many faces (para/military, judiciary, death squads), actors, and objectives. In regards to the latter point however (the objectives or effects), the history of violence in Iran sheds a second light: by understanding how obedience was crafted through fear, individuation, figures of the enemy and the martyr, and above all, a political topography of “red lines” not to cross, we can grasp the scope and depth of what is being radically challenged by the “Woman Life Freedom” movement as a moment where “walls of tears” crumble, “red lines” are crossed and their crossing performed as acts of resistance. In this sense, the genealogy of nation and State formation through violence after 1979 in Iran offers tools for a seismography of the struggles between State and society, and allows us to understand the ruptures and changes brought about since the uprisings of Fall 2022 in Iran.

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Reflecting on Iraqi patient mobility post-2003 war for care, "Therapeutic Geography" is reexamined to understand health's tie to location and cross-border influences, underscoring health's transnational nature amid conflict.

Paper long abstract:

In this talk I reflect on the decades long ethnographic research on the mobility of Iraqi patients across the Middle East to seek medical care for war injuries and emerging medical ailments in the wake of the US-led occupation of Iraq (2002-2011). In doing so, I revisit the concept of Therapeutic Geography (Dewachi et al 2013) that we developed almost a decade ago to explore the scope of such phenomenon and its limits. "Therapeutic Geography" could be considered a framework for understanding health and healthcare as it intersects with issues of space, place, and location. It recognizes that the health experiences of individuals and populations are not confined to their immediate geographic or political boundaries but are influenced by a larger regional and global context. This approach can help explain how health care practices, access, and policies in one place are affected by events and conditions in another, particularly in regions impacted by conflict and political instability. By considering the movement of people across borders for medical treatment, "Therapeutic Geography" can reveal much about the social determinants of health, the geopolitics of healthcare, and the ways in which health systems and resources are stretched and interconnected across nations. It suggests a need to understand health from a transnational perspective, where the impacts of war and political decisions extend into the lived experiences of individuals seeking care, and the health systems of neighboring countries that take on the role of providing that care.

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Paper short abstract:

War and cancer are intertwined across the Middle East, with international military interventions generating toxic landscapes as well as cross-border pathways of medical care. How are these overlapping geographies of cancer negotiated in the experience of illness?

Paper long abstract:

War has transformed geographies of cancer across the Middle East. International military interventions, counter-terrorism campaigns and state violence have unleashed carcinogenic toxins while also destroying oncology infrastructure. Cancer patients and families have responded to these changing environmental and therapeutic conditions in part through strategies of mobility, journeying within and across international borders in pursuit of cancer care. These non-linear trajectories have transformed cities with high-tech oncology infrastructure (e.g., Beirut, Amman, Ankara) into hubs for war-affected cancer patients arriving from across the region. Toxic landscapes and cross-border therapeutic pathways endure long after formal hostilities cease, calling into question ‘health systems’ approaches to cancer control planning that fail to take seriously war-related environmental conditions and the rise of cross-border trajectories of care. While the emergence of these cancer geographies has been established in previous studies, little is understood about the lived experiences of cancer patients and families. The aim of this paper is to develop a better understanding of the experiences and mobilities of cancer patients navigating the toxic landscapes and changing therapeutic geographies of cancer care in the Middle East region. The paper focuses on the case of Iraq drawing from ethnographic fieldwork as well as hospital-based interviews with Iraqi cancer patients between 2014 and 2022.