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- Convenors:
-
Ahmad Moradi
(Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO))
Foroogh Farhang (Brown University)
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- Discussant:
-
Munira Khayyat
(New York University Abu Dhabi)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Location:
- Facultat de Geografia i Història 206
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 24 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
This panel brings a bottom-up perspective into how the violence embedded in security projects is endured, embodied, and at times overcome by the most marginalized bodies within the MENA region. It contemplates the role of anthropology in aligning with the everyday struggles of marginal subjects.
Long Abstract:
Twenty years after the war on terror was inaugurated and over a decade following the revolutionary uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa, the security paradigm remains paramount to the region’s framing in global and national regimes of governance. Amid ongoing wars, economic breakdown, and large-scale displacement, varied discourses and practices of securitization have proliferated and multiplied across the region and the daily lives of its inhabitants. From international security agreements, to deadly borderland regimes of surveillance, expanded projects of policing and militarized crackdowns, top-down projects of security increasingly create insecurity for the very communities they claim to be protecting.
Based on long-term, on-site ethnographic research, this panel aims to bring a bottom-up perspective into how the violence embedded in security projects is endured, embodied and at times overcome by the most marginalized bodies within the MENA region. We specifically encourage scholars to examine the movement of bodies, whether dead or alive, as a means to chart the evolving landscape of securitization in the region. By focusing on the south-to-south movement of bodies, we pose the question: how do people (re)establish lived relations of struggle that are emplaced while circulating security projects across multiple, disparate scales? The response to this question involves contemplating the role of anthropology in aligning with the everyday struggles of marginal subjects. Those who carve pathways to undo the structural, institutional, and transnational circuits of violence perpetuated by security projects, while continually seeking to bring about a more survivable future.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 24 July, 2024, -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.
Paper short abstract:
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.
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.
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.
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.