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 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.