The division of the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire following the First World War was a formative and highly contentious process in which maps played an integral role. British and French delegates who parceled out the Ottoman Empire created and altered maps in a succession of treaties and conferences that would lead to the reordering of these territories into new imperial mandated states. In this paper, I examine the reordering of the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire by focusing specifically on seven different maps that British delegates used and created during the years of wartime and peace negotiations. Drawing upon literature that focuses on how maps are integral in coding, ordering and controlling territories, I argue that the division of the Ottoman Empire may have been in pursuit of order, but the project was actually messy and haphazard. More specifically, expanding on recent scholarship on how maps should be framed as processes, as opposed to static documents or representations, I examine the linkages between British maps that were made and used during the period of 1914 - 1923 when British delegates debated the division of the Ottoman Empire. These maps were archived in several different depositories in the UK and the US, and though some of these maps are well known, like the Sykes-Picot map, many of these maps have not been documented or discussed. The maps I examine in this paper were not part of major surveys or military mapping projects, nor were they widely distributed or consumed by the public. Instead, I examine the different and seemingly disparate maps that British (French and American to a lesser degree too) delegates and politicians created and used to summarize agreements, to stake claims to territory, and to conceptualize places that most of them had never visited. By linking and contrasting these different maps as part of the larger imperial process, both the imperial and geopolitical discourses that framed the negotiations, as well as the disordered and contentious character of these territorial negotiations, becomes evident. By underscoring the disordered mapping processes, some of the supposed truths about our geopolitical world are destabilized.

Why is Palestine dirty? This is a question that offices of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and local municipalities in the West Bank have for the past several years been attempting to answer. Efforts to “green Palestine” have ensued. Funded by international donors, they claim to be introducing new ideas about civic responsibility, especially vis-a-vis spaces outside homes. They include anti-littering campaigns, regulation of household and business garbage disposal, textbook reforms, the production of posters and the distribution of dumpsters. Reforms have been far from monolithic in scope or logic, however, among other things because they originate in institutions whose diverse histories and mandates render their relationships to the publics they address very different. “Greening” programs have also been only unevenly and tentatively implemented. By their own standards their success has thus been partial at best. For this paper I draw on fieldwork in Jenin and Ramallah municipalities, where municipal and PA-sponsored anti-littering efforts and “environmental awareness” campaigns are ongoing. This is in part as a result of plans to construct (and in Jenin’s case the successful construction of) a regional sanitary landfill for each corresponding governorate. I juxtapose examination of these endeavors with observations from everyday moments in which pedestrians took leave of objects in public—or “littered”. I am as interested in the scalar imaginaries, expectations and valuations expressed in these different approaches to urban public space as I am In contemporary “publicness” itself. I aim first to characterize the experience of being governed as a resident of a municipality under partial PA jurisdiction. I explore the extent to which, following Foucault, we can read biopolitical or disciplinary logics into these reforms, as scholars writing about sanitation reforms in other colonial and post-colonial contexts have done. Second I propose that from an analysis of minute, fleeting and anonymous acts of discarding in public we gain a sense of how urban space is mapped and remapped on a daily basis through reordering of (and by) people and things. To what extent does framing practices around urban refuse as a form of “mapping” diverge from or intersect with Mary Douglas’ (1966) notion that dirt is a matter of spatial and cultural “order” and order alone? How do local Palestinian and international scientific debates over appropriate environmental policies for Palestine complicate the idea that dirt in Palestine is a mere matter of social order?

As the source of 96% of Egypt’s water, the Nile is fundamental to life in Egypt. The division of Nile waters between the states of the Nile Basin has long been a matter of debate and contestation. More recently, Ethiopia’s initiation of a project to build a major dam across the Blue Nile has reignited concerns within Egypt about how upstream withdrawals could affect the country’s water supply. This paper focuses, however, on another factor that will shape the future of the Nile – climate change. As the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increases, changing patterns of precipitation in the Nile’s East African source regions have the potential to alter river flows, with profound implications for Egypt. This paper looks at the scientific project to understand the future of the Nile River under climate change. Drawing on interviews with Egyptian and international scientists and participant observation at international water meetings, I examine the process of climatic and hydrological modeling through which scientists probe the future of this critical resource. Due to the difficulty of modeling precipitation dynamics, the range of predictions for Nile flows under climate change remains wide. Indeed this range spans from the positive – a prediction that Nile flows will increase – to the negative – a prediction that they will decrease. I show, first, how different scientists’ responses to this uncertainty are shaped by the position they hold within sociocultural and geographical networks of expertise. Second, I discuss the political ramifications of knowledge about Nile River futures, and how this plays into the way in which different actors present model results – the projections they highlight and those which they underemphasize. Through this analysis, the paper explores how the scientific work of projection shifts and redefines borders. These borders are both temporal – between the present and the future – and spatial – between Egypt and its upstream neighbors in the Nile Basin, between local farmers and the nation, and between scientists working in Egyptian research centers and those working overseas.

As workers and activists involved in cross-border water conservation attempt to re-map lines of cooperation along the boundaries of watersheds, rather than political borders, they encounter what Paul Silverstein has referred to in other activist contexts as "scalar dilemmas." These water workers must operate simultaneously along local and international priorities, melding these different scales within their work. Along the Jordanian, Israeli, and Palestinian border regions that frame the Jordan River and several shared aquifers, the dilemmas of simultaneously engaging these different scales are particularly troublesome. This paper is based on multi-sited fieldwork with a tri-national environmental NGO and case-study communities on the Israeli and Jordanian sides of the Jordan River Valley. NGO workers engaged in community level projects attempt to prove their commitment to local residents through small-scale projects like building storage tanks and school water gardens, while also striving to scale up residents' notions of water problems and solutions to include international treaties and river restoration projects. At the same time, the NGO must prove to donor agencies that it successfully "articulates knowledge" as Timothy Choy has described the process of demonstrating both universal knowledge and locally appropriate know-how. Meanwhile, the waterworlds (the webs of social and environmental connections that water has in different societies) into which these cross-border projects intervene are not static, but rather historically fluid. In Jordan, water provisioning by the central government has extended only slowly and partially to peripheral regions of the Kingdom, and many periphery residents view it as arbitrary and unreliable. In the case study community, these problems are compounded by confrontations between farmers and family-owned spa businesses over how best to use the village's spring water. In Israel, in contrast, national control of water and the provisioning of even the most remote kibbutz was a central mission and mode of territorial control since the state's founding. Today, residents of the Israeli case-study community are adjusting to privatization of water, shifting regulations regarding water recycling, and the rise of large-scale desalination. This paper examines how NGO water workers attempt to re-map water rights and responsibilities, joining two very different waterworlds under a single watershed of shared stewardship, and how this re-mapping project requires situational re-scaling to manage the challenges of a politically fraught region. These encounters illuminate Israeli-Jordanian power relations, as well as how border area residents live out these regional politics in their everyday lives.

This paper examines the emergence of an environmental movement aimed at reviving a centuries-old network of himas – natural areas protected under Islamic law and through local, communal governance – in Jordan and Lebanon. Though himas and similar protected areas were used for more than 1500 years to manage communal rangeland in tribal areas across the Middle East, most had been wiped out by the mid-1900s. In recent years, several national and regional environmental organizations have begun to reestablish old himas and develop new ones in or near rural communities as part of a strategic revival movement aimed at conserving biodiversity, increasing economic development, and mitigating drought. Leaders in this movement are framing the revival of himas as a homegrown approach to conservation work that blends environmental science with religious duty and Arab cultural heritage. With its focus on community development, environmental conservation, and collective history, the hima movement is producing a kind of “environmental imaginary” (Davis and Burke 2011) that envisions a Middle Eastern future, based on imaginings of a Middle Eastern past, in which human communities live in harmony with their natural surroundings. This paper focuses on how the hima movement’s central tropes of morality and Islamic sanctity are mapped onto the physical landscapes of three hima sites in Jordan and Lebanon. It examines how the hima revival movement produces and plots himas as sacred, Islamic spaces, and what this does for the plants, animals, and people living inside them. For instance, how do the Islamic guidelines that structure the use and protection of himas (e.g., which wild animals not to hunt; when and where to collect wood) challenge and/or change villagers’ use and conceptualizations of these natural areas? The hima movement has created campaigns to replace common local practices like bird hunting with more palatable and conservation-friendly activities like bird watching, hiking, and species tracking. How do these campaigns enact in local communities a new kind of Islamic ethics regarding animals and, in general, nature? Drawing on ethnographic research with villagers, hunting clubs, and environmental activists, this paper explores these and other questions to better understand how the environmental imaginary of the hima revival movement is plotted and enacted on the ground. In so doing, it engages with larger questions about the production of space and place; the entangledness of conservation and development; and the history of environment and land use in the Middle East.