Immediately after being established in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran sought to reconfigure city spaces to reflect an Islamic public order. Gender segregation was one of the spatial strategies adopted by the state in order to Islamize the city along the gender lines. Sports stadiums were among the first spaces that became gender segregated. Not only were men and women assigned to different sport spaces, but also women were banned from attending men’s (national) sports matches as spectators. Over the past three decades, however, this ban has been challenged on multiple occasions. This paper focuses on one particular site: Azadi Sports Stadium, the national sports complex located in Tehran. This paper offers a historical narrative about the ban and examines the different historical moments in which the ban on women became a “national” problem offering a space for contestation between the Iranian state and multiple parties both at the domestic level (i.e women, clerics) and at the international level (i.e FIFA, AFC). The chronicle demonstrates how, during the past three decades, the stadium has been mobilized as a site for both celebrating and challenging the nation as an all-encompassing entity. The paper offers an account of the different kinds of strategies adopted by various groups to either transgress or reinforce the spatial boundaries drawn by the state. It highlights how each group mobilized the terms of gender, “national” politics and religion to promote or oppose women’s right of entry to sports stadiums.

Scholars challenging the assumption that having a right equals having access to that right, approach rights as subject positions of individuals, where performances of rights contribute to configuration of relationships and institutional arrangements. Similarly, in this paper I assert that rights are not legally given but have to be performed in the "judicial space" of the courtrooms. Specifically, I examine the performance of the right to freedom of expression in Turkey through the legal performance within three court spaces that occur within three judicial systems over three decades. Subsequent to a coup d’état in 1980, martial law was declared in Turkey, and the military courts took on the role of the civilian judicial system. Journalists and intellectuals were severely suppressed during the military rule, and were judged at these military courts. Upon gradual reintroduction of democratic procedures between 1984 and 2001, a new system of criminal courts with jurisdiction over crimes against the state, namely the State Security Courts (SSCs), replaced the military courts. SSCs became a parallel legal system, existing side by side with the ‘normal’ legal system. In this period the suppression of journalists and intellectuals continued, as Turkey became the country with the highest number of incarcerated journalists in the world in 1996. With the consolidation of the institutional framework of democracy during European Union accession negotiations between 1999 and 2005, SSCs were abolished, creating the expectation to have more room for peaceful challenges against the official ideology. However, in 2012 Turkey once again became the country with the highest number of imprisoned journalists. In this paper, I analyze one court case from each of the three afore mentioned periods, namely the case of the ‘Petition by Intellectuals’ from 1983, the case of “The book of Freedom to Thought” from 1995, and the case of the book “Imam’s Army” from 2010. Each of these cases has been turned into acts of civil disobedience by the parties involved. Examining these three court cases and the struggles that surround them, I approach the courtrooms as "judicial space"s of negotiation over the limits of freedom of expression. By demonstrating the continuities in the spatial performances of both the state and the rights since 1980, I argue that the normalization of military judicial space into civilian judicial space accounts for the continuity in the restrictive limits of freedom of expression in Turkey.

The fact that online protests and offline protests are undertaken in different spaces -in the virtual space of the internet and in the physical spaces of the street- does not mean that the two are completely distinct. Indeed, they are both related to the broader context of participatory opportunities and constraints that are a function of state repression in non-democratic societies. This study examines how the dynamics of state repression shape the spaces of possible public activism, and influence individuals’ motives to participate in online protests, offline protests or both. In the heat of the Iran’s Green Movement in 2009, the striking share of mobilization attempts and protests were undertaken in physical spaces, and the internet was employed by the dissidents to support offline events. However, when activism in the physical spaces was severely repressed and the cycle of public street protests declined, offline protest and mobilization activities were gradually transferred to online space and converted to online activities. Dissidents found the internet to be not only a safe haven of communication, but a new space in which to forge their values and beliefs (ideology), establish shared identities through new social ties (networks), and calculate the cost and benefits of protest and group/individual action (efficacy). In fact, the form and amount of activities on the internet has been changed by the level of offline state repression: offline activity was not simply transferred online; online activity created a new online space, including expanding across national borders and geographical locations. Based on the unique data from three waves of online surveys and a number of qualitative interviews with online activists, this study compares the changes in the online activities undertaken by dissidents, dissidents’ participation motives, and perceived repression. The findings enhance our knowledge about the use of online space to influence politics under circumstances of severe repression, and the possibilities for continuing expansion of spaces of political participation even when the state exerts prohibitive control of offline physical spaces and opportunities.

Building on Henri Lefebvre’s identification of space as the “conceived’, “perceived”, and “experienced,” this paper develops a space-agency framework for understanding the contingent praxis of successive regimes of power in dealing with the concepts of public protest, surveillance, and control in Tahrir Square since the 2011 uprising. Tahrir Square has been considered to be the central example of popular celebrations for liberating space and transgressing beyond the socially constructed walls of divided communities, whether under Mubarak’s or other’s dictatorial regimes. However, soon after the revolutionary “liberation” of the square, cement walls were built to contain revolutionaries inside the once-liberated space, making it again a spatial prison for insurgents. Under the new regime of the Muslim Brotherhood, once also part of the opposition, this public enclosure is open for people to leave, but remains a space of surveillance, while potential actors get arrested in the bordering streets and alleys. The fluid exchange among roles and actors since the revolution can be discerned in the space, as Mubarak government remnants join the opposition revolutionaries to protest in Tahrir against the new regime of power. This paper problematizes the boundaries among competing claims to Tahrir, tracing how the same actors, Mubarak/ Muslim Brotherhood, who continuously change political and spatial position contradictorily superimpose them. It is in these processes of de- and re- walling that the singular space of Tahrir exhibits the inherent contradictions among multiple claims to political and spatial control, and the tactics people continue to generate to resist these walls and the technologies of power they represent.

Scholars in Middle Eastern studies interpret Rifa’a Rafi’ al-Tahtawi’s travelogue An Imam in Paris as a work that documents the Arab view of the West as unfamiliar other, which sowed the seeds for modern Arab nationalist identity. I wish to undermine this interpretation by focusing on a section of Tahtawi's work hitherto unexamined, its epilogue, in which Tahtawi emphasizes that Arabs are more similar to French than to Turks. I argue that this claim, once historically contextualized, could signify a defensive, almost reflexive counter-reaction against a French mindset that homogenized the entire Middle East as a completely Turkified bloc. Building upon various 19th century primary French sources that reflected the French views on Egyptian students in Paris that included Tahtawi, such as newspaper articles and Gustave Flaubert’s letters, the paper demonstrates that Tahtawi confronted the menace of becoming shoehorned by the French into a monolithic Turkish identity, while key French figures that became actively involved in Muhammad Ali’s reforms, such as François Jomard who supervised Tahtawi's studies, brought to Egypt a repertoire of stereotypical codifications for Turks, projecting them as the savages that Arabs cannot afford emulating in their march towards civilization. Hence, Tahtawi sharpens the difference between Turks and Arabs in his epilogue, eventually seeking to create a narrative of the Middle East that does not centralize Turk or Ottoman. I also argue that it is no mere coincidence that Tahtawi writes about gender in his epilogue, since the discrepancies in gender roles seem the main obstacle against locating any point of reconciliation for the French and the Arabs. He claims that Arab and French women are not as different as we think, since the Arabs could find in the French a mirror image that reminds themselves of their ideal of manhood in an oppressive Turkish milieu that was adamant to eradicate it. Such an analysis points to the necessity of a revised understanding of Arab nationalism enriched by works that dialogize Turkish and Arabic studies in Middle Eastern scholarship, whose almost exclusive focus on the relations between the homogenized blocs of East and West eclipsed our understanding of the multi-layered intra-Middle Eastern interactions.