Morocco’s cities have changed spectacularly over the past three decades. They are now the showcases of a modern kingdom that presents itself as an exception of stability and free market reform in the region. In this paper, I want to look behind this inviting narrative of cosmopolitanism and liberalization to reveal the political project(s) behind Morocco’s urban transformation and the making of a new political world that is shaped by and, at the same time, produces contemporary forms of globalization. More specifically, this paper looks at the interrelation between megaprojects reshaping urban skylines and promising economic growth, slum upgrading projects reconfiguring the social question and the question of urban government and globalized class agency. Morocco’s cities have become urban laboratories for the development of new strategies of capital accumulation and dispossession, new modalities of government, control and domination. The paper shows the interconnectedness of global capitalism and local places like Casablanca and Rabat and argues that the political result is not so much less authoritarianism, let alone some kind of gradual democratization, but authoritarian government with a different face. Consequently, the making of a new political world in Morocco, and the Arab region more generally, has been determined not only by “the regime” or by domestic state– society relations but also, and increasingly, by interests and interventions related to global capitalism. In other words, through an urban lens we can understand how authoritarian government in Morocco has become, in many ways, a more globalized affair.

This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of the significance of the role that international aid organizations and the United States played in housing provision and urban planning during the Cold War in Lebanon, and as the country geared up to the 1958 uprising followed by a fifteen-year civil year war (1975-1990). It does so by tracing the tenuous relationship between development and planning discourses, and highlighting the corresponding shifts in approaches to housing provision and ordering of territories. This paper illustrates how these shifts in logic coincided with global moments of anxiety around communism, and later, political Islam. It also shows how eventually spatial practices were eventually transformed through militias’ and religious-political organizations’ spatial interventions into a collection of innovative design and planning exercises aimed at balancing the spatiality of a sectarian order. It highlights how this shift in the approach of planning from the quests and questions of development centered on issues of poverty to an exercise in spatializing sectarian difference changed the discourse around Beirut’s southern peripheries from that of informal and poor peripheries to sectarian frontiers. The paper illustrates how this reformulation of the political consciousness vis-à-vis the periphery, its economy, marginality, and inhabitants has had major repercussions on poverty, segregation, violence, and environmental degradation.

Space features variously in the literature on social movements. It appears both as the site, scale or “field” within which struggles unfold, and as a metaphorical arena within which we attribute meaning to those struggles. Rarely, however, is the materiality of space itself considered a constitutive stake of political struggle. How do social movements inscribe their claims into the world? How do they inscribe the world into their claims? And how do they reassemble the elements of geography to create a world within which their claims might be made intelligible and effective—spaces within which their facts or claims might survive? Such questions suggest the ways in which the work of social movements intersects with that of engineers, tour operators, planners, farmers, archeologists, environmentalists and many others. They also call attention to the agency of artifacts, infrastructures and technologies—ranging from industrial plant, agricultural systems and built heritage, to the catalogues that assemble the global geographies of tourism and leisure—in the production of the spaces within social movements act, seeking to give traction to particular political claims. Drawing on evidence from Jordan and Palestine, this paper situates social movements within the place-making (and deeply intertwined) geographies of colonialism and commodification, suggesting how they mobilize elements of the material world to establish alternative relations of power, economy and significance, and counter geographies of possibility.

Knowledge production cannot be seen outside the larger power relations that inform the geopolitical interactions between the MENA-region and influential centers of learning. The hegemony of Western, mostly Anglo-Saxon, academia in building theories, setting research agendas and conceptualizing political life in the MENA-region creates in a sense the object of study called the Middle East and North Africa. Nugent (2010) already established how in the US the state and corporation have had an unusual interest in the knowledge produced by social scientists showing the collusion between geopolitical interest and social science production. The development of a global regime of knowledge production and the circulation of that knowledge within the social sciences – while clearly meant as a de-colonizing experiment – are actually sustaining and reproducing power hierarchies within the construction and dissemination of knowledge. While there has been ample research on how modernization studies or area-studies have been linked to Western political agendas, this paper wants to address the issue of knowledge production from a more relational and geographical viewpoint. More specifically the paper raises the question to what extent the Arab Uprisings have entailed alternative modes of knowledge production in and about the Arab region and whether these alternative approaches potentially signal an epistemological decolonization of the region. This paper is focused on the way academic publications have perceived the Arab uprisings and the ways in which they are portrayed in scientific discourse. We will address both the content of academic journal articles on the Arab uprisings, as well as analyze (through network and citation analysis) who produces the knowledge and who frames the scholarly debate.

As Palestinian industry decreases in scope for reasons related to the intertwined imperatives of occupation and global political economy, new economic and social geographies are emerging between the West Bank and China. Although there have been no formal studies to date, there is plenty of anecdotal data. News reports describe family businesses destroyed by "cheap Chinese imports" and bemoan the lack of production, especially of heritage items like the kuffieh. A Palestinian importer spends half his year abroad-at first it was uncomfortable, but now there are many Arabs, "translators, and Syrian and Lebanese food." Another made Mandarin business cards. A 2008 New York Times piece describes Yiwu, "a buzzing trading spot thanks to the influx of Middle Eastern money…a hub for selling made-in-China Arabic products, like fashion clothing and religious artifacts." I have heard that "anyone with a few thousand dollars can get a visa to import a container." It is apparently harder in Ramallah to find stuffed neck, a fairly Hebron-specific dish, than when walking the "streets and streets" of Arab businesses "in China." There is a joke about an importer's pivot, innovation, and attentiveness to his context: finding himself with a container filled with too-big brassieres, he cut them up and made huge profits in the kippah market. Based on early-stage field research in Ramallah and Hebron, and in Beijing, Yiwu, and Guangzhou, I elaborate some of these links, and the relational geographies being produced. In particular, I am interested in how the global political economy touches the ground in Palestine, and what it has to do with occupation. These ties are often individual, questions of representation and conception-West Bank Palestinians understand China as a symbol for aspiration, while diaspora Palestinians in China, many of whom have never set foot in Palestine, see economics as part of a project to aid Palestine and enhance Palestinian identity in China. But there are also political, structural, and historical questions. How is it that Palestinians typically operating under severe mobility restrictions are being granted permits to travel? In what ways do occupation restrictions operate on particular forms of economic practice, through VAT, logistics, standardization, in addition to practical military prerogative? And given the worldwide shifts indicated by the historical movement from Bandung to neoliberalism, Maoism to "capitalism with Chinese characteristics," and from the PLO to the PA, what does it mean that such south-south ties are logically coherent today?