During the summer of 2015, Suriçi, the ancient city center of Diyarbakır, the largest Kurdish city in Northern Kurdistan/southeast Turkey, became the epicenter of urban war between the Turkish state and the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H), a Kurdish youth organization allied with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The United Nations documented that military engagements involving heavy weaponry in densely populated areas resulted in numerous casualties, instances of torture, violence against women, mass displacements, disappearances, and the destruction of homes and cultural landmarks. Following the conflict, instead of facilitating the return of residents, the Justice and Development Party (JDP) government prioritized building up the district's tourism potential as a crucial component of its security strategy post-urban warfare. This emphasis on tourism development wasn't new, as the historical city center had been targeted for similar urban development initiatives in previous years, notably during the intermittent peace processes of the 2000s. During this period, the JDP government collaborated with municipalities, led by pro-Kurdish political parties, to enact neoliberal urban development projects aimed at transforming Suriçi into a trade and tourism center. Despite ideological disparities, both parties worked together towards this goal. However, progress was halted abruptly in 2014, and the district descended into urban warfare in 2015. Consequently, this prompts the question: What does explain the collaboration between conflicting parties through and over urban development projects in the context of civil wars? Why do urban development efforts fail despite apparent collaboration between national and local institutions? To answer, I draw on the 11-months-long multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in 2022-2023 encompassing three districts of Diyarbakır, including Suriçi, the buffer zone for the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Diyarbakır Fortress and Hevsel Gardens Cultural Landscape, as well as Kayapınar and Bağlar. As such, I argue that although the JDP government and Kurdish municipalities collaborated due to their shared economic vision to transform the district into a hub for trade and tourism; expert activists in the city leveraged the heritage value of the place to prevent top-down gentrification projects that targeted spatial and demographic configuration of the place. In doing so, I employ a critical interpretivist approach to discern the mechanisms that produce and (re)shape urban development plans on the ground by paying specific attention to the dynamics of civil war in Northern Kurdistan.

Exceptional modes of government have been one of the durable characteristics of the Turkish Republic since its foundation. Not only its history has been marked by periodic nationwide or regional emergency decisions under civilian or military governments but the logic of emergency has long shaped the ordinary functioning of its legal-administrative order as well. Consequently, the violent curtailment of civil and political rights by such measures have been formative of the state-society relations and the intermediating citizenship regime that the republic engendered. This paper explores how Turkish state has governed informal urbanization since the 1940s to reveal the constitutive role of a different kind of politics of exceptions in the formation of state-society relations that diverged from the aforementioned “Schmittian” modality. I argue that state’s use of legal exceptions to property and zoning laws from early on has been central to its capacity to generate popular consent for its rule by turning legal transgressions into semi or full property ownership in discretionary, fragmented, and uneven ways. From the vantage point of the property law, Turkish state appears flexible and accommodating in its relations with the popular sectors and produces a mode of power relationship defined more by governmentality than sovereign impositions. Studying governance of urban land, therefore, reveal an under the radar and murkier realm of governmental interventions that distribute resources to ordinary citizens within a modality of exceptions, ultimately detrimental for the development of democratic citizenship. AKP’s politics of urban renewal appeared to mark a discontinuity with these entrenched patterns by redeploying legal politics of enforcement and exceptions for a massive transfer of urban property to urban growth coalitions, commonly justified by the emergency discourse of disaster preventions. Nevertheless, the surge of grassroots mobilization in reaction to these projects opened space for insurgent modes of citizenship and the regime’s subsequent attempts to govern these escalating tensions facilitated new set of negotiations over the distribution of property in continuity with earlier patterns. Therefore, even when urban governance appears increasingly Schmittian in its dispossessing instances, it has continued to maintain its flexibility in accommodating diverse array of urban interests by relying on exceptions. The evidence for these arguments come from fieldwork in three neighborhoods in Istanbul, analysis of legal and policy documents, and semi-structured interviews with officials.

The period surrounding the 2011 Egyptian revolution (2009-2014) was significant as a time when neoliberalism and authoritarianism Egypt were challenged but eventually restored in a way that relies on intensified ‘neoliberal authoritarianism’. This paper focuses on struggles around urban tourism during the Egyptian revolutionary period, which contested neoliberal inequalities. These inequalities resulted from three decades of local neoliberal reforms in the context of broader neoliberal globalisation and Egypt’s longer history of evolving authoritarianism (Bogaert 2013). This paper asks the following: how did contestations surrounding urban tourism not only fail to disrupt neoliberalism and authoritarianism in Egypt but also play a pivotal role in shaping this new adaptation of neoliberal authoritarianism? To answer this question, I break with existing approaches to studying 1) the Egyptian revolution and neoliberal authoritarianism and 2) urban tourism. I analyse these issues together through an analytical framework which centres the experiences/practices of those contesting exclusionary neoliberal projects (Bogaert 2018; Montesinos-Coleman 2021). I use this framework to study materials I generated through an ethnographic study of resistance to neoliberal tourism conducted immediately before, during and after the Egyptian revolution (2019-2014) in four critical sites of contestation – the Pyramids of Giza, Khan-al-Khalili Market, Garbage City and Tahrir Square. I identify key aspects of neoliberal tourism revealed through contestations at these four tourism sites during the Egyptian revolution. These include precarity; the transnational reproduction of commodified nationalism; neoliberal environmentalism; and the neoliberal co-optation and domestication of revolutionary practice. Contestations at these tourism sites at the time reveal the workings of neoliberal tourism, helping us understand what neoliberal tourism is – its conditions, outcomes and alternatives possibilities – in the context of how it operates and is negotiated on the ground in Cairo. I look at how these contestations provoked various responses from the Egyptian military and security apparatus, government officials, the news media and tourism industry, which shaped the character of the neoliberal authoritarian regime that followed. In so doing, I offer unique insights into how neoliberal authoritarianism in Egypt is shaped through struggle and was entrenched despite contestations through tourism in Cairo. At a time when authoritarianism in the Global South is on the rise, this paper contributes to understanding how struggles surrounding urban tourism play a significant role in shaping this more neoliberal iteration of authoritarianism in Egypt, a process that entrenches coloniality through practices of racialised dispossession and cultural extraction (Axster et al. 2021).

In this paper, argue for de-exceptionalizing the Arab Gulf via materialist, Marxist analysis. My argument is two-fold. First, drawing upon a Marxist theory of class struggle, I argue that the story of class struggle and anticapitalism in the Gulf shows most strikingly how unexceptional the Gulf is and how patterns of labor exploitation and labor resistance there resonate with the same processes beyond the region. Second, I specify the structural position of the working class in the Gulf and discuss the class and racial legacies of imperialism in shaping current labor regimes. In this way, I challenge the binaries that still stubbornly get applied to the region: the binary between the supposedly “liberal” North and the “illiberal” South; between the “normal” capitalism of the North and the “deviant” capitalism of the South (and the Gulf in particular); and binaries that reify Northern democracy and Southern authoritarianism, extracting both from their larger social and class contexts.

This paper examines a particular line of authoritarian learning that is both domestic and spatial, as opposed to the more mainstream international cross-state dimension. It maintains a top-down perspective of how the Syrian regime operated regarding potential threats of rebellion before and after the uprising of the 1980s. How did the regime restructure both the social make-up of central neighborhoods and manipulate the religious circles and classes traditionally opposed to it? In pursuit of an answer, the study will highlight the socio-spatial conditions for mobilization that were present during the uprising in terms of the built environment and social networks, and how the regime targeted both elements in the following decades. To do so, it will examine the spatial scales of political economy that are intertwined with urban and socio-economic vectors throughout the city. The emphasis will be on neighborhoods in Aleppo that witnessed the highest levels of urban challenge against the regime by the Militant Vanguard and subsequent mobilization the lasted for 6 months in 1980. This learning stands out in comparison with other Arab regimes and its consequences were patent in 2011 as a process of suburbanization of contention took place. That said, the learning happened through a process of trial-and-error and was not complete given issues of capacity. The limits of this learning, just like classic kinds of learning, will be traced. The paper will employ qualitative causal narrative analysis and consult evidence collected from interviews (with activists and politicians from the neighborhoods and networks in question), political memoirs, spatial analysis, census data, and original event datasets on the two rounds of uprisings in 1980 and 2011.