In the course of the present Syrian revolution, Syria’s third largest city, Homs, gained notoriety as the capital of the revolution—first as the site of sustained, peaceful protest and later as the site of intense violence running along largely sectarian lines. Before either of these narratives became the animating theme of the revolution in Homs, thousands of Homsis gathered in the city’s central square in March 2011 to demand a number of reforms. One of their demands stands out in comparison with those made in other Syrian cities: the sacking of their governor, Ayad Ghazal. Local politics—from the sectarian tensions underlying long run rural-urban migration patterns, to the unequal provision of public services, to the forced displacement of thousands for the governor’s pet development project, the ‘Homs Dream’—figured largely into Homsis’ mobilization and the content of their demands. The sectarian violence into which the city descended has a local character as well, often pitting neighbor against neighbor. The paper concentrates on the first year of the Syrian revolution and explores the extent to which the distribution of populations across space structures contentious processes in the city: How has the spatial proximity of different groups, whether ethnic, occupational or income-based, shaped the course of the revolution in Homs? What is the role of the state, both in shaping long run settlement patterns and channeling interactions during the conflict? More fundamentally, how do identifications with existing social groups drive sorting of populations across space, and does spatial dispersion, in turn, give rise to new identifications? The paper employs a mixed-methods approach. First, it uses event history analysis to understand the broad patterning of contention within the city and relate it structural factors like income, timing of settlement, tribal linkages and ethnicity. It proceeds, drawing interview and documentary sources, to explicate the historical background and divergent revolutionary trajectories of two neighborhoods: al-Waer and Baba Amr. The former is a planned suburb that remained relatively isolated from protest or violence in the time period under study. The latter is an informal settlement that the governorate tried to dismantle in the late 2000s; it witnessed intense violence from an early point in the uprising (The residents of both neighborhoods are overwhelmingly Sunni Arab.). The paper argues that class and ethnic politics intersect in the sorting of peoples across physical space and the struggle for control of those spaces.

The historiography of modern Iran disagrees on nearly everything except one social fact: 1979 was the year zero that cleaved the country into two distinct historical periods and social-ideological formations. Yet in both a symbolic and material sense, the Islamic Republic rests on the uneasy foundations of the Pahlavi Monarchy. This paper will propose one mechanism through which the Islamic Republic's unexpected longevity emerged from its predecessor's politics: the after effects of the Shah's land reform policies of the 1960s-70s in the post-79 era. Drawing from anthropological and historical sources as well as my own ethnographic work, I argue that a significant segment of the Iranian peasantry took advantage of the unsettled property rights regime of the 1980s-1990s. If the Shah's land reform enlarged a middle peasantry, the 1979 revolution and its aftermath provided new avenues for these peasants to capitalize on the country’s refashioned political economy - in some cases, literally. They did this not solely through peasant production for the market but also land pooling and speculation concomitant with urbanization. In this sense, the relatively persistent pattern of low inequality in Iran – far less than middle-income countries in Latin America, for instance – can be partly traced back to the long-term effects of land reform under the Monarchy. Land claims and tenure operated as a rural subsidy to household livelihoods. This paper examines the provinces of Fars, Mazandaran, and Khorasan to show the variation in state formation in the Islamic Republic and the actually existing social contract which emerged. In each case, provincial elite politics as well as center-periphery relations played a key role in determining the ability of peasants to capitalize on land reform. In addition, the agrarian structure of each region shaped the bargaining power of peasants in the post-revolutionary era. The paper concludes with a research program aiming to re-theorize provincial politics in Iran over the 20th century.

Residents and Municipalities: Renegotiating Political Space and Public Goods in Cairo How do particular neighborhoods of a city develop an identity and a sense of their centrality to the city? In Cairo, where large swaths of the city have been settled within three decades while other neighborhoods are centuries old, how do residents from newer, informal areas understand their place in the city, demand representation, and negotiate their fair share of public resources? This paper examines how municipal level governance during the Mubarak era and the larger centralized government constrained the emergence of a residential identity as local district councils managed and secured neighborhoods, rather than building community and engagement. At the same time, it will examine how mobilization at the local level over the distribution of public goods and services and new demands for representative government following the 2011 Egyptian uprising, may be contributing to a more defined residential identity for Cairenes. The paper will explore the ways in which local popular committees, formed after the revolution, and other collective actors are trying to broaden the possibilities for representation and participation through residential solidarities. It will examine the former and current system of local administration in Cairo at the district level to understand patterns of negotiation and political engagement between residents and local district managers and local councils. How has the design of local government, as a result of constitutional and executive policies emanating from the national government and new, more activist, political sensibilities at the local level, built a more residential identity—stratified as it may be. Theoretically, this paper will engage scholars who theorize about participatory governance, Lefevbrian ideals of “The Right to the City,” and local democracy at the municipal level.

Urbanity of Insurrection: Space and Politics in the Middle Eastern Cities Recent uprisings in the Middle East ranging from the 2009 Green Movement to the Arab revolutions and Gezy protests all took shape in the urban spaces. The paper analyzes what are in the Middle Eastern cities that render them politically contentious; and why certain urban spaces are more prone to mobilization and street politics than others. The analysis draws on field studies of the cities of Tehran, Cairo, and Tunis that have seen widespread contentions in recent years. I will argue that urbanity generates particular needs (such as dependence on cash, collective consumption, urban jobs), and, at the same time, greater possibilities for forging urban subjectivity, collective identities and solidarities, which altogether may facilitate collective action. This paradoxical urbanity has become more pronounced in Middle Eastern cities because of their particular histories shaped by post-colonial project of uneven modernization that has fostered societal change but maintain political status quo, instigates social modernization but govern through authoritarian polity.

The paper proceeds to focus on one crucial way in which web 2.0 technologies have come to operate in Syria. Displacing an outmoded, brittle Ba`thist party rhetoric with increasingly sophisticated modes of ideological reproduction in the first decade of Bashar al-Asad’s rule, the regime has been able, in the course of the uprising, to counter human rights activists’ and citizen journalists’ efforts to document “the truth” by putting forth its own evidence—no more obviously believable than the opposition’s—which nevertheless serves to sow doubt about what is actually going on. The regime has successfully raised questions about the nature of evidence, the credibility of countervailing knowledge, and the comfort offered by familiar falsehoods as compared to the unknown. This element of doubt, frequently reinforced by an inexperienced, conflict-ridden opposition, has been crucial to the regime’s efforts at retrenchment. Competing images, rumors, conspiracy theories, the divisive testimony of “eyewitnesses” have raised questions about whether the political alternatives on offer would spell improvement over the regime, which personalities or sensibilities best represent the opposition, and how the veracity of images circulating could be determined. Here I take as exemplary two moments: 1) the mysterious controversy over who might have murdered the well-known singer Ibrahim Qashshush, or indeed if he was killed at all, his deployment as a symbol of oppositional courage, regime brutality, and then, as has lately been alleged, of regime cooptation and the opposition’s revenge—the overall sense of uncertainty that can dilute moral outrage and cause standards of political judgment to come unmoored; 2) the chemical weapons attack in eastern Ghouta, a devastating event, the “evidence” for which has pointed in different directions, animated a global community of politicians, activists, and scientists, and served to polarize those with already firm positions even while regenerating uncertainty (as to accountability) for those who were not so sure. The paper ends with a discussion of Wittgenstein’s analysis of uncertainty, drawing out its relevance for our understanding of politics in the local Syrian as well as more global present. It considers how virtual space matters politically in this information-awash era.