We live in a world of ever-increasing precarity. Given the rise in global populist movements, ever-expanding surveillance and security regimes, and the effects of advanced neoliberal capitalism, are the aspirations of inclusive and responsive governance becoming less attainable to communities and individuals who seek access to rights and wellbeing? This question is particularly relevant in the context of the Middle East, where grassroots movements calling for democratic participation and religious and ethnic pluralism have provided openings for both change and retrenchment. As people move across borders to secure livelihoods, protest for better living and working conditions, continue practices of communal cultivation, and seek to ground themselves more firmly in place, illiberal and repressive assemblages of governance exacerbate existing situations of precarity and produce new ones. Bringing together discussions of precarity focused on uncertain relations of employment, urban housing, and precarity in small-scale agricultural production, this panel examines the unequal distribution of risk and potential for further deterioration of conditions for precariously situated lives in the MENA region. In distinction to the how scholars in the US have been concerned about the expansion of American universities into “illiberal” contexts like the Gulf Arab states, our first paper explores how university structures utilize illiberalism as an alibi to further neoliberal practices that increase employee precarity. Our second paper examines how residents of the informal neighborhood of Ezbet Khairallah have faced repeated attempts to displace them from their prime location near downtown Cairo, and shows the work that residents have done to remain embedded in place by focusing on a longstanding land tenure case. In Turkey, small farmers are responding to legislative restrictions on preserving traditional varieties’ seeds and are forming new communities of seed and knowledge exchange. Our third paper elucidates how claims of food justice and sovereignty, rooted in the stories that seeds tell, are intersected with classed power differentials in Turkey. Our fourth paper draws on ethnographic research in the United Arab Emirates to consider how oil company practices shield corporations from risk and also displace this risk onto Indian migrant laborers. Together, these papers examine the ways in which precarity brings to the fore the embodied experience of those living in structural conditions of vulnerability and asks for an accounting of transhistorical projects to build coherent and dignified lives, and for an investigation into the kinds of novel politics that contemporary assemblages of illiberal governance might make possible.
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Ms. Tessa Farmer
Egypt has long been described as an illiberal democracy, in which the process of ballot-box electoralism is either loosely or inversely related to both structural frameworks for administrative enfranchisement and spheres for public debate (Blaydes 2011; Zakaria 1997). However, during the previous regime of Hosni Mubarak public discourses about citizens’ welfare did in fact create possibilities for the amelioration of some key public health issues, such as the extension of sanitation infrastructure (Arefin 2019). Under the current regime of Abdel Fatah el-Sisi that possibility has diminished, with active processes to recapture state-claimed resources that had been tentatively settled in the public favor under Mubarak’s regime, especially in terms of land tenure (Michaelson 2017; Sims 2016). This paper examines the history of land tenure claims in Ezbet Khairallah, one of Cairo’s largest informal settlements, as an exemplar of how communities negotiate precarity in the context of shifting illiberal regimes (governmental, economic, and infrastructural) and at a variety of scales (nation-state, municipal). It does so though looking at a longstanding court case brought by residents of the area to secure tenure and the ways in which that process has intersected with the expansion of potable water and wastewater networks. Beginning with collective work by residents to build stable housing in the area and to halt repeated attempts to evict them, going through the 1999 decision by the supreme administrative court that the Governate of Cairo must sell them the land, and on to the still in progress extensions of multiple Governate-run utility networks, the paper examines the ways in which residents of the area work in formal and informal ways to gain recognition and stability for their neighborhood.
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Dr. Neha Vora
Critics in the US have attributed academic precarity within Gulf branch campuses to illiberal and authoritarian states and their non-transparent and uneven treatment of foreigners. In my research in Education City, Qatar, I found that actors within the branch campuses reinforced these ideas by suggesting the Qatari state had the ultimate authority over employment. In this paper, I explore how these narratives obscured the logics that animated the American university’s neoliberal and imperial motivations. Home campuses operated as corporate entities in the Gulf, engaged in limited liability agreements with the Qatar Foundation. But their agreements clearly outlined that the American university, through its branch campus, was directly responsible for the everyday management of all faculty and staff, including their termination; it was also responsible for setting curricula, admitting students, and community outreach. As with most business partnerships in the Gulf, the non-citizen owner of the American branch campus was the on-the-ground kafeel (sponsor) that produced the conditions of precarity and exploitation, often for compatriots, that direct state sponsorship would likely have prevented or at least dampened, according to the very migrant rights activists who criticize projects like Education City and NYU Abu Dhabi. Treating migrant labor as a category that did not include all of the employees of Education City allowed branch campuses to take a problem endemic to all levels of the academy and pass it off as the product of a supposedly illiberal state. With operating costs, consulting fees, and incentives coming directly from Qatar Foundation, branch campuses could have ensured much better working conditions and job security across the board. There are however profits to be gained for them in not doing so, ones that resonate quite well with home campus systems, such as the growth in adjunct labor, the reliance on international student tuition, and longstanding entanglements between the academy, the state, the private sector, and imperial interests.
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Dr. Caterina Scaramelli
In the last two decades, Turkish farmers have variedly adapted to and rebelled against new seed laws and agricultural restructuring. A series of legislative measures has disincentivized, seed-saving — farmers’ practices of selecting choice seeds after the harvest to be used for the following planting season. Seeds that are not registered commercial varieties or hybrid cultivars can no longer be sold on the market. Further, farmers cannot receive agricultural subsidies and incentives for fields planted with heirloom vegetable varieties. While larger industrial farmers and private seed breeding companies have benefited from these changes, many farmers have been marginalized in the process. The rapid disappearance of regional varieties of vegetables, herbs, and fruit mirrors the global loss of two thirds of existing agro-biodiversity. But seeds always carry stories with them, as several anthropologists have recently argued. This paper analyzes how non-registered seeds, often linked to specific localities, and referred to as “yerel tohumlar” or “atal?k tohum,” travel from farmer to farmer, across long distances, and get re-localized through practices of agricultural care. Outside of university and governmental seed-banks, yerel tohumlar have become a focus of cultural, economic, and political interest. Drawing on my ongoing ethnographic research with two distinct communities – rural migrant smallholders and middle-class “back-to-the-landers” – this paper focuses on the stories that farmers tell about their seeds as they plant, cultivate, and exchange them and, in the process, forge new classed responses to illiberal agricultural regimes.
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Dr. Andrea Wright
In 2010, I conducted ethnographic research at an oil rig construction site in Abu Dhabi, UAE. During this time, an Indian laborer fell from the rig and died. While this tragic event was unique in the course of my research, worker deaths, unfortunately, are not uncommon, and, on average, ten Indian workers died daily in the Arabian Gulf between 2012 and 2018 (Nayak 2018). When discussing the Arabic-speaking Gulf, the precarious conditions of laborers is often attributed to exceptional practices that are unique to the region and that are continued because the wealth garnered from oil rents hampers the development of liberal policies (Davidson 2009; Kamrava 2018; Longva 1997). This focus on oil rents as the source of illiberal labor practices obscures how oil companies actively restructure local governance (Mitchell 2011; Vitalis 2009; Watts 2004). The influence of oil companies is further obfuscated because few comparisons are drawn between oil production sites. As a result, accidents are seen as localized and exceptional events. Such an engagement with accidents during oil production muddies the role that oil companies’ legal and disciplinary practices play in shaping contemporary labor conditions and the ways in which states actively support corporate practices.
In order to understand how oil company practices impact labor conditions and how this situation is not unique to the Arabic-speaking Gulf, this paper compares two oil rigs: the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico and the rig being built in Abu Dhabi. Drawing on ethnographic research and legal documents, this paper examines the commonalities and differences in the deployment of safety standards and contracting at each site. This examination demonstrates how contracting and safety regulations allow for corporations to shield themselves from financial and legal risk. In addition, this analysis highlights how states’ laws and regulatory bodies actively facilitate corporate practices and limit corporate responsibility. The consequence is that risk is displaced onto the most vulnerable workers and their families.
