The end of the 17th century was an important turning point for the Ottomans and nomads. I will focus on the Ottoman settlement policy applied to the Kurdish nomads (Ekrâd) and Turkish nomads (Türkmân). I shall use imperial edicts and other archival documents to analyze nomad policies from the end of 17th century to the 18th century. The reasons why the Ottomans began to settle the nomads in this era are as follows: the Kurd and Turkish nomads had hardly been employed as regular troops or auxiliary units during the 16th and 17th centuries. The Ottomans had failed to use them as armies or auxiliary units because they had previously rebelled against the empire and were considered bandits. In addition, some imperial edicts show that the Ottomans began to consider the nomadic seasonal migration as troublesome and disastrous in contrast to the precedents at this time. The Ottomans utilized the settlement order to Raqqah Prefecture and northern Syria as punishment for troublesome tribes. The Ottomans initially made them settle places other than northern Syria. Then the Ottomans gradually began to order all troublesome tribes to settle into northern Syria. The Ottoman government persisted to make the Turkish and Kurdish tribes settle into the places where they were initially ordered to settle. When they fled from these places, the government ordered them to re-settle to the same places. Because of this, many tribes who were ordered to settle the northern Syria became bandits. Thus, the social order in northern Syria and other places was disturbed. Additionally, their migration and escape from the northern Syria to other places influenced the population composition in Anatolia until now. To conclude, the Kurdish and Turkish nomads in Anatolia failed to adhere to Ottomans demands from the end of 17th to 18th centuries. Thus, the Ottomans forced a settlement policy on them.

Conflicts involving sheep-breeding in an agricultural district: Gebze in the mid-1700s Documents on sheep-breeding in the Ottoman world often concern the supply of animals for the slaughterhouses of Istanbul; presumably this concern is also a backdrop for for the documents studied here. But from the local peasants’ viewpoint, other issues were more immediately significant: above all, they needed to safeguard their pasture rights vis à vis nomads and semi-nomads on the one hand, and against sheep-breeding farms working for the Palace (miri mandıra) or members of the elite on the other. In addition fellow villagers might cause conflicts as they might wish to plough up rough pasture to transform it into fields. Access to pastureland – and the dues payable for access -- were thus a frequent bone of contention. Whatever information emerges on sheep-breeding practices is incidental to this set of conflicts. As for the administration, the ‘ancient registers’ (defter-i atik) or compilations detailing settlements, taxes, and tax-takers, which went back to the 1500s and sometimes even the late 1400s, had established a norm from which it was very difficult to deviate, even almost a quarter of a millenium later. This fact appears with special clarity when people tried to change land use: villagers could not set aside land for grazing if the registers did not provide for this need. In a region known for its good-quality pastures such as Gebze, official inflexibility must have made for many unofficial ‘arrangements’, which only entered the records if one of the conflicting parties, usually a tax-taker, decided to take the issue to court or directly to the administration in Istanbul. In this paper, I will try to establish how the parties to the conflict referred to the registers of the 1500s in order to get their way in the changed context of the 1700s. Responding in this manner legitimized complaints and allowed whoever used this form of recourse to put his opponent in the wrong. Peasants sometimes used this strategy; but above all it was the tax-takers who benefited from references to ‘imperial tradition’, which after all served the elite more than it served the subject population.

This paper will discuss boundaries between Muslims and non-Muslims in Ottoman society (17th to early 19th centuries). It will use findings of recent studies on responses to natural disasters to demonstrate that on many levels, social borders between Muslims and non-Muslims were rather loose. Recent studies have shown that the previously prevailing assumption that reactions to natural disasters, and particularly plague, were tied to one’s faith, is no longer valid. That is, Muslims did not entirely refrain from fleeing plague-ridden areas, despite injunctions not to do so found in Islamic plague treatises; and flight was not always an obvious choice for Jews and Christians. The Ottoman state, too, did not usually discriminate against non-Muslims in its allocation of resources when offering post-disaster relief. Because natural calamities happened so often in the Ottoman Empire and were virtually an inseparable part of people’s lifetime experiences, such findings have broader implications for the study of Ottoman society. Combined with new evidence from Ottoman, French, and British archives, Arab chronicles, and Jewish responsa literature, they suggest that Jews and Christians living in the Ottoman Empire were not organized as segregated communities, but rather well integrated into Ottoman society and the Mediterranean commercial scene. Jewish communities, in particular, should be described as fragmented social units that interacted freely in a public sphere that integrated many other groups, and that lacked formal, top-down leadership. Therefore in this paper, which is based on a major ongoing research project, I will argue that Jews and Christians living in Ottoman cities had more in common with Muslims than historians have assumed; and that confessional boundaries, previously believed to have been imposed by the Ottomans and communal leaders, were in fact rather porous and played little part in the daily activities of most Ottomans, Muslim or non-Muslim. This only changed in the mid-nineteenth century with the advent of religious reforms as part of the Tanzimat.

The Sahara is typically represented as a vast space of barren lands, degraded ecologies, and ungoverned territories. Political and literary discourses as well as cartographic representations depicts the Sahara as one monolithic and homogeneous desert that form a 'barrier, bridge, or borderland' on the global scale. These dominant geographical tropes, often betraying a form of environmental orientalism, obfuscate the diverse political ecologies of resource extraction, transnational energy projects and urbanization processes, as well as the ways these projects are implicated in regional and global geopolitics. This paper argues that these different projects of space making are, not only interdependent and constitutive of state power, but more importantly, articulating new formations of power across multiple socio-spatial scales, from the local and regional to the national and global. Therefore, paying due attention to the spatiality and materiality of these projects, we argue, enables a more nuanced understanding of the constitution and the working of political power as well as the production of uneven spatial development. In the context of critical geography, there has been recent calls for ‘provincializing’ theory to account for non-western and postcolonial environmental and urban conditions. This paper will employ an urban political ecology approach to the study of the 'non-urban' hinterlands of the Sahara to examine the multifarious relations between ‘landscapes of energy’ and processes of urbanization across multiple scales, ecological conditions, and sociopolitical formations. Our research focuses on case studies of special economic zones, exploration concessions, socio-technical arrangements, mega-engineering and infrastructural schemes, as well as enclave urban developments. Furthermore, this paper argues that the dominant ‘urban age’ discourse illustrates that “[i]n a world where it has almost become commonplace to talk about power as networked or concentrated, distributed or centralized, even decentred, deterritorialized or radically dispersed, it is all too easy to miss the diverse geographies of power that put us in place.” (Allen, John. Lost Geographies of Power. 2008. 1-2) By employing mappings, diagrams, cartographic representations and historical analyses this paper renders visible the latent territories of power in the seemingly ‘remote’ Sahara. By doing so, the aim is to shift the discussion on power beyond the existing discourses of state sovereignty and rentier states and economies to encompass the territorialized geographies of energy and urbanization as the medium through which power is both constituted and practiced.

Launched immediately after Moroccan independence in 1956, a popular rebellion in the Rif Mountains in the country’s north posed a significant challenge to the ‘Alawi monarchy. After violently suppressing it, the Moroccan state anxiously sought to solidify its control of the rural region, which bordered the country’s agricultural heartland, the Sebou River basin. International assistance was vital to this project. This paper critically examines the role the forestry division of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization played in the unparalleled extension of state power over the Rif. This paper, based on original research conducted at FAO archives, explores the international development organization’s focus on “developing people” in its first two major projects in Morocco. Employing spearhead zones reminiscent of the French protectorate’s tache d’huile approach to rural modernization, FAO and the Moroccan state attempted to transform individual economic behavior as part of a broader strategy of political and economic control. The forestry division aimed to make pastoral populations sedentary by encouraging the plantation of orchards and other trees. Such tree cover was also supposed to reduce the rate of soil erosion, which at times put so much silt in the Sebou River that large plumes of dirt appeared in the Atlantic Ocean at its mouth. As King Hassan II (1961-1999) solidified his rule with the help of wealthy French and Moroccan landowners, the FAO mission shifted toward agricultural improvement in the rich plains to the Rif’s south, and by the end of the 1960s, FAO itself admitted that the Rif project was not successful. The “modest” results of the project notwithstanding, the imposition of an economic development programme on the “difficult” Rif helped the state elaborate its political authority there, an instrument-effect that recalls James Ferguson’s “anti-politics machine.” As the broader infrastructure of international development emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, it often enabled the resurrection of colonial policies in newly independent states; the recruitment of “a lot of expatriate technical experts with a wealth of experience of working in the tropics,” as one FAO forester later put it, facilitated this process. This study of the relationship between FAO foresters, the Moroccan state and the population of the Rif immediately following the end of French colonial rule throws into stark relief the European and colonial approaches to rural control that the post-1945 international development system has perpetuated in Morocco and elsewhere in Africa and Asia.

Protected areas have undergone a powerful and sustained critique that is often preoccupied with the appropriation of lands and the ensuing marginalization of those living in the area. In addressing protected areas these treatments are largely concerned with the demarcation of lands, the loss of access to resources, and the loss of access to lands that provided livelihoods. This paper contributes to the understanding of conflicts and negotiations connected to the loss of access to land by exploring the nuances of these negotiations in connection to the practice of sport hunting in and around the Shouf Biosphere Reserve. This paper is based on months of interviews and participant observation with biosphere personnel, police, politicians, Shouf residents and hunters. In particular this section of the data addresses how hunters feel about not having hunting access to the areas where the reserve has been established. While there is variance in the findings, there are many hunters who do not take issue with the reserve. These findings stand in contrast to much of what is demonstrated in the literature and this paper analyzes why this is so in the case of the Shouf Biosphere reserve. By tracing interviews and participant observation the paper contends that the intersection of hunters’ prey selection and weak state enforcement facilitate a particular situation that reduces the sorts of animosity and conflict often found between protected areas’ administrators and local users.