How is urban capital and profit protected in spaces marked by war, insecurity and violence? In Baghdad, part of the answer lies in the relationship between money, infrastructure and privatised order. In this paper, I argue that: 1) urban development has been facilitated by the turn towards private security provision, filling a vacuum created by ineffective state security practices; and 2) political actors who battle over control of the state and its resources have also developed economic interests that are better served by weaker or even absent state security institutions. I show this co-constitution of urban development, private order and political power by zooming in on the affluent western Baghdad district of Mansour – named after the founder of Baghdad, Abu Ja'far al-Mansour. New investment and construction is today re-anchoring Mansour as an upper middle-class entertainment hub; two glitzy shopping malls have opened in the last four years. The area is also notably home to a number of private security companies, international NGOs, embassies and political parties – sites surrounded by Baghdad’s infamously ubiquitous blast walls. I investigate Mansour’s relative safety in comparison to other parts of Baghdad by unpacking the relationship between capital, politics and space. My research ultimately suggests that the sources of the challenge to state power in and around Baghdad are not sectarian but economic, rooted in the privatisation of security. This paper presents ethnographic data from more than 10 months of doctoral fieldwork in Baghdad, primarily open-ended interviews with business owners and developers, property management personnel, site engineers and private security contractors. Complementing interview findings, my participant observation in malls and restaurants uncovers a striking legal geography of security in and across these spaces, namely how private security personnel and infrastructure sit alongside and even compete with public security institutions like military and police. This in turn raises new questions about the power of the Iraqi state, and who controls law, order and violence within popular urban spaces and across Iraq’s capital city.

Over the last decade, Lebanon has witnessed the burgeoning of an urban social movement. This paper explores the growing influence of discourses focused on ‘the right to the city’, liveability and wellbeing within contemporary activist circles in Lebanon. I argue that for many activists operating in the aftermath of Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005, and the easing of restrictions on public socio-political critique that accompanied it, a turning away from discursively challenging Lebanon’s sectarian-political system, towards a pragmatic focus on the ongoing damage to livability caused by post-civil war development, has come to be seen as a more promising strategy for social change. This shift, I argue, aims to create the conditions for a transcendence of sectarian dispositions by redirecting debate, spinning an extra-sectarian narrative of nationally legible, shared suffering. The initiatives that embody this shift don’t seem primarily concerned with confronting contentious memories, beliefs or ways of being, but with facilitating a conversation about issues that, ostensibly, all citizens and residents of Lebanon are or can be invested in – the hope being that down this alternative discursive road, a new kind of citizen and denizen will emerge and the utility of sectarianism as a mode of meaning making and identity formation will be organically undermined. Drawing on fieldwork in Lebanon amongst two prominent public space-focused advocacy groups, I will narrate attempts at nurturing empathic bonds across sectarian, economic, racialized and gendered boundaries by drawing attention to uncontroversial, solvable public issues that are causes in themselves and a means for exposing governmental corruption and neglect for the majority of Lebanon’s citizens and denizens. These strategies are grounded in knowledge production, gaining trust through expertise, the deployment of facts to cast doubt on the establishment, and the use of in-depth research to understand not just what doesn’t work in Lebanon, but how the things that do work function so that activists can manipulate existing frameworks like the legal system to facilitate incremental change. I argue for understanding this form of urban activism as a move away from the transgressive politics of the traditional Lebanese left, towards a valuing of law and order – recourse to the law and the demand that it be applied fairly become subversive. I will discuss how urban activists are re-articulating what it means to be politically militant, making political what was never thought of as politics, moving beyond deadlocks of class and sect, secularism and religion.

It has been seven years since Egyptians took to the streets and momentarily dismantled the country’s political order. Since then, the Egyptian military machine has re-asserted its authority and the protestors’ calls for political reform and social justice have gone unanswered. However, while the January 25th Revolution has been dismissed as a political “failure,” it has in fact engendered widespread–and ongoing–socio-political transformations outside the realm of “high politics.” In particular, it is responsible for the recent fluorescence of urban revitalization initiatives in Cairo–a remarkable array of sociospatial interventions largely undertaken by professional elites and focused on improving the city and the lives of its residents. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2014-2016, this paper unpacks the repercussions of these initiatives in the neighborhood of Historic Cairo, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This area has long been the object of state and international attention due to its rich architectural heritage, but since 2011, it has witnessed a surge of activity by local groups. In this paper, I narrow in on the work of one such organization–namely, the Cairo Heritage School (CHS), a newly formed association of Egyptian architects, urban planners, and conservationists. In 2016, CHS held a week-long workshop on the “adaptive re-use” of Maq'ad al-Amir Mamy al-Sayfi, a 15th century palace located in the heart of Historic Cairo. The aim of the event, which engaged young professionals from both Egypt and abroad, was to develop innovative plans for the re-use of the building and its environs. Through an analysis of the workshop activities, I demonstrate that the project contributed to the exchange and circulation of Western conceptions of heritage-making, urban space, and adaptive re-use. My paper thus offers insight into how the movement of knowledge and expertise is frequently hitched to the flows of capital associated with so-called globalization. Yet I also illustrate the organization’s struggles to shake free of those flows. In particular, I show that the workshop sought to bring Egyptians from across the socioeconomic spectrum together as a means of forging a kind of trans-class connection. I contend that this endeavor should be understood as part of a broader desire to reconstruct Egyptian civil society, and in so doing, to re-engineer the political landscape–not through direct confrontation with the state but through sociospatial activities aimed at refashioning political subjectivity.

This paper explores the relationship between the urban built environment and local policing arrangements in two Arab cities in Israel. Building on recent work examining the implementation of Combined Municipal Policing (CMP) in the city of Nazareth, it examines common spatial patterns of (in)visibility in Nazareth and Umm el Fahem that have resulted from decades of exclusion, confinement and neglect. Drawing on Ariel Handel’s work on “exclusionary surveillance” (Handel 2010 & 2017), it explores how these patterns of (in)visibility produce distinct “spatial regimes of power” that test, challenge and disrupt prevailing systems of ethnocratic control. In so doing, this paper seeks not only to draw attention to the local specificities of the Arab urban built environment in Israel but to develop a critique of prevailing approaches to the study of surveillance which assume, or centralise, the omnipotent, omniscient, panoptic power of the state. Ultimately, this work develops a broader interest in the latent and immanent political agency, or potency, of the Arab city to talk back to, and with, power.

As the Syrian government, with Russian and Iranian military assistance, consolidates power over territory under its control, questions of urban reconstruction come to the forefront, highlighting a common dilemma: How might reconstruction contribute not only to the securing of state power, but also to the rebuilding of the social fabric and the consolidation of civil society institutions? Drawing upon media reports and letters published by Raqqawi journalists, this paper explores this question through the case of the now devastated city of Raqqa. Raqqa freed itself from the Syrian government with the aid of the Free Syrian Army (ASL) and Salafi groups associated with Jabhat al-Nusra in March 2013. During the subsequent three months, a local council administered the city. It included representatives of civil society organizations and the youth movements Haqquna and Rashid’s Grandchildren. Together they proclaimed Raqqa “Capital of the Revolution.” These citizen groups cleaned the streets, distributed bread in the poorest areas of the city, and cared for the internally displaced. But this period of autonomy and empowerment was short lived. By April 2013, members of ISIS were infiltrating the city. Despite opposition from local civil society organizations and the council (which called upon the FSA to intervene on their behalf) ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra consolidated control of the city through a campaign of intimidation and assassination. Today, three quarters of the city are destroyed, and 450,000 inhabitants now live in camps, their return hindered, not least, by tens of thousands of landmines. Challenges of internal governance obstruct any steps toward effective reconstruction since two rival civilian councils now claim authority over the city. The first formed in May 2016 by members of the teachers’ union and supporters of the ASL in Gazientep, Turkey, where the Syrian transitional government is based. The other was created in April 2017 in the Ain Issa camp by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF, and is supported by the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which includes Kurds. The latter council lacks popular support, as it endorses a plan to integrate Raqqa into "Rojava," a Kurdish region that extends north east of Syria. Municipal elections will be held in Raqqa and the camps in May 2018. USAID has started supporting the reconstruction efforts led by the Kurds, and this before Salafist forces can regain control of Raqqa.