This paper draws on twenty months of observant participation in three bakeries in Amman to explore the role of subsidized bread, and those who make it, in generating the state effect. It asks and seeks to explore if and when the affiliation of ‘more-than-human arrangements’ produce the state as a coherent entity, one whose presence is welcomed just as its absence is deplored. Building on recent explorations of craftwork, this paper begins by dissecting the skills, both cognitive and corporeal, through which practical knowledge of baking is transmitted and developed amongst bread-makers in the Jordanian capital. I forefront dexterities exercised by people to coax and tame a variety of ingredients into a form congenial to human consumption because the stabilizations achieved so frequently conceal the conditions of their own assembly. The paper then turns to a broader consideration of the way governmental practices, such as welfare provision, are enacted. I argue that attempts to capture bread production in statistics and numerical indicators are always partial and uncertain, subject to the whims of fire and dough, yeast and water, or the machinations of a shrewd miller or mischievous bread-maker. Instead, welfare services--and the infrastructures central to their delivery--‘work’ and ‘endure’ through recurring practices of maintenance and repair that entangle humans and non-humans in relations of cohabitation and collaboration. If we wish to understand the routine realization of governmental practices, then we should consider the bodies, components, efforts and exertions upon which all such measures are built. Outcomes and results, which have us enter the fray far too late in the game, are not all that matter; so do the people and things at their heart. Taming materials to make them congenial to the state effect takes a great deal of shrewd manoeuvring. It requires craft.

This paper considers the role of soldiers as statemakers in Iraq’s capital city. It does so by centring the urban checkpoint as the site through which soldiers play an integral role in making the state in Baghdad. Checkpoints are often seen as sites of obstruction, monitoring and surveilling the movement of people and goods. While such practices are critical to the instantiation of the checkpoint and its role in effecting the state, what about the men who carry out these practices? How might their years of checkpoint work and accumulated knowledge help bring about the entity they purportedly represent, the state? Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic research, including two months of participant observation at two state security checkpoints in Baghdad, I zoom in on the personnel who man these security installations. Through their years of service at checkpoints, and their accumulated knowledge watching and probing residents passing through, soldiers have honed and crafted security skills. These skills are hardly coercive at first glance because they have less to do with obvious technical abilities such as weaponry. Instead, in this paper I investigate the social aspects of soldiers’ work that make them statemakers, namely their observations and gestures while interacting with residents, and the conversations and negotiations among and between soldiers on duty. In conflict and post-conflict settings like Baghdad, security personnel at checkpoints are as much bureaucrats as they are soldiers. Checkpoints are ubiquitous, residents are forced to navigate them every day. Soldiers in turn carry out security routines and practices that are far more quotidian and mundane than spectacular or exceptional, in the process accumulating background knowledge, crafting and honing social practices integral to their work and vital to the production of the state. While checkpoints are indeed obstructive, they are also generative of soldiers as statemakers who learn and carry out ‘bureaucraft,’ a collection of practices vital to engendering the state in Baghdad and beyond.

An estimated one million people were displaced during the height of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). The Ta'if Agreement, which brought an end to the fighting, was to address past forced migration and offer return to internally displaced people (IDPs). But more than three decades on, some of the most vulnerable Lebanese communities remain displaced, their plight largely absent from mainstream political and academic discourse. This paper explores the struggle of the last remaining IDPs of East Beirut, Arab Al Maslakh, in their quest to return home. Arab Al Maslakh—or Arabs of the Slaughterhouse—were a nomadic tribe of cattle merchants and traders who settled in the late Ottoman era near Beirut’s slaughterhouse, in an area today known as Karantina. As a predominantly Muslim group, they were displaced to West Beirut in January 1976 following the civil war’s first massacres by Christian militias. In their absence, Karantina hosted the headquarters and training bases of these same militias—sites that were subsequently transferred to the Lebanese Army upon conclusion of the war. Arab Al Maslakh remain displaced from their homes and land, forced to negotiate with a Lebanese state apparatus whose both presence and absence has facilitated and perpetuated their ongoing displacement. The visible spatial presence of the Lebanese Army within Karantina, perhaps counterintuitively, brings into stark relief the absence of a clear state interlocutor for Arab Al Maslakh. Despite years of advocating for a solution, the IDPs grievances remain unmet, their claims left in limbo through state inaction. In this paper, I argue that this inaction helps constitute a larger policy of mass dispossession targeting Lebanon’s most vulnerable. I present findings from 16 months of fieldwork, including from oral histories, archival research, and participant observation. In turn, I show how identitarian divisions intersect with state, space, and displacement, a social-material entanglement that is a lost part of Beirut’s urban history.

This paper aims to historicize the advent of municipal governance in late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine (1870s-1930s) and its material and social effects on its urban centres. Against literature that reads Palestine and the region from the top-down perspective of imperial powers and their influence on local settings, this paper elucidates how local environments and populations shaped processes of urban change and modernisation within an imperial context. The role of municipal institutions in the modern Middle East has been greatly overlooked in historical and recent scholarship. This lacuna is partly because municipalities fit neither ‘Islamic city’ nor ‘colonial city’ frameworks that dominate the historiographies of Middle Eastern cities in this period. Through my close examination of the establishment and activities of the municipalities of Jaffa and Nablus, I demonstrate that these chiefly locally-run institutions were the primary platforms for financing, planning, and executing most of the urban development projects often attributed to the Ottoman and British Mandate ‘states’ ruling Palestine at the time. Through my examination of municipal projects—planned, implemented, and failed—I argue that municipalisation amounted to more than simply the creation of a new bureaucratic institution that carried out technical and administrative work in the cities. Municipalisation opened up new spheres of public involvement in urban affairs and new arenas for political participation. I examine municipal elections, debates in Arabic newspapers, and petitions by local residents regarding urban affairs as the principal sites where these new possibilities materialised. My paper thus reframes local residents not as passive urban subjects of imperial and colonial rule, but as active participants in governance processes. My paper draws on two kinds of sources: an analysis of the built environment, and archival materials. In the first vein, I read the wealth of buildings and urban plans as a material history. This approach allows for analysing them as meaningful expressions of their historical moment, and as bearers of social, political, and cultural meaning. In the second vein, I look at material shifts beyond their physical manifestations and consider their underlying processes of change. For this, I rely on extensive archival research I conducted over four years in archives in Palestine/Israel and in Europe, and investigate historical materials on the conception, planning, and execution of municipal projects in modern Palestine.