In 1933, Abu Jilda, a small-time local outlaw from the edge of Palestine’s Jordan Valley, emerged as a nationally- (and internationally-) known bandit figure. He did so through his actions—killing a Palestinian policeman and evading the ensuing manhunt for nearly a year—but especially through media coverage of his exploits, real and imagined. Newspapers gave near daily coverage to Abu Jilda, ranging from dutiful reproductions of police statements to wild speculation, while Abu Jilda himself sent personalized photographs to the press and, supposedly, encouraged them to print his own narrative of events. Abu Jilda also received fictionalized treatments, including an illustrated pamphlet by Palestinian journalist Hilmi Abu Sha‘ban and an issue of the Beirut-based magazine al-Lata’if al-‘Asriyya (Modern Wit). In some circles, Abu Jilda became symbolic of Palestinian defiance to British rule, expressed more fully in a widespread revolt from 1936–39. Contemporaneous and later commentary debated Abu Jilda’s role in setting the stage for the Palestinian uprising: sympathizers placed him alongside ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam, an iconic militant preacher killed by British police in 1935, as men of action who fomented and foreshadowed the 1936 revolt; detractors saw him as a ruffian with no connection to politics. This paper draws on both journalistic and fictionalized accounts of Abu Jilda to ask: how did Palestinians read (in both sense of the word) Abu Jilda’s actions? That is, in what form did they consume his exploits, and how did they understand them in broader context? This paper brings together “fact” and “fiction,” as well as the social, cultural, and political history of Mandate Palestine, to show how a broad narrative of Abu Jilda allowed writers, publishers, and audiences to critique the difficult conditions imposed on rural Palestinians, the perfidy of British authorities, and the inaction of Arab leaders, while expressing ambiguity about lawbreaking, which some sources justified so long as it was motivated by justice, undertaken out of necessity, or distinguished by cleverness. Moreover, it considers how different media—journalistic and literary, visual and written—sought to evoke pride, anger, sympathy, fear, or humor. Though it draws on the abundant scholarship inspired by Eric Hobsbawm’s “social banditry” thesis, this paper is less interested in the “historical” Abu Jilda than on the impact—political, cultural, affective—of his media profile on Palestinian audiences in the lead-up to the 1936 revolt, and the atmosphere that shaped, and was shaped by, its reception.

In Spring 2019, the Office National du Litani (ONL), the Lebanese state agency that manages the Litani River basin, demolished hundreds of informal homes and forcibly relocated thousands of Syrian refugees. In the last decade, the Litani and the reservoir it feeds, Lake Qara‘un, have become notoriously polluted. The river basin is rapidly becoming uninhabitable. The ONL’s Syrian displacement campaign was part of a broader effort to combat what they term “environmental crimes” in the Litani basin, in which they issued hundreds of violation notices to polluting factories, municipalities, and farms. Some civil society groups lauded these efforts for setting an important precedent to hold polluters accountable. But this campaign effectively held accountable only the stakeholding publics of the Litani basin—farmers, businesses, municipalities, and refugees—as environmental criminals, and meted out punishment to the basin’s most vulnerable refugee communities. If the ONL’s environmental management criminalizes the communities of the river basin to protect the Litani River, then who are they protecting the river for? And what exactly is the “environment” the ONL are protecting? This paper is a historical genealogy of “environmental crime” in Lebanon. It demonstrates that the “environment” the ONL protects is a particular arrangement of nature, technology, and political economy that they constructed and sustained, and traces how Lebanese environmental law emerged to manage these kinds of “environmental” spaces. Between 1954–65, the ONL implemented a World Bank project to develop the Litani River. The infrastructure they installed generated hydroelectric power for Beirut by extracting water resources from the communities of the Litani River basin. Since 1965, the ONL has successfully weathered challenges from Litani communities seeking to regain popular sovereignty over the Litani. Only in the last few years—years in which plans have emerged to transmit the Litani to provide drinking water to Beirut and Jabal ‘Amil—has the ONL pivoted to cleaning and protecting the Litani as its core function, using relatively recent laws governing the disposal of public and private lands and waters. The ONL’s efforts to police the Litani basin are consistent with their longer history of monopolizing the river as a natural resource and denying basin communities’ claims to it. The historical constitution of “environmental crime” in Lebanon permits governing institutions like the ONL to avoid accountability for their long-term role in making Lebanon uninhabitable while criminalizing the country’s most vulnerable communities.

As much as the 25th January 2011 Egyptian revolution brought hope and inspiration to large sectors of the population, culminating in the stepping down of Hosni Mubarak who hailed from the military establishment, the defeat of the people’s dream in social justice, freedom and dignity in the period following the revolutionary euphoria was indeed crushing. I argue that this sense of horrific defeat has instigated a current of dystopian novels and literary visions which illustrate crime from multiple angles. We can trace this trend in novels produced by such writers as Ahmed Khalid Tawfiq, Ahmed Mourad, Nael Eltoukhy, and Basma Abdel Aziz. These writers have portrayed crimes committed against people’s bodies (torture, murder and imprisonment), against land and the environment (destruction of natural resources), and against society (family and social relations) in the context of the triumph of the counter-revolution which has reinstated forcefully the military regime at the top of the state apparatus. My paper aims to set in a comparative context the analysis of three prominent novels which have acquired a large readership and critical attention, namely: El Singa (The Knife) by Ahmed Khalid Tawfiq (published in 2012); El Tabour (The Queue) by Basma Abdel Aziz (published in 2013); and Nisaa’ al-Karantina (Women of Karantina) by Nael Eltoukhy (published in 2013). I aim to approach this theme through a feminist lens which considers the significance of gender constructions within dystopian fiction that reflects on crimes and violence committed against women’s and men’s bodies with the purpose of paralysing dissent against the authoritarian/patriarchal order. These fictional crimes, which target the body to destroy the soul and the revolutionary spirit, convey new meaning about post-2011 Egyptian society, thus blurring the lines between fiction and reality. The narratives also provide us with new literary aesthetics, steeped in socio-political commentary on crime and violence. Their authors situate the events in urban areas so as to dissect the cityscapes and the ways in which the characters shape the cities they live in.

Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, as the number of detainees in Iran’s prisons has steadily increased, members of first the Pahlavi and now the Islamic Republic governments have promised that carceral methods – surveillance, policing, and especially prisons – would render Iranians safer from the social scourge of crime. This paper analyzes the methods by which mass criminalization and mass carceralization — in other words, the surveillance and categorization of everyone in Iran into categories of relative criminality, and the incarceration of increasing exponential numbers of people — came to be seen in Iran as obvious and necessary modern (and eventually Islamic) responses to a wide host of social issues, including drug use, sex work, border crossing, and more. In the mid-20th century, in part in response to rising public concern over female and child criminality, the Pahlavi elite began to heavily promote the rehabilitative capacity of their newly built prison system, claiming that these prisons would help transform social deviance into social productivity, perhaps even ending crime altogether. The names of Iran’s prisons were changed in the 1960s to reflect this rehabilitative impulse; the Central Prison for Men and Women [Zendan-e Markazi-ye Mardan va Zanan] was changed to Penitentiary (or place of repentance) for Men and Women [Nedamatgah-e Mardan va Zanan], while some prisons stopped using the word prison [zendan] altogether and instead called themselves Place of Counsel [andarzgah]. Indeed, government officials both before and after the 1979 revolution in Iran, despite using different languages and moral logics, have both argued that their prisons could reform the incarcerated from bad criminals into good citizens. Beginning with a brief overview of policies founded by the Pahlavi government — including prison labor and education programs — this paper traces the idea promoted both before and after the 1979 revolution that increased policing and incarceration was a rehabilitative strategy meant to address and even cure the “disease” of criminal activity. This paper also examines recent efforts in the Islamic Republic to decrease the numbers of those held in traditional carceral sites (that is, prisons) by the use of different forms of carceral control — biotechnology, ankle monitors, facial recognition software, digitized border surveillance, etc., arguing that the making of the carceral imagination in Iran has always been and remains a fundamentally global project.