In 1965, the Egyptian government launched a national family planning program in order to slow the national birth rate. Although the program was ostensibly national in scope, government officials, international development agencies, and researchers focused overwhelmingly on rural Egyptians as the culprits behind the country’s high fertility rates. The family planning program had modernizing objectives in addition to its health and development concerns; the program provided a new way for the government to increase its surveillance over the countryside while attempting to persuade the peasantry to adopt middle class norms and material status markers. Yet hegemonic control over the countryside proved elusive: most peasant families refused to regulate their families on the government’s terms, rendering the program a failure in its initial phase. This paper proposes new ways of thinking about peasant resistance and subaltern agency through a historical study of Egypt’s family planning program. The numerous demographic and development reports penned by Egyptian government officials, international development personnel, and independent researchers captured the anxieties that these diverse authors felt about Egypt’s rural populations. These anxieties were often expressed in terms of class, gender, and race. At the same time, these development reports are also a rich source of insights into the actions and attitudes of Egypt’s subaltern populations. In both the narratives and statistical tables of these family planning surveys, it is possible to discover how rural men and women responded to the government’s population policies, and the motives that guided their responses. From this collection of primary sources I argue that the vast majority of rural Egyptians engaged in a “resistance of persistence” against the government’s family planning. This mode of resistance differed from the “hidden transcripts” described by James C. Scott in that rural Egyptians’ defiance toward the national family planning program was typically open, honest, and non-violent, and it did not take place in the context of severe oppression or domination. Persistence in old behaviors has not usually been considered a form of resistance by most historians or social scientists, and yet viewing it as such reveals new dynamics that can exist between the state and subaltern populations. In the case of Egypt’s family planning program, rural Egyptians were able to maintain significant control over their reproductive decisions in spite of an expensive nationwide campaign to decrease Egypt’s birth rate. This paper contributes new insights about subaltern agency, peasant resistance, and the myth of state hegemony.

In recent years, several debates have opened in Morocco over the status of Berber/ Amazigh language and Berber identity. One of these debates concerns Berber language standardization, which refers to the process of creating a uniform lexicon, grammar, and script for all Berber varieties in Morocco. This study explores how this process is not a neutral activity (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994), but rather a socially constructed field in which certain identities and political ideologies are manifested. While standardization might offer some benefits by using a single Berber language at schools, it negatively affects components of local varieties. The standardized form, then, presents an example of linguistic erasure of the intimate qualities of mother tongues (Irvine and Gal 2000). In order to analyze the Berber language situation and the social implications of Berber standardization, this study draws on theories of languages ideologies (Kroskrity 2010) and tenets of discourse analysis (Goodwin 2007). The data that informs this study is based on analyzing discursively and statistically language questionnaires, group interviews, and individual interviews conducted in Morocco. The study discusses the views of Berber activists and non-activists regarding Berber standardization, and it reveals a wide divide between these two groups on how standardization is perceived. The study also shows how these disparate views are based on local identities and different political ideologies. Goodwin, Charles. 2007. Environmentally Coupled Gestures. In Gestures and the Dynamic Dimensions of Language. Susan Duncan, Justine Cassel & Elena. Levy, eds. 195-212. John Benjamins. Irvine, Judith and Susan Gal. 2000. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In P. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of language. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Kroskrity, Paul V. 2010. Language Ideologies-Evolving Perspectives. In Language Use and Society (Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights), ed. Jurgen Jaspers. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 192-211. Woolard, Kathryn A. and Bambi B. Schieffelin. 1994. Language Ideology. Annual Review of Anthropology 23. Web. 55-84.

Originally planning to explore memories of urbanities and lost and transformed urban landscapes in Jaffa and Tel Aviv, the vicissitudes of fieldwork brought me to a shared Zochrot-Badil project. ‘Envisioning the return of the Palestinian refugees’ ambitiously aspired to shift the discourse about the return from a ‘right’ to ‘practice’ by asking its participants, Israeli-Jews and Palestinians, to plan and imagine everyday life in a post-return polity on multiple scales, from state administrative, symbolic and legal apparatuses to micro levels of urban landscapes in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. This year-long joint project yielded a few unexpected twists and turns, taking us to Cape Town, South Africa, on a study tour of post-Apartheid society, and back to Palestine to dilapidated refugee camps. My paper will therefore offer preliminary thoughts about the multidirectionality not just of memory, but of place. The ‘directionality’ I am citing here alludes to spatial and geographical dimensions – itineraries within the city, across Palestine and to and from South Africa – as well as temporal ones; Allowing my research project to transform with shifting circumstances and opportunities redirected my focus from memories (dwelling on the past) to fantasies about the future(s), and therefore elicited reconsideration of temporalities and the ways in which they intersect with places and imbue them with meaning. In the end, the present urban spaces of Tel Aviv / Jaffa cease to be mere repositories of memories of lost homes and forms of sociability; in the same vain, they are not only lived spaces of current residents. By eliciting fantasies of possible futures, Tel Aviv and Jaffa become places that enact certain kinds of activism – towards return and reconciliation. And moreover, they become places that intersect and partially merge with other sites – refugee camps in the West Bank or a Cape Town neighbourhood razed by the apartheid regime. Finally, I also argue, these fantasies and imagined futures are shaped by those unexpected intersections of places as well as the emotionally-charged encounters between those who fantasize and between these people and the places they inhabit, visit, or pass through.

Israeli efforts to steer the struggle with the Palestinians continue to break new ground in the practice of population management. This holds true for occupied East Jerusalem. Taking forward a nascent but advancing field, Zionist ideological, institutional and policy imperatives are understood here through the lens of biopolitics; this lens aims to capture a swing in the emphasis of government from territory (geopolitics), to people (biopolitics). The goal of this paper is to show that in the fraught case of East Jerusalem, biopolitics can offer fresh insight equally into Israeli efforts to manage the city and into the scope for non-violent Palestinian resistance. The broader significance of the project lies in the capacity of biopolitics to present a fresh conceptualization of post-Oslo Israel/Palestine, shedding new light on the demographic dimensions of the conflict. The paper is based on fieldwork conducted in Jerusalem during 2012. Interview material cited ranges from the Israeli City Engineer in the Jerusalem Municipality and a dissenting (Meretz) member of the Municipal Council, to the official representative of the Palestinian Authority (PA) President’s Office in the city as well as Palestinian nationalist cadres (including prisoners) and community organizers. The planning context to this demographic struggle is set by the Israeli policy document ‘Demography, Geopolitics, and the Future of Israel's Capital: Jerusalem's Proposed Master Plan’; state planning aims expressly to maintain a demographic split in favour of the Jewish population. In practice this results in a range of measures including zoning policies, permit procedures, house demolitions and restrictions on residency juxtaposed with highly pro-active infrastructure construction in support of settlement expansion. It is in the context of an absence of control over planning that biopolitics captures some of the less obvious micro-sites of Palestinian demographic resistance, that is, sites attesting to and supporting a continued Palestinian presence through economic, social, cultural and political means. Relevant sites include commercial enterprises like the remnants of the Palestinian hotel and tourism sector (some of which have seen substantial recent refurbishment) and retail centres such as the Addar Mall (under the management of the Nuseibeh family), plus cultural centres of political import like the Yabous Productions and Cultural Center and the Palestinian National Theatre (al-Hakawati). The biopolitics of East Jerusalem are seen to unfold against a backdrop of Palestinian demographic retrenchment in the pockets of Areas A and B under PA administration in the West Bank.

Successive governments have attempted to create institutional design mechanisms for governing Iraq as a divided society. Contemporary works on governing in divided societies and Iraq ignore or devalue critical and historically contingent factors of citizen-states interactions. This study aims to situate the relevance of institutions as governing structures by converging existing works on governing in divided societies and state formation with historical institutionalism as an approach for contextualizing the ways in which divided societies reproduce governing structures that reinforce the saliency of ethnic conflict. A key obstacle to the 2003 invasion has been the development of governing strategies for Iraq as a divided society. Current works on governing in Iraq often neglect and undermine the impact of the country’s political history and the limitations of development effective governing institutions on ethnic conflict. This paper analyzes Iraq’s early institutional design on a continuum in order to conceptualize the role of institutions as variables for exacerbating ethnic and sectarian identities. It hypothesizes that a comprehensive understanding of the current dilemmas in governing Iraq requires an analysis of the preceding critical processes that shaped governing structures and institutions since the establishment of the Iraqi state that have produced—and continue to reproduce weak state structures and institutions that exacerbate ethnic conflict. The aim is three-fold. First, to demonstrate the importance of engaging in a contextual analysis of institutional design in divided societies—that is, to pay attention to how Iraq’s early institutional design has affected ethnic conflict. Attention here is paid to issues relating to critical junctures, timing and sequencing, and path dependence as they relate to Iraq's early state formation. Second, it aims to bridge a conceptual gap between the literature on governing in divided societies and historical institutionalism by illumining the relevance of the latter as a tool for explaining historical and contextual causal links missing in the former. Third, it hopes to provide a new analytical approach to conceptualizing and contextualizing the role of a historical analysis of early institutional design on ethnic conflict in divided societies.