In the Arabic speaking world it is inappropriate to ask “what is citizenship?” in the singular. Rather, owing to the linguistic wealth of Arabic this question must be employed in the plural. In Arabic political discourse there are at least four terms: ra‘?yah/ra‘ay?, t?bi‘/atb?‘, jins?yah and muw?tin/muw?tinun; which encompass the web of behaviours and associations connected with the words citizen and citizenship, understood on the basis of its Greco-Roman predecessors polites and civis. This paper focuses on two: jins?yah and muw?tanah because both are intimately tied to the the nation-state, and thus to the so-called modernity project in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The prevailing literature has treated these as little more than labels, lending a degree of regional authenticity to an otherwise assumed universal analogy. Hence the ease with which democratisation studies in-particular have taken for granted the existence of a model of citizenship facilitative of liberal democracy. Yet, they are derived from dissimilar roots, j-n-s and w-t-n respectively, and therefore refer to different forms of association and behaviour. It is the state construct that brings them together, and in whose advent they came into existence. Within this context then, my position is to assert that when scholars discuss modern/contemporary citizenship in the Arab world both jins?yah and muw?tanah must be taken together, effectively as two sides of a single concept. Conceptualising jins?yah and muw?tanah in this way elucidates their inherent relationship while not denying their very distinct pedigrees, and therefore capacities, as drivers for political action on the part of citizens. I argue that comprehending the contests over, and changing behaviours of citizens in the Arab world in response to their citizenship can be further advanced. Specifically, insofar as citizenship regimes in an Arab context are divided between jins?yah, and muw?tanah. While the former is the preserve of the state, and thus concerns questions of recognition, the latter contrastingly centres on residing within an identified space. This may or not be contiguous with the borders of the nation-state. It is through this residence, and the constructions of individual and collective self and other, that facilitates claim-making by these actors, to which the state is called to respond. Such offers a unique perspective with which to analyse contemporary realities of citizenship regimes in the MENA, and their different trajectories following the uprisings of 2011.

This paper offers a new narrative of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution and the formation of an Iranian nation by analyzing the experience of early elections in two marginalized cities- one border city, Kermanshah, with a primarily Kurdish population and a considerable number of Sunnis, and one interior city, Kashan, with a primarily Persian and Shi’a population. The mainstream literature on the Constitutional Revolution and the post-Constitutional electoral politics either ignores the experience of less politically active cities during the Revolution or often characterize them as cities not “ready” for the coming of a democratic institution like elections, thus it identifies “local competitions” as a barrier to the “appropriate” conduct of elections. However, I argue these elections and the subsequent “local competitions” were effective tools for the formation and reinforcement of different local identities, such as guild-based, city-based, religious and ethnic identities, during a period in which the discourse of nationalism is assumed to be dominant. In other words, the elections enabled different groups of people to offer their own narratives of citizenship by pointing to their experience as less-privileged people in their electoral complaint letters. The author of these letters showed how their electoral dissatisfaction is connected to a much broader range of social inequalities and discontents, while they used a nationalist language. For instance, tanners of Kashan, who were illegally prevented from voting, objected their exclusion by writing to majles: “They did not give us any ballots, as if we were not people of Iran [ra’yat-e Iran].” Natanzis were also dissatisfied with losing their central role to Kashan due to the electoral law, and they characterized it as the “abolition” of their “independence” which, as they wrote, implied that they “were not part of the Iranian nation [Mellat-e Iran].” It was also an indication of the persistence of injustice and inequalities, despite the promises of the Constitutional Revolution and Natanzis’ efforts in it: “We do the labour and working, but knowledge and schools are for the others.” Considering the different socio-political circumstances in Kashan and Kermanshah, I compare the experience of these cities, and the different groups of people within them, during the elections to the second (1909-1911) and third (1914-1915) parliament. This research is primarily based on three sets of published as well as unpublished letters from Kashan and Kermanshah, along with the responses of the parliament and other national institutions to these letters (around 120 letters).

After years of heated political debate, in July 2018 Israel’s parliament narrowly passed a new basic law entitled “Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People.” Dubbed the “Nation-State Law,” it has elicited widespread criticism both inside and outside Israel, with critics denouncing it as harmful, divisive, or, at best, unnecessary. This paper begins by examining the contents of the nation-state law to assess its significance. It argues that while it has no immediate practical consequences, it could have far-reaching long-term implications by legally justifying Jewish privileges and discrimination against non-Jewish citizens of Israel, and elevating Israel’s Jewish character over its democratic character. The paper then places the nation-state law in the historical context of the decades-long balancing act between Israel’s democracy and its Jewishness, and the struggle between liberalism and majoritarianism in Israel. It also places the nation-state law in the current political context of growing political intolerance and ethnic chauvinism in Israel, and the numerous challenges in the past few years to democracy and the rule of law in Israel by rightwing populist politicians. Such challenges are by no means unique to Israel. In fact, the tactics and ethos of rightwing populism in Israel bears many similarities with that recently evident in countries like Hungary and Poland, and even the United States.

In the MENA as well globally, indigenous, occupied and colonized peoples continue to seek independence in ethnically and/or religiously defined sovereign states as the best way to escape systematic oppression and achieve a measure of independence. These struggles continue even as the long-term repression by the states that control these territories, along with changing geopolitical circumstances and opportunities, are leading to the imagination of new strategies of resistance and self-determination. This paper offers four case studies of this process, examining current imaginaries of political-territorial independence by nationalist movements in Western Sahara, the Occupied Territories, and the Rojava region of Syrian Kurdistan vis-a-vis the Zapatista notion of autonomia as a strategy for communal resistance and self-determination. Based on in-depth fieldwork and textual analysis, I explore the various ways in which Sahrawi, Palestinian and Kurdish Rojavan activists have imagined territorially grounded, state-centered identities, and attendant conceptualizations of self-determination, which remain very much in the conditional—and increasingly unreal—future. I then move to a consideration of the concept of autonomia, one of the defining concepts of Zapatismo. Autonomia is a grassroots-level material, political and cultural-spiritual concept that has powerfully subverted the control of the Mexican state in Chiapas by eschewing demands for territorial and political independence in favor of a focus on “bottom-up” self-government, communal freedom and respect for traditions as the best strategy to create sustainable lifeworlds. My discussion first explores the experiences of Palestinian and other Arab as well as Rojavan activists who've come to Chiapas to study the Zapatista experience as a potential model for their own struggles. I then contextualize these through a critical reading of Arab(ic), Sahrawi and Kurdish imaginaries of the “nation” and “nationalism,” and then to a consideration of the unique political and topographical terrain of Chiapas that enabled the Zapatistas to seize and hold previously colonized territory for the last twenty-five years. Finally, in light of these comparisons and in the context of increasingly brutal state repression and civil and drug wars, unprecedented global environmental threats, emerging post-nationalist and -territorial political imaginaries, and the emergence of locally grounded but globally connected challenges to a synergized state-global power structures, I assess both the potential and the limits of the Zapatista strategies and experiences of autonomy when applied to the Sahrawi, Palestinian and Rojavan/Kurdish cases.

While airports are often seen as emblems of seamless mobility and an interconnected world, for Palestinians and other marginalized populations (refugees, migrants), airports often represent the inaccessibility and exclusionary nature of such transnational networks circulation. Palestinians, as a fragmented population that predominantly lives in exile or under occupation, have long experienced spaces of transit as sites of stasis and blockage, as reflected in literary works such as Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “Athens Airport.” The airport as a place of immobility is particularly evident in Palestinian narratives of Ben Gurion/Lydda Airport in Israel, where practices of racial profiling, harassment, and detention of Palestinians are well documented. Drawing on Jasbir Puar’s notion of debility and Sara Ahmed’s writings on exilic mobility to develop the idea of arrested movement, this presentation examines Palestinian representations of detention that constitute a counternarrative to the frictionless global airport. I focus on three recent works: Adania Shibli’s short story “Out of Time,” Randa Jarrar’s first-hand account of detention entitled “Imagining Myself in Palestine,” and Raba’i al-Madhoun’s novel Destinies: Concerto of the Holocaust and Nakba. In each of these, the stoppage and delay of movement through Ben Gurion airport renders Palestinians mute, comatose, and disoriented through moments of spatial inversion, sensory deprivation, and temporal suspension. In this light, I consider to what extent the arrested movement of Palestinians at the airport constitutes a form of mass debilitation, which Puar defines as the imposition of physical and bodily harm in order to produce precarious populations that are vulnerable to discipline and control. I conclude, however, by considering how the act of narrating temporal suspension, spatial distortion, and bodily immobility can produce a sense of shared experience by recoding spaces of detention in the airport as “Arab” or “Palestinian.” This suggests that arrested movement at the airport can provide a catalyst for acts of solidarity and protest, complicating notions of mobility and movement as subversive and liberating.