From the early 20th century, the domestic financial sector in the Gulf states was kept relatively underdeveloped by British imperial interests. In the 1940s, for example, some Gulf states were still using the Indian rupee as their primary currencies and the formal banking system was overwhelmingly dominated by British colonial banks. However, by the time the British formally withdrew from Kuwait in 1961 and the other states in 1971, local merchants and rulers had already established domestic banks that dramatically captured the market share once enjoyed by colonial banks. In contrast to the experiences of most British colonies, a domestic financial sector flourished in the Gulf states under the auspices of British rule and in competition with British capital. As such, my paper engages with historical sociologies of development to ask: what were the local, regional, and global processes that explain the success of financial development in the Gulf states? To explain the success of financial development in the Gulf states, my paper relies on English and Arabic-language primary sources from two archives: the Arabian Gulf Digitized Archive and the HSBC bank archive. The former is an online collaboration between the national archives of the UK and UAE, and the latter hosts the records of the British Bank of the Middle East (BBME) - the biggest British colonial bank in the Gulf. My paper draws upon important documents such as bank reports, letters of correspondence, and dossiers to identify how different institutions contributed to, or resisted the emergence of a domestic financial sector. My paper argues that local merchant mobilization, regionally-inspired developmentalist policies, and the demise of the sterling area prompted the establishment of a domestic financial sector. Moreover, it argues that local merchants and ruling classes exploited conflicts between private British capital and British colonial authorities so that the latter prioritized the interests of domestic banks over British colonial banks. Historical sociology has a robust theoretical tradition of explaining the success or failure of industrial development in the global South, particularly by paying attention to domestic classes, coalitions, and institutions. This paper intervenes in sociological debates on development in colonial and post-colonial contexts by examining financial classes and institutions, rather than industrial ones. Moreover, scholars have studied the development of the Gulf states largely through oil extraction. Instead, my research contributes to emerging scholarship on state and class formation in the Middle East from the perspective of financial institutions.

Situated in the wake of the ‘October Revolution,’ this research analyzes the dynamics of contention that surround the construction of the Bisri Dam, locating it within the larger context of environmental politics and activism in Lebanon, and the contending interplay between global, national and local material interests and forces. The backdrop of previous cycles of protest in Lebanon reignited debates surrounding the state’s mis-management of resources and basic services, epitomized with the onset of the massive wildfires that preceded the ‘October Revolution’ in October 2019, the garbage crisis in 2015, and longstanding electricity and water shortage. Infused with significant corruption and crony profiteering, these domains have attracted marked critique of the state’s degenerate resource management policies and service provision. Built upon the construction of massive and ludicrous dam projects across the country, the state’s espoused ‘model for development’ and management of water resources, in particular, has proven inefficient at best, leaving behind a litany of colossal failures, exacerbated debt, land expropriations, and environmental wreckage. Funded by a ludicrous loan from the World Bank, the Bisri Dam project has invited particular attention given it massive ecological and socio-economic footprint, and the significant mobilization that it has evoked, that has taken multi-scalar, local, national, and transnational, dimensions. The research builds upon burgeoning bodies of literature, particularly within the fields of post-colonial studies, post-development literature, and critical global ethnography to unpack the complex interplay between these multi-scalar dynamics, and how they play out in the everyday terrains and material lives of people, re-inscribing landscapes, re-valuing nature, and redefining livelihoods. To this end, fieldwork for this research relies upon a triangulation of methods: ongoing semi-structured interviews with key activists, local community actors and organizers against the dam project, content analysis of a range of primary resources, including assessment plans, official policy documents, websites and Facebook pages, as well as ongoing in-depth ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Bisri valley and surrounding villages. This research, therefore, compels us to re-think north/south encounters beyond the ‘good local actors’ vs. ‘bad global institutions’ dichotomies. Instead, the research explores the operations of the international ‘developmental logic’ and its global structures of power, knowledge and capital, epitomized in the World Bank style of ‘green neoliberalism’ (Goldman, 2005), and how they operate through ‘friction’ (Tsing, 2005), and confluence of complex constellations of power and interests.

As a part of the Mediterranean Development Project of the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization in the 1960s, the State Planning Institute in Turkey devised the agricultural development scheme of the Antalya region at the epicenter of Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. Prior to this planned transition to tomato production from the 1960s on, Antalya had been a major cotton producing region with large tracts of cotton fields in its coastal valleys similar to its neighboring Mersin-Adana region. This paper focuses on this period of transition to a new industrial crop in Antalya, as the region has become fashioned with Mediterranean identity in Turkey. Based on the findings from ethnographic and archival research, I discuss the meanings attributed to the cotton and the labor regime associated with it in contrast to liberal values the introduction of industrial tomato production has claimed to have created. Since the tomato is introduced to Antalya as a quintessential commodity of the agribusiness in the nation-state paradigm, the way it re-shaped the relations of the landed property, the market and the labor provides a way to understand the entanglements of region-making, development, and the fashioning of Mediterranean liberalism in the late 20th century. In view of the debates on plantation-like ciftlik system emerging on the Mediterranean littoral of the Asia Minor during the 19th century, this paper puts a magnifying glass on a set of local institutions embedded in the social and that constituted the region of Antalya in the late 20th century. Thus, I propose to put the rise of the tomato as an iconic national commodity squarely in the region-making trajectory of Antalya with its local dynamics of social power embedded in the new property/market relations and the cultural meanings the tomato has created.

In this paper, I work to understand the making of an informal politics by way of social reproduction for those living under settler colonialism and military occupation. The current scholarship on social reproduction focuses on women’s roles regarding childbearing and caring for children and/or the community. However, there is a different means by which social reproduction influences life and politics, which is through cultural continuity/preservation in the face of dispossession and erasure. This strand of social reproduction is acknowledged in the literature (e.g. Federici, 2019, 312); but has not been fully explored. In this paper, I look at the ways in which women, through their everyday practices of survival, create a politics of life, through social reproduction. Anthropologist Didier Fassin was first to coin the term “politics of life” to refer to an understanding of politics not from the outside (i.e. the state or institutions), but from the inside and “in the flesh of the everyday experience[s]” (Fassin, 2009, 57). Recently, anthropologist Ilana Feldman expanded on Fassin’s work by using humanitarianism as a site since most of its actors claim to act outside of formal politics (2018). Feldman uses Palestinian refugee camps as her context, exploring the ways in which people “act politically” (2018, 4). In this paper, I expand on Fassin and Feldman’s work by focusing on social reproduction as a gendered politics of life, a politics that seeks to understand how ordinary women operate within their everyday lives and unintentionally “act politically” (Feldman, 2018). This paper uses Palestinian embroidery to explore a gendered politics of life or a way of acting politically. I use ethnographic research of Palestinian women who currently embroider and sell their products in historic Palestine. I have discovered that these women are embroidering the very cultural materials that hold up a nation and a fragmented people. The women who embroider the pieces that carry Palestine all over the world would not be considered politically active since they are unseen, their work is done in silence and at home, but their work is the backbone of Palestinian culture and heritage. Embroidery serves as material expression of Palestinian experience, history, and identity. Embroidery serves multiple purposes: a source of economic self-sustenance, creates an invisible (ironically through vibrant and colorful materials) historical and cultural connection shared by Palestinians across the world, and enables cultural preservation and cultural continuity in the face of erasure, fragmentation, and dispossession.