In 1945, towards the end of British rule in Palestine, Jerusalemite lawyer Musa Alami founded the Arab Development Society (ADS), a nongovernmental fund aimed at improving living conditions in Palestine’s Arab villages and protecting them from the threat of Zionist colonial expansion. The project, which was temporarily funded by the newly founded Arab League, soon faced a mass challenge when the 1948 Arab-Israeli war broke out, and most of its constituency of Palestine’s Arab rural population were forcibly displaced from their homes. In the face of this new crisis, Alami devoted his work in the next two decades to remodel ADS as an alternative refugee settlement scheme in the Jordan Valley. Revisiting the history of ADS is equally significant to academic literature on the modern history Palestine and the Middle East, and to ongoing debates within and outside the fields of architecture and urban studies. On the one hand, as a Palestinian-led project, ADS presents, first, an alternative to the work of the UNRWA as the main basis for the conceptions of ‘displacement’ and ‘resettlement’ in the Palestinian context and, second, a new understanding of Palestinian initiatives in the under-investigated period of Jordanian rule in the West Bank (1948-67). On the other, the project’s geopolitical location at the ‘frontier’ between the West Bank and Jordan, its extreme environmental conditions, and its modernist ethos together offer a rich palimpsest of situations and choices that allow for a complex and dynamic reading of the political implications and limits of the natural and built environment in situations of human crisis and mass displacement. The paper relies on a wide range of published and unpublished materials including historical photographs, Arabic and English newspapers, maps and brochures collected from the archives of St. Antony’s College Oxford, National Geographic, the United Nations and the National Library of Israel. The paper offers three intersectional readings of ADS; first, as a model that offers an alternative conception of ecology and the environment to that of the UNRWA; second, as an experimental scheme with multiple readjustments in terms of financing, scope, and operation; and third, as an ideological project that carried with it not merely a technical solution for refugee settlement but an entire vision for a new Palestinian society conceived in a time of crisis.

This paper examines the visions and imaginaries of liberation embedded within the rhetoric of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), as expressed through its mouthpiece Al Hadaf magazine during the 1970s and 80s. These visions are read in their relationship to the PFLP’s position on governance and democracy, particularly their evolving position on municipalities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), and their own initiatives (such as cooperatives) during this period. The paper focuses on the spatiality of the PFLP’s visions in order to build a framework to analyze the spaces that the Front and its affiliates have produced (cooperatives) and those it participated or refrained from participating in (municipal bodies). This paper seeks to build an understanding of the influence this major political faction had in the imagination of spaces that preceded, and arguably facilitated, the Intifada in the late 1980s. The paper argues that while the rhetoric of the PFLP remained general, only painting in the broadest strokes its vision for liberated Palestinian society and space, the Front’s ideological commitments and thus the revolutionary movements it looked up to (such as Thufar and The Democratic Republic of Yemen) played a role that honed the imaginaries of the Front’s cadres.

Lebanon, where 1 in 4 individuals is a refugee, has featured prominently in news headlines since 2011 as the biggest host per capita of Syrian refugees. The latest Syrian influx only comes as a continuation of many waves of displacement Lebanon has witnessed in the 20th century. Starting with the Armenians after World War I, Beirut in particular has also hosted Kurds, Palestinians and many internally displaced communities. The refugee literature in Lebanon has mostly focused on studying these groups in isolation from their host context, with a large focus on refugee camps. My research steps away from the dominant approaches by studying a non-encampment situation, where several groups of refugees have lived side by side with a local native community, and focuses on the role of displacement in the production of space in Beirut. In this paper, I explore the everyday and political life of Quarantina—also known as Al Khodr or Maslakh part of the district of Medawar—a Beirut neighborhood that has hosted successive waves of refugees to Lebanon and has been largely unstudied by scholars. More specifically, I focus on a 15-year period, from 1960 until the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975. During that time, the neighborhood evolved into a space of collaboration and cohesion between the native population, the migrant laborers and the Palestinian, Armenian, and Kurdish refugees who settled in the area. In this specific time and place, a new proletariat identity began to form within the marginalized community of Quarantina. In this case study, the distinction between citizen and refugee is blurred. I consider, more specifically, the shared struggle of the community when faced with multiple and consecutive fires in the area and view their different mobilizations and appropriations of space as their claim to their right to the city, a new form of invented citizenship. I contrast these experiences of class struggle in their everyday life with the perceived identity imagined by aid agencies and the public opinion through an analysis of newspaper and archival materials. Based on 16 months of fieldwork, including oral histories, archival research and participant observations, I highlight the intricate intersection between class struggle and refugee identity, while grounding the current debate on displacement in its historical context.

Shortly after the U.S. removed Saddam Hussein from power in 2003, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) launched a local governance program to train Iraqis in American-style democracy by creating neighborhood, district, and provincial councils throughout the country. USAID allocated $807 million dollars to this project, and within the first six months, 88 neighborhood councils with a total of 1500 council members were established in Baghdad alone. Council members were rapidly trained in how to run meetings according to Robert’s Rules by a U.S. army reservist whose credentials included the fact that had once served as a mayor of a small town in Colorado with a population of less than 5,000 people. The responsibilities of these new neighborhood and district councils include receiving citizen complaints, responding to electricity outages or sewage problems, and registering residents for their monthly food rations. In spite of challenges from funding shortages, security threats, and sectarian violence, these councils continue to operate today. Yet despite the peculiar origins of Baghdad’s neighborhood councils and the significant roles they have played in residents’ lives, these councils have not yet been the subject of scholarly analysis nor viewed within the historical context of Ba‘thist governance structures. Prior research about state-society relations in Ba‘thist Iraq has revealed that neighborhood Ba‘th Party offices existed under Saddam to carry out functions similar to the councils set up later by the Americans: Ba‘thists fielded complaints from residents, addressed problems with essential services, and registered Iraqis for food rations. Could it be that Americans reinvented the wheel by establishing new councils that closely mirrored the very Ba‘th Party institutions they dissolved? Or did Iraqis, having certain expectations about what a local government office should deliver, shape the functions of the councils to more closely resemble their predecessors? The aim of this paper is to articulate how U.S. neoconservative ideologies about democracy promotion and state-building played out on the micro scale across Baghdad’s neighborhoods, revealing a considerable disconnect between what U.S. policymakers imagined for a new democracy in Iraq and the actual power structures that were created (or recreated) within Baghdad’s neighborhoods. This paper is based on fieldwork in Iraq, Iraqi Ba‘th Party archives, interviews with Iraqi neighborhood council members in Baghdad, and interviews and documents from the U.S. soldiers responsible for creating neighborhood and district councils in Baghdad after 2003.

The two decades after the Second World War witnessed the blossoming of humanitarian work focused on the child, as diplomats, educational psychologists, and economists sought to safeguard the potential of the child generation to promote prosperity and prevent another devastating war. Almost no attention has been paid to how Iraqis conceived of this postwar generational challenge, despite the extensive dislocations and wartime privations its citizens suffered after the British occupation in 1941. Iraqi children in these years were the beneficiaries of a parent generation that had witnessed considerable national development in their own childhood. As they looked forward to how development should best take advantage of rising oil revenues and an increasingly well-educated workforce, Iraqis increasingly came to invoke childhood as a focal point of reminiscence and sociological analysis with which to direct future development. Participants in the discourse on childhood often imagined archetypes of the spaces through which children passed as they developed into adults, in particular the kittab or maktab school, which threatened to harm the child if not managed carefully, and the museum, which was held forth as an embodiment of cultural authenticity that prepared the child to contribute to national progress in their adulthood. These spaces stood in contrast to the street, which served as the repository of failed attempts to bring children into an economically productive and moral future. The many contributors to the discourse on childhood were active as lawyers, journalists, and teachers in Iraq, including Sabiha al-Shaykh Dawud, Anwar al-Sha’ul, ‘Ali al-Wardi, and Matta Akrawi, among others. They understood their own childhood reminiscences as the point of departure for further discussion, but came to rely on the archetypal spaces of childhood development in a bid to control the future of the nation as the growing city of Baghdad, in particular, threatened to overwhelm childhood with a host of negative experiences. In order to understand this discursive representation of childhood in relation to the nation, my paper seeks to step back from the vocabulary of national curricula and idealist educators with which previous scholars have written on Iraqi children, and highlight the spatial components of the discourse so as to ground it in the daily experiences of a rapidly urbanizing population. My sources are pedagogical writings in Arabic, memoirs in Arabic, and the Iraqi periodical press.