How do transnational circulations affect the everyday practices and social imaginaries of individuals who are restrained from movement due to political, economic or social conditions? In scholarly discussions on globalization and transnationalism, the figures of the immigrant, the refugee, and the tourist have become axiomatic, that is, persons who have undergone a process of voluntary or forced re-location. However, much less has been written about individuals who have been prevented from movement for political, social or economic reasons. Contemporary Tunisia provides an especially instructive context for this analysis due to recent immigration policies and increased border vigilance that have decreased the likelihood of transnational emigration (Collyer 2008). This paper aims to forge new ethnographic and analytic territory by examining the socio-spatial imaginaries of Tunisian working-class men and unemployed youth who have been unsuccessful at fulfilling their stated intentions and ambitions of transnational emigration motivated by high rates of national unemployment. Through discourse analysis, this paper outlines the contours of a socio-spatial imaginary as expressed in the course of a series of interviews conducted with would-be emigrants in the coffeehouses of contemporary urban Tunis. Interview data analyzed in this paper was collected during two years of ethnographic field research in the coffeehouses of inner city Tunis from 2005-2008. Data from these interviews index the unevenness of transnational flows and evidence a tension between the limits of everyday practice and the reach of a socio-spatial imagination. In this manner, the paper proposes the thesis that the coffeehouse provides a locus for transfigurative action that mitigates the constraints of socio-economic realities. Interviewees referred to this process as ‘’amal jaw’ or, ‘making air.’ Consequently, the paper highlights the role of the imagination for the Tunisian coffeehouse habitué as a critical instrument in both alleviating as well as exacerbating the anxieties of contemporary experiences of social anomie. The paper builds on recent scholarly contributions to the discussion of the imagination (Castoriadis 1998; Crapanazano 2004; Mittermaier 2006; Taylor 2002) and draws on theoretical anthropological debates on the dynamics of circulation (Appadurai 1988; Latour 1999; Lee & LiPuma 2002; Povinelli & Gaonkar 2003).

In the last decade, political science scholarship in Middle Eastern, especially Arab, politics has focused primarily on the phenomenon of robust authoritarianism, with particular focus on the strategies and tactics used by incumbent political leaders to consolidate power and ensure political survival. Research on civil society or non-state political activity, in this context, has been reduced to the relationship between centralized authoritarian state structures and society-level organizational actors, many of which remain closely linked if not dependent on the state. These scholarly trends are rooted in two distinctive theoretical traditions: (1) the civil society literature following Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work, which is concerned with the presence or absence of autonomous organizational activity; and (2) the dissatisfaction with the democratization literature in explaining the reversal to authoritarian rule, one in which the cooptation of actors, institutions, rules, and political processes have assumed a distinctive, neoliberal character. As recent critical scholarship shows, the fetishizing of organizational activity and state-level cooptation has clouded the more complex effects of increasingly authoritarian state practices on the involvement of ordinary citizens, in participatory, if not civic, practices outside state-directed venues. My paper seeks to address these studies and contribute to research that examines the relationship between authoritarian state practices and the development of alternative and deliberate spaces of political expression. Specifically, I am exploring the effects of informal political practices and alternative spaces of expression on the political conceptions and motivations of every-day Tunisians. I will draw on evidence from participant-observation conducted in the capital’s soccer stadiums, which serve as locales of entertainment, contestation, identity formation, political expression, and in some cases resistance. Soccer stadiums, unlike other public spaces in Tunis, have become venues for competing athletic spectacles representing intra-urban, regional, political as well as socio-economic differences, while likewise utilizing song and slogan to subversively mock governance. My paper will draw on political ethnographic research conducted in Tunisia between September 2008 and June 2009, and conceptually rely on recent critical research in political science, anthropology, urban studies, architectural theory and sociology to hypothesize about the every-day civic activities of ordinary citizens and their intended and unintended effects on political structures and processes. The goal is to present an alternative image of Tunisian political space by locating relevant political activities outside the scope of state-controlled institutional channels.

Along with China the contemporary Arabian Gulf is undergoing an urbanization of massive proportions. Like China, architects view the Gulf, whose member states are run by tiny elites disposing of immense wealth and nearly nonexistent labor and environmental regulation, as a liberating place in which to work. No Gulf countries have been as aggressive in advancing top-down, large-scale, institutional urbanism (Lefebvre 2003:79) as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar. Although because of the economic crisis, many architectural projects are currently on hold, the elite realms of state and technocracy in emirates such as Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Qatar, and Ras al-Khayma continue to formulate an urban vision and prospectus privileging monumantal architecture and commodified, spectacular urban landscapes. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre's oeuvre on "urbanist ideology" (e.g., the Urban Revolution, 1968, The Production of Space, 1971, and the Critique of Everyday Life, 1947--1981), I analyze the elitism, cultural reductiveness, and justification of local power in which the starchitectural turn has collaborated through its alliance with the Gulf state.

In the seemingly vacant and resource rich region known as the Chittagong Hill Tracts, geo-politically crucial in its vicinity to problematic neighbors and populated by communities deemed as threatening to both the identity and the security of the state, an aggressive militarization, development and Bengali settlement agenda has been evolving since 1971. Similarly, a large-scale Israeli civilian settlement project has developed, incrementally, in the occupied Palestinian Territories since the 1967 war under every government since the beginning of Israel’s occupation. Since 1967 there have been upwards of 149 settlements developed in the West Bank alongside a vast network of roadblocks, check points, military bases and physical barriers. This paper explores how states maintain control over contested spaces. In order to tease out what causal factors lead states to resort to a civilian, non-military, settlement policy in contested territories I employ a most-different systems design comparing the well-known case of Israeli settlements in the West Bank to the lesser known case of Bengali settlement in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. While these cases take place in very different geographic, historical, and cultural contexts, I propose that three causal variables: An exclusionary national identity, a desire for territorial contiguity or defensible borders and internal security, would be sufficient if not necessary for a state to implement an aggressive settlement policy in a contested territory. Contemporary literature on the state has largely abandoned the focus on frontier settlement. Most of the existing studies do not account for the use of non-state civilians to contend with internal security concerns, or as part of a state counterinsurgency strategy in a contested region. This study concludes by arguing that a better understanding of the contested and shifting borders of these two cases, highlighting the factors influencing states to implement settlements and military occupations in contested territories is useful in furthering our current understanding of state repression and territorial expansion, potentially challenging existing scholarly biases as well as furthering our understanding of the root causes of these intractable conflicts.