Studies about contested cultural heritage sites emphasize how powerful groups use memory to assert exclusive claims to particular places, and how marginalized groups mobilize competing counter-memories to contest those dominant narratives. Less often considered is the way that marginalized groups might also actively forget memories of place, seeking to deny the significance of that place to powerful actors who seek to control it. This project investigates this counter-memory tactic of forgetting and the social and political costs it entails. Specifically, this paper considers the case of Joseph’s Tomb, a contested religious site near the northern West Bank city of Nablus. Often called a “microcosm” of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the tomb has long been a site of violent confrontation between Palestinian youths and Israeli soldiers. The conflict over Joseph’s Tomb is not just a conflict over space and territory, however, but over history and memory. Though Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Samaritans have historically revered the site due to its supposed connections with the Prophet Joseph, many Palestinians today deny such claims as superstition, viewing with suspicion attempts by Israeli settlers to revive Jewish worship at the site as a move to claim yet more territory within the occupied West Bank. Palestinian youth from the area have little knowledge of the important social and religious role that Joseph’s Tomb once played in Palestinian public life, particularly for women. Using intergenerational narrative interviewing, this paper explores how memories and meanings of Joseph’s Tomb have been transmitted, forgotten, and renegotiated within the geopolitical context of conflict and occupation.

Displaced Afghans in Turkey face an intersecting set of legal, social, and political precarities that operate together to shape their lives and opportunities for seeking safety. Since the passage of the European Union (EU)-Turkey Deal of 2016, Afghan migrants and refugees in Turkey have found themselves at the “bottom rung of the migrant hierarchy” (Mackreath and Rabiei 2018). Much of the recent political geographic literature on the EU-Turkey Deal focuses almost exclusively on the plight of displaced Syrians in Turkey at the expense of empirically informed accounts of other refugee and migrant communities affected by the Deal. With a feminist political geographic framework in mind, this paper asks: How do Afghans specifically experience the effects of the EU-Turkey Deal? Through careful study of Turkish and EU legal policies and documents, paired with ethnographic interviews with Afghans themselves, this paper unpacks how Afghans, initially welcomed as guests and fellow Turkic brethren in 1980s, became ‘illegal’ border-crossers today. I show how different layers, scales, interests and actors within the Turkish state have come together as a result of the Deal to produce an intersecting set of precarities that displaced Afghans encounter on a daily basis. In doing so, I also reveal how Afghans experience and resist Turkish and EU migration regimes, as well as the structural and material uncertainties generated by displacement. Works cited: Mackreath, H. and F. Rabiei. 2018. “The Bottom Rung of Migrant Hierarchy: Afghans in Istanbul.” Los Angeles Review of Books. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-bottom- rung-of-migrant-hierarchy-afghans-in-istanbul/#!

Changing lifestyles, mobility patterns and its linked identity challenges of young Omani nationals in Muscat After extensive modernisation processes linked to the prosperity derived from the oil industry starting in the 1970s, the Sultanate of Oman is now in a post-modernisation era. To respond to the current challenges, e. g. diversification of the economy due to limited oil resources, high numbers of international labour force, high youth unemployment amongst Omani nationals, the Sultanate of Oman is envisioning a knowledge-based economy as its future strategy and is expanding its global exposure. This increased international alignment affects the political, the economic and the social level. By focusing on the latter, the paper aims to investigate current aspirations of the “post-oil”-nation with its above-average young society from a socio-spatial perspective. In this context, the following question arises: To what extent do new lifestyles affect mobility patterns and challenge identification processes of young Omani nationals (under 35 years)? The analysis is based on qualitative interviews, which are evaluated hermeneutically-interpretatively. The ongoing globalising processes in the form of increasing mobility through study visits abroad, global consumption patterns, the use of digital media etc., particularly concern the focus group of young Omani nationals (under 35 years), especially when they are highly educated and live in the capital area of Muscat. These influences affect their lifestyles, with differences emerging here between the urban and the rural area. The young generation of Omanis finds itself balancing between modern urban lifestyles and tribal-based patterns of life of their parent’s generation, in particular when the latter live in the rural area outside the capital. Therefore, the paper aims to analyse which new lifestyles are emerging and how they are spatially expressed. In addition, identification processes are challenged due to the before mentioned new life plans. Most of the younger generation has been raised and educated in the nation-building process, and thus has embraced national identity as promoted in school curricular –at least those living in the urban context. However, new global lifestyles in the urban area and resulting changes in mobility patterns within Oman are creating new identity challenges for the young generation (in urban as well as outside of urban areas), which the paper will analyse. Therefore, the paper examines to what extent new urban lifestyles and the increasing global exposure affect identification processes and the sense of belonging of young Omanis.

The colonial origins of contemporary land development policies in the Maghreb region have long been recognized. Environmental historians have traced land expropriations, changes in tenure, and restrictions on traditional land uses to erroneous colonial narratives which portrayed the North African landscape as a region desertified by the ‘barbaric’ practices of Arab nomadic communities. Yet while the economic motivations behind colonial land practices are widely recognized, less understood are the links between land policy and the security objectives of colonial institutions. Such an understanding is especially important when one considers the prominent role often played by military administrators in the formulation of colonial policy. In the spirit of the “colonial present” (Gregory, 2004), this paper revisits the intertwined history of security and development. In particular, it investigates how land use policy under the French protectorate in Morocco (1912-1956) was shaped by the security objectives of French colonial administrators. Through an analysis of official reports, training manuals, correspondence, and memoirs of French colonial administrators, it traces the installment of water infrastructure and irrigation networks as tools through which land use policy came to be shaped by the mantra of “tying the natives to the soil.” This strategic military objective was animated by ethnicized and spatialized imaginaries of security that projected a particular hostility towards nomadic pastoralism and transhumant communities. Adopting the methods of historical sociology, the paper contributes to a number of contemporary debates within the fields of development, planning, and security studies. First, it seeks to contextualize current narratives on the imbrication of security and development within the Maghreb and North Africa. Second, it brings a more agentic lens to understanding how spatialized geographies of security are constructed and sustained. Finally, it builds on the turn within planning studies towards incorporating rural perspectives as a means to understand how rural and urban histories are co-constituted.

Historically, Islamic Sharia courts across the Ottoman empire used a document called hujja (literally translated as proof) for registering property transactions and demonstrating ownership. In present-day Jordan, the use of hujja has been declared illegal by the Department of Lands and Survey. Yet, in Palestinian camps, hujjaj (plural for hujja) continue to be used for transferring the possession of homes, establishing building guidelines, and demonstrating occupancy for utility connections. Particularly, in the camps that have been self-built by Palestinians themselves and that remain unrecognized by the UNRWA and deemed “squatter settlement” by the Jordanian government. By taking up the case of Muhammad Amin Camp – a self-built Palestinian camp in eastern Amman on a plot of land that remains the legal property of a Jordanian Circassian whose ancestors came to Amman as Ottoman refugees – this paper examines how, on the one hand, land tenure gets entangled with the individual property rights of the Circassian landowners, the competing claims of the Palestinian inhabitants and the overriding power of the state before/after the now obscured events of September 1970, and on the other hand, how hujjaj continue to be used to facilitate the inhabitation of the refugee camp (its internal order, building guidelines, real estate market, inheritance, and water and electricity flows). Rather than taking the self-built Palestinian camp for granted, or assuming it to be part of the informal urban growth of Middle Eastern cities, this paper puts the “squatter” and the “informal” settlement back into Palestine studies and in older genealogies of Ottoman property regimes.