Throughout the Middle East, a number of processes linked to globalization have, over the past decades, reshaped the world rural populations live in. Prominent among them are policies of liberalization (of markets) and privatization (of state institutions and resources), along with an ever-increasing mobility of people, goods, and ideas. These processes have directly and profoundly affected the nomads of Eastern Morocco as well. The high plateaus of Eastern Morocco have traditionally been characterized by nomadic pastoralism, and occupied a marginal position both in terms of economic relevance and public perception, in comparison to other Moroccan regions. Accordingly, the local nomads can be seen as a marginal group in the political dynamics, being just one among many competing actors with strong interests in the region and its resources. In the current power struggles about the collective rangeland and its utilization, for instance, different state agencies, international organizations, and foreign investors seem to play a more decisive role than the nomads. Fundamental transformations in land ownership and, consequently, land use have been an outcome of such processes. Local pastoralists are losing access to more and more parcels of pasture land. Moreover, the modes of land use have been altered by the introduction of pastoral cooperatives. Against this background, my paper examines how nomads respond to these transformations. It has been observed that diversification of economic activities constitutes a main strategic option for households to secure their livelihoods; I will address this issue from a political ecology perspective. Such an approach explicitly takes into account the interplay between socio-political dynamics on the one hand and natural resource dynamics on the other. The paper thus analyses the ongoing negotiation of land ownership and access in the region from the viewpoint of individual nomadic households, drawing upon fieldwork carried out in a joint research project with Moroccan academic institutions. Specifically, I will use exemplary case studies to discuss: - how nomads try to secure their livelihoods and their identities at the same time; - the relative importance of natural resource access in such household strategies; and - winners and losers produced by the current dynamics and the implications this could have for the region’s further development.

In the last twenty years, civil society and community-based groups have emerged across the Middle East to address a variety of environmental challenges, from water scarcity and waste disposal to industrial pollution and coastal degradation. Despite evidence of the trend, little scholarly research exists on this relatively new kind of political activism. Research on the Middle Eastern environment has examined the prominent environmental issues facing the region and the varying policies and protections states have instituted in response to those challenges, while research on political activism in the Middle East has focused on Islamist movements and other popular campaigns against authoritarian rule. Neither approach accounts very well for the patterns of environmental activism that have emerged in recent years. This project addresses that gap in our understanding by looking closely at grassroots and civil society campaigns around environmental issues in Jordan in recent years. The project draws on information from newspapers, organizational websites, interviews, and government documents. The analysis pays close attention to the groups involved, their complaints and demands, how they mobilize, and the outcomes and impact of their efforts. This analysis of environmental activism in Jordan should shed light on the varying patterns of mobilization around environmental issues across the Middle East and the role civil society plays in addressing environmental concerns in the region.

No narrative dominates the demographic history of late Mamluk Syria more than the decline of the countryside in the fifteenth century. The general drop in the size and concentration of villages, and the abandonment of many settlements suggested by archaeological surveys (most pronounced in Transjordan), has been considered the most important local response to the collapse of the Mamluk state. While settlement fluctuations in this period transformed rural Syria in important ways, there here has been little systematic study of the issue in order to determine to what degree population levels dropped from the 14th-century, how many settlements “disappeared”, and what was the long-term legacy of this phenomenon. Critical analysis of contemporary Arabic chronicles, economic (waqfiyyat, registrations of land sale and purchase) and legal (Shari’a court) documents related to land tenure and use, early Ottoman tax registers, and travelers’ accounts, combined with the results of recent archaeological fieldwork and environmental studies, indicates a dispersal of large settlements in Transjordan forced by a confluence of political turmoil, economic trouble, and climatic change. In anthropological parlance, this could be described as a kind of “internal migration” in which settlement in large centers participating in imperial agro-industries was replaced by more modest settlements, located in more marginal zones, engaged in diversified production. This paper explores the physical and functional transformation of the Jordanian countryside in the 15th and 16th centuries as a kind of internal migration and suggests that the dispersal of towns and large villages of the period, and the partial abandonment of the plains, resulted in a shift to new agricultural regimes, new patterns of land tenure and management, and changes in the tribal-residential structures of the region that have relevance for the form the Tanzimat reforms took in Jordan in the late 19th century and the demographic structure of the country today. The study will compare settlement shifts of the period in Transjordan to those in Palestine, in order to gauge the differential impact of Mamluk decline on local societies and suggest reasons for those differences.

In a setting of political instability, recurrent natural disasters and economic restructuring, marked by increasing privatization, foreign investments and market liberalization, the livelihood options for many – especially rural - people have deteriorated. In the past decades pastoral nomadic people were subject to such dynamics, which impacted their access to and the quality of natural resources, forcing them to alter elements of their pastoral production systems. This paper investigates how Rashayda pastoralists in northeastern Sudan responded to livelihood challenges in a context of scarce resources, political marginalization and successive environmental disruptions. Thereby the Rashayda represent a peculiar case, due to their late immigration to Sudan and the maintenance of strong ties to the Gulf. This paper will contribute to the discourse on the role of diverse mobilities in current livelihood systems. Based on fieldwork from early 2009, four biographies will be presented identifying the livelihood strategies of individual households, their responses to crisis and the respective political and socioeconomic outcomes.

The first half of 2008 witnessed the rise of an encompassing environmental social movement in the port city of Damietta, Egypt. The movement succeeded in compelling a reluctant government to halt the construction of a fertilizer plant by the Canadian petrochemical company Agrium and local Egyptian affiliates. The company, like many others, had been recently lured to Egypt by the liberalization policy, greatly subsidized natural gas prices, and a host of other incentives. The movement included wide sectors of civil society, commercial elite, and political parties and ordinary citizen, who feared the environmental pollution by the plant would be detrimental to the local economy—fishing, real estate, and tourism. We argue that this movement rather being an exception could be a “model” for broad political change in that country, or at least a major example from which the opposition—and even the government—could learn how to engage with each other and carry out major political and social reforms. A closer look reveals that this is one of the few “confrontations” where the government engaged the opposition politically - as opposed to resorting to security measures, arrests, and torture. The opposition itself, after an initial call for a strike that the government planned to break up by force, used creative tactics, such as music, art, T-shirts, confronting security men with flowers, mobilizing children. The press, local and national, was used extensively to spread the movement’s point of view. The movement itself was unified, and the political parties remained in the background. Underlying the political engagement of both sides was an elite split: the Cairo government elite, versus the Damietta elite. Following this experience, the opposition could in the future exploit possible splits in the governing opposition or even try to create them. It could also learn from the tactics like those of the Damietta movement. Our research relies on primary sources, including detailed accounts by the national and local press (especially Al-Masry Al-Youm, Al-Badeel, and Domyatt), and interviews with leaders of the movement, including the head of the Popular Committee for the Environment in Damietta, the head of the Sananya Charity Organization (a key activist), the lawyer who took up the case against possible graft in grating the contract, ordinary citizens, including fishermen, and others. We place the discussion in the context of the literature on social movements and foreign direct investment (FDI) and the environment in the global South.