The border between Oman and the UAE was finalised only as recently as 2008. This paper asks: over the span of five decades, what work has gone into making this border? How have local and foreign powers exploited legal and political disputes in the Arabian Peninsula littoral in order to push for delimitation in unmarked territory? And how has the border shaped the contemporary political landscape? Drawing on archival research in the UK, and 16 months of fieldwork in Oman between 2017 and 2020, this paper documents the cunning planning, the difficult demarcation and the constant contestation of what would become the Omani-Emirati border. The paper consists of two parts. First, it produces the genealogy of the border: its conception in telegraph exchanges between British diplomats stationed in the Arabian Peninsula, its necessity for obtaining oil concessions, and its imagined role in maintaining regional stability after Her Majesty’s Government’s (HMG) departure. It then traces how HMG capitalised on its role as arbiter in minor intertribal conflicts in order to force Oman’s Sultan Sa’id bin Taimur to commit to delimitation. Whereas some scholars (Beasant 2002; Valeri 2009) have asserted that Sultan Sa’id’s opposition to rapid oil-rent funded development in the 1960s occasioned the British-backed coup against him, I argue that Sa’id’s contrary vision of sovereignty in the 1950s already accounts for HMG’s gambits to subvert his rule. In the second part, this paper explores how the border exacerbates contemporary issues of national belonging and citizenship among border-dwelling Omanis. With Beaugrand’s (2018:223) provocative claim in mind that “statelessness is part and parcel of the modern Gulf state,” it draws a parallel between the bidun she studied in Kuwait and young Omani men living in bordertowns. Although they are, of course, included in the Oman’s social contract, many borderland Omanis feel excluded from any kind of national membership in a fuller sense. The Omani state has neglected developing its peripheries (Valeri 2017), while the appearance of border walls, checkpoints, and customs and immigration offices has made entry into the UAE more difficult—and consequently complicated borderland Omanis’ access to employment, education, and entertainment on the other side. Here, I argue that the recent materialisation of the border can help us understand why some borderland Omanis are now invoking historical and kinship ties to justify their pursuit of Emirati citizenship.

In October 1906, an Egyptian-Ottoman boundary commission delimited a “separating administrative line” between the Sinai Peninsula and the Ottoman Empire. This paper explores the perspectives of the Egyptian state and Egyptian nationalists on the border’s formation and the Sinai’s transformation into a geographic site of politics—its territorialization. The boundary represented the diplomatic solution to Ottoman, British, and Egyptian tensions that had animated the Taba/Aqaba crisis earlier that year. The existing scholarship on this topic focuses on British diplomatic considerations and, to a lesser extent, Ottoman calculations. This paper highlights the Egyptian role in the peninsula’s territorialization by examining the positions taken up by nationalist writers in Egyptian newspapers, state rationales offered in written accounts by members of the Egyptian boundary delegation, and published archival material from the British Foreign Office detailing both internal deliberations and cooperation with Khedive Abbas Hilmi II. This paper argues that Abbas Hilmi II had reasons independent of British interests to support a boundary running from Rafah to the head of the Gulf of Aqaba and thus formalize the entirety of the Sinai Peninsula into Egypt. This contradicts the established narrative that Egyptians played a passive role in the formation of their modern borders. Instead, Abbas Hilmi II saw an opportunity to reaffirm his autonomy before the Ottoman sultan who threatened to upset the Cairo-Constantinople imperial relationship by asserting his direct authority over the Sinai Peninsula and challenging the British. The Egyptian state also sought to finalize a contentious process of shifting boundary conceptions in the peninsula in its favor, an ongoing process since Muhammad Ali Pasha was awarded dynastic rule over Egypt in 1841. Egyptian nationalists, however, derided what they saw as their state’s acquiescence to British demands, arguing instead for the validity of the sultan’s claims. They criticized British encroachment on Ottoman lands and sovereignty, and they found little value in Sinai for Egypt. This disconnect demonstrates the struggle between the Egyptian state and the wider public over the construction of a common conception of an emerging Egyptian territoriality. On a final and more theoretical note, this paper also argues that the history of this boundary demonstrates how geography increasingly became a site of politics through the development of cartographic and centralized administrative practices, how sovereignty and political authority became increasingly associated with territory, and how modern diplomacy was fundamental to these developments.

Egyptian law and judicial practice shield sovereign acts from judicial overview. This practice has recently come under heavy scrutiny, with the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court’s decision in cases 37 and 49 of Judicial Year 38 asserting that the Egyptian Supreme Administrative Court’s decision to annul the Egyptian-Saudi border demarcation treaty overstepped by ruling over an act of sovereignty. As part of its reasoning, the court cites the long legal tradition of shielding sovereign acts from administrative judicial overview, as well as the consistent treatment of the conclusion of international treaties as “a sovereign act”. Yet, critics of the court’s decision cite Article 151 of the 2014 Constitution as basis for reformulating the contours of sovereign acts shielded from judicial review. Critics argue that Article 151 states that “no treaty may be concluded which is contrary to the provisions of the Constitution or which results in ceding any part of state territories.” Thus according to proponents of annulment of the treaty, since the treaty involved cession of two Egyptian Islands, the court must employ this constitutional provision to annul the prime minister’s signature of the treaty. This article argues that, while the court’s decision was consistent with the court’s doctrine on sovereign acts, the 2014 Constitution provided an opportunity, albeit indeterminate, to expand the court’s jurisdiction over different steps of treaty conclusion if the court had wished to do so. The article proposed is going to examine the court’s decision in this case in light of historical cases adjudicated upon either by the Supreme Constitutional Court or the Supreme Administrative Court and assess coherence in the court’s sovereign acts doctrine as applied in the different cases. Additionally, the article will examine the argument that the 2014 constitution re-calibrates our understanding of sovereign acts in favor of judicial oversight over acts potentially conflicting with Article 151 and its newly imposed restrictions on conclusion of treaties.

This paper examines how women’s bodies became an important site for conceptualizing Jewish-Arab difference in late Ottoman and British-mandate Palestine (1908-1948). Specifically, it explores how Palestinian Arab nationalists mobilized narratives of Jewish female sexual immorality through newspapers, literary depictions, and gossip, in order to 1) establish difference between Jewish and Palestinian Arab women; and 2) resist Zionism. I first investigate Palestinian portrayals of European Jewish immodesty in dress, behavior, and sexuality. I then turn to Palestinian portrayals of “Eastern” Jewish women in Palestine. I argue that ideas circulating about Eastern Jewish women’s increasingly immodest clothing and behaviors created a discursive gap between these Arabic-speaking Jewish women and their Christian and Muslim counterparts. Therefore, we see that the Jewish-Arab national boundary in Palestine solidified not only through colonial policy and ideology, but also through ideas and gossip that circulated about women’s bodies. This paper takes up Wilson Jacob’s call to explore affective matters and body cultures as part of the history of nationalism and colonialism. It also takes up Sherene Seikaly’s call to study Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine that goes beyond a narrative in which “the Jews act, the Palestinians react.” In reality, Palestinian Arabs took an active role in shaping Jewish-Arab difference, and mobilizing anti-imperial resistance, through their portrayals of Jewish women. The ideas about Jewish sexuality that circulated were both top-down (spread by nationalist actors) and ground-up (spread, e.g., by Palestinian Arab women at social gatherings). I seek to make three broader contributions. First, this paper both builds on, and complicates, historical analyses of the European colonial sexualization of indigenous women. Second, it complicates our understanding of what constitutes “Palestinian resistance.” Finally, the paper seeks to theorize “modesty” as a relational concept. I engage with photographs, memoirs, oral histories, literature, magazines and newspapers, and colonial government documents.

Research Question: This paper unravels the entanglements of affect and fetish bound up in foreign graffiti production on the Israeli Separation Wall in Bethlehem. It analyzes a movement of defacement, orchestrated by a group of Palestinians and local activists, who defaced a series of graffiti murals painted on the Wall by Australian artist Lushsux. Through a visual tracing of Lushsux’s graffiti and its subsequent defacement, this paper asks: what does defacement engender, when it is enacted by Palestinians living under Occupation, within a landscape of conflict fetishism and tentative state sovereignty? This paper unpacks the ways the defacement sought to ‘expose’ the fetish behind foreign graffiti on the Wall. It visually explores how this exposure counteracted the graffiti’s beautification of the Wall, by rendering its’ materiality naked and by foregrounding its real material presence for Palestinians. Thesis Statement: The defacement movement of Lushsux’s graffiti was a movement of ‘unmasking’; a suspension of the fetish-secret of the Wall as an appropriate canvas for foreign graffiti artists’ and tourists’ expressions of resistance and solidarity with Palestinians. The act of defacement is an act of image destruction. Bound up in this is the assertion of a sovereign individual, impervious to the structures of power and economy that maintain such conflict fetishism, and critical of the ways such fetishes make permanent this Israeli colonial frontier. Methodology: This paper is based on events that erupted while carrying out 16 months of fieldwork in Bethlehem. It is based on participant observation amongst tourists and foreign graffiti artists visiting the Walled Off Hotel, a boutique hotel opened by British street artist, Banksy. The Walled Off Hotel hosted Lushsux in Bethlehem as their resident ‘graffiti artist’ for 2 months. However, this paper is premised upon fieldwork and individual interviews with a group of 10 defacers - two foreign activists and eight Palestinians, living in Bethlehem. During this time, I examined the reasons the defacers mobilized. They included local artists, filmmakers and university students. Results & Significance: This paper argues that those involved in the defacement sought to expose the ways Lushsux’s graffiti turned the Separation Wall into a fetish. Those involved in the movement sought to reveal the problematic politics of his graffiti, which employed the obscure metalanguage of the racist and anti-semitic Alt-Right movement. This paper argues that in doing so, the defacers were reclaiming and asserting popular, Palestinian sovereignty in a frontier-space otherwise defined by the Israeli colonial project and marred by conflict fetishism.