The Arabs in Ireland: Securing a space for specialism, sanctuary, and the right to the city. This paper maps the settlement of Arabs and Arab communities across the Island of Ireland, and examines the impact of Irish and British governments’ respective polices on the politics of migration and resettlement of Arab Communities in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The paper explores Arab migration to Ireland, from Libyan and Egyptian medical professionals attending universities and training in hospitals in the 1950s, to the more recent re-settlement of Syrian refugees. A comparative qualitative study of the two largest cities in Northern Ireland (Belfast and Derry/Londonderry), and three cities in the Republic of Ireland (Dublin, Cork, and Galway), this paper tracks the experiences of the early career Arab professionals, with the conceived, perceived and lived experience of more recent Arab migrant professionals, and new Arab refugees - residing in these same cities - to better assess the impact of spaces of sanctuary and societal security and social cohesion. Based on survey data and semi-structured interviews with Arab community organizations, representatives and individuals, along with focus groups of newly arrived Arab refugees in all five cities, this paper analyzes the impact of governments’ policies on new Arab migrant social cohesion over time, and seeks to help us map, and understand, the Arab migrant experience across two jurisdictions on the Island of Ireland.

The willingness of Canadians to receive Syrian refugees was affirmed in 2016 with the establishment of thousands of private sponsor groups, and with the Liberal government’s promotion of the Private Sponsorship of Refugee Program (PSRP) as a model policy for other nations to adopt in refugee resettlement. However, evidence suggests that refugee resettlement is consistently supported by only 50% of the Canadian population. Our qualitative studies of PSRP in both rural and urban reception contexts indicate that private sponsor groups and sponsored refugees are confronted by and respond to oppositional discourses throughout the sponsorship process, but that rural resettlement can be experienced as more “successful” than in urban city contexts. The key rural-urban differential is “visibility”: both sponsors and sponsored are more visible in sparsely populated reception contexts. Counter-intuitively, greater visibility can work to the advantage of rural resettlement of refugees. In this presentation, I argue that sponsor groups and sponsored refugees negotiate a highly public approach to refugee resettlement both inside and outside the city. I will chart the content of oppositional and supportive discourses and develop the concept of “reception defusion” to draw out their impact on the “rural” resettlement experiences of Syrian refugees. By doing so, the presentation will ask significant questions of city-focused refugee resettlement.

My contribution to this panel is a qualitative analysis of the processes of urban restructuring, heritage-commodification and neolibrealization of Moroccan cities. Cities like Marrakesh, Fez, Casablanca and Tangier –where the central state orchestrates such processes via PPP arrangements– have become “contested terrains” where local residents attempt to resist all attempts that compromise their right to the city. I begin with an analysis of the various ways in which policy and media discourses ideologically frame Moroccan cities and their neighborhoods as spaces of consumption, poverty, threat, illegality and so on. I then develop a model of “symbolic topographies” in order to understand, on the one hand, the spatial forms attendant to the political and ideological power in history and, on the other, the process of (re)signification of the spatial units within each city. Hence, each Moroccan city is an assemblage of discrete spaces which, together, make up (inter alia) areas of commodified memory and; state intervention; enclaves of consumption and; fledgling neoliberalism as well as social stigma. Given the authoritarian nature of the state, many urbanites avoid open confrontation and deploy in its stead an “art” of surreptitious, unobtrusive resistance. My ethnographic work reveals that the forms of resistance I identified are far from monolithic. For instance, women’s groups, residents of historic and peripheral neighborhoods, and street vendors, all adopt distinct ways of counter-conduct that each fit their spatial and temporal contexts. Further, some civil society groups internalize the modern governmental reason in their activism. Others espouse the language of “empowerment” as a practical mimesis of the market logic, while many simply appease the state in order to secure short-term benefits. As for those urban subjects who lack the capacity to assert their right to the city, they engage in various forms of collective, albeit fragmented, speech/action consisting of informality, re-villaging and what James C. Scott calls “infrapolitical… gestures of contempt and desecration” as means of oppositional politics (1990, 199). To be sure, informality is no “mere survival,” but rather a tactic to expose the dystopian nature of the neoliberal Moroccan city fraught with failing policies, unresponsive private sector and corrupt local authorities.

The paper discusses the activities of the grassroots movement “People’s Committee for the Land-Plots of al-Fuheis” with the primary goal of analyzing the conceptual and the practical aspects of the concept “Right to the City” in less democratic and more authoritarian societies, with special focus on the backgrounds of possible positive outcome of people’s initiatives. The dispute in al-Fuheis, a middle-size Christian town in Amman Metropolitan Area, began when Lafarge Jordan was planning to build a large-scale urban project on the territory of the out-of-service cement plant. The first version of the US$2,800 million project involves the construction of a mixed-use complex on 188 ha of land. Two major issues have been in the focus of the initiative; first, the question of the ownership of the plant’s land-plots; and, second, the urban development project. The question of ownership put the initiative in direct conflict with the governments of Jordan and their privatization models of the public sector. This legal dispute challenges the notions of “public good” and the role of FDI in privatization policies. The rejection of the mixed-use urban development project reflects the anxiety of the residents that the project would radically change the demographic-religious composition of the town, its historic texture and spatial identity as well as the people’s “way of life”. Based on qualitative semi-structured interviews, the study reveals the importance of local embeddedness, self-organization, public lobbying, and “unity” to claim a city. The movement’s actions combine civil advocacy and not-in-my-back-yard approaches. The success of the grassroots initiative to prevent the suggested urban development project is framed within the Christian background of the town, the upper-middle class character of its inhabitants and their global migratory networking as well as in the political and economic situations in the country and the “momentum of crisis and change” in the region.