“Why are all these roads being constructed while we are barely surviving?” This is a question that drivers and toll workers have posed time and time again on the Cairo-Suez road. The Cairo-Suez road is one of the central highways in Egypt. It connects the capital to the Canal and Sinai area. During the past few years, Egypt has been witnessing massive amounts of infrastructural projects that are executed by military institutions. This has cost the country millions of pounds. At the same time, the cost of living is rapidly increasing.Thus, the purpose of the massive construction of roads and their maintenance by the state’s military institutions poses several questions, not only about why these constructions are being made, but also about whom they are being made for. Near several construction sites set up by the military, a campaign reads “With one hand we protect and with the other we build.” The military builds the country’s infrastructure with the same urgency that it fights terrorism. It seeks its legitimacy mainly from feeding the narrative of war on terror, just as it did in removing the Muslim Brotherhood from power. It uses this legitimacy to build a military industrial complex that has colonized the economic sphere in Egypt. This paper speaks to the emergent literature on military economy (Saghyeh,2015, Marshal, 2017, McMahan, 2017, Springbrog,2016, Abu Almagd,2017, and Qandil,2017) from an ethnographic angle and attempts to think through this militarization, including how it happens and how it affects the everyday life of the Cairo-Suez road. After six months of ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted on one of the toll roads of the Cairo-Suez roads, I developed an understanding of the socio-economic fabric of the road and how the militarization process occurs in relation to other local powers. By looking at life on the toll road, as well as the politics that occurs on and around it, whether through new military decisions, new enforced laws, or the making of new deals, we get an ethnographic account of how the military institution negotiates with different political and economic actors. In this paper I will attempt to unpack how the military manages to colonize the economic sphere through a politics of accumulation by dispossession and how the military uses its political legitimacy as the “terror fighter” to create capital and profit?

My presentation looks at the concept of Wasta, or connection building as a form of “social infrastructure” (Elyachar 2011) in rural Egypt to address how citizens access state services. Wasta as a social infrastructure serves as a basis through which citizens, especially those in marginalized rural communities develop certain communicative skills and channels of alliance building that are essential to navigating the opaque state bureaucracy and accessing needed services. I analyze the two villages’ differing relationships to representatives of state governance to understand how different speaking genres arise from and give rise to the material infrastructures in the two villages. The presence of a Omda (village chief) in the first village versus a youth-led village council in the second, produces different speaking genres like “sweet talk” versus direct talk. I argue that the two villages’ differing communicative practices, serving as a channel for Wasta initiation, are directly linked to their differing rural histories and connections to land. The first village in the governorate of Al-Daqahliya is a “new village” created as a result of President Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s nationalist-socialist land reform in the 1950’s, and supplementary land reclamation policies. This process provided newly settled small-scale farmers with land ownership opportunities. The second village in Al-Beheira governorate was one of the seats of power of the Ottoman Empire, as well as the subsequent British Protectorate over Egypt. The village was former estate land that became nationalized under President Nasser and then returned to private landowners during the 1990’s under Egypt’s open market policies. The presentation therefore connects the social infrastructures of the materiality of communication to the physical infrastructures of the materiality of place. The connection between both forms of infrastructure looks at how Wasta is perceived and created, what essential function it serves in attaining certain objectives and what that means for those who are excluded from the spaces and subjects of Wasta initiation. Reference: Elyachar, Julia. 2010. Phatic Labor, Infrastructure, and the Question of Empowerment in Cairo. American Ethnologist 37, no. 3 (2010): 452-464.

Written during the Lebanese Civil War, the Municipal Act of 1977 set the goal of dispersing governmental power from the central government to local municipalities and their officials, with the intention of spreading power amongst Lebanon’s eighteen sectarian groups. The Act has been a failure however, and rather than ‘end’ sectarian division, seems to have only perpetuated it: from the Act’s implementation about a decade after the war’s end to its inability to provide economic, bureaucratic, or political means necessary for sustainable decentralization. Indeed, the perpetual economic crises plaguing Lebanon—electricity cuts, water shortages, and garbage emergencies lasting months on end—are direct results and can be understood as inevitable outcomes of the failure of the decentralization planned in the 1977 Act. As importantly, these crises have only perpetuated the very divisions imbalances that the Act sought to alleviate. This paper contends with two main matters: first, the Act itself—its implementation, and the implications of unsubstantiated decentralization on Municipalities. In tracing and providing a historiography of the Act, my second objective is to analyze its material effects on local governance, infrastructure, and resources. Based on ethnographic research conducted in the village of Aitat in the Mount Lebanon Governorate, I historicize and assesses new waste-management site constructed in Aitat through the Municipal Act. I argue that the Act reproduced a spatialized sectarianism that intrinsically creates a reliance on sect-based politics for subsistence, and use the waste-management site in Aitat to display these manifestations. Ultimately, this paper contends with how municipalities attempt to enact the Act’s failed decentralization, and how the Act has paved a road towards what I term sectarianism as a mode of governance.

In October 2015, the Amman-based online media platform 7iber published an article entitled “How reading Jordanian literature has become nearly impossible.” The article explores the paucity of works by Jordanian authors available at bookstores in Amman while enumerating the various challenges faced by authors in the country to produce and circulate their work. Chief among these challenges is the lack of resources for the writing profession or, as the article’s author contends, the fact that writers are “left behind, alone in the wake of capitalism.” This paper argues that despite the aforementioned economic challenges and lack of institutional support—whether government or private—authors and readers alike in Jordan have created and shaped their own spaces for literary production, consumption, and engagement. These spaces, moreover, do not exist in isolation but rather coalesce to form infrastructures that facilitate meaningful encounters among members of a broadly defined literary community—authors, readers, publishers, and booksellers, among others. These encounters take the form of book clubs, local writing and editing collectives, as well as readings and talkbacks arranged (virtually or in-person) by authors looking to connect with their audiences. These sites of literary production, consumption, and engagement act as discursive sites wherein members of literary communities negotiate what it means to be a writer in Jordan and make claims as to what constitutes “Jordanian literature,” if such a categorization is even deemed possible. However, these discursive sites are not bound by the disciplinary confines of literary criticism and theory. Rather, for writers and readers, literature serves as a framework through which individuals can articulate their positions toward state-sanctioned narratives of history, discourses about nationalism as “invented,” economic marginalization, foreign imports and influences, as well as Jordan’s role within the Arab world and globally. Drawing upon ethnographic interviews and participant observation within varied literary communities in Jordan alongside theories of cultural production, this paper argues that literature is not epiphenomenal to the power and social structures in Jordan. Rather, discussions of literature in Jordan are sites of narrative contention—over identity, capital, and the state—among different actors and institutions.

In the 1870s, Egypt’s most influential engineer, Ali Basha Mubarak, offered a pioneering critique of what we would call today the cash crop economy. He examined how the expansion of cotton in the Delta and sugar cane in upper Egypt disrupted older economies of flax production and ecologies of pastoralism. Overseeing the expansion of perirenal irrigation as the minister of public works, Mubarak was himself instrumental to the expansion of cotton and sugar cane. His critique is thus all the more remarkable and reveals a tension endemic to the engineering profession that scholars have noted across temporal and geographic divides, from the interwar United States to Soviet Russia. Industrial profit or state revenues on the one hand and efficiency and accurate assessment of costs on the other constitute the conflicting prerogatives of engineering. In their attempts to reconcile these competing objectives, engineers of Mubarak’s generation and their successors critiqued the interrelationships between scientific knowledge, natural processes, and political formations. By the revolution of 1919, engineers articulated an understanding of the links between political formations and environmental interventions, locating the origins of the Egyptian state in the perennial struggle with the Nile. These critical interventions were an important and overlooked moment in Egyptian intellectual and political history as well as transnational debates and knowledge production on development. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Egyptian engineers sought to transform their strictly technical profession into an explicitly political discipline. Rather than simply the builders of the material undergirding of state and society, the engineering profession actively participated in imagining Egypt’s future and sought to direct the course of a country at the crossroads between empire and nation. In the process of their political participation individuals like Mubarak, Ibrahim Zaki al-Muhandis, and Hafiz Ramadan developed an understanding of science that was imbedded in politics, human relations, and ecological processes. By analyzing a number of government reports, manuals, and biographies from 1870 to 1920, this paper reveals the overlooked intellectual and political work of Egyptian engineers, who linked nature and culture and transgressed the enlightenment’s strict divide between objective science and politics.