Cities across the MENA region are usually conceptualized as bounded (and disempowered) places contained within a system of bounded states, yet sharing a particular meta-region quality of ‘Middle Eastness’. An alternative applies a relational urban lens, backgrounding ‘the state’, borders and identity in preference for understanding cities as emergent assemblages within relational urbanism. Cities are thus (always) interlinked within an (always) evolving, fluid multiscalar network of relations with other local sites in various ways. We can thus parse out particular emergent urban assemblages, sub-assemblages, and sites, examining their component parts, the processes of relating that ‘produces’ them, their coherence over time, and what political consequences or causal power emerge from their assembling. Foucault proposed that there is a carceral archipelago, a carceral network, a carceral city system of institutions of supervision/constraint, of discreet surveillance and insistent coercion, a material framework, dispersed but coherent, stretching across the social body. Borrowing this argument, I explore punitive urbanism stretched across, entangling and materializing the MENA region, tracing various processes and components assembling its cities together into ‘a MENA Carceral City’. Transcending traditional state boundaries or regulation, this Carceral City interlinks spaces, agents, technologies, materiality, social imaginaries, subjectivities, norms, knowledge and performances to ‘police’ this regional urban assemblage running from Casablanca and Benghazi to Gaza, Aden, Raqqa, Haifa, Khartoum, Tehran, Diyarbakir, Jenin and Manama. Individuals, institutions, subjectivities, spaces and communities are imprisoned, rendered, disappeared, housed in supermax institutions, tortured and disciplined via policing mechanisms and practices which interconnect regimes, urban conurbations, actors and certain core urban centres beyond the geographic region (e.g. Washington, London, Moscow, Beijing) into a political assembly of intervention praxis emergent from strategically distributed multiscalar human and material elements. The paper lays out the theoretical argument; reviews ‘components’ and mechanisms of this assembling [spaces, agents, technologies, performances, and imaginaries] through comparative urban examples; then concludes by assessing how policing the MENA Carceral City shapes other urban assemblages beyond this carceral assemblage.

Disappearance, detention, torture, displacement; stress, anxiety, exhaustion, despair. The trappings of counter-revolution have serious emotional and psychological ramifications that make it difficult for those living through these periods to continue to carry on their political engagement, or even daily lives. This paper continues a recent thread of research that positions affective dynamics as a driver for political mobilization in the MENA region; as hope has been examined as a mobilizing affect throughout the revolutionary uprisings, this research seeks to explore the demobilizing affects that have been and continue to be produced by the ensuing period of counter-revolution. The paper takes an interdisciplinary approach, benefiting from the incorporation of trauma studies into a reading of the current political situation in the region, surveying the current literature on affective response to state violence, conflict, and displacement, and mapping the ways in which those who participated in revolutionary events navigate their responses to these. The research revolves around open-ended interviews with activists, both those who remain engaged in political activity and those who now avoid it, centering their feelings as well as their behaviors to understand how revolutionary and counter-revolutionary moments engender affective responses. The paper finds that counter-revolution has a deliberate goal of “breaking the spirit” of revolutionary encounters, and that in periods both revolution and of counter-revolution, activists are increasingly conceiving of practices of self-care as avenues to sustain political engagement.

This paper explores the roles institutional and discursive practices play in allowing femicide (i.e., the gender-related killing of women) in contexts where state sexism and authoritarianism converge. Focusing on the case of Turkey, I demonstrate that the practices that let women die include, but are not limited to, inefficient prosecution, delays in issuing orders of protection, and the lack of infrastructure to empower survivors. These institutional practices commonly force women to return to abusive partners who later become their killers. Moreover, the governing elites frequently make statements that promote conservative and gender-normative standards of feminine propriety, which justify violence against women who do not conform to the idealized notion of “proper woman.” Perpetrators employ the same discourses in their victim blaming defenses, which result in significant penalty reductions. This institutional and discursive context renders femicide a “tolerable crime” and leads perpetrators to think that it is their “right to kill” women (Milliyet 2015). I synthesize this data with the theories of biopolitics in explaining the phenomena that allow femicide without significant legal or social repercussions. I argue that the latter is enabled by a specific exercise of state power, which I term letting kill—a manifestation of biopolitical sovereignty that simultaneously claims to protect lives and allows their destruction (Agamben 1998). Letting kill refers to the processes through which the sovereign lets individuals assume the “right to kill,” without directly investing them with that power. It operates through three major mechanisms: policymaking and implementation, state representatives’ discursive practices that justify gender hierarchy, and lenient court decisions. As such, it implicates a strong yet complex relationship between those who do the letting (the state actors) and those who kill (ordinary citizens).

BORDERLAND DYNAMICS: AMBIGUITIES OF CONTROL AND CONFLICT AT THE EDGES OF TURKEY’S WAR What does Turkey’s Kurdish borderlands lay out in terms of the relationship between the state and Kurds? I will address this question, with a specific emphasis on the question of territorial control and its lived experiences. I argue that the intensity of territorial control in the lived experiences of Kurds in contested borderlands has profound impact on state-minority relations. This approach integrates analysis with the interview data from twelve months of fieldwork in the cities of Van, Hakkari and the surrounding towns and villages, located along the Kurdish-populated borders of Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Considering the immense impact of territorial conflicts, the number of scholarly works related to a theory of territory and its empirical analysis in diverse contexts has been increasing. Theoretically, most of the relevant scholarship focuses on the concept of territory (Elden, 2013; Paasi, 2004) and the scope of territorial rights (Miller, 2012; Simmons, 2001). These debates are held among philosophers (Nine, 2008; Kolers, 2009; Moore, 2015), political geographers (Elden, 2010; Yiftachel, 1998) and, of course, political scientists (Murphy, 1996; Agnew, 1994; Fearon and Laitin, 1999). Despite the growing interest, the current literature lacks the explanation for the complexity of the relationship between states and mobilized minorities in borderlands and more specifically, the evolving dynamics of state-minority relations across time and space. My research fills this gap in the literature and contributes to the scholarship on border studies, territorial politics, the politics of MENA, as well as Kurdish studies. Although all of these existing pieces have informed the theoretical background of my research, I go beyond the limits of these theories and develop my own empirically-driven approach, which is the bottom-up view of territorial control. I expand on this literature by examining the relationship between a peace process and territorial control in a divided setting and, in addition, I apply the literature’s theories to a specific territorial context: the Kurdish borderlands of Turkey. This study also develops a typology of territorial control that offers data to identify at least five mechanisms of territorial control and their lived experiences on the ground. In doing so, this presentation contributes to intriguing academic debates on territorial control and engages with the growing body of literature that focuses on the complex relationship between people, states and territory in conflict-ridden border zones.

This paper analyses activities of Iraq’s main intelligence agency, the Jihaz Al-Mukhabarat Al-Amma, carried out during the 1980s against the Kurdish opposition. I use this historical material in order to make a specific, theoretical argument about the role that the Jihaz Al-Mukhabarat Al-Amma played for the maintenance of the Iraqi state. I argue that the agency’s measures can be divided into knowledge-gathering measures and disciplinary measures. I follow the concept of policing as set out by Foucault, who presents policing as a tool for modern states to preserve raison d’etat. I argue that in the modern Iraqi state, police, in the Foucauldian sense, was best exercised through the Jihaz Al-Mukhabarat Al-Amma. During the 1980s, the Jihaz Al-Mukhabarat Al-Amma applied various methods to the Kurdish population, to reduce security risks. In this context the paper gives two arguments. First, I argue that the Jihaz Al-Mukhabarat Al-Amma acquired knowledge about the Iraqi Kurds and used disciplinary mechanisms to maintain raison d’état. Here, I elaborate the Kurdish rebellion in 1983 within the framework of the Iran-Iraq War. Second, I demonstrate that the Jihaz Al-Mukhabarat Al-Amma’s policing measures against Iraqi Kurds became transnational. I analyze the case of the attempted bomb attack against Iraqi Kurds at the 1980 Kurdish Student Congress in Berlin and argue that with economic and political interests trespassing boarders, also policing became transnational. Eventually, the Jihaz Al-Mukhabarat Al-Amma collaborated with the German Bundesnachrichtendienst to gather knowledge on the Iraqi Kurds in Germany. Research for this paper was conducted in the following archives: Hi?b al-Ba'th al-'Arab? al-Ishtir?k? Records (Ba'ath Party Records), Politisches Archiv, Bundesarchiv, BND-Archiv. Keywords: Raison d’état, Critical Realism, Intelligence Cooperation, Bundesnachrichtendienst, Jihaz Al-Mukhabarat Al-Amma, Iraqi Kurds, Kurdish Rebellion 1983, Bomb Attack on Kurdish Student Congress in Berlin 1980