This paper analyzes three major sites of contestation and local resistance to the “Blue Line” in southern Lebanon, the unofficial borderline separating Lebanon and Israel. Far from an agreement between friendly neighbors, the Blue Line is currently being drawn by the United Nations Interim Force In Lebanon (UNIFIL) and roughly marks the Israeli military’s line of withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. Its coordinates are based on slightly adapted versions of the 1920 French and English boundary descriptions of modern Lebanon that were never been fully enforced—until now. This article will explore UNIFIL’s ongoing process of the gradual normalization of the line as the de facto border between the two warring states. This presentation will problematize the instances where once productive contested areas are transformed into abandoned, highly militarized zones in the absence of a political solution to the Arab-Israeli war. At the same time my research underlines the fragility of the Blue Line, while exploring its contradictions with the actual human geography of the land. Considering land use before and after the Blue Line demarcations, it will demonstrate the implications of enforcing this often involuntary border for the populations who are directly affected by it. By looking at the different narrations and claims to power, this paper interrogates the notion of sovereignty in a region that has undergone major political change, moving from foreign occupation to liberation, while hosting a long-term UN presence. In order to grasp the politics and meaning of contested boundaries, it will illustrate the accounts of major actors involved in the demarcation process: the Lebanese state, Israel, UNIFIL and the local population. This paper is based on ethnographic research and interviews conducted over several years with southern Lebanese citizens and officials, former officials from the Lebanese Armed Forces, and UNIFIL officials, as well as historical accounts of the borderline in question.

The ‘security’ wall recently proposed by the Iraqi government, and stretching more than 300 kilometers around the city of Baghdad is another mechanism of power that furthers the fragmentation of the territory and national polity, through the separation and segregation of communities. This process was generated by and during imperial occupations and invasions, the most recent being the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. In recent years, resulting from US policies in Iraq, the urban public space of Baghdad has been reconfigured. The erection of walls and checkpoints, have to a great extent separated and confined the inhabitants within sectarian and ethnic enclaves. These processes that destroyed older neighbourhoods and streets have been concurrently erasing and marginalizing older memories of a more diverse city, where spatial arrangements had enabled different kinds of social relationships. Since memory and place are inextricably linked, the reconstitution of space diminished national consciousness and instead fostered collective solidarities based on ethnic or sectarian belongings. Thus, this paper aims to argue that these physical structures and check points refract an imperial imaginary and strategy of the 'new' Iraq, and parallel other processes, such as census taking, and formal institutionalization of sectarian and ethnic identities that undermine national belonging and citizenship. These processes have repercussions on memory making in the post-2003 neighbourhoods of Baghdad and in Iraq more generally. Controlling the movement of Iraqis for example, the condition that internally displaced groups from outside must have a sponsor from Baghdad in order to enter the city, and other kinds of obstructions of movement within and between their cities, contribute to new social and political relationships, and new forms of belonging, and memory making. Needless to say, identities are processes, always in flux and in a state of perpetual contestation in both time and space (Hall 2006), and informed by social and political contexts. City walls and checkpoints represent “miniature” borders (Stewart 1984). In time, these miniature borders, along with other policies that fragment territory and people confine relationships and experiences, and in turn undermine national belonging creating new layers of otherness. This paper will also situate these physical structures of confinement and control within the context of the crisis of internal displacement in Iraq since the occupation, analyzing how walls and checkpoints have further alienated Iraqis beyond Baghdad from their capital (but also Baghdadis from their larger Iraq), and thus weakening collective national consciousness.

“الوطن عنصري” is scrawled across a wall of a fictional Syrian refugee camp in an episode of the American television series, Homeland. Unbeknownst to the production company and actors, the artists tasked with “replicating” the graffiti found on the Syrian-Lebanese border, marked the walls with subversive inscriptions instead. Walls, in this instance, become open spaces for transgression and resistance. Indeed, graffiti as an alternative form of communication has long been used to express political dissent. This paper considers the circulation of images of the Arab refugee through a comparative reading of fictional graffiti on the walls of a Syrian refugee camp in Homeland and of real graffiti found in the camps of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon. By attending to the materiality of the inscriptions left behind by Palestinian refugees, this paper addresses how aesthetic contemplation is inextricable from political contemplation. The paper also traces the various ways that the “real” aesthetics of Arab refugees disrupts the image of the Arab refugee that circulates in the realm of North American culture.

This paper argues that Ottoman Naturalization Law of 1869 did not intend to create a more inclusive imperial identity, but rather aimed to establish and maintain control of the state over the subject peoples i.e. by facilitating expatriation, displacement, naturalization and loss of citizenship, through the example of the Ottoman plans for the deportation of Greeks in 1869. In their attempt to modernize sociopolitical orders that had come to seem backward by mid-century, the Ottoman bureaucrats tried to adopt models regarded as successful in the West. To this end, they decoupled citizenship from older ascriptive categories—ethnic, social or confessional status—replacing them with more universal civic definitions. This reconceptualization of citizenship—and by extension the relationship between state and subject/citizen—emerged as a core issue of redefining statehood in most non-western states from China to Iran. Pulling together fragmented individual cases, as well as bureaucratic and diplomatic correspondence, this paper contextualizes the practical ramifications of the 1869 Ottoman Naturalization Law for the Greek population. This new law aimed to identify select ethno-religious communities deemed to be “undesirable” in order to expel them and targeted those born in the empire who obtained foreign passports to benefit from the legal exemptions extended to citizens of western powers. During the 1860s, the Ottoman state faced a constant threat of separatism among non-Muslim populations, and embarked on the task of creating an exclusivist imperial citizenship by denaturalizing those populations. Most importantly, this denaturalization process would entail the deportation (teb’id) of significant portions of the native Ottoman population, mostly Christians. By examining the ways in which the mass deportations of Greeks in the Empire reflected in policy the new approaches to imperial citizenship, this paper advances historical arguments related to studies of genocide in the Middle East, from the mid-nineteenth through early twentieth centuries. This paper rather suggests that ostensibly liberal/secular definitions of citizenship actually acted to marginalize people who under earlier legal regimes had enjoyed some kinds of protection, if not full rights of political participation. This shift in the definition of citizenship laid the conceptual foundations for subsequent genocidal policies against the marginalized populations.