Dr. Robert P. Parks
In Algeria, questions of property are unsettled. While legal titles exist and courts adjudicate disputes, conflicting notions of citizen rights and state obligations continue to blur two analytically distinct concepts – possession and ownership – each tied to questions of individual, collective, or state claims. Absent widespread agreement on who owns what, who has the right to own what, and who should own what, land, real-estate, and public space in Algeria are sites of loud and silent claim-making, as well as abandonment and appropriation.
This paper explores the link between land/real-estate, public space, the state, and citizen in contemporary Algeria through the lens of the very polyvalent term beylik. The term beylik is used as a general substitute for dawla (state), kita’a ‘am (public sector), or hukuma (government) – all denoting sovereign authority and power. Linked, the term is too used for property, though in distinct (if not conflicting) ways, revealing much about how many Algerians view the state and property, as well as the intersection between the two. In its first sense, the term refers to the public domain land, and is derived from the Ottoman-era land category ardh el-bey. The term has alternative meanings too linked with property. It can be applied to any property owned by the state, including land, buildings, bus-stops, and park benches. While in this sense, the term too has a link with the state, in the final, and equally common usage of the term, beylik is used to describe any property in which the ownership is unclear, including abandoned apartments and properties, industrial sites, or public spaces that are no longer widely used or frequented by citizens. This form of beylik can be appropriated for personal use, and so in this sense of the term, beylik means not just absence of an owner, but too absence of the state.
This paper examines the appropriation of citizen-ascribed beylik property in order to tease out the links between state, individual, public space, and private property in contemporary Algeria. Looking at a number of cases of citizen appropriation of public space in Oran, Algeria, the paper seeks explore larger (though often silent) debates on citizen rights and state obligations and how the palimpsest of property reforms over the past fifty years have shaped public conceptions of public and private.
This paper examines the interwoven land and seed questions in contemporary Tunisia through a survey of post-2000 national and local, institutional and collective, attempts at seed sovereignty. Seed sovereignty is based on the notion that juridical control over land, without national control over seed-stock, especially including autochthonous landraces, can simply lead to new forms of dependence and the hemorrhage of sovereignty which control over land is supposed to prevent. The notion further suggests that the agrarian question is one whose answer is not simply linked to equal distributions of land endowments, but in fact is also a question of the technics used on that land. Land struggles are in fact struggles about the relationship of people to each other, through land; and that relationship is mediated by the technics used on that land, too. Post-colonial Tunisia has seen a process through which indigenous knowledge and local land-races have been gradually replaced by either seedstock owned by multinationals or oriented to monocrops such as the Deglet Nour in the oases of the South producing for the international market, leading to the razing of indigenous genetic variety. Questions of which varietals to plant, or whether to use indigenous landraces or foreign species of crops, are in fact intertwined with questions of the entire orientation of the rural economy. This paper thus considers several attempts at seed sovereignty in Tunisia, especially post-revolutionary Tunisia. Such moves towards seed sovereignty have taken form both in the state and in non-state voluntary associations. Through survey evidence, interviews, and other material, I assess the current state of struggle concerning moves towards seed sovereignty, especially as they have occurred through the Ben Ali-era National Gene Bank and the various initiatives which have burst out of the Tunisian oases in the pre- and post-revolutionary era oriented around restoring the country’s control over its endogenous genetic treasure, the fruit of thousands of years of living experimentation on the land.
Lana Salman
How does standardization make land a perceivable and governable object? What are the political consequences of making land governable in this manner? The literature on land in the Middle East and North Africa region can be grouped in two broad categories. The first provides historical accounts of the constitution of property rights in regimes with overlapping tenure systems (Owen, 2001) and documents the violence which accompanies property making as nation making (Mitchell 2002, 62-63). The second focuses on informal property rights in the expanding peripheries of the region’s cities, and puts particular emphasis on the law and its interpretations in addressing the political repercussions of tenure in/security in these spaces (Razzaz 1993, 1994 on Amman, Jordan, Fawaz 2008, 2014, Clerc 2006 on Beirut, Clerc 2013 on Syria, Sims 2016 on Egypt). Rather than focus on property making and tenure in/security, I propose to examine the technologies that make land thinkable before it is turned into property characterized by a particular type of tenure. To do this, I focus on five decades of urban upgrading programs in Tunisia and argue that these programs made land thinkable as urban by creating expectations for service delivery. While expectations of service delivery extend indefinitely into the future, the actual provision of services (paved roads, water, electricity and sanitation) is the product of particular political bargains. Such a history of urbanization from below enables a narration of the current post-revolutionary juncture that is centered on land rather than labor.
