In the Negev/Naqab region of Israel, Bedouin Arab and Jewish citizens and the government are embroiled in disputes over access to land for homes, farming and factories, and over the status of Bedouin villages. Although this is often labeled as a “land conflict,” what is actually at stake? What does land mean for those who are clashing over it? Based on ethnographic fieldwork and oral histories collected in the Naqab region, this paper examines how contemporary land disputes also constitute a struggle over belonging and exclusion. Land has long embodied a complex set of values for those on all sides of this conflict. As many scholars have demonstrated, Zionist movements have looked since their early days to land, particularly shared labor in the land, as the material means necessary for preserving a threatened Jewish people. But, the particular lands sought by Zionists were already peopled, and taking them over has required severing these prior social attachments. Bedouin Arabs’ experiences of severed attachments have received less scholarly attention than Zionist nation-building, but to understand the tenacity of land claims in the Naqab today, I argue that we must attend to these experiences, as well. Minority groups in different social contexts face various pressures to accommodate to dominant social groups that range from multicultural recognition to assimilation. And nomadic groups throughout the world have and continue to face sedentarization policies that range from enticement to coercion. In Israel, Bedouin Arabs are denied inclusion in the state and access to substantive citizenship either through recognition of difference, as offered by liberal multiculturalism (since governmental bodies insist that Bedouin Arab residents not perform in supposedly authentic Bedouin ways, such as shepherding or living nomadically), or through recognition of similarity, as offered by assimilation. In this context of sedentarization policies and refusal of cultural recognition, loss of land has become a focus of anxiety over loss of culture and identity. Through both narratives of the past and contemporary land-use practices, many Bedouin Arabs of the Naqab look to land as the material means for anchoring the communal identity and cultural distinctiveness they feel to be threatened and disappearing.

This paper interrogates the complex spatial and political conceptualizations of environmental justice articulated by the supporters of the ‘Bergama resistance’ in Turkey. Originating a few years after the official application of Turkey for full membership of the European Union, the Bergama resistance against the Australian-owned Eurgold Corporation was one of the largest and most successful environmental social movements in Turkey. Mobilized by a group of internationally-connected policy entrepreneurs and peopled mostly by a group of dedicated and relatively prosperous peasant activists, the movement opposed the establishment and operation of a gold mine based on the cyanide-leaching method of extraction. The Bergama resistance utilized two main strategies to further its goals: political demonstrations that created nationally-appealing public spectacles and judicial interventions at various local, national and international courts that consolidated incremental gains secured against Eurogold. Both strategies relied heavily on a conceptualization of environmental justice that aimed to fill a perceived void left by the Turkish state that had been dismantling itself through neoliberal economic reforms. The first section provides a brief overview of the Bergama movement, paying particular attention to several key demonstrations (e.g. the protest on the Bosphorus bridge connecting Europe and Asia) and important legal decisions (e.g. European Court of Human Rights ruling on the case). The second section demonstrates that the movement utilized examples from different historical and geographical contexts (e.g. experience of the indigenous peoples with the conquistadors in South America and poverty in post-colonial Africa) to assert the primacy of ‘the local’ by invoking a universal notion of environmental justice. The third and final section argues that extensive recourse to legal channels was not merely borne out of a need for a convenient strategy of action. Nor were ‘justice’ and ‘rights’ fashionable tropes deployed to garner public attention. The paper demonstrates that by anchoring the concept of justice to a stylized notion of ‘European civilization’ and arguing that Turkey should play a central role in it, the activists sought to critique the ongoing neoliberalization of the state while reaffirming its final authority to direct socioeconomic development in Turkey. The paper uses ethnographic data collected during in situ field research that was conducted in 1999, 2000, 2005 and 2010.

This paper examines notions and practices of participation in the management of one of Egypt’s limited but critical resources: water. Since the early 1990s, a number of international donors have promoted a shift towards participatory water management through the establishment of water user associations (WUAs). Based on the assumption that it is in the interests of those who use the majority of the water to manage it efficiently, these farmer organizations are designed to improve the system of water distribution. Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork with a Dutch funded project, which is working through the Ministry of Water Resources to establish a WUA on every irrigation canal in Fayoum governorate, this paper explores the dynamics of participation in practice. Paying close attention to the fluidity of the resource in question, the paper asks how the material nature of the resource matters to the process of forming a participatory management community around it. The first section of the paper examines four understandings of participation that are variously held by irrigation engineers, farmers, policy makers, and international donors: participation as communication; participation as action; participation as economy; and participation as democracy. I argue that the divergence in perspectives about what the WUAs will actually do is critical to how this attempt to organize participation plays out. The second part of the paper looks at the process of constructing a community of water users. I contrast the forms of communal interaction that emerge in the fields through the farmers’ shared work of directing the flow of water with the project’s attempt to manufacture community around clusters of branch canals by organizing a series of meetings and elections. I argue that water’s fluidity, namely the difficulty of bounding water into a clear space of community-based management, lies at the root of the WUAs’ failure to attain widespread support and fulfill the role that their architects had in mind. Bringing an ethnographic lens to this examination of participatory resource management, the paper demonstrates the significance of the environment as a focal point of international intervention, community formation, and social mobilization in Egypt.

This paper investigates the social life and material circuits of water in the Egyptian squatter settlement Izbit Kherallah in order to examine the role of water in urban ecologies and to understand the social pathways that water takes through city environments. The research was carried out over a sixteen-month period, from September 2009 through December 2010, in a six hundred acre squatter area located near downtown Cairo. It investigates how the role of water as a border zone, or “ecotone,” (Haraway 2008) between humans and other living and material forms in urban ecologies frames new questions about the nature of interspecies dependence and human cultural worlds (Thrift 2004; Mitchell 2002; Latour 2004; Gandy 2004, 2005; Tsing 2005; Haraway 2008). It looks at the ways in which a variety of city infrastructures, including physical, social, biological, and affective cycles, conjoin in water. Water is a key site in which to view the implications of human’s mutual constitution with a whole host of “others,” from the intense investigation of the domestic or microscopic biological interlocutors that Haraway proposes, to the meanings of our human connections to the built environment of cities that Nigel Thrift and Mathew Gandy suggest. In Izbit Kherallah, community members seek enough potable water to cook, drink, bathe, make wadu (which is the act of bathing particular body parts with water in preparation for prayer in Islam), and clean their homes. At the same time they also combat the effects of alternating periods of highly chlorinated water that causes kidney and liver issues, and water contaminated by sewage leakage that spreads communicable diseases such as hepatitis and intestinal worms. One key arena in human-nonhuman relationships is the stomachs of Izba’s youngest residents, as repeated exposure to contaminated water and food frustrate the attempts of mothers to keep their children healthy. Here, the project uses the idea of bodies as composites of various interdependent creatures ultimately necessary for each other’s survival to think through the permeability of bodily boundaries and their connection to larger water systems in which they are enmeshed. In sum, this project engages with how the lives of Izbit Kherallah residents coexist with cycles of water and the living things that move in and through it.