Over the past five years, the Palestinian territories have experienced what could be called an astronomy boom: from the emergence of university clubs and graduate programs in major cities, to the founding of public astronomy organizations, to the development of small-scale, community observatories, a fascination with the interstellar has seized local audiences. Many Palestinian astronomers have speculated that growing geographic and political suffocation in the occupied territories are one reason why the science’s popularity has surged: with Israeli military rule restricting Palestinian movement throughout the West Bank more than ever, astronomy helps bring them to something outside their carceral homeland. As one prominent Palestinian astrophysicist has put it, astronomy can show Palestinians that there is a “beautiful universe for everybody out there” with “no borders.” Set against this backdrop of structural and psychological violence, this paper seeks to understand why—given the obstacles and massive commitment of time and resources—Palestinians are seeking to create and institutionalize a field of astronomy now. What work does studying the galaxy and looking out into the universe do for Palestinians? To ground such broad explorations, this paper focuses on the particular histories, stories, and struggles of Palestine’s largest astronomy club—one located at a major university—in which astronomers are working to direct their scientific research vertically at a time when the Israeli state is working to vertically elevate their forms of surveillance, military arsenal, and sovereignty. This paper, then, recasts the most seemingly benign recreational activities—like stargazing—through the lens of empire and coloniality. In so doing, this paper does not simply (re)tell the story of Palestinian adversity; rather, it shows how studying the vertical in Palestine has produced new educational, scientific, and humanitarian horizons across national borders, offering astronomers and the greater Palestinian population professional and material opportunities—jobs, internships, resources, supplies, equipment, connections, partnerships—that have historically been foreclosed by the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. Across these scales, this paper traces the geopolitics of the sky from a Palestinian locale in order to reveal how these vertical dimensions affect sovereignty, mobility, imagination, and possibility on our own planet.

The Middle East lies at the center of a three-decades-long reconfiguration of global commercial air traffic, emerging as the most rapidly growing hub that connects all world regions with one stop. As the aviation industry expects a doubling in passenger and freight traffic in the next 20 years, the recent rise of the region will continue exponentially because the aviation industry’s center of gravity has been moving from the West to the East as the developing economies in the Asia- Pacific, the Middle East and Africa rise. The states in the region are competing with each other to dominate the airline routes that radiate from them as multiple Middle Eastern carriers gain the upper hand over their North American and European competitors in the global aviation market. Several Western carriers have been pressuring their governments to reconsider open skies agreements in an attempt to suppress the Middle Eastern carriers’ global growth. On the other hand, the competition among regional carriers is overshadowed mostly by political conflicts among different states. In this respect, this paper analyses the current Qatar-Gulf crisis from the lens of the contestations over the airspace rights and the increasing international as well as regional competition to dominate the global commercial air traffic in the Middle East. On June 5, 2017, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates and Egypt cut diplomatic ties with Qatar, imposing air, land and sea blockade on the country. Since then, the no-fly zones surrounding Qatar has caused flight cancellations and rerouting of planes. While the Qatari government condemns the no-fly zones as “illegal”, the blockading states argue that they have the right to shut down their airspaces to Qatari airplanes. Based on ethnographic and archival research conducted in various parts of the region, this paper brings up to the forefront the airspace over the Middle East and suggests that Qatar-Gulf crisis necessitates a rethinking of sovereignty and jurisdiction over the airspace in the region. This paper seeks to discuss compelling questions about air rights opened up by the blockade: Is airspace over the Middle East political? Who controls the airspace? Does the airspace belong to states or to the international community? Taking the crisis as a case study, the paper argues that the airspace over the Middle East is a crucial site that effects and is affected by vertical dynamics of political, social and economic relations of the region.

It is no secret that the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is over land. As such, a great deal of academic, activist, and institutional research has been oriented (explicitly or implicitly) by property, detailing histories of ownership, theft, and future compensation that will undergird any final settlement of territory and borders. I take a different approach, asking instead: what is it that constitutes private property? This paper follows several Palestinian surveyors who work to “translate” (Nadasdy 2005) the Ottoman kushan (title) to the Israeli military courts as private property. After 1979, Israel began seizing unregistered, uncultivated areas as "state land". This adversarial process of land registration shifted the burden of proof to the landowner who was called upon to furnish evidence of title or cultivation in order to prove, to the satisfaction of the authorities, that the land was private and therefore exempt from expropriation. In the early 1980s, several surveyors realized that Israeli military courts would accept the Ottoman kushan as evidence of private property. However, there was a problem. Created in the late 1800s, the kushan was not connected to a cadastral map but only contained a written description of borders. As such, changes in cultivation, shifting sources of livelihoods, and the movement of people rendered it illegible as proof of property. In response, surveyors developed a type of forensic historical anthropology, working to recreate chains of ownership, trace kinship, test soil, and generate new maps. These practices unearth material histories and their associated social relations in order to render the kushan as a recognizable form of private property in the eyes of settler law. The result is not simply more proof, but the production of a novel, if tenuous, configuration of property that expands the conditions of possibility for land defense. Attention to these practices has several scholarly implications. First, while a large body of literature has demonstrated that the category of state land is dynamic and fluid, it imbues private property with stability, as a result leaving Palestinian responses to expropriation under-theorized. Second, it challenges accounts – which often take the liberal norms of international law as a starting point – that Israel/Palestine is best understood as a conflict over ‘who owns what’. Instead, looking to the histories and dynamics of other settler colonies, I argue that land struggle is a battle over the grounds of what constitutes property in the first place.

This paper examines the legal regulation of treasure hunting practices in Turkey’s Kurdistan. In recent decades, treasure hunting has emerged as an important means for the pursuit of wealth in Kurdish areas of Turkey, where the formal economic sector has been devastated by state violence and neoliberal economic reforms. Reduced possibilities of making a living have led thousands of people to search for treasures believed to be buried by the victims of the Armenian Genocide, in abandoned Armenian graveyards, among the ruins of old monasteries, in the backyards of old Armenian houses, and remote rural caves. In addition to exploring new theoretical and methodological perspectives on the afterlife of a genocide, my paper advances the hypothesis that the “underground” activities of Kurdish treasure hunters create a new domain of practice in which the issue of genocide has to be dealt with by the state unintentionally and inevitably. In the context of the state’s recognition of the material existence of “Armenian treasures,” and denial of the origins of that treasure, I will explore how the ruined landscape and treasure excavations are legally constructed and controlled.