Urban politics has received growing attention in the anthropology, sociology, and political science of the MENA region. In line with global trends, questions of scale, territory, flows and connectivities and materialities have come to the fore, with a wide range of creative and novel lines of inquiry connecting the global to the hyper-local and every scale in between. In February 2023, POMEPS partnered with the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut and The Policy Initiative think tank for a workshop in Beirut to bring together an interdisciplinary group of young scholars from across the region to explore questions of urban life, politics, and culture. The papers moved beyond more traditional political science topics such as municipal government, decentralization, clientelistic voting, protests, and clientelism. While those themes certainly operated in the background, the authors assembled in Beirut pushed to shift the lens towards multi-scalar ethnographic modes of inquiry, highlighting the materialities and relationalities of the hyper-local, examining sites and places which concentrate power dynamics.
Mona Harb, Marc Lynch, and Jillian Schwedler
Wānās, Henna, and the City: How Sudanese Henna Artists Navigate Greater Cairo
Gehad Abaza, University of California, Santa Barbara
The Politics and Economics of Urbicide: Why Were Syrian Cities Destroyed?
Munqeth Othman Agha, University of Trento
Carine Assaf, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Mastering Heritage: Reconstruction of History and Space in Post-Conflict Diyarbakır
Ronay Bakan, Johns Hopkins University
Countering “Fripisation:” Competing Forms of Order-Making in Tunis’ Second-Hand Markets
Katharina Grüneisl, University of Nottingham
Dalia Ibraheem, Rutgers State University
Tehran’s Nightlife and Spatio-Temporal Configurations
Abbas Jong, Humboldt University of Berlin
The Food Geographies of Filipina Migrants in Beirut
Noura Nasser, Concordia University
In Search of the Black “Ghetto:” Racial and Spatial Stigma in Tunisia
Shreya Parikh, UNC Chapel-Hill & Sciences Po Paris
Women and the Algerian Hirak: Resistance and Negotiation
Seréna Nilsson Rabia, University of Bergen
The Politics of Arbaeen: Transcending Militarized Urbanism in Iraq’s Shrine Cities
Alex Shams, University of Chicago
Checkpoint as Paradox: Notes from Baghdad
Omar Sirri, SOAS University of London
Automation Zones: Expanding the Digital “Frontier” of Labor and Trade in Aqaba
Zak Tobias, Queen Mary University of London