Urbanism and the Arab Uprisings: Beyond the Square

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Nov 30, 2013
[The Urban Research logo. Image from https://www.facebook.com/urjournal.] [The Urban Research logo. Image from https://www.facebook.com/urjournal.]

Urbanism and the Arab Uprisings: Beyond the Square

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Urban Research invites submissions on the topic of “Urbanism and the Arab Uprisings: Beyond the Square.” This special issue will explore the ways in which the urban has informed the on-going Arab uprisings.  In part, it will examine how urban spatial forms and phenomena-both material and discursive-have been constitutive of the uprisings. Equally, this issue will look at what the Arab uprisings have illuminated about the urban. In this regard, we will explore the material and discursive use of urban spaces at various phases of the uprisings to see what they reveal about the urban as a distinctive socio-spatial phenomenon.

The Arab uprisings have illuminated fascinating socio-spatial dynamics and imaginative geographies in the urban context that warrant critical scholastic attention.  However, the early literature on the uprisings focused largely on the role played by social media as an aspatial force of social organization that determined the trajectory of events.  In response, subsequent scholarship has argued for the centrality of physical spaces–particularly the square–to our understanding of events on the ground.  But neither body of scholarship has yet contended with the broader urban histories and social contexts in which events have been unfolding and the ways in which they intersect with the uprisings.  Furthermore, to understand these events and the continued unrest in the region, it is critical to take account of urban spaces and processes beyond the square.  This special issue proposes to redress this gap in the research.

Particular questions that this special issue will address include:

  • What role have physical spaces outside the public square of the metropolis played in the Arab uprisings?
  • What have the uprisings told us about how urban areas are linked or not? Have certain connections between spaces/places been forged or broken as a result of the recent political upheaval?
  • What novel constellations of power, knowledge, and imaginative geographies have emerged in relation to the use of urban space during the uprisings?
  • What do the Arab uprisings tell us about the tensions between social classes, religion, and ethnicity at the urban level?

This special issue will be organized around the following themes:

Connection and Disconnection: An examination of the connections and/or disconnections across the broader physical spaces in which the Arab uprisings have unfolded has important implications for our understandings of the urban, as well as the sub- and supra-geographical scales. The movement of protesters, images, and information throughout the Arab uprisings has articulated new connections and revealed previously submerged ones. Questions explored in this section will include: What implications do the Arab uprisings have for theoretical formations of geographic scale?  How have spaces relevant to the uprisings articulated–practically and/or discursively–with other spaces? What have the uprisings told us about how urban areas are linked or not? What are the structures, meaning and consequences of these links? Have certain connections between spaces/places been forged or broken as a result of the recent political upheaval?

Suburbanisms and Small Cities: On 17 December 2010, Muhammed Bouazizi’s self-immolation precipitated protests that spread throughout Tunisia and then the region. Bouazizi’s protest suicide took place more than 265 kilometres south of the capital in the small city of Sidi Bouzid.  Spaces beyond the public squares and the centre of the city have been crucial to the on-going Arab uprisings but remain almost invisible in discourses surrounding them.  Questions examined in this section will include: What role have physical spaces outside the public square of the metropolis played in relation to the Arab uprisings?  What impact has the rapid suburbanisation occurring throughout the region–including the rise of gated communities and processes of gentrification–had in relation to the protests? Have the uprisings impacted notions of what constitutes the urban, rural-urban, urban-suburban and/or their relations to each other?

Laboratory: The Arab uprisings have entailed a dramatic alteration in the use of urban space.  Both protesters and the state have utilized the urban fabric in novel ways to achieve their respective goals. In the context of the uprisings themselves, this has been manifested in various ways, including the performative, be it self-immolation or protest; artistic and discursive, including street art, urban literature, and music; social organization, such as the rise of neighbourhood security and organising around access to basic urban utilities; and security/fear, for example, the construction of walls by the state. The uprisings have also generated new uses of urban space in the aftermath of regime change, among them, locally organized infrastructure, gentrification/beautification, and development projects. Questions focused loosely around these processes will include: How have the Arab uprisings generated new ideas about the use of urban space?  How has the construction and/or reconstruction of urban spaces occurred and how have these processes facilitated hegemony and/or resistance in ways that informed the uprisings? How have actors sought to organise, disrupt and/or resist certain formations of time and space in the urban context? What novel constellations of power, knowledge and imaginative geographies have emerged in relation to the use of urban space during the uprisings? Can the Arab uprisings be understood as a demand to the right to the city?

Papers should be between 3,000-5,000 words, double-spaced, including endnotes. If you are interested please submit an abstract of 500 words to deensharp@gmail.com by February 1, 2014. Final submissions will be due in early May 2014. If you would like to discuss your article before submission, please contact the special issue editors: Deen Sharp (deensharp@gmail.com) and Claire Panetta (cpanetta@gc.cuny.edu).

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Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412