Joanne Randa Nucho, Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power (New Texts Out Now)

Joanne Randa Nucho, Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power (New Texts Out Now)

Joanne Randa Nucho, Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power (New Texts Out Now)

By : Joanne Randa Nucho

Joanne Randa Nucho, Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Joanne Randa Nucho (JRN): I have family roots in Beirut, through Palestinian and Armenian grandparents and great-grandparents displaced to Lebanon in the early and mid-twentieth century. I was born in Los Angeles and always loved visiting cities and seeing how they are designed and remade. This love came together with questions about my family: how did my grandparents experience Beirut as home? How did they remember Beirut after they left for the United States? Stories from my Armenian grandmother about Beirut first led me to Bourj Hammoud, which was urbanized to settle Armenian refugees in Lebanon, and has continued to be a hub for refugees from Lebanon, Syria, and beyond to this day. I became fascinated by the real expertise and know-how it took to navigate the city and get basic services in Bourj Hammoud and from there around Beirut. Over time, I began to think of these in terms of infrastructures, and channels, through which people could make claims in specific times and places, and how that could help us rethink the question of sectarianism.  

J:  What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

JRN: The book begins with a question I often heard in Beirut whenever something breaks down: Wayn al Dawleh, or “Where is the state?” That question reflects the frustration with the patchwork private provisioning systems layered on top of a barely functioning state grid. Even the state electricity grid is supplemented by a Turkish power boat. I explore the question ethnographically— how do people come to understand themselves as a member of a sectarian community in ways that are both affective but also material, especially when the provision of basic social services are channeled through sect affiliated clinics, schools and organizations? How do these channels shape and transform not only the subjects who navigate them, but also the meaning of organizations and communities themselves?

Bourj Hammoud is known as Beirut’s “Armenian neighborhood,” but, in fact, it is far more diverse. Making a claim to community there involves the mobilization of class, gender, and geography in addition to religion or sect. These elements must come together in the right moment to make a connection successful, and they can change over time.

In this book, I bring together the recent anthropological conversations in infrastructure, including work by Julia Elyachar, Paul Kockleman, Brian Larkin and others, together with critical literature on sectarianism in Lebanon by Suad Joseph and Ussama Makdisi and others. I also draw upon the great work in urban studies coming from the Beirut context by people like Lara Deeb, Mona Harb, Mona Fawaz, Aseel Sawalha, Hiba Bou Akar, and Eric Verdeil. 

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

JRN: Before coming to this work, I was interested in urban memory, historic preservation, and commemoration. In this book, I focus on how people navigate the city. In Bourj Hammoud, many neighborhoods are named for the Ottoman towns and villages from which Armenians were displaced and are simultaneously home to displaced people from Syria and beyond. Memory is constantly referenced, recalled, and transformed in daily lives moving through the city. So is forgetting. When do people remember things? When are those memories invoked and to what ends? My background in film and visual practice made me curious about what people saw or noticed in the city, and when things seemed to fade into the background. These turned out to be important questions.

Sectarianism is often discussed as something immutable and intrinsic to Lebanon, as a conflict that stems from religious difference itself, and my book is critical of that.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

JRN: My main target audience is people interested in Lebanon, of course, and those who are interested in troubling the concept of sectarianism. Sectarianism is often discussed as something immutable and intrinsic to Lebanon, as a conflict that stems from religious difference itself, and my book is critical of that. I take seriously the role that infrastructural investments and service provision play in shaping notions of belonging and exclusion, and that complicates the idea that whatever people understand about “community” is apriori to these investments.

I would also like for the book to be read by people interested in infrastructure and cities anywhere in the world. I have recently written about the importance of Lebanon for thinking about crumbling infrastructure in the United States, and the ways in which moments of breakdown can be used to do all kind of work to shape public opinion and discourse on the left and the right. Increasingly, the vision for rebuilding in the US context is greater privatization and public-private partnerships. The situation in Lebanon is not exceptional, especially if we take into account the ways in which racism and inequality shape access to public goods and services in the US as well.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

JRN: I am currently completing two articles related to infrastructure in Beirut—the first on the garbage protests of 2015 and the second about private electricity generator subscription systems. Both approach Lebanon as a place from which to generalize about questions of privatization, rather than a site of exception. Another multi-sited project looks at migrations, transnational organizations and charities that connected communities in the United States, Europe, Aleppo, and Beirut as a way to rethink legacies of the twentieth century’s first large-scale refugee crisis.

 

Excerpt from the Book:

One late August afternoon, in the thick humidity of the Beirut summer, I was on one of the many private buses moving at a snail’s pace across the traffic-clogged streets between the west of the city, where I was visiting the library at Haigazian University, and Bourj Hammoud, just east of Beirut’s municipal boundary. Since the 1930s most of Bourj Hammoud’s social and political infrastructure and educational institutions have been dominated by the Armenian population that was settled in Lebanon in the wake of the genocide in former Ottoman lands (present-day Turkey). Haigazian University was one of the few Armenian cultural institutions in the western part of the city after the end of the 1975–90 Lebanese civil war, in which violence and ethnic cleansing had transformed many Beirut neighborhoods.

We were barely moving. At this rate, it would take over an hour to reach my destination. The bus stopped at the large intersection in the middle of the city where it routinely does—either to change drivers or for the driver to have a short break. The driver jumped out and walked across the street to urinate against a wall. A woman sitting a few rows behind grew impatient with the wait and burst out: “Wayn al dawleh? Shufu hayda Lubnan!” (Where is the state? Look, this is Lebanon!).

I had heard this phrase before often—during rolling electricity cuts or intense traffic jams—but not to scold someone for inappropriate behavior. Friends explained to me later that such use of wayn al dawleh was not unusual. In Beirut in 2011 it had come to express anger or humor or a hopeless appeal for efficient service provision or for accountability when that service was nowhere to be found. Wayn al dawleh is not the only phrase deployed in everyday life through which Lebanese express the longing for dependable infrastructure and anger at a government that seems unable, or unwilling, to provide it. In quite a different context, for example, the seven-year-old son of a friend of mine jumped up after hearing the familiar switch-off of the hum of the private electricity generator and said, “Ijit al dawleh!” (The state is here!), meaning that the national electricity grid was providing power again. That moment shaped the temporality of household life in neighborhoods like Bourj Hammoud, where government electricity was on for only eight to fifteen hours a day. Washing machines begin their work, air conditioners groan to life, and elevators resume their way up and down the heights of residential buildings. In each apartment of each building on each street in neighborhoods like Bourj Hammoud, people negotiate these multiple flows of electricity on a daily basis. State agencies like Electricité du Liban are but one player in this flow of services providing the infrastructure of daily life in the household. For many people in such neighborhoods, this means paying for a subscription to a generator owned by a local patron who provides electricity for that particular block. These systems pump power through wires as equal players with state utilities and kick in when the national grid supply cuts out.

As much as each household has successfully patched together platforms for the provision of essential infrastructure for family life, the frustration with the lack of “someone” in charge of it all and the failure of the state to provide these services as public goods is expressed through the utterances of daily life. Another often-repeated query in Lebanon, “Meen al-masʾoul?” (Who is in charge/responsible?), is used to locate whomever is “supposed” to be in charge in a particular context to manage resources or maintain infrastructures. In its literal translation, it is a call to locate power or responsibility, a frustration that, in 2015, was expressed as a revolt against inefficient garbage collection but quickly spread to a broader critique of state infrastructures. The unfortunate case of the driver lacking a proper place to take a restroom break raised the ire of the passenger who thought that this was yet another example of a wayward public and moral order of behavior in Lebanon and the inability to locate anyone or any governing body to “take responsibility” for the broken infrastructure and perception of disorder. “Who is in charge” is a constant refrain. Where does power reside, and in which actors—a “failed” state, a sectarian political party, a distant nation, or another state linked to a Lebanese sectarian political faction? What is organizing the flows of people, money, and things through urban streets, mediated at different levels of accountability with the family, sectarian institutions, and the state?

Map of the Book

This book navigates the human and material infrastructures and services that produce a sense of belonging, sometimes sectarian, in and through the urban district of Bourj Hammoud. To unpack popular discourses about sectarianism and conflict in the wake of the past ten years of significant geopolitical regional shifts, I begin in chapter 1 with a closer examination of a new “sectarian conflict” emerging along the fault lines in space in Bourj Hammoud. This conflict led to the mass eviction of Syrian Kurds from certain parts of the municipal district. In the chapter, I trace how violence is often interpreted as a reemerging sectarian conflict that is both entrenched and inevitable immediately after it begins.

The next three chapters focus on various municipal technologies, nonprofits, and lending institutions to show that the sectarian “community” is not a naturalized social category that is simply represented by these institutions. Rather, it is a networked system with differential access to those claiming “Armenianness” through various means not narrowly limited to religious-ethnic identity. In chapter 2, I focus on the permanently temporary housing regimes of two Armenian refugee camps in order to examine the various technologies that municipality and political actors use to mobilize notions of belonging to the “community” through informal property. These processes are deeply related to specific urban histories and class associations with particular neighborhoods as well as sets of documentation and other legal technologies. Chapter 3 focuses on the role of notions of gendered propriety in differentiating access to Armenian women’s organizations in Bourj Hammoud, which has important ramifications in accessing services and resources as well as understandings of belonging to the Armenian community. Chapter 4 compares an officially licensed credit facility to informal women’s rotating credit associations. How might official credit institutions foreclose the possibility of crosscutting patterns of lending outside of sect-affiliated channels?

Chapter 5 jumps beyond the neighborhood scale to a city-to-city collaboration between Bourj Hammoud and a foreign municipality as a means of challenging Lebanese state infrastructure projects. I analyze the ways in which the overlapping jurisdictions of power go far beyond the fragmented infrastructures of the neighborhood block to transnational circulations of expertise and resources. In doing so, I demonstrate how the popular notion that Lebanon’s infrastructural and conflict-oriented problems could be solved through a strong centralized state or through the ideology of decentralization completely ignores the way that municipal governance works through overlapping jurisdictions. While Lebanese centralized state-sponsored infrastructure projects have had a destructive impact on environmental and social conditions in Bourj Hammoud, municipality-endorsed initiatives have often been equally destructive. Chapter 5 navigates the delicate balancing act made by one urban planning expert as she tries to draw in outside experts through city-to-city collaborations to block some of the more damaging projects.

As I learned throughout my fieldwork, unexpected consequences are often just as important to the unfolding of these various projects as the intentions of their architects. The Syrian conflict, which was just beginning during the course of my fieldwork, has now escalated into a full-scale war, displacing at least one million Syrians to Lebanon. In my conclusion, I describe the ways in which many displaced Syrians in Lebanon have had to navigate the existing networks of services and aid in order to receive vital relief. As major international organizations use sect-affiliated clinics and social service centers as distribution hubs for various forms of aid and assistance for refugees, it is even more critical to think about the ways in which these institutions function within the political space of Lebanon. As the term “sectarian conflict” is presented by way of explanation for conflicts in Syria and Iraq, it is important to think about how that concept is produced, how it circulates, and what it means in different contexts. At a certain point, approaching something as always already sectarian and creating the infrastructures, institutions, and channels to accommodate it are part of the way in which it gets produced as inevitable in the first place. It is my hope that with more careful scholarship, we can demonstrate that even the most entrenched-seeming identity categories are constructed through far more contingent networks than we realize.

Luna Khirfan, ed. Order and Disorder: Urban Governance and the Making of Middle Eastern Cities (New Texts Out Now)

 

Luna Khirfan, ed. Order and Disorder: Urban Governance and the Making of Middle Eastern Cities (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2017).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Luna Khirfan (LK): I was frustrated by the lack of resources on the contemporary urban governance of cities in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Apart from Seteney Shami’s edited volume published in 2001, there was an obvious dearth of theoretical and empirical research on urban governance in MENA cities. Upon receiving a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to investigate the “Middle East New Urban Landscape,” and in collaboration with Columbia Global Centres, Amman, I held a book workshop in Amman. I invited several scholars whose work underscored issues related to governance in Middle Eastern cities, and in particular, I was interested in involving scholars and researchers at local universities and institutions in the Middle East. As with any project, the group evolved over the years, and unfortunately for an array of reasons, the work of several of the local scholars who were initially invited to the book workshop eventually did not appear in the final edited volume.

In simple terms, the book investigates the interactions among the state, the market, and civil society—the three constituents of social order in the urban governance scheme.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

LK: In simple terms, the book investigates the interactions among the state, the market, and civil society—the three constituents of social order in the urban governance scheme. In more elaborate terms, the book identifies an “urban governance conundrum” that ensues from the interactions among these three actors in the context of MENA cities, and specifically from: the tension between the authoritarian state’s technologies of power against the push back by civil society’s technologies of citizenship; the accordance between the regional market’s economic push and pull factors and the state’s neoliberal policies; and the conflict between the exclusionary market approaches and civil society’s agency. The book is accordingly divided into three parts, each of which tackles one aspect of this governance conundrum between: the state and civil society; the state and the market; and the market and civil society.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous research?

LK: I have always been intrigued by Middle Eastern cities, whether it is their architecture and urban form, their complex socio-economic and cultural landscapes, or the nuances of their urban politics. This work came as a natural progression. In fact, I recall that as a Visiting Fellow at Columbia Global Centers in Amman during a sabbatical in 2010, I was conducting research on the mobility of planning knowledge between Middle Eastern cities like Amman and Abu Dhabi and Canadian cities like Toronto and Vancouver when the Arab Spring Uprisings started. In Amman at the time, several of the demonstrations and activism were geared toward issues directly related to urban planning. That’s when I started asking the questions that triggered this research project. I wanted to understand the web of relationships that constitutes urban politics in MENA cities. I was, and still am particularly interested in civil society’s multi-layered, nuanced, and often not-so-nuanced agency and its impacts on the urban landscapes of cities in the MENA region. For example, Jabal el-Natheef in Amman, Jordan seems to have become a hotbed of civil activism, including Ruwwad and Arini’s mapping of the area. Simultaneously, there were other activisms that really intrigued me, such as the citywide protest against a proposed public service like the Bus Rapid Transit.  

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

LK: I strove to make this book accessible to a larger audience than merely an academic one. For researchers, academics, and students interested in MENA cities, the book continues and expands upon the dialogue started in Shami’s 2001 edited volume. It is my hope that it will stimulate further dialogue and debate that tackles urban politics in MENA. There is definitely more room for this kind of research. In particular, I hope this book prompts local academics and researchers to delve more into urban politics. Moreover, the critical analysis of case studies, particularly from Amman and Cairo, makes the book relevant for planning professionals and policy makers whose reflections on the book’s analyses of Amman and Cairo might impact their practices, whether by gleaning insights from these two cities, or by empowering these professionals to critically reflect on their own practices. Lastly, it is my hope that anyone who is interested in urban development and urban politics in MENA cities would both benefit from and enjoy the book’s contents.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

LK: I am currently working on two projects, both of which underscore Amman’s urban landscape.

The first is a new book that expands on my work on urban governance in Amman. It explores Amman’s unique state of flux, in which the regional political upheavals since the 1920s have continued to generate an influx of (mostly) political refugees (hence, triggering uncertainties with regards to planning and policy-making). To put things into perspective, according to the Jordanian Department of Statistics, of Jordan’s total population of 9.5 million, there are 2.9 million individuals (i.e., 30.6 percent) who are actually not Jordanian citizens (they are labeled in the official statistics as “guests” rather than “refugees”). More importantly, almost half of these “guests” (or 1.44 million non-Jordanians) live in Amman, compared to 2.54 million Jordanian citizens who live in Amman. These large numbers of newcomers to Amman are combined with: uncertainties from regional upheavals, a dearth of resources (natural resources like water, technological resources like transit, and economic resources, since Jordan's primary and secondary economic sectors are non-existent), weak urban governance structures (in-line with the semi-authoritarianism of Jordan's regime), and lastly, a shift toward neoliberal policies in urban planning. Nevertheless, Amman continues to attract incoming refugees and even thrives—often at the expense of other major urban centers in Jordan, like Irbid and Zarqa (Irbid, for example, is closer to the border with Syria, and its inhabitants have strong social, cultural, and economic ties with Syria). Accordingly, this research project explores the causes behind Amman’s resilience, and its ability to continuously transform with the objective of exploring the lessons that Amman may offer for the benefit of other cities around the world that are struggling with the uncertainty of absorbing and integrating refugees.

My other research project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and focuses on the adaptation of cities to climate change. Titled “The Potential of Daylighting (Deculverting) Urban Streams for Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation and for Place-Making,” this project explores the connections between, on the one hand, urban resilience, climate change mitigation (i.e., strategies that seek to reduce Green House Gas emissions) and climate change adaptation (i.e., interventions in the natural or built environments in response to climate change effects), and on the other hand, ecosystem services (i.e., the benefits of blue and green infrastructure), and ecological design (e.g., the social values of ecosystems, their performance dimensions, and their adaptability). The daylighting (or de-culverting) of the Cheonggyecheon in Seoul, Korea in 2004 brought the practice of daylighting urban streams into the limelight. Yet, there is a dearth of empirical studies with regards to this practice’s potential to provide ecosystem services, to enhance urban resilience, and to improve the public realm.

The dialogue on climate adaptation and mitigation seems lacking thus far from the urban debates in MENA—a region that is particularly susceptible to the impacts of climate change. Indeed, few, if any researchers are exploring the links between climate change and place-making in MENA. This research project will focus on Amman’s Seil neighborhood along with other international case studies like the Cheonggyecheon in Seoul, Korea, and the nearly 160km of de-culverted brooks and streams in Zürich, Switzerland. I investigate the various scales, from the watershed to the detailed urban design, and I connect interventions at these scales to climate change mitigation and adaptation. Throughout, I am interested in how the involvement of the local communities especially with regards to the value they attribute to urban ecosystems including streams.

 

Excerpt(s) from the Introduction:

Urban governance interactions in MENA

This edited volume investigates the complex interactions that ensue between the state, the market, and civil society in urban governance in MENA. Specifically, it presents urban governance in MENA cities as the conundrum between a triad of interconnected dynamics among these three constituents, as mapped in figure 0.2, which builds on figure 0.1. Figure 0.2 reveals how the political rationality of the authoritarian state, starting with the state, trickles down to the urban governance realm through its technologies of power toward its subjects and its pull strategies toward the market under the neoliberal economic agenda. Civil society ripostes by exercising its technologies of citizenship and by its inclination to participate in urban politics. In turn, market actors deploy their push tactics to establish a footing in the burgeoning economic opportunities under neoliberalism, including real estate, urban services, and urban development. Prompted by self-interest, market actors seek to exclude civil society not only from these economic opportunities, but also from decision–making processes by striking an authoritarian bar-gain with the state – yet again excluding civil society.

The chapters in this volume highlight the dissonance between the authoritarian state’s technologies of power and civil society’s technologies of citizenship under the umbrella of crony capitalism that ensues from colloguing between the state and corrupt market elites. The contradictions underlying these dynamics stem primarily from the authoritarian state’s speciousness – where the state appears to be advancing urban governance, it is in fact generating dissonance between the included disparate select and the excluded majority. Throughout MENA, under neoliberal economic agendas, urban political dynamics bear witness to the associations between authoritarian regimes and market actors. By deploying their technologies of power to support major urban entrepreneurs, authoritarian regimes guarantee not only their own financial gain, but also lend credence to their image as economically progressive and urbanistically avant-garde. Whether in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, or elsewhere in MENA where resources are scarce and production is virtually nonexistent, urban development (especially in the last two decades) has become not only an indicator of modernization and development, but the de facto catalyst for economic development, thus asserting the influence of major urban entrepreneurs. By excluding civil society from the urban governance scheme, and by striking their own bargains with the authoritarian state, market actors further exacerbate the state’s authoritarianism while simultaneously advancing their own self-interest. Examples from MENA abound through initiatives like the Jordan Gate Towers in Amman, the Solidere in Beirut, and, more recently, the Capital Cairo Project. While the authoritarian regimes have been deploying their pre-emptive power and technologies of power to collude with market forces, civil society actors have been deploying their generative power and technologies of citizenship to effect change. Indeed, contrary to assumptions that civil society is apathetic to and lacks awareness of urban politics, public demonstrations in Amman, Beirut, and Cairo against the large-scale development initiatives, inequitable distribution of resources, corruption, and inept urban services, indicate otherwise.

 

Figure 0.2 The urban governance conundrum in MENA cities

Furthermore, these dynamics shown in figure 0.2 highlight, first, the extent of the autonomy of civil society actors and the nature of their social contract; and, second, the mistrust that civil society actors harbour toward the establishment and the consequences of this mistrust. To begin with, political regimes face the threat of public reactions against urban affairs (whether policies, development, or services). If any lesson has been learned from recent events (e.g., the Arab Spring uprisings) it is that while individual actors might trigger moments of shock, the more politically organized movements are adept at co-opting these moments to their advantage. Tensions over urban political dynamics become particularly precarious in light of the current regional political instability, especially the upsurge of radical extremist factions, who, as their rise and brutality in Iraq and Syria has proven, possess the means to exploit instability effectively. Events in Jordan and Egypt have already demonstrated the increasing influence and reach of Salafi Islam – ultra-conservative puritanical Islamist movements that uphold the implementation of Shari‘a law. Egypt’s al-Nour Party, although only created after Egypt’s 2011 revolution, nonetheless gained nearly a quarter of the parliamentary seats in the 2011–12 elections. Meanwhile, Jordan’s Salafi movement has been rapidly gaining momentum, as evidenced in the violence constantly racking the city of Ma‘an in southern Jordan, which is considered its stronghold, and also in the ascendancy of Jordanian Salafis in the upper echelons of extremist movements like al-Qa‘ida and Da‘esh, also known as the Islamic State (IS). After all, al-Qa‘ida’s founder in Iraq was Jordanian while Da‘esh (IS) was supposedly founded in a jail cell in Jordan. Not only are these ultra-conservative factions capable of co-opting urban political tensions in MENA, their social networks are also proving effective at recruiting to their ranks urban youth who are distrustful of, and disenfranchised by, the establishment due to the high unemployment rates, especially among the educated. Accounts of hundreds of Jordanian youth, often highly educated and from the upper-middle class, who have been recruited to fight with extremist groups in Syria and Iraq, provide cautionary tales.

Furthermore, when individual civil society actors, mistrusting the establishment, channel their generative power to self-organize and contest large-scale urban development projects, they do not always necessarily act in the best interests of the public. At best, they are misled by the dearth of information that is a direct consequence of their exclusion in the first place, while at worst they are motivated by short-term self-interest. For example, as an indication of their lack of knowledge of the BRT project, civil society activists and popular media outlets contesting it wrongly interpreted the term “Rapid” in Bus Rapid Transit as referring to the speed of the bus instead of the frequency of its service. While Amman has – literally – reached a state of gridlock due to the absence of an adequate transit system combined with the proliferation of the private automobile as a status symbol, the BRT project was eventually halted under public pressure. Therein lies the dilemma: the victims of civil society’s mistrust are often the truly public projects like Amman’s BRT that would have provided equitable access to a crucial resource and provided the regime and its corrupt elites with fewer benefits than the glitzy, yet truly controversial, Abdali and Jordan Gate Towers projects. Thus, while citizen action can surely serve to effect change, it is also essential to question the nature of the ensuing change and its consequences.

To delve into these dynamics, the chapters in this book offer a thick description of their respective case studies in Cairo and Amman. The specificity of each context’s nuances has prompted this volume to adopt a cross-national comparative analytical framework that is capable of capturing these multi-layered complexities. Thus far, most research on the manifestations of neoliberal governance forms on an urban scale focuses on western contexts, leaving cross-national comparative research largely uncharted territory (Harding, Wilks-Heeg, and Hutchins 2000). Indeed, with the exception of Beirut, there is a dearth of urban governance studies on MENA cities. Moreover, the coexistence of various actors and their interactions within the same urban political space lends further complexity to the study of urban governance. Hence, the case studies presented in this volume adopt Jon Coaffee and Patsy Healey’s (2003) redefinition of urban governance through a sociological institutionalist perspective. That is, instead of perceiving governance institutions through the lens of structure and policy formation and implementation, this perspective perceives them through the lens of “values, norms and ways of acting which shape the realm of collective action – the relations between citizens, the regulation of individual behaviour in relation to wider social norms and the organisation of projects of collective endeavour” (Healey 2004, 92). This redefinition parallels this volume’s focus on the locality so as to underscore inter-actions as opposed to decisions. Hence, it emphasizes the assemblages that form, and the norms that dictate, how various factions of society interact. The methods deployed in the various chapters also parallel this focus on interactions within the locality. They are there-fore in line with Seteney Shami’s (2003, 61) “ethnography of governance,” which deploys bottom-up research approaches that do not balk at exploring the struggles and conflicts in urban governance or preclude players who are external to the locality (60). The socio-logical institutionalist perspective also warrants investigations that emphasize the “actors, interactive practices, arenas and networks” through an analysis of “the formation and dissemination of dis-courses and practices, the relation between deeper cultural values and specific episodes of governance, and the interaction of the activities of specific actors and wider structuring forces” (Healey 2004, 92). As a result, the thick description adopted in presenting these case studies delves into the local planning cultures in reference to “the collective ethos and dominant attitude of professional planners in different nations toward the appropriate roles of the state, market forces, and civil society in urban, regional, and national development” (Sanyal 2005, 3).

Accordingly, and in reference to figure 0.2, part 1 of this volume delves into the state–civil society interactions that highlight the dynamics between the technologies of power and the technologies of citizenship. Part 1 includes the chapters by Christopher Harker (chapter 1), Elena Piffero (chapter 2), and Luna Khirfan and Bessma Momani (chapter 3).

Christopher Harker’s “Governing Majorities in the Arab World: Urban Life Beyond Neoliberalism” (chapter 1) begins the discussion with civil society. In defining our understanding of “the urban” in MENA, Harker highlights the need for a profound understanding of civil society by advocating “historically and geographically specific” notions that address “majorities” such as religious and tribal net-works. Harker therefore advocates for a paradigm shift away from the neoliberal discourse to depart from a myopic view of “a political imaginary” that limits “the actors and processes (i.e., neoliberalism)” and that leads to “a very limited set of countervailing responses, labelled ‘resistance’” where “[t]he only response possible to the power of ‘neoliberal elites’ is a rejection of such power – to a greater or less extent, or co-option by it” (46) Instead, Harker introduces “three possibilities” that he dubs “majorities,” which serve as “conceptual avenues through which we might begin to engage the practices.” Harker highlights three urban majorities ….