Is Abolition Global? Iran, Iranians, and Prison Politics (Part 1)

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Sep 2, 2020 Iran
Poster by the Organization of Iranian Students in Paris. Image from the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Poster by the Organization of Iranian Students in Paris. Image from the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.

Is Abolition Global? Iran, Iranians, and Prison Politics (Part 1)

By : Arash Davari, Omid Tofighian, Golnar Nikpour, and Naveed Mansoori

[This is the first installment of a two-part roundtable on abolitionism and Iran featuring Naveed Mansoori, Golnar Nikpour and Omid Tofighian. Read Part 2 here.]

Introduction


The police murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 in the United States sparked widespread global protests and inspired widespread interest in the project of prison abolitionism. The project understands punishment and exclusion as the primary mechanisms of social control. It focuses on prisons, police, and the myriad institutions and actors—what Michel Foucault described as the “prison archipelago”—that sustain them or act on their behalf. 

Initially founded as a movement to abolish slavery across the Americas, Black feminist scholars and activists such as Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba recovered the language of abolitionism to critique the US prison system following the formal declaration of equal civil and political rights in the 1960s. Since the 1980s, the United States has expanded its prison system to roughly a quarter-million people, the largest prison body per capita in the world. Michelle Alexander names this age of mass incarceration “the New Jim Crow,” due to the disproportionate number of Black prisoners. 

Some have applied this critique of prisons and police beyond the territorial United States, notably in Palestine and Brazil. Scholars have also discussed and critiqued modern prisons in Iran at length, from Ervand Abrahamian to Darius Rejali and recently Nasser Mohajer. Recently, Middle East activists and writers concerned with peoples incarcerated during the COVID-19 pandemic have added their voices to the global call for abolition. This roundtable adds to these efforts, asking does US-based research and activism organized around abolitionism provide insight into the condition of imprisoned Iranians in the Islamic Republic and abroad? Can and should the call to abolition prisons be a global one? Do these disparate settings need movements and languages attentive to their specificity? 

We asked three scholar-activists of Iran and Iranians whose work concerns prisons and abolition transnationally to address these questions in conversation: Australian philosopher, translator, and community advocate Omid Tofighian and Jadaliyya Iran Page co-editors Golnar Nikpour and Naveed Mansoori. Their responses appear as a two-part roundtable.

Question One

What is incarceration?

Golnar Nikpour: We must think historically when we talk about incarceration. Although there are records of confinement-as-punishment going back to the earliest human societies, we must distinguish between these earlier forms and modern carceral systems. Contemporary incarceration is characterized first by the transformational vastness of its scope and reach; the numbers of people confined in earlier periods wildly pales in comparison to the numbers of those incarcerated beginning in the nineteenth century and exponentially increasing until today. In Iran, for instance, the number of incarcerated persons jumped from just a few hundred in the early twentieth century to over a quarter million today; before the twentieth century, confinement almost never lasted longer than a year, and rarely even lasted that long. Meanwhile, many millions of people around the world today are incarcerated and set to serve sentences that represent billions of years of human life. When considering size, scale, and disruption of social worlds, our current carceral system simply has no earlier historical antecedent. There is also no antecedent for the scope of the contemporary carceral system beyond prison walls—policing, surveillance, punishment, borders regimes, etc. are all either dramatically expanded from earlier forms or entirely novel techniques of control.

The second distinguishing characteristic of modern carceral systems is that they rely on the production of the categories criminal/non-criminal, with the insider/outsider notion of social belonging that those categories entail. Modern notions of citizenship and nationalized inclusion are shaped in part by the work that categories of criminality do in delimiting who does and does not fit within a polity. In this, I am influenced by Lisa Cacho’s definition of “criminalization.” Cacho argues that criminalization is not simply the marking of certain groups as criminal, but rather the process by which behaviors get newly categorized as “criminal,” thus rendering certain populations vulnerable to carceral responses—that is, surveillance, policing, detention, incarceration, torture, etc. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, for instance, the criminalization of certain forms of gendered dress has rendered women in public spaces vulnerable to policing and state violence. In the United States, which is amid a nationwide mass uprising against racist policing, criminalization has rendered Black communities especially vulnerable to extraordinary forms of judicial and extrajudicial violence. Similarly, both countries have criminalized border crossing and have incarcerated racialized others—Latino migrants at the southern border of the US; Afghan migrants at the eastern border of Iran. Notably, both borders have been carceralized in part by using the rhetoric of a (racialized) war on drugs. These are not identical situations or processes, but these examples nonetheless give us a sense of how social difference—race, ethnicity, gender, poverty, immigration status—is in part mediated and produced through carceral interventions.

Lastly, the modern prison is distinguished from earlier forms of confinement by the prison institution’s original promise of representing a civilizational leap forward for humanity by curtailing the “barbarity” of pre-modern punishments. As French philosopher Michel Foucault reminds us, it is an institution born in part from reformist impulses and predicated on being able to transform (i.e., civilize) incarcerated persons. Hence, the phrase “correctional” facility. These “correctional” and “civilizing” discourses must be understood as part of the broader story of European liberal imperialism (and the racial hierarchies inherent to that project), the rise of the modern nation-state, and the expanding reach of globalizing capital. In the Iranian case, the modern prison system was established in the 1920s-30s by Pahlavi statesmen who believed that Iran simply could not be a civilized modern state without modern prisons and policing, and who were moved towards these reforms by powerful Euro/American trends. In recent decades, this original reformist pretense has all-but-collapsed around the world as prison populations have ballooned. While intellectuals and activists have long challenged even this pretense of reformism, to understand the history of the modern prison we have to understand that it originated in Euro/American locales as an institution that at least rhetorically promised humane, rational, scientific, and even transformational possibilities for the incarcerated. Then we must look at the specific social contexts in which similar prison systems have taken root and ask ourselves why none of these seeming promises have ever come close to being fulfilled.

Naveed Mansoori: Ruth Wilson Gilmore provides a useful description of incarceration: it is “the practice of putting people in cages for part or all of their lives.” Four predominant reasons for why modern states justify incarcerating people are retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation. The prison is the central site of incarceration, yet carceral states are sustained with policing. The concept of “carcerality” refers to the way carceral strategies do not just belong to prisons, but are distributed across myriad social institutions, ranging from schools to hospitals. Carceral states are sustained through carceral strategies and are organized around carceral sites.

Omid Tofighian: My recent work thinks about incarceration as a bordering practice. I consider borders to be physical, symbolic and epistemic and build on scholarship that moves beyond the notion of borders and bordering as things and interprets them as evolving processes and institutions. ‘Practices of bordering’ refers to the demarcation of spaces, processes of territorialization and the multiple dimensions of boundaries—all of these perpetually subject to contingent events and ideas. In this context, borders are part of broad, interweaving processes in which they are used to assign and sustain meaning and control movement. Borders and bordering also exist and function within complex, fluid and multiplying networks of oppression and carceral technologies. In addition, my work explores and suggests ways of debordering, and working towards abolition, particularly in the context of immigration detention.

Question Two


How do you think about incarceration in your work? What specific carceral sites are you thinking about and working on?

NM: I focus on the various ways people in Iran have navigated heavily policed spheres of political life. A question I ask is how public life in contemporary Iran emerged through the threat of incarceration. The police denied dissidents their freedom to participate in public life by incarcerating them when dissidents exercised their freedom in ways that threatened public order. For instance, dissidents responded to state censorship in pre-revolutionary Iran by organizing dissident counter-publics so that they could publicize dissent. People also learned how to elude censors, either by maintaining privacy or speaking in coded language. There was virtue in public truth-telling, yet so too in knowing when to whisper or to stay silent.

Likewise, I think about how people listen, share silence, and experience silence in carceral states.  From 1971 to 1975, the SAVAK, the Pahlavi State’s secret police, tortured political prisoners to get confessions. Noted Marxist-Leninists apologized for their ways and praised the efforts of the Pahlavi State. The state published the “interviews” or broadcast them on state-run radio and television to sway public opinion. The idea was that if notable intellectuals thought the state was doing things right, other intellectuals would change their minds. Yet all this was too little, too late. State legitimacy was gone. If you heard your comrades turn a one-eighty, you were not likely to believe what you heard. When there is a silenced population, people who can speak are in a difficult position to give voice. In pre-revolutionary Iran, there was a widespread sensibility that people in general, including those who “confessed,” disagreed with the state when silent. People who are incarcerated are silenced. How do we listen to that silence? How do we speak of it?

OT: My research interests and activism in relation to incarceration were originally influenced by two factors: Black cultural production from the United States (particularly hip hop), and forced migration and the border industrial complex (particularly Australia’s detention industry). My activities then expanded to include select issues related to 1) the dispossession and incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples; 2) the notion of physical, symbolic and epistemic borders and bordering practices (bordering as processes and institutions); and 3) the relationship between border violence and the global prison industry.

I consider multifarious sites such as prisons, immigration detention centers, universities, and media organizations; and different geographic locations such as Australia, the United States, Iran and certain EU countries. I argue that debordering and dismantling need to address the material conditions that create and sustain carceral sites and other systems of oppression, and that this needs to be interdependent with achieving epistemic justice and transforming the symbolic aesthetic that drives bordering practices and structural injustice. My approach places special focus on popular culture and narrative; for instance, in a recent course I designed called “Prison Writing” I address work by incarcerated writers which include poetry and song lyrics, fiction, non-fiction (such as autobiography and journalism), creative non-fiction and cinema. In addition, I emphasize some of the support work done by and with Indigenous peoples and refugees, especially from Australia and neighboring countries: Sisters Inside (Australia); Deaths Inside (Australia); IndigenousX (Australia); Dreaming Inside (Australia); Jurrungu Ngan-ga by Marrugeku (Australia); Deathscapes (Australia, North America and UK/EU); People Against Prisons Aotearoa (New Zealand); and Writing Through Fences (Australia, Papua New Guinea, Nauru and Indonesia). I also give special attention to examples actually produced in carceral sites and borderlands, such as Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains and his co-directed film (with Arash Kamali Sarvestani) Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time—both text and subtitles my translation; Dreaming Inside; Writing Through Fences; poetry by Hani Abdile; writing by Hass Hassaballa, Mohamed Adam, and Mardin Arvin and Erfan Dana (both my trans.); art and music by Farhad Bandesh and Mostafa Azimitabar; Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi; Tilapia Sucks the Blood of Hur al-Azim by Sepideh Gholian; letters by Nasrin Sotoudeh; The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank; Devil on the Cross by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o; books by Abdullah Öcalan; Riot Days by Maria Alyokhina; and pieces by Angela Davis, Mumia Abu Jamal and Martin Luther King, Jr. And I draw on ideas and theories from social epistemology, decoloniality and abolition movements. 

A lot of my research and activism has been dedicated to Australia’s carceral-border archipelago, which includes immigration detention centers on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, on the Republic of Nauru (both former Australian colonies that gained independence in the 60s and 70s), on Christmas Island (an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean) and Australian-funded detention centers in Indonesia (through the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration). In 2001 the Australian government set up offshore carceral sites, referred to by critics as gulags, to detain people seeking asylum by boat traveling from Indonesia: Manus for men travelling alone and Nauru for women, unaccompanied minors and families. Most of my work has been focused on Manus Island, in addition to onshore detention centers.

Over the last five years I have been collaborating with Behrouz Boochani, the Kurdish Iranian writer, journalist and cultural advocate who spent over six years in the notorious Manus Island detention facility. Behrouz escaped to New Zealand in November 2019 and his asylum claim was accepted this year on the 23 July (both his birthday and the day his boat was picked up by the Australian Navy in 2013). Our most notable work is the multi-award-winning book No Friend but the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison (2018), written by Behrouz via WhatsApp text message on a mobile phone smuggled into the prison, and translated and edited by me while in Sydney, Cairo and Manus Island. Together we critically analyze the symmetrical relationship between carceral sites such as Manus and Australian society and institutions (part of what we refer to as Manus Prison theory). We also collaborate on various creative and scholarly projects with other refugees in immigration detention or people who have recently been released (see my translations of work by Kurdish Iranian writer Mardin Arvin, currently imprisoned onshore after transfer from Papua New Guinea).

I plan to start applying my critical methods and research experiences to the situation of marginalized and criminalized ethnic and religious groups in Iran. Members of these communities are part of the prison population in Australia’s detention network. People seeking asylum from marginalized groups include Kurds (including Feyli Kurds), Ahwazi Arabs (also Sunni), Hazaras, Christian converts and other persecuted religious groups, open atheists and those with links to banned political groups (the situation of queer and trans people must also be addressed by researchers and activists with expertise).

GN: I study and write on the history of prisons and carceral systems in Iran from the late Qajar period to the contemporary Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as the global context for the emergence of these institutions. Although I work primarily on Iranian prison history, the global reach of the modern carceral state—itself a legacy of European colonialism and globalizing capital—has pushed me to think broadly and transnationally about the history of this institution as well as political responses to its emergence and expansion.

 

In the Iranian case, there is a great deal of work done—both by subsequent governments and by prisoners’ rights groups and international NGOs—to distinguish between “political” and “non-political” prisoners, both within the prison system and even in the political imaginations of those critiquing that system. I have written about this elsewhere, but throughout my work I make the case that we must think more capaciously about what we mean by “political prisoners.” In other words, I argue that the historical transformations by which things like drug use, sex work, refugee border crossing, etc. have all come to be addressed through policing and incarceration have themselves been political processes. I worry that the hard distinction between “political” and “non-political” offenses in the Iranian political imagination has had the effect of naturalizing the vast majority of arrests and imprisonments in Iran, which are for “ordinary” offences.

Question Three

How would you describe the intersecting histories of prisons, detention centers, and carceral sites across the globe? Is there one story to tell or are there many?

NM: Carceral states bulldoze history. Theirs is a flat world. They number lives and turn them into “criminal histories.” We see this play out in obituary writing after police kill Black people. Journalists select moments of a life from a set of “illicit” actions. This perspective is the administrative point-of-view. It is storytelling as a police report. These stories work to justify punishment. If we begin with a universal category, “the incarcerated,” we overlook differences. We conform to criminal history. Whether we are thinking of San Quentin, Otay Mesa, or Guantanamo Bay, we are habituated to grasp the lived experiences of the carceral state as one: the incarcerated are a criminal body, their history is captured by fluctuations in crime rates, those rates are driven by a criminal justice system that separates the guilty from the innocent. Criminal historiography in the United States has its origins in the narrative arc of repentance. Social conceptions of lawfulness historically provide standards for explaining and justifying crime and punishment. A challenge of thinking about carceral sites is to work through the ideologies that justify them. That is the pathbreaking, eye-opening work that Michelle Alexander did in The New Jim Crow, in which she was able to demonstrate continuity between slavery and mass incarceration.

GN: That is a great point Naveed.

In my view, varying forms of incarceration—including jails, prisons, migrant camps, labor camps, interrogation centers, detention centers, internment camps, etc.—differ widely and have histories that cannot be collapsed into each other. There are discrete stories to be told regarding how modern prison systems were introduced in different locales and whom they were used to discipline. There are also particular stories to be told about how the incarcerated have made lives and politics in the context of forced confinement. The legacies of colonialism, slavery, national border-making, expanding global capital, and authoritarianism, do not produce uniform effects.

Take the issue of prison labor for example. On the one hand, innumerable carceral sites around the world have used or today use prison labor, so much so that it might seem close to universal. Still, we cannot simply tell one story about prison labor and expect it to hold true across contexts. In the Iranian case, the Pahlavi state publicly promoted its prison labor program as progressive and reformist in nature, all while nonetheless boasting of the surplus value produced for the state by laboring prisoners. The post-revolutionary government in Iran has wrapped that logic in the language of Islam, saying that prison labor is capable of transforming the soul of the incarcerated. On the other hand, Florence Bernault’s work on prisons in colonial Africa reveals the viciously exploitative quality of this forced labor. Here, there was virtually no pretense that the labor had any reformist end for the incarcerated. The goal was simply producing wealth for colonial states. In the US context, meanwhile, as numerous Black activists, scholars, and artists have shown, prison labor today is an explicit continuation of the institution of slavery.

NM: Right. There is a problem, carcerality, but the wealth of carcerality belongs to its multiple histories. How we approach the problem depends on the work we’re doing. For example, the Islamic Republic inherited Evin Prison in Tehran from the Pahlavi State. So too, the history of forced confessions inaugurated by the ancien régime was carried on by the Islamic Republic. Is the history of carcerality in Iran singular, or is it homologous with parallel systems elsewhere? Put otherwise, how might we think of continuities between carceral sites across the world along with the histories that make them unique? The two facts above about Iran suggest continuity.

Yet there are also registers and dynamics of prison history in Iran that are singular. In 1984, the main theoretician of the Tudeh Communist Party, Ehsan Tabari, published Kajrāheh [Waywardness] while in Evin Prison. The Ministry of Intelligence wrote the text on his behalf after he suffered a stroke, drawing on interrogations. Waywardness was a history of the left and a criminal autobiography that culminated with, in his own words, an awakening. Tabari organized the story of his life, and the history of the left along with it, around a social conception of what is good and legal, relative to the time and place he wrote. When Tabari said he experienced an awakening, he was referring to his conversion to Islam from Marxism. He underwent, and narrativized, a story of repentance. But the metaphor of “awakening” has its own specific history in modern and contemporary Iran, with origins in Islamic history and philosophy. That raises an historical question: Is Evin a place of penitence like the penitentiaries built by Quakers in America or is it built with the brick-and-mortar of a different archive? It does not have to be one or the other. It could be that different histories are congealed in this one place, Evin. As we work through the one history of carcerality, we start seeing the multiple histories that are foundational to it.

GN: Although histories of incarceration cannot be collapsed into each other, I believe that there are significant links between disparate carceral systems. In my own research, I have discovered repeatedly that the architectures, economies, and techniques of modern punishment are transnational and linked. For instance, blueprints used for federal prisons in the United States in the twentieth century (and now into the twenty-first century) were used around the world—from Iran to Israel to New Zealand and beyond. International prison conferences based in Europe drew officials from Asia, Africa, and the Americas as early as the nineteenth century. Today, neoliberalism, privatization, and securitization have linked carceral sites in new networks of capital, techniques, and peoples. This is why we see, for instance, the spread of surveillance tech (think facial recognition software) to “democratic” states and “undemocratic” states alike. Unsurprisingly, the Islamic Republic is now experimenting with this technology, already popular around the world, in its own surveillance state. And of course, prisoners around the world have long organized their political struggles around principles learned in conversation with fellow prisoners and movements around the world. In the popular imagination, we tend to imagine certain countries as having particularly brutal or even “barbaric” prison systems—Iran being one of those countries. Yet I have found over and over again that carceral sites around the world are inexorably linked. For me, this means that our urgent efforts to decarceralize our world must also be transnational in scope, and anticolonial, anticapitalist, and anti-militarist in content.

OT: I agree that it is extremely important to create a global movement that aims toward prison abolition by exposing and transforming the operations of racial capitalism. But as someone living and working on Aboriginal land—Sydney’s northern suburbs are part of un-ceded lands of the Darramuragal people—it is necessary that I prioritize resisting settler colonialism and anti-Blackness here in Australia by supporting Indigenous peoples first and building from there. In fact, the incarceration of displaced and exiled peoples by the Australian state is part of the same settler-colonial project and deeply intertwined with the dispossession, displacement, and ongoing suppression of First Nations. The establishment of the land as a penal colony by the British Empire in 1788 has multiplied and morphed into numerous carceral sites since invasion, including offshore prisons to hold refugees indefinitely since 2001.

The death of George Floyd due to police brutality galvanized global Black Lives Matter protests and calls to defund the police and hold them accountable; this took on a particular kind of power in Australia and inspired grassroots Aboriginal groups to build on previous work and organize massive protest against systemic racism, especially disproportionately high incarceration and the over four hundred Black deaths in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1987-1991). In relation to immigration detention, the same companies contracted to build, secure, manage, and maintain the facilities are operating in the same or similar carceral sites around the world (companies such as G4S, Serco, Transfield/Broadspectrum, IHMS, and many more). Also, many guards hired to supervise refugees—who have already experienced multiple forms of trauma—either worked as guards in regular population prisons or were soldiers in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan (places from which many of the refugees fled). There are other disturbing connections: Australia is directly involved in driving forced migration by their involvement in foreign wars (Iraq and Afghanistan), training and supplying militaries involved in genocide (Sri Lanka), and involvement in brutal economic sanctions that indiscriminately weaken populations and help quash pro-democracy movements (Iran).

An area I hope to explore further is the persecution and incarceration of deportees. A significant number of people have already lost their lives (including by suicide) or experienced imprisonment after refoulement to different places including Iran, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. In relation to marginalized and criminalized ethnic and religious groups it is important to acknowledge how their experiences of oppression in countries such as Iran are replicated, and even amplified, in immigration detention. Australian detention camps, for instance, hold ethnic Kurds, Arabs, Hazaras, Christian converts and other persecuted religious groups, and open atheists. Gay people persecuted in their countries are also detained (refugees have reported that queer and trans people have also been incarcerated, but this has never been investigated by Australian authorities). Same-sex relations are punishable with up to fourteen years imprisonment on Manus (facilities for men travelling alone) and Nauru (facilities for women, unaccompanied minors and families).
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Apr 22, 2013 Lebanon
Nathalie Peutz By :
Nathalie Peutz

Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula Roundtable: Perspectives from the Margins of Arabia

[This is one of seven contributions in Jadaliyya`s electronic roundtable on the symbolic and material practices of knowledge production on the Arabian Peninsula. Moderated by Rosie Bsheer and John Warner, it features Toby Jones, Madawi Al-Rasheed, Adam Hanieh, Neha Vora, Nathalie Peutz, John Willis, and Ahmed Kanna.]

(1) Historically, what have the dominant analytical approaches to the study of the Arabian Peninsula been? How have the difficulties of carrying out research in the Arabian Peninsula shaped the ways in which knowledge is produced for the particular country/ies in which you have worked, and in the field more generally?

When I first began studying Arabic and, subsequently, formulating a research project in Yemen in the early 2000s, I did not consider myself to be working in or on the "Arabian Peninsula," as such. Rather, what drew me to Yemen was its historical, geographical, and cultural distinctiveness, which remains even now quite remarkable, but which nevertheless often obscures the relations, connections, and shared histories and presents that do exist within the region and beyond. This oversight is born perhaps out of what Sheila Carapico identified nearly ten years ago as a pernicious "dualism" that shaped not only American research agendas, but also the stereotypical conceptions, popular and academic, of "the Gulf" (rather than the peninsula as a whole): "Yemen is kaleidoscopic; the Gulf is monochrome…The Gulf is good for business; Yemen is good for ethnography" (Carapico 2004).

This same oversight—what Adam Hanieh in his response discusses as a "methodological nationalism"—is also born out of what we may call a secondary Orientalism: a way of "knowing" that considers the majority of the Arabian Peninsula without "culture" and without "history" in comparison to the Arab states of North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. This fallacy has been exacerbated, of course, by the relative difficulty for short-term visitors and new scholars of actually engaging on a deeper level with the citizenry in countries like the United Arab Emirates, where it may be easier to befriend migrants from Egypt or Sri Lanka than its small minority of "nationals." As a result, although there have been notable exceptions—including recent scholarship on the political economy, political ecology, and youth and urban cultures in Saudi Arabia, in addition to an older, rich tradition of studies on kinship and its Bedouin—anthropological scholarship on Gulf-state citizens has seemed relatively flat in comparison to the "thicker" ethnographies of migrant populations in "the Gulf" and of "tribal" communities in Yemen. In both cases, these research foci emerge from the historically dominant approaches to these "two" areas: oil and security in the Gulf (and its resulting dependence on cheap, imported labor) and state-tribe relations in Yemen (and related studies on tribalism, sociality and gender). Nevertheless, they are also being productively complicated by theoretically informed analyses of space, political subjectivities, and belonging. A similar and amplified turn to non-labor migrant populations in the Gulf (as in the work of Mandana Limbert in Oman) and non-tribal populations in Yemen (such as Marina de Regt’s work on Ethiopian domestic workers or Susanne Dahlgren on the public sphere in Aden) remains welcome.

As for the difficulties in carrying out, rather than framing, research in the Arabian Peninsula, the challenges of conducting research in Yemen may be somewhat distinct. Adam Hanieh, Ahmed Kanna, Madawi Al-Rasheed and Neha Vora have touched on the lack of (Western) research institutes and networks in the Gulf, the dearth of statistical data, and the difficulty of gaining unmediated access. In Yemen, a robust network of foreign research institutes work in tandem with several Yemeni research and studies centers to house and fund scholars and to facilitate their research there. These include the American Institute for Yemeni Studies (AIYS), the French Center in Sana’a for Archaeology and Social Sciences (CEFAS), and the German Archaeological Institute (DAI). In the early 2000s, when I lived in Sanaa, these centers supported a vibrant research community of both foreign and Yemeni scholars who frequented their libraries and attended their talks. The deteriorating security situation in Yemen and the subsequent evaporation of US funding for in-country research has had an unfortunate impact on these centers, which, during my visits in recent years, have appeared particularly vacant. Still, even with this institutional support, it could be challenging to be an anthropologist in Yemen. For one, as Ahmed Kanna notes, anthropology is one of the less known and less understood of the social science disciplines. And when my Yemeni acquaintances did have an understanding of anthropology, they were also well aware and suspicious of its colonial and imperial legacy. This was made clear to me when a professor of anthropology at Sanaa University asked me in March 2003 in front of his class of students why the United States had not sent one hundred anthropologists to Iraq, instead of bombing it. Suspicion toward the discipline and a more general suspicion of foreign researchers as spies was not new. One only needs to read Steve Caton’s remarkable account of his arrest and imprisonment in 1980 to see what an effect such suspicions have had on the kind of knowledge that is produced. Indeed, in reflecting on his own encounter with the National Security in Raydah, Paul Dresch notes that it is often the most mundane of facts that are the most heavily guarded.

This was certainly true of my own experience of fieldwork in Socotra. Whereas I was made privy to various conspiracy theories, extra-marital affairs, secret religious conversions, etc.—all things I hesitated to take note of, much less write about—it was nearly impossible for me to ask my hosts quite straightforward questions about their genealogies, tribal structures, and political past. Of course, I was conducting research at a time when US presence in Iraq as well as in Yemen was acutely palpable. Moreover, it made little sense to my Socotran friends that a US student would receive funding to hang out in Socotra or anywhere else if she did not have significant ties to the political powers that be. As a result, I turned to and became more interested in Socotri poetry where people’s opinions, struggles, and contestations were more forcefully voiced. In so doing, I thus followed, or rather stumbled, in the footsteps of a group of scholars who work on poetry in Yemen, including Steve Caton, Flagg Miller, Lucine Taminian and Samuel Liebhaber, but without their expertise! Fortunately, such suspicions do ease over time. Although it has become even more difficult in the past five years for anthropologists to conduct fieldwork in Yemen, now that I live in Abu Dhabi where I am easily accessible by telephone and where my current position is more comprehensible to my Socotran interlocutors, Socotrans are more comfortable reaching out to me, calling upon me for help, and working with me. I know that if I were to have the chance to return again for a lengthy period of time, fieldwork—in terms of the questions I could ask and the answers I would receive—would be very different this time.

(2) What are some of the new and innovative ways of thinking and theorizing the Arabian Peninsula and how has your work drawn on these approaches? How do these new theoretical interventions address elisions or tensions within more traditional approaches?

In my view, one of the most useful attempts to reframe and theorize the Arabian Peninsula occurred with the 2004 publication of Counter-Narratives: History, Contemporary Society, and Politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen (edited by Madawi al-Rasheed and Robert Vitalis). It is here that Sheila Carapico issued her "Arabia Incognita: An Invitation to Arabian Peninsula Studies" cited above. Carapico’s is a research agenda that would bridge the conventional divide between Yemeni and Gulf Studies to focus on the interconnections between the inhabitants and nations of the peninsula as a whole. Whether in direct response to Carapico’s invitation or in reaction to the region’s most recent and emblematic transnational phenomena, such as the global “war on terror,” the emergence of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and the spread of the Arab uprisings, several scholars and even academic journals have now taken up this call. For example, in the past two years we have seen the 2011 launch of the Journal of Arabian Studies: Arabia, the Gulf, and the Red Sea followed by, in 2013, the conversion and expansion of the journal Chroniques yéménites into Arabian Humanities: International Journal of Archaeology and Social Sciences in the Arabian Peninsula, both focused on the Arabian Peninsula en bloc and from antiquity to present.

What is needed when it comes to theorizing the Arabian Peninsula, however, is not just an expansion of scope—a sort of micro "area studies"—but also scholarship that explicitly draws on and forwards this transnational and interdisciplinary peninsular perspective. This approach breaks with the traditional dualism described above in its recognition that one cannot adequately study migration, religious reformism, sectarian identities, state and popular (or cultural) sovereignty, youth cultures, urbanism, natural resource exploitation and conservation, gender transformations, heritage production, or class, etc., within one nation without at least recognizing the influences and entanglements of these phenomena throughout the peninsula and across its surrounding waters. New scholarship that exemplifies this approach includes, of course, Engseng Ho’s work on Hadhrami migration; Adam Hanieh’s work on transregional (Khaleeji) capital and class formation; Laurent Bonnefoy’s work on Salafism in Yemen (and yet highly contingent upon grassroots flows to and from Saudi Arabia); Steve Caton’s emerging research on water scarcity in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates; and Andrew Gardner’s comparative studies of the kafala system in Bahrain and Qatar, among others.

Even in a relatively "remote" and off-shore location such as Socotra, this "peninsular" perspective is imperative to an understanding of the "local" and of how Socotra has been produced recently as a World Heritage Site and a "natural" biodiverse research laboratory. Yet, in the early stages of my research on the development, conservation, and heritagization of Yemen’s Soqotra Archipelago, and perhaps due to the pervasiveness of the distinctions drawn between Yemen and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, I was surprised by the degree to which my Socotran friends and neighbors were oriented not toward Sanaa or Aden, but rather toward Salalah, Ras al-Khaimah, Ajman, Sharjah, Bani Yas, and Jeddah. It was the cities and representations of "the Gulf" and Saudi Arabia—not mainland Yemen—which captured their imaginations and fueled their aspirations. Indeed, I soon learned that I could not examine heritage production in Socotra—conventionally understood to be a "national" project—without first examining heritage projects and discourses in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. For example, the annual Festival of the Socotran Poet which, as I wrote about in MERIP last May, was transformed in 2012 into a platform for public debate on the viability of Socotra’s cultural and political sovereignty, was originally modeled after the United Arab Emirates’ reality television show, The Million’s Poet, created by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (now the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority) to promote and safeguard national Emirati culture. This small example demonstrates to me the importance of seeing and understanding the peninsula holistically instead of continuing to bifurcate it into Yemen and the rest.

This is not to say, however, that the space and study of the Arabian Peninsula is any more "natural" than are the constructed borders of its nation-states. I agree with Toby Jones and John Willis’ deep reservations about area studies and about the "Arabian Peninsula" as yet another imperially produced category. As well as they state it here, these reservations are, of course, not new. And yet, as all of the contributors to this roundtable point out or imply, the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf—Yemen, too (hence Lisa Wedeen’s book title, Peripheral Visions)—have long been treated as peripheral, geographically and conceptually, to the Middle East and to Middle East studies. One only needs to look through the bibliography of Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar’s excellent review article, "Anthropologies of Arab-Majority Societies," to note that ethnographies and anthropological articles situated in Egypt or in Palestine far outnumber the recent scholarship produced on all of the Arabian Peninsula states combined. There is thus obviously no a priori reason to theorize the "Arabian Peninsula"—but we may still learn a lot in doing so.

Here, at New York University in Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), Pascal Ménoret, Justin Stearns, and I were hired into a nascent program named "Arab Crossroads Studies." During our first year teaching at NYUAD, we spent many hours debating both the merits and productivity of the name and the rationale for turning this then-concentration into a full-fledged undergraduate major. The legacy of US area studies’ Cold War roots was something we took seriously. What does "Arab Crossroads" even mean? And was it productive or just as flawed to move from a geographic focus, that is, Middle East studies, to a linguistic, cultural, and ethnic one: the Arab world? Even as these are questions we continue to ask, the renaming and reframing does something. If nothing else, it reminds me as a scholar and a teacher to focus more explicitly on the historical, political, economic, and social connections between the "Arab world" and its immediate surroundings (Africa, South Asia, the Indian Ocean region, and Europe) as well as on the human, material, and conceptual "crossroads" within "it." In doing so, it draws our attention away from place and toward movement across space and within various spaces.

In treating the Arabian Peninsula as a "center" rather than a periphery, we are forced to widen our geographical focus and broaden our conceptual one. That is, we cannot design classes or research projects as if the "Arab world" or the "Middle East" begins in Morocco and ends in Muscat. Nor can we ignore the capital and labor flows that link South Asia to the Arabian Peninsula to the Levant (and also to the United States). Finally, as Tom Looser has convincingly argued, it is with the export of Western universities and branch campuses to the Gulf and East Asia, for example, that area studies gains new salience. With the fashionable emphasis today on all things "global," a critical area studies approach can ground and situate an otherwise imperialist (and predominantly Western) sense of "global" knowledge and "cosmopolitan" belonging. Through the newly established "Arab Crossroads Studies" major at NYUAD, we seek to emphasize to our "global" students that their being here, in Abu Dhabi—in the Arabian Peninsula—does matter and that Abu Dhabi is not merely the "global" city it aspires to be, but that it, too, has been historically and politically produced. Included, however, among the required courses for all undergraduate majors is a "Problems and Methods in Arab Crossroads Studies" course: a course that examines area, area studies, and areas like the "Arabian Peninsula" critically, while asking what new theoretical interventions such a focus may uncover. We welcome further discussion on this!

(3) "Sectarianism" seems to have reemerged in popular and academic work on the Arabian Peninsula as both the label for and analytic of a socio-political phenomenon. What is the utility of both past and more recent formulations of "sectarianism" as an analytical tool for the study of the Arabian Peninsula? What challenges or problems have these formulations created?

This is an important question.  As I have not worked on sectarianism directly, however, I will defer here to the other roundtable participants.

(4) What is the relationship between local scholarship produced in the Arabian Peninsula and the work done by academics in the United States, Western Europe, Russia, etc.? What kind of attention has been given to local and regional knowledge production, if any?

I think it fair to say that the relationship between local scholarship produced in the Arabian Peninsula and the work done by academics from the outside is growing stronger, while still remaining contingent upon or even hampered by the hegemonic status of English as the scholarly lingua franca. We see this even in the shift from French- and German-language publications to English-language ones. Serious scholarship produced by "Western" academics does rely on local scholarship and knowledge production, but more can and should be done to translate these works to make them more widely accessible. For example, I recently assigned Ahmed Kanna’s Dubai: The City as Corporation to my students at NYUAD. Kanna draws heavily and productively on the writings of Emirati scholar Abdul-Khaleq Abdullah, thereby introducing his important work to Kanna’s English-language readership. As the majority of Abdullah’s articles have been published in Arabic, however, I am less able to assign them directly, meaning that "local" scholarship, like his, may be in danger of being presented or perceived as secondary to the English-language publications that build upon it.

Similarly, in my work on Socotra, I draw considerably on the texts written and published by the Socotran historian Ahmed al-Anbali (who resides in the United Arab Emirates), as well as on knowledge production by non-academics. The latter include Socotran guides, heritage brokers, and activists who, in response to and as a rejection of the international regime of "experts," are now fashioning themselves as what one may call "para-experts," engaged in an explicit and self-aware counter-form of knowledge production. Although I am mostly interested in the development and deployment of this parallel expertise (as opposed to the content itself), it remains a challenge to adequately present this knowledge production as scholarship and not just as ethnographic artifact. This is due in great part to what John Willis identifies as the incommensurable position of Yemeni academics in terms of their institutional and financial support and the different intellectual and political project in which they are engaged. Until recently, Socotran scholars were eager to promote a narrative of Socotran unity, stability, and exceptionalism. This has started to change, however, in the wake of the Arab uprisings, which have opened a space for more critical histories to be told.

Finally, as someone teaching at a US institution of higher education in the Gulf, I should say something about intellectual exchange and the proliferation of Western branch campuses mentioned by Al-Rasheed, Hanieh, and Vora. Madawi Al-Rasheed expresses concern that Western academic institutions (not just in the Gulf, but also in the West) may be forced through their funding sources to engage in self-censorship, if not the kind of outright censorship that occurred when Dr. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen was denied entry into the United Arab Emirates for a conference sponsored by the London School of Economics this past March. Adam Hanieh questions whether these institutions will reproduce dominant narratives about the Middle East and both Hanieh and Neha Vora raise the specter of their financial motives. It is undeniable that there are restrictions on academic freedom in these places—as there are in the United States and in Western Europe, especially when it comes to untenured faculty. Here at NYUAD we are guaranteed academic freedom in the classroom and within the institution more broadly, as long as we do not criticize the ruling families or Islam. Critics of these institutions perceive this as a profound infringement upon academic freedom and knowledge production. On the other hand, my students—Emirati, Filipino, American, and Palestinian—are reading and discussing Yasser Elsheshtawy, Andrew Gardner, Ahmed Kanna, and Neha Vora on structural violence, labor regimes, citizen-foreigner relations, and the politics of race, class, and space in the Gulf. In history classes, such as the ones taught by Pascal Ménoret, students are reading Madawi Al-Rasheed, Mamoun Fandy, Stephen Hertog, Toby Jones, Amelie Le Renard, Timothy Mitchell, and Robert Vitalis on resource extraction, corporate capitalism, imperialism, authoritarianism, political protest, and gender in the Arabian Peninsula. If our collective efforts to "theorize the Arabian Peninsula" take root, it will be in universities like NYUAD where students are eager to engage these analyses. This is only one way, but an important one, of creating a new generation of critical scholars and also of developing spaces of inquiry in which "local" scholarship is given serious attention within "Western" universities.

(5) Some argue that the Arab Uprisings changed the ways in which the Middle East can and will be studied. What has been the immediate impact of the Arab uprisings on scholarship on the Arabian Peninsula and what are likely to be the long-term effects?

The immediate impact of the uprisings on scholarship on the Arabian Peninsula has been an increased attention to both the transnational reverberations of these events and their antecedents—the politics of sectarianism in and across Arabian Peninsula states, the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the peninsula, the impact of social media transnationally, etc. Another result seems to be a renewed attention to various modes of sovereignty—state, popular, cultural—and its contestations. What may and hopefully will emerge with this, then, is the more thorough replacement of the Orientalist notion of "Gulf" states and societies as monolitihic and monochrome sites with a "thicker" understanding of the richness and complexities that underpins each Arabian Peninsula state individually and in relation to one another. To paraphrase Sheila Carapico, it should now become increasingly obvious that the entire Arabian Peninsula "is good for ethnography"—or, more importantly, that it deserves and requires a broader group of scholars’ critical attention.

 


Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula electronic roundtable contributions:

Thinking Globally About Arabia by Toby C. Jones.

Knowledge in the Time of Oil by Madawi Al-Rasheed.

Capital and Labor in Gulf States: Bringing the Region Back In by Adam Hanieh.

Unpacking Knowledge Production and Consumption by Neha Vora.

Perspectives from the Margins of Arabia by Nathalie Peutz. 

Writing Histories of the Arabian Peninsula or How to Narrate the Past of a (Non)Place by John Willis.

Towards a Critical Cartography of the Political in the Arabian Peninsula by Ahmed Kanna.