Urban Politics in the Middle East and North Africa

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel highlights new research on the Middle East and North Africa that compares and analyzes urban politics in relation to core themes in comparative politics. Papers address different aspects of urban ecologies and built environment in relation to political violence, authoritarianism, local governance, migration, voting behavior, and political economy. This panel thus joins the call for shifting political science scholarship on MENA cities beyond the dominant lenses of Islamism, rentierism, and sectarianism. The diverse methodological and epistemological tools employed in the papers—including the “city as archive,” and the “heritage as data” approach—as well as diverse comparative techniques—including cross-regional, cross national, and short and long-term horizons—offer novel ways of studying comparative politics in and through urban spaces. Together, the papers take the materiality of built environment seriously to re-think comparative politics. Moreover, they offer fresh perspectives on multi-method research pertaining to topics and contexts often considered difficult to study empirically.



Sarah Parkinson builds on immersive field research in Doha, Qatar, in the lead-up to and during the 2022 FIFA World Cup to explore how states define, perceive, and seek to manage public safety threats. She examines how the site of sporting events and mass spectacles prompt states to develop and participants to submit to policies that include mass surveillance, crowd management, and evolving behavioral guidelines. Lama Mourad, drawing on 13 months of fieldwork in Lebanon and analysis of conference documents, briefings, and government and international NGO reports, critically engages with existing discourses that position mayors and municipal authorities as “outside the state,” revealing how they act as gatekeepers and boundary-making actors in migration governance. Christiana Parreira and Amanda Rizkallah use an original national survey and qualitative interview evidence from Lebanon to investigate how residential displacement within and across urban geographies due to violence during and participation in the country’s civil war (1975-90) influence contemporary partisan identification and voting behavior. Ronay Bakan builds on her multi-sited ethnography of local governance and city planning in the post-conflict Kurdish city of Diyarbakır to elaborate how heritage efforts serve as tools to suppress perceived future insurgent threats. By treating “heritage as data,” she examines how selective excavation, destruction as well as reconstruction contributes to the Turkish state’s counterinsurgency policies. Sarah El-Kazaz re-centers the materiality of the built environment to understand the city as an archival repository, doing so through a multi-sited ethnography of urban transformation projects in contemporary Istanbul and Cairo. By focusing on how the archival repository found in the layered subterranean ecologies of both cities, she analyzes the linkages made between past, present and future through the city’s materiality. Ultimately, she offers a material-cultural framework of “city as archive” to augment the study of the political.

Sub Unit

• Division 57: Middle East and North African Politics

Individual Presentations

• Securing the Spectacle: Public Safety and the Qatar World Cup  - Sarah E. Parkinson, Johns Hopkins University

• Mayors as Partners? Municipal Actors in Migration Governance - Lama Mourad, Carleton University

• Counterinsurgent Urbanism: Weaponizing Land and Heritage in Northern Kurdistan - Ronay Bakan, Johns Hopkins University

• Rethinking “City as Archive”: Rumors and the Subterrain in Istanbul and Cairo  - Sarah El-Kazaz, SOAS, University of London

• Displacement, Civil War Participation, and the Development of Partisan Identity - Christiana Parreira, Geneva Graduate Institute; Amanda Rizkallah, Pepperdine University

Chair

• Amaney Jamal Princeton University

Discussant

• Michelle Day Weitzel The Graduate Institute, Geneva