Urban Violence and Political Contestation in the Middle East

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Cities are crucial sites of contestation throughout the contemporary Third World—protests typically begin and escalate toward violence in urban centers, insurgencies increasingly operate in peripheral urban districts, and prolonged fighting profoundly reshapes the urban physical and social fabric. The relationship between urban space and political violence is thus complicated, yet remains undertheorized. This is specifically true of the Middle East; while scholarship of the past two decades has given greater attention to urban politics, it has not explicitly engaged with how violence touches the city.

This panel theorizes the relationship between urban space and political violence, drawing on insights from a range of Middle Eastern cases spanning from Egypt to Iran. The range of methods also include two quantitative and two ethnography-based analyses, all using highly detailed sub-city variation. Pascal Menoret analyzes the urban planning techniques deployed to control the population of Riyadh. Specifically, he shows how suburbanization, which planners often think of as unconducive to contentious political challenge, in many ways enables it, and asks whether there is a Riyadh model of suburban planning in the region. The paper by Peyman Asadzade explains the spatial variance of the recent wave of protests (2022) in different neighborhoods in Tehran by highlighting the role of education and the mechanisms through which it shapes contentious political behavior. In her piece, Ansar Jasim draws on extended ethnographic fieldwork in Baghdad to show how violence affects not only urban infrastructure, but the intimate spaces of the urban subaltern, focusing in specific on the affective everyday experience in the popular neighborhood, “Sadr City.” Lastly, Motasem Abuzaid and Kevin Mazur reconceptualize the role of the built environment and unpack the mechanisms by which it structures conflict at two-time scales: (1) in the long run, through the reproduction of social networks, and, (2) in the short run, by shaping perceptions of efficacy among protesters/combatants. They showcase this dynamic by exploring different neighborhoods in Damascus during the early months of the Syrian uprising of 2011. Collectively, the panel offers a comprehensive view of the complex intersection of the physical space and urban violence, ranging between the spectacular forms of warfare, to revolutionary situations to the less documented, everyday experiences of violence.

Sub Unit

• Division 12: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries

Individual Presentations

• Higher Education and Contentious Political Behavior in Tehran, 2022 - Peyman Asadzade, Harvard University

• Between the Square and the Quarter: The Urban Logic of Violence in Syria, 2011 - Motasem Abuzaid, Oxford University; Kevin Mazur, Northwestern University

• Mass Mobilization and Space in Revolutionary Egypt: An Affinity Convergence Theory (ACT) Analysis of Cairo's Tahrir Square - Benjamin Abrams, University College London

Chair

• Jillian M. Schwedler Hunter College

Discussants

• Dina Bishara Cornell University

• Chantal Berman Georgetown University