Browsing by Subject "Middle East"

Iraqi academics have had a pivotal role in shaping and building Iraqi society, identity, and national structures, since the country’s independence from British colonial rule. Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, a significant number of academics were assassinated and forced into exile and internal displacement. Since this population has always been intertwined with the state and different regimes of power, they are uniquely-situated to provide critical and multifaceted analyses on politics, the intertwined relationship between academics and power, and the complexity of exile. Through what I call a “genealogy of loss,” this ethnography traces the academic, political, and social lives of academics in contemporary Iraq to uncover the losses this population-and the Iraqi people- have incurred in contemporary Iraq. Beginning with the period from the ascendancy of the Ba‘ath Party in 1968, to the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and up to the present, I examine the lives of Iraq’s exiled academics in three sites: the UK, Jordan, and Iraqi Kurdistan. I first examine their experience during the Ba‘ath era to explore their work, struggles, and hardships, as they made significant contributions to building their society and nation. I attempt to provide a nuanced anthropological account of life under the Ba‘ath regime and its ideals and complex realities. The second part examines these academics’ post-US occupation experiences both inside Iraq and in exile. I argue that the reconfiguration of the Iraqi state, and the shift from a secular, unified, one-party system into a divided space ruled by the occupying forces and their appointed sectarian and ethno-nationalist leaders and militia groups, has reconfigured the role of the academic and of higher education. The occupation and the subsequent Iraqi governments used death threats and assassinations, sectarianism, and “de-Ba‘athification” as forms of governance to restructure society. Many academics and professionals were either assassinated or forced into exile by sending them bullets and threat notes in envelopes. I explore how academics’ relatively stable jobs in pre-invasion Iraq are now “contracted lives” with devastating effects on their personal lives, intellectual projects, and the future of Iraq. Such lives entail living in spaces under precarious and temporary contracts and with residency cards subject to annual renewal or termination. These academics now live in constant fear and what I call a “plan B mode of existence.” While an extreme and violent case, this ethnography argues that the conditions of Iraqi academics in exile are connected to neoliberal global trends marked by the commercialization and corporatization of higher education, adversely affecting academic, social, and political freedoms of writing, thinking, and being in this world.

This dissertation examines the interplay between sovereignty and governmentality in the domain of welfare provision in Turkey’s Kurdish southeast through the analytic of debt.

The dissertation shows that debt lies at the heart of Turkish and Kurdish political identities in Turkey, but with a significant difference. For decades the Turkish state has exerted strong control over the economy and selectively distributed economic resources in favor of allegiant populations while dispossessing the unruly. This dynamic has given way to a common conception among the mainstream Turkish citizenry that allocation of economic resources is at the mercy of the state and citizens owe allegiance and obedience to the state for all that it bestows on them.

Although this debt morality pervades Turkey, it is interrupted and transformed in the Kurdish region. Considered the internal other of the Turkish nation and resisting ethnic homogenization and economic and political centralization policies for decades, Kurds have been subjected to systematic state violence and dispossession. This state violence and resistance to it have engendered a counter-debt morality in the Kurdish region, finding expression in the idiom bedel ödemek (paying the price). Foregrounding a history of state violence and dispossession rather than state benevolence, bedel reverses the hegemonic debt morality in Turkey, rendering the state indebted to the Kurds. Moreover, having emerged out of the Kurdish struggle, bedel redefines the Kurdish political identity around a new set of obligations: to stand up against the state for individual and collective self-determination and to pay tribute to those who made sacrifices in resisting the state.

This dissertation unpacks the political, economic and cultural logics of these two competing debt moralities and traces their contestation in the domain of welfare bureaucracy in an effort to demonstrate how struggles over sovereignty permeate governmental practices in the region.

My two years of ethnographic research (2012–2014) largely focused on the decision-making practices of local welfare officials, who enjoy an immense discretionary power in selecting beneficiaries. It showed that many officials’ practices were informed by the hegemonic debt morality in Turkey that promotes welfare as state benevolence and expects beneficiaries to repay their debt through allegiance and subservience. Although bedel leaks into welfare distribution—through the moral judgments of Kurdish officials—it works in the shadows, remaining largely silent and secret. This suppression of bedel, I suggest, bespeaks the state’s role in denying its own violence and asserting a unidirectional debt relation on beneficiary citizens. Illustrating how state-sponsored social welfare governance operates as a violent, debt-producing mechanism, the dissertation suggests that sovereign violence is intrinsic to the state’s governmental practices in the Kurdish region.

However, the domain of social welfare is not limited to the central state-sponsored social assistance programs. Over the years Kurdish movement has initiated its own welfare programs. Just as with centrally organized welfare programs, alleviation of poverty constitutes the main framework in which these initiatives operate. However, bedel plays a more overt role in these initiatives’ approach to social welfare than it does in centrally organized public social assistance programs. This difference can be traced to the categories and vocabularies that Kurdish movement-led initiatives use as well as to their practices of beneficiary selection. The dissertation traces the ways in which bedel is incorporated into the workings of Kurdish movement-led welfare programs and illustrates how this incorporation opens up room for the nurturing of resistant subjectivities and socialities that challenge the hegemonic debt morality in Turkey as well as the political and economic dispossession it entails. I thus argue that incorporation of bedel in Kurdish initiatives politicizes welfare and constitutes an obstacle to the Turkish state’s establishing and maintaining its sovereign power in the Kurdish region by means of welfare governance.

The dissertation contributes to broad theorizations of power and statecraft, redistribution and dispossession, and political conflict in the Middle East. These lines of inquiry have dominated social sciences for decades, but they have often remained separated. This disconnect obscures the close connections between governmental practices and the workings of sovereign power, preventing us from accounting for the moral and economic dynamics that inform political conflicts. I take debt as both an empirical object and an epistemological vantage point to bring these literatures together and offer different historical and ethnographic strategies of analyzing the state, political subjectivities and their conflictual construction.

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the independent music scene in Cairo, in which music producers and cultural entrepreneurs who came of age during the 2011 revolution and 2013 counterrevolution hope to constitute alternative music cultures and markets in the neoliberal digital age under an authoritarian regime.

This media culture is in part defined by its refusal of the dominant urban middle- class social values, the values and aesthetics of the established media industry, and the authoritarian state’s control of media cultures. Yet independent music producers do not present their scene as a political one. Rather than confronting post-2013 authoritarianism head-on, the producers of the independent music scene invest their hopes in entrepreneurial practices and artistic labor that attempt to constitute an alternative media culture beyond the ambit of the state. These independent music producers are consistently engaged in an ongoing tug-of-war with the authoritarian state over the control of the affect of hope. On the one hand, independent music producers’ aspirations push them to undertake collective endeavors to create artwork, music enterprises, concert venues, and events that expand the independent music scene. On the other hand, the arbitrary manner in which the state has wielded its power since the 2013 counterrevolution makes it impossible for the musicians to ever feel entirely safe from potential state interference. This fosters a climate of uncertainty, ambivalence, and a sense of stuckedness in the lives of independent music producers, which impedes their entrepreneurial hopes and expansions into public life. Thus in this study I ask: How is hope mediated through the process of independent music production under authoritarianism in Egypt? By tracing the ways independent music producers attempt to cultivate hope in their entrepreneurial practices under authoritarianism in Egypt, I suggest that we can unveil a field of affective politics, in which we can examine the formation of political imaginaries and the structures that undergird or impede the social production of hope. And by gaining a deep understanding of the hopes animated by the 2011 revolution, we can also examine the thickness of independent music producers’ lives as they bear the brunt of despair under authoritarianism in Egypt.

This research is based on thirty-three months of fieldwork in Cairo among the musicians, studio and venue managers, cultural entrepreneurs, and fans of the independent music scene, between 2011 and 2018. The analysis pays close attention to the forms of labor, entrepreneurial practices, and aesthetic forms by which social actors anticipate their futures. As such, the study is organized along three affective registers— ambivalence, aspirations, and fantasies—which capture the journeys of the social actors who strive to endure and practice hope in spite of the despair propagated by authoritarianism. By bridging between affect theory and Arendtian political theory, I explain how the spreading of affective forces of hope constitutes alternative publics beyond the control of the state, revealing some of the factors that contribute to the crisis and persistence of authoritarianism in Egypt.