Browsing by Subject "Middle Eastern studies"

Israel's establishment in 1948 in former British-Mandate Palestine as a Jewish country and as a liberal democracy is commonly understood as a form of response to the Holocaust of WWII. Zionist narratives frame Israel's establishment not only as a response to the Holocaust, but also as a return to the Jewish people's original homeland after centuries of wandering in exile. Debates over Israel's policies, particularly with regard to Palestinians and to the country's non-Jewish population, often center on whether Israel's claims to Jewish singularity are at the expense of principles of liberal democracy, international law and universal human rights. In this dissertation, I argue that Israel's emphasis on Jewish singularity can be understood not as a violation of humanism's universalist frameworks, but as a symptom of the violence inherent to these frameworks and to the modern liberal rights-bearing subject on which they are based. Through an analysis of my fieldwork in Israel (2005-2008), I trace the relation between the figures of "Jew" and "Israeli" in terms of their historical genealogies and in contemporary Israeli contexts. Doing so makes legible how European modernity and its concepts of sovereignty, liberalism, the human, and subjectivity are based on a metaphysics of presence that defines the human through a displacement of difference. This displaced difference is manifest in affective expression. This dissertation shows how the figure of the Jew in relation to Israel reveals sexual difference as under erasure by the suppression of alterity in humanism's configuration of man, woman, and animal, and suggests a political subject unable to be sovereign or fully represented in language.

This dissertation offers an anthropological portrait of how algorithms are transforming what it means to wage and live with war across Israel and Palestine. My findings emerge from three years of ethnographic research with Israeli intelligence veterans, Palestinian advocates and influencers, and ordinary civilians living at the cross-hairs of regional conflict. I begin in the early 2000s, as Israel’s surveillance apparatus across Palestine proliferated amidst the violence of the Second Intifada and receding visions of regional peace. I conclude more than two decades later, as AI-powered surveillance and weapons systems intensify warfare across the region. I argue that the imperatives of a globalized information economy tangle with violent forms of dispossession across the occupied Palestinian territories to entrench warfare, a process I call algorithmic dispossession. Bringing critical algorithm studies to bear on an anthropological portrait of warfare in Israel and Palestine, I show how the buildup of algorithmic systems embedded the Israeli army into the most intimate domains of Palestinians’ lives. As new technologies drove up arrests, displacement, and death for Palestinians, the economic value placed on algorithmic development cleaved Israeli soldiers and military strategy writ large off from the imperatives of reducing bloodshed, ensuring warfare continued at a profound human cost to Israelis and Palestinians across the region. By placing ethnographic evidence gathered through years of fieldwork in Israel/Palestine alongside urgent debates surrounding the ethics and impact of new technologies, this dissertation ultimately foregrounds the iterative relationship between war and automation today.

How do political leaders strategically manage fiscal policy formation to enhance their political survival? What are the implications of the fiscal mechanics of survival for theories of redistribution and democratic transition? This dissertation examines the complex relationship between political regime types and fiscal information asymmetries. I focus on budgetary policies (taxation and public spending) as major strategic tools available to the executive for co-optation and punishment of opponents. I argue that allowing some degree of contestation and transparency on the fiscal contract in electoral authoritarian regimes helps the executive identify distributive claims and co-opt the opposition. Paradoxically, in new democracies, political survival depends more on lower levels of budget transparency than existent theories would have us expect. Chapters 1 and 2 present a general formal model from which I derive the major hypotheses of the study. Second, Chapters 3, 4 and 5 use new cross-national measures of fiscal transparency and test empirically the theoretical implications. The statistical models confirm the main theoretical intuitions. Finally, Chapter 6 compares in greater detail the evolution of fiscal transparency in Morocco, Turkey and Romania between 1950 and 2000. I argue that fiscal taboos closely followed the shifting political alliance and their distributional consequences for leader's survival.

While China’s recent Belt and the Road Initiative and its expansion across Eurasia is garnering public and scholarly attention, this dissertation recasts the space of Eurasia as one connected through historic Islamic networks between Mecca and China. Specifically, I show that eruptions of unpredictable wars and political turnovers across Asia in the twentieth century sparked a sector of Chinese Muslim militarists and scholar-politicians to constantly reformulate extensive networks of kinship, scholarship, patronage, pilgrimage and diplomacy between China, the Indian Ocean world and the Arabian Peninsula. In these endeavors, Mecca represented a hub and mediator of mobility, a diplomatic theater filled with propaganda and contestations, and a fictive homeland that turned into a real home which absorbed streams of exiles and refugees.

Each chapter adds a layer of Chinese Muslims’ engagements with Mecca as a locale and a metaphor – from old little Meccas in Linxia (southern Gansu) and Canton (Guangzhou), to the new logistical hub of Shanghai that hosted Mecca-bound pilgrims from across China in the first half of the twentieth century, and to Mecca where competing pilgrimage diplomatic delegations and refugee settlers asserted their belonging. By doing so, the dissertation unleashes Chinese Muslims’ sphere of activities, imaginaries, space-making, and historiographical reconfigurations from the confines of the territorial state of China, revealing the creation of sacred places and logistical hubs across regions, and channels of circulations that went through them. I draw from a wealth of pilgrimage and diplomatic travelogues, interviews with living communities in Saudi Arabia, mainland China and Taiwan over multiple generations, archival documents, memoirs and biographies.

While the protagonists in this dissertation represent only a portion of the diverse groups of Chinese Muslim populations, they present an indicative view of Chinese Muslims as a collective — as a people for whom real and imagined connections with external places have been central to their self-understandings and social mobility in multiple locales. At certain moments when inter-state relations were about to take off, they undertook roles as diplomatic mediators in official and unofficial capacities. Their spatial configurations, in turn, show the role of Mecca as a physical site and a symbolic center in assembling inter-Asian circulations -- giving rise to little Meccas and infrastructural hubs elsewhere, attracting competing diplomatic missions, and offering a haven for pilgrim sojourners and diaspora communities who have constituted the diverse social make-up of Saudi Arabia.

With the revival of Imāmī or “Twelver” Shīʿa Islam in the Safavid Empire (1501- 1722) of Iran, histories of its clerical elite have emphasized the overt juridical mechanisms that they erected in support of their imperial project. Alternatively, many have also argued that gnostic counter-currents emerging in the same milieu reflected a wider disinterest in political activism. This dissertation provincializes the experience of the Safavid heartland to ask how Iranian émigré scholars working among the royal courts of the Deccan Sultanates (1490-1687) engineered an elite scholarly culture through alternative intellectual rubrics that were simultaneously gnostic in character and overtly political. Drawing on unstudied Arabic and Persian manuscripts trafficked within the Quṭbshāhī Sultanate of Golkonda-Hyderabad (1518-1687), I recover the intellectual career of one of these émigré scholars, Niẓām al-Dīn Aḥmad Gīlānī (b. 1585, d. after 1662), who forms the centerpiece of a nearly two-century story of evolving Shīʿī scholasticism in service of the state. Gīlānī’s intermittent sojourns between his homeland of Gilan, the academies of Safavid Iran, various courtly spaces in Mughal India, and his long-term home in the Deccan make him the perfect subject to refashion these territories into a contiguous intellectual terrain. In six chapters, I show how various medical, natural philosophical, and occult sciences practiced and theorized by Gīlānī and his colleagues as “Shīʿī naturalists” were not only legitimated by Muslim scripture, but were heavily patronized by Muslim rulers as a cornerstone of their political theologies. It demonstrates, furthermore, how Gīlānī’s mode of naturalist inquiry builds upon a speculative and

affective intimacy with non-human and non-Muslim others.

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 research explores the practices and aspirations to national belonging among Evangelical Egyptians, converts to a distinctively Euro-American form of Protestant Christianity through the proselytizing efforts of European and American missionaries between the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Although Evangelical Egyptians have historically been known as politically quietist, in the wake of the January 25 Revolution, leading Evangelicals began to adjust their practices of public engagement with the revolution, civil society, and political activism. Through participant observation, in-depth person centered interviews, and archival research, this dissertation argues that far from severing Evangelical Egyptian imaginations, desires for, and practices of national belonging, conversion from the historic Coptic Orthodox church and to a more internationally connected form of Christian community, in fact provides Evangelicals with some of their most potent tools for articulating their historical and contemporary place in the nation-state of Egypt. This dissertation aims to bring timely and productive debates on the anthropology of religion to bear on the shape of global evangelicalism in the global south as a key shape of politics and sociality. Indeed, this dissertation argues that it is precisely the ‘will to the global’ as the future imagined community of ‘God’s kingdom’ that paradoxically roots Evangelical Egyptians in a robust nationalistic articulation of their faith.

The dissertation explores the artistic and cultural histories behind Egyptian national monuments and museums that were built and renovated by North Korean artists and architects. Archival materials from the American University in Cairo, Seoul National University, and the North Korean Research Center are used to contextualize these cultural sites within the broader history of diplomatic exchanges between the two nations. Such exchanges are framed as part of the international Cold War and inter-Korean competition. By piecing together resources such as government documents, artworks, and media coverage, the dissertation provides a history of exchanged aesthetics, ideologies, and methods of memorialization connecting the Korean Peninsula to the Middle East. The dissertation attends to questions of representation and national identity as they pertain to national monuments, museums, and cultural sites.

The dissertation begins by outlining the cultural and political developments between Egypt with North and South Korea from 1956 to present, complicating Cold War as a concept and extending beyond outdated geographic and temporal limitations. Then the dissertation uses Egyptian news coverage to trace the history of three buildings resulting from Hosni Mubarak’s 1983 diplomatic tour in Asia; the Japanese-funded Cairo Opera House (1988), the North Korean-designed October War Panorama (1989), and the Chinese-built Cairo Conference Center (1989). Next, the study theorizes the function of North Korean museums in Egypt and questions the implications of importing nationalistic aesthetics. Subsequent analysis addresses paintings by North Korean artists in the Egyptian National Military Museum that take inspiration from international films set in Egypt through the ages, from antiquity to the colonial era. The dissertation concludes with an exploration of the relationship between North Korean Juche ideology and the display of diplomatic gifts at the International Friendship Exhibition.

This dissertation is a theoretical and art/archival practice-based exploration of aesthetic-affective resistance to neoliberal recuperation of urban space that not only constitutes a physical manifestation of capitalist accumulation by dispossession, but also serves to aesthetically valorize affluent middle-class normativity. Through archival research, I discuss the rise of aesthetic-political dissidence against the rent-seeking displacement of the minoritized in Istanbul, and follow its trajectory from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. Using visual analyses, I theorize the aesthetic strategies of cultural-political dis-identification from the presiding logics and affectations of neoliberalism. These aesthetic strategies include satire, valorization of the obsolete, discarded, devalued and superfluous, and the fragmental provocation of memory to keep the lived history of Istanbul active against neoliberal erasure without monumentalizing a particular historical narrative. The art practice component of this dissertation provides self-reflection on my art works that draws upon aesthetic-political developments in Istanbul. In my discussion, I also put my art practice in conversation with queer temporality, utopian realism, and a queer-feminist ethic-erotic that orient us to social practices of production, reproduction, and subjectivization based on relational principles driven from sensuous reciprocity that go beyond the familial and the naturalized, and that the dominant political-economic order renders unfeasible.

Based on fieldwork in Bursa and archival research, this dissertation investigates the historical interplay between professional soccer, nationalism, and globalization in Turkey. The dissertation makes the case that the globalized commercialized competition in professional soccer as well as attempts and failures to regulate the explosive economic and cultural dynamics of professional soccer have made significant contributions to the remaking of Turkish nation-building over the decades throughout the 20th century and until the present day. Starting with a historical analysis of the interwar origins of commercial soccer in post-imperial Istanbul and its fraught relation to militarist nation-building, the dissertation then moves to the formation of a national sport bureaucracy and subsequent development of a national professional league after the 1960s. An ethnography of a city team Bursaspor, which constitutes the second half of the dissertation, demonstrates that what I call the joint-stock politics of city’s soccer team is a cultural performance for the city to tell itself stories about its industrial modernity and the globalizing transformations the city undergoes.

Political upheaval in Syria makes Jordan a temporary home to over one million Syrian refugees. More than half of these individuals, due to limited resources and challenging financial circumstances, do not have adequate access to reproductive health and family planning mechanisms. Among pregnant refugee women in Jordan, approximately one in five are at risk for poor obstetrical outcomes, including premature and underweight births. Due to increased rates of birth in humanitarian and lower resource settings, and the crucial need for addressing sexual and reproductive health in these settings, this study conducted a comparative analysis of the sexual and reproductive health climate among Syrian refugee and Jordanian men and women.

Using a case study research design, semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with 34 study participants, including 15 Syrian women, 8 Jordanian women, 6 Syrian men, and 5 Jordanian men. These interviews examined participants’ migration experiences, pregnancy outcomes, influencers for reproductive decisions, and gaps in sexual and reproductive health care.

Qualitative interviews revealed that Syrian refugees indicated greater reproductive and sexual health need than Jordanians, more specifically related to education on reproductive health and contraceptive methods. Syrian refugees were married at earlier ages than Jordanians, and, overall, had more children. Additionally, Syrian refugees confirmed that healthcare in Syria was more accessible, affordable, and comprehensive in comparison to Jordan. The greatest contributors to gaps in care for both Jordanians and Syrians were financial constraints and apathy regarding refugee welfare among providers in public facilities.

Increasing access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive healthcare among refugees in low-resourced, humanitarian settings, while also continuing to meet the needs of the nation’s own population, is a healthcare priority. The findings of this study have the potential to guide and influence policy affecting family planning mechanisms afforded to migrants in Jordan in both public and private facilities. Action is required immediately by policymakers and government officials to create budgetary resources for sexual and reproductive health education programs in Jordan in order to meet the family planning needs of refugee and migrant populations residing there.

Turkey’s neo-Ottomanism, Iran’s Shi’a Crescent, and Russia’s neo-Eurasianism: together, they evince increasing transregionalism across West Asia. As states and societies interact beyond national borders, their interactions transform them from without. Evidently, the social basis of this mutual transformation is not to be found in one country but in many, spread out through networks of trade, religion, kinship, etc. This dissertation offers a model for analyzing social orders that are constitutive of multiple political domains. The model is developed through an ethnographic and historiographical study of Azerbaijanis, a Transcaucasian people with diasporic presence across Iran, Turkey, and Russia. By stitching together biographical accounts of itinerant Azerbaijanis from past and present, this study develops a temporally capacious, diasporic perspective on post-Cold War connectivity across Iran, Turkey, and Russia. This network-centric perspective shifts the focus from old imperial centers to their shared frontier as the locus of transregional analysis. In frontiers states interact through a connective tissue woven by diasporic societies whose routes, past and present, crisscross that frontier. While diasporic ties of intimacy give states access to societies beyond their domains, states may in turn sponsor such ties, giving diasporic individuals mandate to act as cultural diplomats. This shadow diplomacy is underpinned by multidirectional, competitive engagement with shared histories across political borders.

This dissertation addresses the paradox of high public support for democracy in one of the least democratic regions of the world, the Middle East/North Africa. It proposes that the cross-national surveys used to identify this democracy paradox contribute to the apparent misalignment of public opinion and political structure. While in most regions of the world the public’s understanding of the word democracy accords with political scientists’ procedural understanding – people conceive of democracy as a system of competitive elections and civil liberties – this does not bear out in the Middle East. Roughly half of MENA residents conceive of dimuqratiyya as a set of economic outcomes, rather than political processes. Thus, these surveys introduce translation bias; the researchers are measuring support for this plurally-defined construct, rather than a known entity. Using original surveys in Egypt and Morocco, it finds that citizens with different views of dimuqratiyya evince different levels of support for an elections-based system of government. Chapter 1 lays out the methodological challenge posed by discrepancies among researchers and citizens in understanding dimuqratiyya. Chapter 2 focuses on the typology of democrats. Using regression analyses, it examines what citizen characteristics predict a politicist or economicist understanding of dimuqratiyya. The third chapter considers the relationship between citizens understanding of dimuqratiyya and believing electing government is the best method of choosing government, believing that elections are appropriate for their country, and commitment to choosing the government by election to the exclusion of undemocratic alternatives. It shows that politicists are more likely to endorse an elections-based system of government than citizens who hold an economic view of dimuqratiyya. The final empirical chapter focuses on a conjoint analysis of hypothetical government features, including elections, barriers to political participation, unemployment rate, welfare policy, and role for religion and religious leaders in government. On the whole, Egyptians and Moroccans favor multiparty elections, low unemployment, and a state that keeps religious leaders out of government while maintaining an official religion. Politicists and economicists, however, place different weight on the ability to participate in government, the economic outputs it generates, and the religious character of the regime. These findings suggest that the abundance of economicists in the Middle East/North Africa represents a potential wellspring of authoritarian persistence. Not only are the economic deliverables on which they focus providable by authoritarians, who could then create a false narrative of democratic success, but they are less committed to the central procedural features of democratic governance: elections. This dissertation contributes both to our understanding of the democracy paradox and authoritarian persistence in the Middle East.

Although Tunisia has been celebrated as the unique success story of the Arab Spring, its emergent democracy has failed to resolve the structural inequalities that caused the 2011 revolution, or meaningfully include marginal subjects within its address. This dissertation documents the life-worlds of those left behind in Tunisia’s democratic transition by tracking the precarious labor of smuggling by youth in the Western-Central interior. For unemployed youth living in the shadow of underdevelopment, smuggling offers a rare avenue of insertion into productive life, where the border serves as a natural resource for generating value through arbitrage. Disappointed by the revolution’s implicit promise of structural change, many young Tunisians now use these routes of economic survival to join up with jihadist militias abroad. Through 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kasserine, an impoverished province on Tunisia’s Algerian frontier, I examine how smuggling practice generates a landscape of ambivalent belonging to the nation, a “Shadow Zone” that elicits desire for the state, as well as the material means to evade it. I show how cross-border movement refracts the meaning of social justice for local actors, including petty smugglers and informal laborers who work the border economy, Tunisian families whose sons have been recruited to militias in Libya, Syria, and Iraq, and unemployed youth and civil society groups who militate for equitable development.

This project examines narrative encounters in space identified as “harem,” produced by authors with biographical ties to the vanguard of the American Suffrage Movement. I regard these feminists’ circulations East, to the domestic space of the Other, as a hitherto unstudied, yet critical component of transnationalism in the history of U.S. Suffrage. This literary record also crucially reveals the extent to which sentimentality was plotted as a potential force for the reform of other cultures. An urge to sympathize denied in the space of the harem illustrates the colonial anxieties that subtended sentimentality’s prospective deployment beyond national borders. In five chapters on the work of Anna Leonowens, Susan Elston Wallace, Demetra Vaka Brown, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edith Wharton, I examine how Suffrage-minded authors writing the harem strategically abandon an activist praxis of fellow feeling. Such a reluctance to transform sentimental literature into a colonial literature consequently informs that genre’s postbellum decline. The sentiments that run dry for American feminists in the harem additionally foreground the costly failures of Wilsonian Idealism, a doctrine that appropriated a discourse of sentimentality in order to script the United States’ expanded involvement in global affairs.

Today, humans must rely on technical operations that exceed their perceptual threshold and control. The increasingly complex and abstract, algorithmically mediated operations of global capital have only deepened the gap between the social order as a whole and its lived experience. Yet, Fredric Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping acts as a model for how we might begin to articulate the relationship between the psychic and social realms, as well as the local and global scales. Jameson’s attentiveness to the conflicting tendencies of capitalist operations is still helpful for us to map the local instantiations of capital’s expanding frontiers – where its differential impacts are felt and negotiated strongly.

This dialectical move, unifying and differentiating at once, is crucial for my project of situating the Middle East within the imperial operations of global capital, thereby overcoming its peripherical reading. In contrast to the post-oil spectacles of the Arabian Gulf, such as Dubai, I look at the war-torn and toxic cities that are spreading in the rest of the region, such as Beirut, due to the violent operations of militarized states as well as the ever-growing economic and ecological deterioration. Hence, these cities constitute two sides of the same coin, bounded by more extensive structures of wealth accumulation and class formation in the region underlying the dominance of the Gulf and US imperialism. Consequently, we can unpack the spatial-temporal reconfigurations of global capital from the vantage point of the Middle East, especially along with the entangled trajectories of oil, finance, militarism, logistics, and computation.

Expanding on Jonathan Beller’s idea of computational capital, I argue that computational media are instrumentalized as an imperial apparatus within the matrix of racial capitalism. In other words, computational media are operationalized within a capitalist society that preys on the continuous reproduction of imperial divisions, techniques, institutions, and rights while obscuring their historicity. Thus, we need to bring back the historicity of those forms as well as the totality they are actively part of in the present, including from material conditions (labor) to ethico-legal systems (law). Consequently, Jameson’s cognitive mapping needs to be reconfigured not only due to the shifts in the granularity and scale of capitalist extraction but also due its embeddedness within the histories of modern thought and colonialism.

My aim is to revive the utopian project of envisioning alternatives to capitalism while reformulating the image of historicity and globality today. To this end, I examine countervisual practices in Nicholas Mirzoeff’s terms, intervening in the economic, legal, and symbolic systems that animate computational media in the Middle Eastern context, ranging from smart weapons to smart cities. My analyses show that artistic practice could allow us some insights about the economic and social structures that govern our immediate and situated experience, whereas media studies could help us to navigate through the convoluted cartographies of computational capital today.

As my project demonstrates, there is no privileged position or method of cognitive mapping, which ultimately corresponds to an active negotiation of urban space. Those urban struggles will persist, always exceeding the bounds of our theories. My project affirms an aesthetic that does not exist yet, not because it is impossible but, rather, it cannot be encapsulated in a formula since it is always already in the process of making on the streets.

This study investigates the interaction between political influences of Islamic fundamentalist parties and the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. The author selects four salient actors, based on five characteristics of contemporary Islamic fundamentalist groups: the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the Palestinian Hamas, the Lebanese Hezbollah, and the Iranian conservatives. With evidences of intertwined supports among them, the author analyzes the cooperative bloc between a state and non-state groups. After Iranian conservatives came to power, Iran's political supports enhanced influences of Hezbollah and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and then helped Hamas seize power finally. Their radical foreign policies intend to end Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories. The theoretical model generates two predictions about strategies of the bloc. First, high political influence in each government is expected to worsen the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. Second, due to Israel's strong military power, the expected strategy of the bloc is a symbolic war that more rhetoric and less Israeli casualties. Using cross-tabulation model, the author finds that the attack numbers are alone increased along with the high political influences, during the given period between 2000 and 2009. Their strong political power and secure cooperative bloc impede democratizing and promoting peace in the Middle East.

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.

When we look up toward the sky, what do we see? The answer may seem to be worlds detached from the colonial conflicts on our own, but in this dissertation, I contend that the sky reveals the contemporary struggles that Palestinians in the West Bank are facing. At a moment when the Palestinian condition is haunted by political malaise, I turn to these expanses overhead through an ethnography of Palestinian astronomy that unearths how ambition and exhaustion take shape in tandem in the airs above the West Bank. Astronomers’ projects frequently encounter Israel’s increasingly atmospheric military occupation, revealing the contemporary dimensions of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, one eking into the sky. Yet at the same time, their profession balances the epistemological wonders of the universe with such wreckage of settler colonialism, providing new grammars for understanding civil aspirations and possibility today in Palestine.

Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork alongside Palestinian astronomers who are largely based in Ramallah and its surrounding environs, this dissertation unfurls around their everyday labors to bring interstellar phenomena to diverse populations across Palestine through workshops, camps, lectures, community initiatives, and stargazing events. As they deal with land seizures and air raids, atmospheric pollution, Israeli surveillance from drones, helicopters, and even satellites, many astronomers attest that their work to learn about the galaxy also entails learning about how outer space is subject to human extraction, including the colonial appetite. The sky, then, is not simply an object of scientific study for Palestinian astronomers, but it becomes a scale of political reckoning through which they learn how forms of governance—Israel’s occupation or otherwise—can impact their own lives and enterprises.

Rather than ending my analysis at an understanding of the sky as political as such, I also query how these political transformations bear on the social legibility of Palestinian astronomers. By working to build up Palestinian educational fields that Israel has long targeted, and fulfilling a civil duty many would expect from Palestinian governments or municipalities, these astronomers understand that their work directly interfaces with the political histories that have led to present feelings of hopelessness in Palestine. And now that the sky houses Israeli byproducts of these histories, they frequently encounter the assumption—from other Palestinians and those abroad—that they have pursued astronomy to counter Israel’s occupation and be political agents themselves. I detail how these astronomers navigate such political expectations, attentive to their frustrations that astronomy must fit into political scripts that Palestinians have inherited since 1948. How they navigate the weight of these inheritances, I argue, reveals a contemporary portrait of political life for young Palestinians in the West Bank. I both draw from and add to the fields of postcolonial science and technology studies, Palestine studies, and political anthropology by thinking past these political affordances and, instead, more critically examining how the scale of colonial history can coopt Palestinian astronomers’ own subjectivities, implanting impersonal intentions within them.

As a whole, The Sky, Upended seeks to offer a political and decolonial anthropology of the sky that does not rely on existing political rhetorics, but instead uses ethnography to craft a social theory that more robustly illuminates the dimensions, effects, and affects of Israeli settlement today—along the y-axis in particular. By attending to these geophysical transformations and their relationship to Palestinian subjectivity, I offer new directions for recognizing and reconceptualizing Palestinian sovereignty and futurity under our shared sky.