Cities as Laboratories of Change

Though commonly assumed to be holding this status temporarily, according to current UNHCR statistics almost three quarters of refugees worldwide find themselves in a situation of protracted, long-term exile. Protracted exile poses a major challenge to earlier dominant academic theories that refer to refugee dilemmas with the metaphor of uprootedness and longing. The identity situation of long-term refugees is far more complex, yet it remains understudied. This article contributes to the understanding of protracted displacement through the case study of al-Am‛ari, a Palestinian refugee camp
located in the West Bank. Since their establishment in the aftermath of the 1948 war, Palestinian refugee camps have been symbols of national suffering and served as commemorative sites dedicated to pre-exilic locations in parts of historical Palestine. However, the interpretation of this suffering, as well as of camps’ commemorative functions, changed over time and was marked with the perceived tension between commitment to places of origin and growing domestication of, as well as attachment to, al-Am‛ari. The coexistence of these seemingly contradicting sentiments can be explained with the concept of “mediated locality,” defined here as a structure of feeling territorialised in a place that acts as a symbolic representation of another site, to which individuals or groups feel attached. The empirical basis for this concept draws on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the al-Am‛ari camp at intervals between January 2010 and August 2012.

We examine the legal framework and the institutional and political conditions that have adversely impacted the electoral participation of Internally Displaced Person (IDP) voters in Ukraine. Since 2014, during intense political instability and military conflict, Ukraine conducted three elections—presidential, parliamentary and local. Meanwhile, the number of IDPs climbed to 1.5 million (as of October 2015 when the last election was held). Based on English- and Ukrainian-language legal and political documents, we trace the development of Ukrainian laws on IDPs and elections. We find that Ukraine’s government has failed to adhere to international standards on IDP enfranchisement; we also show how procedures of IDP electoral registration, policies towards conflict affected areas and electoral campaigns have undermined the principle of political equality for internally displaced citizens. We conclude with steps Ukraine and the international community can take to improve the electoral situation of IDPs.

For people living in violent and insecure contexts, “ordinariness” and “crisis” take on new meanings. Daily efforts to manage these contexts transform everyday life into a scene of resistance, a place of refuge and a domain of resilience and survival. The article discusses four ways in which Palestinian refugees from Al-Am’ari camp in the West Bank frame the ordinary amidst protracted exile, ongoing occupation and recurring military conflict by: (1) suspending everyday life, (2) defending normalcy amidst the crisis, (3) normalizing the experience of crisis and (4) fostering a normative sense of ordinariness. Instead of adopting arbitrarily defined categories of ordinariness and crisis, the aim of the paper is to reconstruct how they are produced, understood and narrated by camp inhabitants. The analysis is based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Al-Am’ari camp between January 2010 and August 2012.

Designed to provide temporary shelter to the displaced, in protracted refugee situations the camps become places of long-term residency and undergo processes of urban change. To understand the socio-spatial complexities of a protracted camp, it is necessary to escape the dichotomy between the city as a norm vs. the camp as an exception that underpins dominant theoretical models derived  from the works of Giorgio Agamben. Instead of approaching the camp as a doomed to fail urbanization project, we should look at it as a space of potentiality where new forms of political engagement and spatial politics may develop. Contrary to popular imagination and much of the existing literature that tend to portray refugees as disempowered victims, the protracted camps have often become sites of symbolic and political struggles against marginalization and injustice. Such has been the case of Al-Am’ari, a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, the paper analyzes urban practices through which the residents have resisted the dispossession, inferiority and uncertainty of their protracted exile. Located on the margins of Ramallah, a Palestinian city known for its neoliberal aspirations and modern outlook, the camp remained a site of political and symbolic mobilization for revolution and change. Through a case study of the main local organization, the paper explores how the camp negotiates its position within the urban surroundings and national politics.

There has been a tendency within the social sciences to treat displacement as an anomaly in the otherwise stable and sedentary society. Consequently, the refugee identity was often reduced to persistent nostalgia for the places of origin, oversimplifying the complex relation between memory and place in the context of exile. A similar conceptualization was at times extended to include long-term refugees, though in their case attachment to the pre-exilic past was portrayed to be fading away with the gradual adaptation to life in exile. This paper introduces a different interpretation of dilemmas faced by refugees living in extended exile, based on case study of a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank. Since their establishment in the aftermath of 1948 war, Palestinian refugee camps served as commemorative sites dedicated to the ideal of Palestine. The efforts to preserve their provisional appearance, as prime means of camps' symbolic significance, grew to the rank of national duty. However, in the situation of extended exile, the residents began to domesticate camps' space what was followed by necessary investments. My research findings suggest that camp inhabitants, conscious of the symbolic threat these developments entailed, began to redefine camp's commemorative utterance, based on the fact of their, the refugees', continuous residence on the site and not on that site's provisional appearance. The camp has been constructed as a symbolic representation of refugees' places of origin, while their attachment to it as a mediated locality through which the pre-exilic past is being lived in exile.

For people living in violent and insecure contexts the commonly assumed opposition between “ordinariness” and “crisis” is called into question. Their daily efforts to manage the difficult and dangerous conditions can take variety of forms and be assigned with various meanings, transforming the realm of everyday life into the scene of resistance, place of refuge from the disturbing reality or simply a domain of resilience and getting by. The article discusses four ways of framing the ordinary amidst protracted exile, ongoing occupation and recurring military conflict, used by refugees from al-Amʻari camp in the West Bank. The analysis is based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in al-Amʻari between January 2010 and August 2012.

Both in popular imagination and academic literature, refugees’ growing attachment to their place of residence in exile is understood to occur at the cost of their commitment to their place of origin. Based on a case study of Al-Amʻari, a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, this chapter views the refugee camp as a mediating locality where the two seemingly conflicting spatial loyalties can be reconciled. It analyses residents’ efforts to preserve the refugee character of the camp community and redefine the nature of Al-Amʻari’s commemorative utterance in a prolonged, and continuing, exile. These efforts have allowed the site to maintain its symbolism and have framed the refugees’ attachment to the camp as an expression of their commitment to their place of origin.

The condition of protracted exile and encampment fundamentally challenges the binary logic of mobility and stasis. Here, the camp becomes a physical embodiment of the inability or refusal to move. For camp residents, this long-term immobility carries the risk of gradual and unwanted resettlement, threatening what little political leverage they have over the more powerful political forces that prefer their refugee status to fade away.

Based on over a year of fieldwork in Al-Am’ari, a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, I discuss how organizations and residents resist such immobility and normalization by nurturing the multilocal character of the camp, i.e. a space that encompasses different temporal scales and representations of diverse localities. Whereas the majority of literature on the experience of exile focuses on how refugees relate to space(s), this paper explores multilocality as a political practice. It analyzes how camp leaders and organizations produce, represent, and navigate multilocality for the purposes of local camp politics and their relations with the outside world. The experience of Al-Am’ari organizations shows that, in protracted exile, multilocality may become a political ideal that allows to reconcile multiple emplacements - across time and different sociopolitical contexts - and sustain the symbolically and politically distinct character of camp space amidst the processes of urbanization.

Most theoretical models of refugee camps draw on the work of Giorgio Agamben and regard them as sites of exception set outside the normal juridical order, designed to strip refugees of their citizenship and reduce them to bare life. Yet, the complex realities of protracted camps challenge the distinctions between camp and city, and exception and citizenship. To contend with this complexity, it is necessary to move away from essentialized models and address the material, social, and political realities of pro- tracted camps. I draw on the concept of ‘the right to the city’ to engage in discussion about civil rights of camp communities within the physical and political spaces of their prolonged residence. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, I investigate (1) the articulations of exception that have shaped the means, conditions and character of its spatial development; and (2) bottom-up responses by which the residents address the reality of multifaceted neglect and political struggles around camp space. In particular, I focus on the camp leadership's efforts to claim their community's right to development, agency over the production and governance of camp space, and recognition of their political autonomy and camp character - a set of claims that can be called, ‘the right to the camp’.

Op-Ed refused by the French newspaper Le Monde on March 20, 2011. I defended the rightness of the German decision not to participate in the Nato military campaign against Libya.

Key Words: OTAN, NATO, Libye, Libya, Tripoli, Merkel, Sarkozy, Cameron, Kadhafi, Ghedafi, guerre, war, bombardement, bombing, CNT, revolution, rebels, rebelles, Benghasi, Allemagne, Germany

An essay in comparative urban history and a look at the spirit of the urban reforms of the late ottoman period.
With an introduction oncomparatism and the Ottoman urban reforms by Nora Lafi and papers on Jerusalem (Vincent Lemire and Yasmin Acvi), Damascus (Stefan Weber), Beirut (Jens Hanssen for the ottoman period, Carla Edde for the colonial period), Rome (Denis Bocquet), Rhodes (Denis Bocquet), Tunis (Nora Lafi), Livorno (Samuel Fettah).

"The nexus of urban governance and human migration was a crucial feature in the modernisation of cities in the Ottoman Empire of the nineteenth century. This book connects these two concepts to examine the Ottoman city as a destination of human migration, throwing new light on the question of conviviality and cosmopolitanism from the perspective of the legal, administrative and political frameworks within which these occur.

Focusing on groups of migrants with various ethnic, regional and professional backgrounds, the book juxtaposes the trajectories of these people with attempts by local administrations and the government to control their movements and settlements. By combining a perspective from below with one that focuses on government action, the authors offer broad insights into the phenomenon of migration and city life as a whole. Chapters explore how increased migration driven by new means of transport, military expulsion and economic factors were countered by the state’s attempts to control population movements, as well as the strong internal reforms in the Ottoman world.

Providing a rare comparative perspective on an area often fragmented by area studies boundaries, this book will be of great interest to students of History, Middle Eastern Studies, Balkan Studies, Urban Studies and Migration Studies"

A denounciation of the continuation and intensification of the bombing campaign against Tripoli. As the Islamist armed factions take over the rebellion in Benghasi, and the moderate democrats hide in Tripoli, the population being terrorized by the bombs, bombings become always less precise and targets less legitimate. It is urgent for diplomacy to replace what is now seen by many Libyans, even of the moderate democratic opposition,as a war of aggression.

Les Annales tripolitaines de Laurent-Charles Féraud sont longtemps restées dans les recoins obscurs des bibliothèques. La présente réédition critique entend donner à ce texte toute la visibilité qu'il mérite. Œuvre d'un des plus grands connaisseurs du Maghreb, elles constituent une source majeure d'information non seulement sur les visées de la France en Tripolitaine (Libye actuelle), une province ottomane qui a longtemps échappé à la colonisation européenne avant de tomber entre les mains des Italiens en 1911, mais aussi sur l'histoire de cette province. Féraud était ce que l'administration militaire française a produit de plus efficace au service de ses visées stratégiques: un homme de terrain doublé d'un érudit, un homme doté de grandes connaissances linguistiques doublé d'un habile diplomate.
Publiées à titre posthume par Augustin Bernard, les Annales tripolitaines étaient depuis des décennies largement inaccessibles. Elles méritent pourtant une large diffusion, offrant à la fois une connaissance précieuse du Maghreb ancien et une chronique implicite de l'expansion coloniale française. Elles complètent également le panorama des écrits de Laurent-Charles Féraud, dans lequel les Annales sont souvent oubliées au profit des écrits sur l'Algérie. Les Annales sont plus -qu'une "monographie" qui se contenterait de rassembler une multitude de renseignements sur la région depuis la conquête arabe en 642 jusqu'à la fin du XIXe siècle: elles sont aussi une œuvre vivante, investie de la passion de l'historien. Certes cette passion est au service de la cause coloniale, mais il faut reconnaître à l'entreprise sa qualité d'érudition et sa grande sensibilité à l'âme tripolitaine. Œuvre majeure de cet érudit du XIXe siècle, qui a connu et parcouru le Maghreb tout au long de sa vie, de l'Atlantique à la Cyrénaïque, et de la Méditerranée au Sahara, dans une période cruciale de son histoire, entre les années 1840 et les années 1880, les Annales apportent un éclairage précieux et unique non seulement sur un horizon géographique mal connu, mais également sur l'histoire du Maghreb en général, entre période ottomane et ère des colonisations.

Lo studio delle città del mondo arabo, dall'epoca medievale a quella ottomana, dipende molto dalla lettura di cronache locali. Molti dei più interessanti capitoli della storia urbana di tali città sono stati scritti usando le informazioni date da una o più cronache. La dimensione più ovvia di questa relazione tra conoscenza storica e fonti come le cronache, riguarda la cronologia. La cronaca è narrazione, e vi si trovano molti degli elementi fondamentali della storia fattuale. Date e eventi, battaglie e dati del commercio vi vengono riportate con più o meno precisione a secondo della personalità dell'autore. Anche la storia dei regni ha usato molto questo tipo di fonte. E siccome in molte cronache l'autore fa anche opera di compilatore di conoscenze storiche (alcuni si confrontano anche alla storia universale) le cronache costituiscono una base fondamentale per la conoscenza della storia del mondo arabo medievale e poi del mondo ottomano.
Con il progressivo movimento di rottura della materia storica con la passività della narrazione fattuale, e con lo sviluppo delle scienze sociali, l'uso storico delle cronache è andato raffinandosi. Si è comminciato a cercare nella cronaca elementi potendo servire a una storia economica o sociale. Ogni tappa dell'iscrizione della storia nelle scienze sociali è stata accompagnata di una rilettura delle maggiori cronache arabe e ottomane, ogni volta con uno sgardo e una retorica diversi. Ma molto di rado si è riflettuto sulla natura della cronaca stessa.
Come mai per quasi tutte le città del mondo arabo, dal medioevo all'introduzione di metodi moderni di amministrazione cittadina durante la seconda parte dell'Ottocento, abbiamo delle cronache? Come mai in tutte queste città qualcuno ha deciso di trascrivere ogni giorno o quasi l'accaduto in ambito urbano? Non puo' ovviamente essere totalmente un caso.

L'essence de la modernité urbaine est généralement définie au travers du processus de rationalisation technique de l'espace urbain et d'application à la société urbaine de nouvelles modalités de gouvernance, liées au développement de l'appareil bureaucratique et au souci de créer des instruments fondés sur une connaissance rationnelle de l'espace et de la société . A partir du cas de l'Europe et l'Amérique du Nord, on généralise souvent le processus à la création de la sphère démocratique municipale, et à la construction d´une société démocratique dans le cadre d´un Etat de droit en général. Et on voit souvent le reste du monde comme en porte-à-faux par rapport à ce processus, connaissant au mieux un modernisme sans modernité, c'est-à-dire une modernisation technique sans réforme de la société , et incapable, pour des raisons facilement conçues comme ontologiques, d´avancer dans la voie tracée par l´hémisphère occidental. La rhétorique culturaliste se greffe aisément sur ce type de discours, qui en constitue même le fondement intellectuel. Cette narration de la modernité se doit désormais d´être contestée, tant elle apparaît comme biaisée. Cette remise en question peut se faire aux deux bouts de la chaîne faussement logique qui irrigue un discours culturaliste si puissant qu´il en est souvent venu à constituer le bruit de fond du raisonnement comparatiste. Du coté de l´Europe, par la démonstration que ce continent ne constituait en rien un modèle exportable. Et du coté des sociétés méridionales ou orientales, en montrant l´existence de formes de modernité dont la nature est plus complexe que la simple transposition, et surtout la prégnance de postures torses de modernité, dans des sociétés soumises par l´Europe même à une forme foncièrement perverse de modernisation. La question urbaine est assurément un terrain important pour l´application d´un tel raisonnement, tant elle recouvre des pans cruciaux de ce qui constitue la modernité elle-même . Pour l'Europe ainsi, le paradigme d'une modernité urbaine univoque et linéaire dans sa progression est discuté et nuancé depuis au moins une décennie. Même pour la période Haussmannienne, un chercheur comme Matthew Gandy a pu montrer comment les caractères de la modernité technicienne urbaine sont plus complexes qu'on ne l'a longtemps pensé . Quant au lien entre modernité technique et construction de la société démocratique, il est encore plus ténu. Qu'Haussmann, bras droit d'un homme arrivé au pouvoir par un coup d'Etat, et exerçant des pouvoirs urbains préfectoraux et non civiques municipaux en soit le symbole. Si ce lien présumé n'est pas toujours discuté avec la vigueur qu'il conviendrait, on peut néanmoins partir ici du constat qu'en Europe même, modernisation technicienne des villes, modernité bureaucratique et société démocratique ne sont pas les éléments d'un même développement parallèle et mécanique. L´Europe, de plus, connaît zones d´ombres, de dictature et d´arriération jusque très tard dans le XIXe siècle, voire le XXe, si bien que toute liaison mécanique entre modernisation urbaine et démocratie est à exclure. Pour l'analyse des sociétés longtemps considérées comme périphériques par rapport à la modernité urbaine (mais aussi par rapport à l'industrialisation et à la complexification des rapports capitalistes), il convient de même de se départir du schéma de la simple importation, ou de l'inadéquation à appliquer des recettes dont on voit qu'elles étaient loin de constituer l'essence d'une prétendue civilisation occidentale, dont les caractères éventuels sont à lire avec plus de nuances . Pour l'Empire ottoman au cours de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, il est nécessaire de sortir du cadre interprétatif de la simple importation et de l'occidentalisation ou européanisation . Pour les périodes suivantes, ce souci doit également être en général celui de l'écriture d'une histoire des sociétés colonisées et colonisatrices . Il convient ainsi non seulement de « provincialiser l'Europe », selon le salutaire mot d'ordre de Dipesh Chakrabarty , mais également de discuter tous les éléments sous-jacents à la narration et à l'analyse de l'histoire ottomane, maghrébine ou coloniale. Ce n'est pas seulement de l'orientalisme dont doit se méfier l'historien, mais également de la construction abusive de paradigmes destinés à analyser l'Europe. C'est cette dimension d'un biais profond que la lecture des vicissitudes de la modernité urbaine au Maghreb permet de remettre en question.

The question of the circulation of municipal knowledge has benefited in the last decade from a renewed historiographical attention.
In a Mediterranean context, the stake is mainly to reconsider our perception of the circulation of ideas that enabled (or constrained) the modernisation of societies during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The subliminal starting point (but sometimes enounced very explicitly) is that circulations occurred from North to South and West to East. The “Mediterranean Crossings” hypothesis I will explore in this chapter, and illustrate with the case of the urban reforms in the Ottoman Empire, is that circulations were more complex, while modernity, even when imported in its exact form, was interacting dynamically with societies in which processes of change were already in action.

The study of circulations in a Mediterranean case is a minefield. It provides opportunities not only to understand the circulation of ideas between different cultures, but also to confront the impact of colonialism and imperialism. The very vision of modernity being prejudiced by these issues, the stake of the promotion of a renewed global history involves a reconsideration of two centuries of unequal circulations and, ultimately, a different reading of the fate of modernity in “subaltern” societies. The study of the Ottoman Empire shows that circulations were more complex than a translation of knowledge from ‘export' to ‘import' societies. It is only with a discussion of ideas on circulation that the complexity of these societies can undo this conventional “reception” mode.

The Ottoman Empire is particularly adapted to such a historiographical programme. On the one hand, the concept of Empire has recently aroused new developments in global and imperial history. These have revisited the canonical empires, or developed comparative imperial questions between the Russian, the Habsburg and the Ottoman, bringing about new insights into the treatment of local characters, the dynamics of integration and assimilation, the importance of circulation as a social glue for imperial constructions, and the governance of diversity. As for the Ottoman case, a whole new generation of scholars is especially keen to discuss the complex interaction between local and global, and to reach beyond nation and religion as central paradigms. This is not to suggest that these notions are irrelevant. Yet, as they turn our eyes to specificities and peculiarities, they sometimes mask the dynamics of the circulation of ideas associated with modernity. This insistence on cultural specificities also contributed to the conceptual isolation of the Ottoman region, despite Franz Rosenthal's proposals for a firm inscription of Muslim societies into World History as early as 1952.