Global & Transnational Sociology Section Spotlight Series
Welcome to the Global & Transnational Sociology (GATS) Section Spotlight Series! The GATS Spotlight Series was re-launched in January 2020 to provide members a platform to share some of the most cutting-edge research in our field. We will post new content based on the selections of council members. See below for our Spotlight Series posts to date.
GATS SPOTLIGHT SERIES ISSUES
August 2024: The War on Palestine: In this spotlight series, Lisa Hajjar sheds light on the ongoing War on Palestine
May 2023 – The End of Title 42: In this spotlight series, Ángel Escamilla García describes the implications of the end of Title 42 for migrants seeking asylum in the United States.
May 2023 – Turkey after the Earthquake: Dispossession and Displacement: In the aftermath of the earthquake in Turkey, Emre Can Daglıoglu addresses how redevelopment efforts are leading to dispossession and how to build solidarity and organize after the disaster.
December 2022 – Woman, Life, Freedom: In this Spotlight Series, Mahbubeh Moqadam describes the emergence and diffusion of popular protests across different sectors, regions, and groups in Iran –- a watershed moment in the country’s long history of women’s struggles.
December 2022 – The Financial Turn of Infrastructure in Egypt: In this Spotlight Series, Dalia Wahdan examines the socio-economic impacts of the resurgence of large-scale infrastructural projects in Egypt and their convergence with private financial markets.
December 2022 – Climate Change and Displacement: In this Spotlight Series, Dr. M. Anwar Hossen and Dr. Nikhil Deb discuss how they understand the relationship between climate change, environmental disasters, and displacement in the context of Bangladesh. They also provide some insights into how graduate students may conduct similar research.
June 2022 – Gender and War on Terror: Given the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, we wanted to highlight research in the Middle East and how we, as scholars, can better understand this withdrawal in historical context, what it means (if anything) for US empire, and its racialized, gendered and sexed dimensions
April 2020 – Global Islamophobia: In the second of our spotlight series, Victoria Reyes poses a set of questions to Neda Maghbouleh, Erik Love, and Jean Beaman about their work on global Islamophobia.
January 2020 – Global Urban Sociology: In the first of our spotlight series, Victoria Reyes poses three questions to Marco Garrido, Xuefei Ren, and Liza Weinstein about their work on global urban sociology.
August 2024 - The War on Palestine
Lisa Hajjar
Professor, Department of Sociology at University California, Santa Barbara
Interviewed by Yağmur Ali Coşkun
Ph.D. Student at the University of California, Berkeley
Eylem Taylan
Ph.D. Student at the University of California, Berkeley
Yağmur Ali Coşkun: How would you evaluate the regional dynamics of the onslaught on Gaza? Because this is tending towards escalating into a regional war or conflict.
Lisa Hajjar: When it comes to the Middle East, one always thinks it cannot get any worse – and it always gets worse. We are seeing a period of multiple crises interlocking with each other that we have not seen since some of the major regional wars of the past like ‘67, ’73, or the US invasion of Iraq. If we even just start with Palestine and with Israel’s war on Gaza that began in retaliation for the Hamas strikes on October 7, 2023, the amount of violence that Israel has been perpetrating in Gaza is absolutely unprecedented. It is plausibly and, in my opinion, obviously, described as a genocide because of mass killing of civilians, the complete destruction of every vestige of life and society in Gaza, and a brutality that is unprecedented in that particular context.
One of the things that I have been working on recently is how the war on Gaza is also playing out as a war on Palestinian prisoners in prisons. Aside from heightened forms of torture, there are deprivations that are paralleling the besieging assaults on Gaza.
But the war on Gaza is never unto itself. There is also the ongoing and escalating war on Palestinians elsewhere: The military attacks and military-supported settler pogroms in the West Bank, the continuous and escalating seizure of lands and building of settlements, and so forth. All these phenomena together have really incited great concern and anger throughout the Arab world, because Palestine has always been a very significant lodestar in Arab politics. And it continues to be. Yesterday (August 24) in the ongoing confrontation between Israel and Lebanon – particularly Hezbollah in Lebanon – we have seen Israel engaged in what they call “preemptive strikes”.
Israel struck deep into Lebanon in order to bomb what they claimed to be Hezbollah rockets that may have been aimed to target inside of Israel. One can think about the fraught tensions along the northern border – hundreds of thousands of Jewish Israelis have been displaced. They were ordered to move out of the harm’s way of Hezbollah rockets. So, we see that even Israeli society is absolutely roiled by the consequences of what the Netanyahu regime has done.
But meanwhile, and not completely unrelatedly, we see the ongoing war on Yemen and then the role of the Houthis in striking Red Sea shipping and the consequences of Saudi and particularly United Arab Emirates intervention there. There is now a big oil carrying freight ship in the Red Sea that, if it is bombed, it can cause a catastrophic environmental disaster. Sudan is also in the grips of incredible violence, where the two parties that perpetrated a coup against the government are now fighting each other. There is horrific violence in Sudan, on a larger scale even than in Gaza in terms of the death toll. And that is being perpetrated by support from the United Arab Emirates. And then we can say Iraq and Syria remain deeply imbricated in war. Since the war in Iraq began with the US invasion of 2003, the country has never settled down. In Syria, the dictator Bashar al-Assad was able to put down the revolution, but the country remains in a civil war since 2011. So, it is extremely bleak.
I have been working on a roundtable of interviews with Arab activists, and one of them is from Egypt.
She talked about how the repression in Egypt now is worse under Abdel Fattah al-Sisi than it was even under Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted by a popular uprising against his dictatorship. In Tunisia, there were some really substantial democratizing gains for ten years in the post so-called Arab Spring revolution, but those were all terminated when the president, Kais Saied, dissolved the parliament in 2021 to endow himself with dictatorial powers. And then you’ve got Morocco, a country that is actually becoming a model of carceral rule in certain kinds of ways. The king has really empowered the security forces in Morocco. They have used their diplomatic power to assert sovereignty over Western Sahara, and that has been the cause of renewed armed conflict. So, we are just seeing that when it comes to conflicts and violence, the region is really at a precarious point. Now we see with Israel bombing Lebanon, the possibilities of things getting even worse. And the absolute clown show that is the negotiations over a ceasefire in Gaza indicates that there is no end in sight for the suffering of Gazans. It is bleak.
YAC: Going back to Palestine specifically, what we see here is a very interesting sort of conflicting claims-making. Jerusalem is the Holy Land for all Abrahamic religions, and a lot of Israeli claims are one way or another based on that biblical reference. And then, to describe the Palestinian misery, human rights discourse around the world has been employed. There is also the language of indigeneity – but it quickly boils down to a debate of who is the “true” indigenous people of the region. What framework do you find most useful in evaluating all these claims or upholding or challenging any (or all) these claims?
LH: I am interested in many ways that various people make conflicting arguments about who belongs where or what is right and wrong. But my personal perspective is and always has been to evaluate the world through the lens of international law, to use law to judge what is happening.
In the context of historic Palestine, now Israel and the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, there are very clear international laws regarding what should happen, which are separate from the indigeneity or the religious claims, etc. The remainder of historic Palestine was occupied in 1967 and remains occupied. Notwithstanding Israeli claims that they ended their occupation of Gaza in 2005, that was not actually true because according to international law, Israel was able to maintain effective control, and there was no replacement of sovereign entity. And because a country cannot unilaterally declare an end to occupation under international law.
I like teaching international law to my sociology undergraduate students, and working with graduate students on these things, because it gives us a grounding to judge what we are seeing in the world. And also because Israel, like the United States, puts a great deal of stock in its own international reputation as a law-abiding state. Israel, in fact, probably more than the United States in past years, has strived to produce alternative interpretations of international law in order to bring their illegal activities within the law by saying that the territories are not occupied, that they are administered, that therefore there is no prohibition on the settlement of Jewish citizens. Israel was the first state to legalize torture, although they used the euphemism “moderate amounts of physical pressure. ”They did that in 1987. Israel was the first state in the world to legalize targeted killing in 2000. The United States followed Israel in both things, and they did it by interpreting the law to try and make those kinds of practices legal.
But one thing that is really significant about this current period is that the current Israeli government, the Netanyahu government, is the most right-wing of any Israeli government since 1948. And that is saying something because Begin, Shamir, and Sharon were all prime ministers.
“one thing that is really significant about this current period is that the current Israeli government, the Netanyahu government, is the most right-wing of any Israeli government since 1948.”
But the kinds of people who are now packed into the cabinet in Israel like Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is the Minister of National Security, and Bezalel Smotrich, who is the Minister of Finance, and other people, are deeply hostile and at the same time indifferent to international law. So, what we are seeing now is that the Israeli government is using the power of the state to assert contra-legal claims that are grounded in “Jewish Power” – that is also the name of Itamar Ben-Gvir’s political party. These are biblical and historical claims that supersede everything else, coupled integrally with absolute political and legal dehumanization of Palestinians. Israel has long sought to make permanently impossible Palestinian aspirations for self-determination. It has long disregarded any standards of human rights. But what we are seeing now is a situation in which the kinds of politicians for whom the most brutality against Palestinians was never enough. And they are just
bringing the heat in ways that do not have any precedent in the past history of the conflict. And that is saying quite a lot!
So, one of the important issues, I think, as far as how the how other people can look at what is happening in Palestine and Israel is the kind of narrative that Israel has relied on for decades to bolster its support from the other countries (first and foremost, the United States): that Israel is a democracy, Israel has legitimate self- defense needs, Israel abides by the law as it interprets it, etc. What we can see happening in Palestine should be a crisis for every government and every person who has long accepted Israeli arguments that what they are doing is justified, legitimate and necessary. What is happening now cannot be justified by any rational or legal or humanitarian standards.
Eylem Taylan: We also wanted to ask a question about the increasing role of transnational human rights organizations in relation to the Palestinian solidarity movement worldwide. Do you see any shifts or continuities with the use of this discourse in similar struggles in the past? Obviously, anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa and protests against the Iraq War come to mind. How do you view the costs and opportunities involved in using the human rights framework in these protests?
LH: The history of human rights activism really begins in the 1970s. And it begins in places where there were extreme forms of repression, because people in those contexts – people living under apartheid in South Africa, Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank and
Gaza, people in Latin America living under the military dictatorships – they had no domestic legal framework to fight for their rights. So, they reached out to international law. That was really the origin story of human rights activism, and I think that remains relatively true.
Obviously, the development of the human rights regime came to be very much centered in New York, London and other Western places. But the significance of international law and its appeal continues to be one of the only things that people who have no other legal resources, no other means to articulate their rights or their demands or the wrongs that are perpetrated on them, can use. And I think that that has been really a driving force in transnational activism around human rights issues since the 1980s.
“the significance of international law and its appeal continues to be one of the only things that people who have no other legal resources, no other means to articulate their rights or their demands or the wrongs that are perpetrated on them, can use.”
The 1990s were very significant also in different ways. From 1948 to the early ‘70s was the internationalization of rights, when you start getting new laws that say people have rights to these rights, and then there is the age of doing human rights activism that took off in the 1980s. The third period in historicizing human rights would be the 1990s, when we saw the development of new institutions to actually try to enforce international law and hold perpetrators accountable. So, I call that the “accountability phase.” There were some achievements, but there was a lot of damage to accountability efforts in the 21st century as a result, first and foremost, of the US “War on Terror” and its disregard of and hostility towards international institutions. And there was a lot of skepticism about the International Criminal Court, which came into being in 2002. Because the way in which the ICC has actually been used has been primarily to prosecute people from weaker states, mostly from Africa, despite the fact that there are perpetrators from the United States.
Last Spring, the chief prosecutor of the ICC issued a request for arrest warrants for three members of Hamas as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Minister of Defense Yoav Galant for their role in the starvation policy in Gaza. So, what is happening in
Gaza now has world-scale significance. South Africa brought a genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice in December 2023. Unlike the ICC, which goes after individuals, the ICJ basically decides on what is legal vis-a-vis states. In January 2024, the ICJ issued a preliminary ruling, saying that genocide in Gaza is plausible. Many countries have joined South Africa in that case. It is a marker of how for people, particularly for governments in the Global South, both Palestine-related matters and international law can be a resource. There
are still expectations that justice is possible. And so, I think that has some significant implications.
Of course, the usual suspects, the United States government first and foremost, have condemned the ICJ for not understanding Israel’s legitimate right of self-defense. But the other thing about this sort of transnational activism is that in some ways, when we see things are really bad, I think people are really looking upwards and outwards to other people and other models. And one important development just in the past few months was that the ICJ, in an entirely different petition, issued an advisory opinion finding that Israel’s governance of the occupied West Bank and Gaza since 1967 has not abided by the law, that all of the things that violate the law must be undone and reparations should be paid to Palestinians. This opinion holds significance for Palestinian civil society and for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions [BDS] movement, which was launched in 2005.
BDS has been criticized and criminalized in some countries, including Germany and the United States, etc. But that ICJ decision of 2024 about the occupation should be grounds for people who are going to fight for the right to call for boycott, divestment and sanctions to say that criminal sanctions that have been attached to people who advocate for BDS are illegitimate. Everything is a fight. But the law is a very important terrain of these kind of fights, and so, that is where I tend to keep my focus.
YAC: I am also wondering what this decision could mean for activism around Palestinian political prisoners, especially because some countries such as Germany have been banning this sort of activism.
LH: One of the headwinds against activism is the organized effort by right-wing or Zionist organizations to target and attack activists who are supporting Palestine, and to put pressure on institutions like universities. A lot of these fights are going to end up in courts eventually. There are organizations that are capable of fighting government restrictions, but we see the passage of laws in various national and local legislatures in the United States and Germany that are seeking to literally criminalize support for Palestinians, as if Palestinians are themselves inherent crimes, and anybody advocating for them is by default criminal. It is outrageous, but hopefully things will change.
I just finished an article that will be coming out this fall, co-authored with my friend Bassel Faraj, who is a professor at Birzeit University. Our article is titled “Israel Is Waging War on Palestinian Prisoners.” This builds on both of our work on torture. And I think that the torture that Israel has been perpetrating on Palestinians since October is actually Israel’s Achilles heel. Because torture is special—every single person has a right not to be tortured, and torture is always illegal.
Even the United States, which can approve or excuse everything, has actually had harsh words for the Israeli government after the exposure of torture at one particular military detention facility [Sde Teiman] that broke into the news last May. And the consequence is that torture is also actually roiling Israeli society. We are seeing a consensus breakdown within Israel over what should happen in light of the abundant evidence that Palestinians were tortured. So, I think in that regard, torture is going to be one of the important points of leverage that can have broader implications for criticizing the Israeli government.
YAC: The final question is to bring it all home. How do you situate the encampment movement and its aftermath with repressions and court cases in the broader context of anti-war activism in the United States? Do you see any similarities or differences with the
past?
LH: I think that the surging support for Palestinian liberation, Palestinian rights and opposition to Israeli policies that are targeting Palestinians builds on a long history. Students are historically the ones who become active, at least since student activism around Vietnam and then anti-apartheid protests. Students are socially positioned to use their voices and new learning that they are acquiring in colleges and universities to engage themselves. But if we just take another look at what has been going on specifically vis-a-vis the encampments and student activism over this past year, it lays bare something that has been going on for a while: There is a real significance of generational differences around people’s views of Israel and Palestine. For example, Joe Biden was already a living, thinking person when Israel was created and during the war in 1967. I think that Biden is representative of these older generations where support for Israel is baked into their DNA. They cannot imagine the world in any other way. And they have internalized narratives that parallel the Israeli Hasbara narratives, where Palestinians are demonized and seen as undeserving of rights. That is not true of people who are born in more recent decades. They can see what Israel has been doing to Palestinians, first Intifada, second Intifada, and what is going on now, they can see it all. And there is not that same instinctive positioning to support Israel as Israel defines its interests. And that is why you have to have these organizations that are recruiting young people, especially young Jewish Americans, in order to keep the line on Israel among that generation. But the activism just really shook a lot of people, including inside of Israel: So many hundreds of thousands of students and others around the world, particularly in these allied states like the United States and the United Kingdom, could come out insistently and
consistently in support of Palestinian rights in this last period. So, we can think of it as a battle of narratives, a battle of consciousness.
“I think that the surging support for Palestinian liberation, Palestinian rights and opposition to Israeli policies that are targeting Palestinians builds on a long history.”
But I think it is necessary for people who are active on these issues to be aware that the Israeli government and some Zionist organizations see these trends as alarming and something to combat. They have used university administrators, and administrators have been pliant tools in trying to suppress students’ rights to express themselves and to mobilize. But the likelihood is already here that, for example, undercover operatives from Black Cube or other corporations are going to be penetrating student activist organizations even more than they already have to not only stop but punish pro-Palestinian speech and activism. This resembles what happened in the “War on Terror” with the FBI leading people into things that they would not have gone to themselves [entrapment]. We have already seen that in the past academic year, but they are also gathering intelligence and data on people who are activists, that then can be exploited and used in different kinds of ways. So, I think that the dangers are very, very real and the political environment is not in any way friendly.
In fact, perhaps the lesson that many institutions have taken from the last year, as we see in the University of California, is to tighten up the rules to make sure that people cannot do this coming year that they did last year, encampments being the most obvious example. Even the California legislature is passing new legislation to infringe upon speech and thought supportive of Palestine or critical of Israel. So, there are a lot of challenges there. The encampment movement has been very heartening to see, to witness as somebody my age seeing this kind of activism, including on my own campus. But it a time where activism is essential and this activism is one where you not only need the energy of youth but also the knowledge of expertise. A knowledge-based foundation for criticism is absolutely central. And it’s also a way for activists to support themselves with knowledge so that their criticisms are grounded in analysis and accurate facts.
May 2023 - Turkey after the Earthquake: Dispossession and Displacement
EMRE CAN DAGLIOGLU
Ph.D. candidate in History at Stanford University. Before starting his Ph.D. at Stanford, Emre received his master’s degree at Exeter University and completed a graduate study in the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University
Interviewed by Eylem Taylan
Ph.D. Student in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Eylem Taylan: The 2023 Turkey-Syria Earthquake was followed by the primitive accumulation and dispossession processes across the region. How should we see this disaster within the framework of these processes occurring globally?
Emre Can Daglioglu: I can discuss this in the context of Hatay in Turkey. If we look at Turkey through this lens, we can see that dispossession constitutes a severe problem in the country’s economic trajectory. Turkey has an incredibly construction-oriented
economy. Going hand in hand with this economy, the government in power sees every part of the earth as zones to be opened for construction and continuously tries to turn land into raw material for the construction sector. We also see the birth of a political
power significantly intertwined with the construction sector at the local and national levels. For example, when we look at the cities of Antep, Malatya, and Hatay, which were hit by the earthquake, we can see that all the side elements and extensions of local politics revolve around construction capitalists, who were rising in the recent period.
“Turkey has an incredibly construction-oriented economy. Going hand in hand with this economy, the government in power sees every part of the earth as zones to be opened for construction and continuously tries to turn land into raw material for the construction sector. We also see the birth of a political power significantly intertwined with the construction sector at the local and national levels.”
If we look at Hatay, particularly Antakya, where earthquakes hit the most, we see that about eighty-five percent of Antakya was destroyed. We know that a political ambition to transform the city, a desire to dispossess the region in the name of urban transformation, already existed before the earthquake. In particular, the transformation of Emek and Aksaray neighborhoods, where Arab Alevis and the working classes resided in large numbers, had been going through legal processes since 2013. The urban transformation project was approved by 2022 and was expected to occur soon. But in February 2023, both of these neighborhoods fell to the ground. So, precisely because
the local economy, the local politics, the national economy, and national politics were increasingly dependent on land grabs, this earthquake was an incredible opportunity to generate significant economic input. The construction industry is working incredibly
hard in demolition and reconstruction in these eleven provinces affected by the earthquake, especially in Hatay. Demolition tenders are being given non-stop. Concurrently, TOKİ’s (Toplu Konut İdaresi Başkanlığı – Mass Housing Development Administration) reserved area construction continues. Hospitals are being built, airport maintenance is being carried out, and an almost destroyed city is being redeveloped.
This earthquake is a serious opportunity for capital, but it is also a natural consequence of what is called global disaster capitalism. Similar developments have occurred in Haiti, Lebanon, Syria, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. And in Turkey, we see this process repeating itself. One of the problems in Turkey, in particular, is that the historical city center of Antioch was declared a risky area and consequently went under the scope of disaster law No. 6306 and the proclamation of Presidential Decree No. 126 for disaster zones by the end of February. In fact, the Presidential Decree does not offer anything new vis-a-vis how political authorities treat Turkey’s disaster zones or urban transformation zones: It was a decree that gathered the existing laws under a single roof and implemented them much faster by accelerating the dispossession, new zoning, and the removal of “shabby” people from these territories.
“This earthquake is a serious opportunity for capital, but it is also a natural consequence of what is called global disaster capitalism. Similar developments have occurred in Haiti, Lebanon, Syria, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. And in Turkey, we see this process repeating itself.”
The decree altogether eliminated the possibility of objection as well. Implementing law No. 6306 also brings about the following consequence: The state can expropriate the area it considers risky and cancel the property rights in the area it declares risky without any justification. The state either moves the people whose property it confiscated and expropriated to the reserved area and, in return, promises them a house there; or it gives them a certain sum of money in a process where an objection against dispossession can be concluded only much later. In this way, the historical city center of Antakya has been depopulated in a sense, or rather, its ancient people are being displaced. Its historical monuments and cultural heritage will be restored in the name of cultural preservation. Still, life around Antakya will be erased entirely, and therefore, the city will be transformed into a touristic area and declared a hotel zone.
I also attended the presentation of the architect Bünyamin Derman, who drew the new city plan of Antakya. When discussing the planned transformation in the area, he answered the questions concerning various rights losses by stating that he was only a planner, not a practitioner, and therefore did not know what would happen in practice.
But, for example, when he talked about how this area would be transformed, he said, “Property rights here will be protected, but I don’t know if these zones will be hotels, restaurants, or cafes.” So, the entire idea here is really to create a touristic spot in Antakya. And it almost certainly leads to property loss, especially in the area declared risky, and the people there will be dispossessed. When we look at earlier examples of earthquakes and urban transformation, what happened after the 2011 earthquake in Van, for instance, we see that the new earthquake-resistant TOKI houses were not given to people affected by the earthquake in a way that measures up to their own houses. People became indebted to the state. And they carried on in the aftermath of the earthquake after losing their existing property by becoming indebted to the state to acquire new property in return for their lost property. So, I think that such developments await Antakya as well. And they will accelerate the ongoing dispossession, which is indispensable in the context of the housing crisis already underway in Turkey, in the context of the economic crisis, and finally, to the economic order that Turkey is a part of. In a sense — I use it in quotation marks — I think developments following the earthquake make dispossession “mandatory” and will lead to it.
“The entire idea here is really to create a touristic spot in Antakya. And it almost certainly leads to property loss, especially in the area declared risky, and the people there will be dispossessed”
Eylem Taylan: Thank you very much for providing this framework. You worked with the online Nehna platform, which focuses on the histories of Orthodox Christians in Antakya and has been doing organizing work in the field in the aftermath of the earthquake. Based on this experience, what can you say about the concrete contributions that researchers can make to the existing solidarity and information networks in the disaster site?
Emre Can Daglioglu: I heard this from the academic Asli Odman: After all these years of learning the theoretical framework or historical background of the processes tied to disaster capitalism, we are trying to do something in the field with a baggage full of knowledge that can be useful in these areas. And as Aslı Odman argues, if we cannot organize this knowledge in a way that proves helpful in the disaster zone, contributes to local resistance in practical terms, or contributes to organizing aid and solidarity, all these years spent in acquiring this expertise will not mean much. The knowledge we have gained over all these years could be more historical knowledge for me, anthropological knowledge of the field for others, or even medical knowledge that can be useful firsthand.
“…as Aslı Odman argues, if we cannot organize this knowledge in a way that proves helpful in the disaster zone, contributes to local resistance in practical terms, or contributes to organizing aid and solidarity, all these years spent in acquiring this expertise will not mean much”
So, if we cannot present this knowledge in a way that contributes to the organizing, to resistance against the usurpation of rights of those dispossessed left in need of solidarity in the urban transformation process in Antakya, and to mutual aid, or if we cannot provide people with the knowledge that we have gained over the years, then in truth we fall into uselessness. And feeling useless would not be preferable during the unfolding of a disaster. There is a field of expertise we know about and have spent years working in. We are becoming experts in knowledge production. But I think organizing this knowledge production and using it in the service of solidarity and resistance is essential and plays a critical role at this moment.
December 2022 – Woman, Life, Freedom
Mahbubeh Moqadam
Ph.D. student in Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She received her Bachelor’s in Sociology and her Master’s in Gender studies in Iran and was involved in student and women’s movements.
Interviewed by Mona Khneisser
PhD Student in Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
M. Khneisser: Can you tell us more about the origins of the recent popular upheavals? Who were the actors initially involved, and who recently joined since?
M. Moqadam: The slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” has a trans-national history. It was first chanted by Kurdish women in Turkey during the 1990s protesting patriarchal values in Kurdish society. The slogan then traveled to Rojava, chanted by Kurdish women fighting for their lands’ freedom. In Iran, the slogan was first raised in response to Gina (Mahsa) Amini’s killing by the morality police who had arrested and beaten her, by Kurdish feminists in Saghez, Mahsa’s hometown, in Kurdistan province in Iran. Within two days of the first call
by feminist activists, more than a thousand women and men came to the streets of different cities in Iran to collectively protest the systematic tyranny plaguing the different levels of society.
“As a young, Sunni and Kurdish woman, Mahsa was the spark that ignited ‘collective anger’ against intersecting forms of discrimination and exclusion facing women, ethnic and religious minorities, youth, and marginalized peripheries, compounded by years of state violence and repression.”
Mahsa’s death is not an isolated event. In fact, her killing came at the backdrop of a series of gender-based violence targeting LGBTQ activists and women in the Kurdish regions of Iran.
Over the past months, people have been protesting across small and large cities, lower and upper-class neighborhoods, and taken on a distinctive cross-ethnic, cross-class and cross-generational dimension.
The participation of the youth, born around 2000- 2005, about two decades after the Islamic revolution in 1979, has been especially remarkable and distinctive. The protests soon took on a cross- sectoral nature, joined by teachers, high school and university students, bus drivers, and labor unions, as well as Bazzar strikes across Iran.
MK: Can you tell us more about the genealogy of the Iranian women’s movement? Everyday acts of resistance, defiance, and presence of women—what Asef Bayat (2010) famously calls ‘quiet encroachments’ or daily ‘non- movements’ by ‘ordinary people’ —often goes unnoticed since they do not conform to Western models of feminism and social movements. Can you speak more to this rich history of women’s struggles and agency, and the different modalities that it has taken in Iran?
MM: The history of women’s struggle for freedom that has brought us to today’s historical moment is not the product of recent months but more than a hundred years in the making. Women’s struggles can be traced back to the 1880-90s, when women protested the economic crisis and joined countrywide revolts against an economic contract with a British company. Women later played an influential role in the 1906 Constitutional revolution, demanding citizenship rights, such as the right to education and voting. Defying restrictive patriarchal and religious norms of the 1910s, women continued their struggle by writing books, publishing journals, playing theaters in their houses, singing, debating women’s issues, lobbying, and participating in international women’s conferences—and of course many paid a high socio-political cost.
Later, under the new Pahlavi (1925-1941) regime, women persisted in their struggles by lobbying officials using every kind of opportunity the new secular state had provided. During these years, the state issued the order to remove the hijab. Although critical of the Shah’s autocratic method, many women’s rights activists supported his decision. However, a lot of women, who could not or did not want to go out without hijab, lost their right to the public sphere. During the Second Pahlavi era (1942- 1979), women achieved the right to choose if they wanted to have hijab. Women’s presence in politics and the academy also increased during this time. Before the revolution, many joined political parties and organizations to protest imperialism and colonial orders in Iran.
Despite their central participation in the revolution in 1979 and the long war efforts with Iraq, the Islamic republic took away many rights women had struggled for, political rights, and the right to choose their hijab, study within many scientific fields and serve as judges. Nonetheless, women shifted their struggles building instead more networks in private spaces and at universities. Under heightened authoritarian surveillance, women shifted their modes of struggle engaging in various forms of ‘everyday resistance’ such wearing colorful scarves, showing more their hair, resisting strict dress codes, and asserting their rights through ‘acts of presence’ (Bayat 2010), defying gender exclusions within university majors (such as some engineering majors), seeking employment in national and private companies, and devising innovative ways to circumvent family laws, that had become too restrictive after the revolution.
During the 1990s, thanks to a more tolerable reformist atmosphere, women hasten their activism engaging in intellectual sphere, legal struggles, increasing their public presence and activities, including but not limited to establishing publication companies storytelling groups, poetry nights, and most importantly, rallying and gathering in 2006 signatures for the ‘One Million Signature’ campaign for advancing reforms in discriminatory laws against women in both public and private spheres, that was forced to stop in 2009 due to the increased repression that followed the Green Movement. In recent years, women in 2017 started taking back to the streets, tying their hijabs on sticks, and waving them up in acts of protest. These brave events captured public and media attention and became known as the ‘Girls of Enghelab Street’ protests and were soon followed by heavy- handed government arrests.
MK: What makes the current upsurge different from the previous cycles of protests and modes of protest?
“Although all the struggles the last four decades are continuous and epistemologically inseparable, compared to earlier cycles of protests and social movements, the current revolutionary movement is a movement of many firsts”
MM: It is the first time a national movement starts from the marginalized peripheral regions of Iran and then spreads into Tehran and other big cities; the first time that a movement is initiated by feminists in general and more significantly, feminists in peripheral areas; the first time the demands, slogans, and central figures are predominantly women (and men) from the marginal, ethic-poor periphery; the first time that school-aged youth are on the streets at this scale; the first time the symbol of women’s oppression, the mandatory hijab, is transformed into a symbol of national oppression; and it is the first time in the last 44 years that demands are not anymore about reform but radical change.
Moreover, in terms of organization and diffusion, this movement is distinctively de-centralized, horizontal and multi-scalar, bypassing traditional city/periphery, city/neighborhood spatial divides, as well as internal organizational divides. The movement instead is diffuse,
neighborhood-based, cross- national and decentralized, making government crackdown more difficult. Moreover, while earlier movements like the Green Movement in 2009 mobilized predominantly the urban middle classes protesting undemocratic electoral results, and the 2017-2019 economic crisis mobilized predominantly male workers and farmers in the periphery, this movement has witnessed exceptional displays of cross-national, multi-class, multi-gender, multi-ethnic solidarity.
“People, especially the youth, have taken to the streets to free the occupied landscapes of their private and public lives and recapture their dreams and hopes for the future.”
Despite compounding repression and violence from both the state and patriarchal familial norms, women have been taking to the streets without their hijab, reclaiming their right to their body, city, and destiny, and the broader right to socio-political freedom and normalcy outside the state oppression. Mothers of those killed in protests are turning their demonstrations of sorrow and eulogies into revolutionary expressions of protest and struggle. Inspired by revolutionary feminist praxis, the current uprising is about life that has been colonized for the past 44 years by the Islamic republic that has occupied every single aspect of the public and private sphere.
“This is a movement by ordinary people to reclaim dignity and autonomy for all through practices of care and life-making and informal ‘everyday politics’ informed less by abstract ideology and more by immediate experience embedded in people’s everyday lives.”
Collective forms of radical feminist praxis liberates not only women but all sections of society, including men, from the shackles of patriarchy and oppression, reclaiming dignified ‘life,’ that includes political and personal freedom and economic opportunities.
Now, after more than two months of resistance a new subjectivity has emerged, one that would be very difficult to ignore. This time, the cross- national, cross-class and cross-ethnic solidarity not only animated new individual subjectivities but, more remarkably, a united collective subjectivity and new national identity that retrieves its legitimacy from below, a radical form of collective democracy. This new subjectivity creates itself by creating the world it desires through day-to-day resistance and struggle. So in a sense, the revolution is already underway and has already been won on different grounds.
I dedicate this piece to the memory of all those who struggled against oppression and pay dearly with their lives.
December 2022 – The Financial Turn of Infrastructure in Egypt
Dalia Wahdan
Ph.D. in comparative urban sociology from the University of Pune, India
Interviewed by Mona Khneisser
PhD Student in Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
M. Khneisser: Infrastructure & power in the global South: How do we understand the recent resurgence of infrastructural mega- projects across the global South?
Wahdan: I understand this resurgence through three forces: a) the global infrastructure scramble driven by the surpluses of technologies and the imperatives of financial capital in the global North, and China, b) the shifts in multilateral development architecture and the convergence with private financial markets, and c) the changing basis of regime legitimacy in the global South. In their position paper in Urban Studies in 2022 Schindler and Kanai spoke about “a global infrastructure scramble,” a scramble for infrastructure financing in the aftermath of the North Atlantic financial crisis in 2007/8. Fernandez and Aalbers (2020) also examined this scramble as the need to recycle liquidity at the Global North “in countries lower in the global money hierarchy” (p.680). A careful examination of the spectrum of reforms put in place to central banks and other financial institutions in those countries indicates the pre- deliberative nature of this scramble. The finance imperative requires a command-and-control type of government or ruling regime in countries “lower in the global money hierarchy” not only for ‘stabilizing’ fiscal and monetary policies but for securing lands for infrastructure. Mega-projects need mega-finance. These are projects, whose magnitude would not be possible only through monetary outlays from public budgets or direct transfer of assets from public to private hands. In fact, it is a finance modality that might not necessarily require either source. This aspect comes very handy for those countries’ governments and ruling regimes. On one side it absolves them off the need to strain their already strained budgets, and on the other, it provides them with ready-made symbolic power leverage.
If you take Egypt as an example, the dominance of the military establishment over economic sectors is consolidated by the fact that it is this establishment that is at once the obligor and the guarantor of the financial instruments that make the mega-projects such as the New
Administrative Capital, power plants, and transportation networks possible. Similarly, the recent resurgence of mega-projects could also be understood through the shift in the architecture of multilateral development and its convergence with private financial markets.For one, it
justifies restructuring and downsizing of large bureaucratic agencies to fit into partnership models.
“What was ‘political suicide’ in countries like Egypt and India is now underway, evident in the transformation of public bureaucracies into revenue generating or non-banking financial structures, reducing government spending on payrolls, changes in mandates and retirement laws, and digitization.”
For another, it produces ever- changing maps of regional alliances. Born out of financial and institutional modeling, governments can now appeal to a wider range of partners and can establish investment entities that transcend national jurisdictions. The resurgence of sovereign or quasi-sovereign wealth funds could be studied in conjunction with the resurgence of mega-projects. Lastly, and as I mentioned above, mega-projects lend symbolic power to governments with depleted legitimacies. The narrative of employment generation, entrepreneurial support, the ability to build big in record times is fodder of mass propaganda.
MK: How has the role of the state as a central planner historically change in Egypt, and how does it connect with global transformations brought about by neoliberal restructuring and introduction of speculative finance as a central player?
DW: Central planning in the sense of a group of experts – civil or military – conducting rigorous studies and designing five- or ten-year comprehensive plans is no longer the case in Egypt, even though the public organizations mandated with planning still stand, such as the General Organization for Physical Planning (GOPP) and the Ministry of Planning. While the former has been hollowed out—with the establishment of the Supreme Council for Planning and Urban Development (Law 119/2008)—and appears only as ‘participant’ in participatory planning initiatives run by international development organizations. The latter has undergone a facelift and assumes the apex role of orchestrating and monitoring key performance indicators laid out by global agendas the likes of the Sustainable Development Goals, the New Urban Agenda, Egypt 2030, and Cairo 2025. Interestingly
“Glossy prototypical reports have replaced the multi-volume plan documents, and what is generally referred to as ‘plans’ come in the form of maps—cartographic or digital—plotting out the territorial spread of national development projects.”
Rarely does anybody raise the question: how did the map come to replace the plan and what is lost along the way? do not imply that planning as design-of-the-future should remain analog. The Central Bank of Egypt is increasingly becoming the most sought-after navigator for anyone who wishes to make saving or investment decisions. The global neo-coloniality notwithstanding, the transformations within the state apparatus could not be overemphasized. The state in Egypt has been restructured organizationally and legislatively such that most, if not all, ‘planning’ functions are the mandate of the Presidency office.
The four supposedly independent national auditing institutions have been restructured in 2015 (Law 16) to report to the president. On the urban scale, the Supreme Council for Planning and Urban Development stamps projects that are ‘planned’ by the Ministry of Defense and its associated Armed Forces Engineering Authority. Many Presidential and Prime Ministerial decrees have been issued since 2016 transforming public utilities into economic agencies to avail of financial markets and services without the powers to formulate respective sectoral plans. Given this context, one can assume that ‘planning’ Egypt has become more centralized, but the so-called plans shift temporally and spatially in reaction to global financial and development appetites.
MK: Land, Infrastructure & financialization: What implications does the large-scale capture and dispossession of land resources for speculative development have on people? What implications does the record of mixed outcomes of these project have on larger questions of responsibility and accountability of the state to the people?
DW: Land is essential to infrastructure and real estate yet, countries of the global South face chronic inefficiencies in land markets. I will speak of Egypt to illustrate. It is common knowledge that the military establishment and public institutions hold most lands. The financial turn in infrastructure drives the state to expand and consolidate land banks and to deploy diverse value capture instruments, some of which have been in use since the 1990s, such as the sale of development rights, while others were dormant or forgotten since the 1950s, such as betterment levies. Let us not forget that nationalization and eminent domain are also ad hoc policy instruments deployed by the state in Egypt in many instances across history.
“While voices opposing the privatization of public land and property were heard before the 2011 uprising, successive regimes were wary of large- scale dispossession of land resources for speculative development. The current regime is different.”
It prides itself on doing what previous regimes dared not: bulldozing entire neighborhoods under the pretext of slum demolition, razing of self-built houses for road widening, periodic bans on private construction, military imposition of fines on building violations, speedy construction of private real estate developments on evicted plots, and recently, the release of The State Ownership Policy Document declaring the public assets on offer for speculative developments. As land becomes the primary vehicle for value generation and private
finance dictates its temporal and spatial logics, the threat of nationalization gets diluted, and the power of eminent domain intensifies. The regime would not scare away private finance, but it would dispossess citizens for the sake of ‘public benefit.’ When dispossession is mentioned, it is understandable why the poor readily come to mind [the official rate of poverty is 29.7% of 104m persons in 2019/20]. Nevertheless, the policies put into practice to meet financial and real estate speculative activities affect the relatively ‘well-off’ as well, and trigger a cascade of vulnerabilities—of employment, health care, income, savings, and livelihood across diverse income groups that begs examination. Unlike housing, statements about the mixed outcomes of mega-infrastructure and real estate developments remain anecdotal and speculative. Serious studies of their impacts on demographic change, mass mobility, income disparities, and homelessness are needed. Their implications on political accountability and answerability are also worth examining. The fact that almost all mega-projects are assigned by Presidential order, not through public bidding and operate on contractual agreements with non-disclosure clauses [to ensure best financial practices] means that the ‘public’ is not a stakeholder. Citizens do not have legal access to those agreements and would find it difficult to hold officials accountable or answerable.
MK: Engaged research & methodologies: Can you speak more to the challenges and difficulties facing scholarship on Egypt. How can these limitations be overcome methodologically?
DW: The challenges facing scholarship on Egypt must be discussed with reference to scholarship within Egypt. Years of interference with academic freedom by the state and by religious zealots have weakened scholarship and engendered fear and self-censorship among researchers, not only in the social but also the natural sciences. The public is not only skeptical of intellectuals but is sometimes aggressive towards researchers. Other challenges concern the capacity to pursue research and teaching without restrictions, to disseminate findings in
discussions and publications, to seek collaborations inside and outside Egypt, and to secure a degree of self-governance of academic institutions. Not to mention, jeopardies to academic integrity. Access to valid and reliable data has always been a problem but it has been exacerbated by the emergence of non- disclosure agreements. It is ironic that those who might have access to ‘classified’ information restrain critical analyses, while those without are pushed to the margins. How to overcome this methodologically is another challenge. The distrust towards qualitative approaches (critical, feminist or action- oriented) makes the positivist approach seem more pertinent—only within the mainstream political frame of course. In urban studies, I am trying to rely as much as possible on technological tools such as GIS, digital mapping, and photography to minimize my visibility, but this is not hazard-free. Unlike in the 1990s when religion, sex and the president’s family were taboo subjects by law. The post-2011 research environment is dicey; I do not know which subject, topic, approach, or argument would offend who and would not fathom the nature of retaliation!
December 2022 - Climate Change and Displacement
Dr. M. Anwar Hossen
Professor of Sociology Department, University of Dhaka-Bangladesh
Dr. Nikhil Deb
Assistant Professor of Sociology at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.
Interviewed by Miguel A. Avalos
Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
Displacement is often understood through the prisms of political, economic, or state violence against a marginalized group. How do climate change and environmental disasters figure into your research on displacement?
M. A. Hossen: Climate change and environmental disasters are embedded in my social, academic and professional background. My ancestral home is at Manikgonj district in Bangladesh that is close to the confluence of the mighty Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna Basin. I experienced the seasonal changes of monsoon rainfall and summer that are the major sources of natural resources such as wild fish, organic vegetables, fruits, and domestic animals. I enjoyed fishing and other natural resources in my childhood that is still live in my memory. Related to this social life in the 1980s, my parents had about 30 acres of cropland as well as a business farm. Agricultural crop
production was very much dependent on the seasonal dynamics. Cow-dung and siltation were the main sources of fertilizers for agricultural production. With our business farm, my father was a major supplier of sugarcane and salt that brought from the capital city of Dhaka with riverways. The seasonal dynamics were the foundation for our livelihood opportunities. Against these natural resources, livelihood opportunities, and schooling, we experienced the first major flood in 1988 when I was a student of grade 10. Every one of our residential house was about seven feet underwater. Wild fish swim on the floor of our house. Almost all of our household assets were washed away including domestic animals, stored crops, and business farm goods. We were in great socioeconomic crises for next year’s food, crop production capital, and school expenditure.
This flood experience made consider the question: “why did we suffer from the higher level of flood” We experienced a stressful life in terms of food crisis, school expenditure, dress, and social visit. I also observed the sufferings of relatively poor people who were our neighbors and received supports from our parents. All of these livelihood experiences drove me to conduct research on natural disasters and displacement through academic research. As a sociology undergraduate student at the University of Dhaka, Dhaka-1000, Bangladesh, I had the opportunity to conduct a research monograph to focus on the linkage between flood effects, displacement, and slum development in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. The findings of this study increased my interests to learn more about flood effects on local community livelihood. I conducted another study at my Master level in the same Sociology department to understand the coping mechanisms of local people. More specifically, this study focused on the reasons for flood and their effects on the groups of people in terms of class, employment, and gender. When I completed this study, I experienced that flood creates benefits for some people who are richer and politically influential in Bangladesh. I explored these unequal effects further when I pursued another Master at Carleton University, Canada. In this study, I experienced the effects of global political economy on local people in coping with flood vulnerabilities. Moreover, another reason for flood problem in Bangladesh is the hydropolitics in the Ganges-Brahmaputra- Meghna Basin in South Asia.
Thus, I pursued PhD at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and currently am focusing on political ecology to understand flood vulnerabilities and related other climatic and environmental issues and concerns such as drought, river bank erosion, salinity, and water stagnation in South Asia.
N. Deb: Displacement has long been a contested development issue, although scholarship in this area seems to be accelerated since David Harvey coined the term Accumulation by Dispossession. Harvey, whose analysis has spurred an enormous volume of research on what is widely dubbed as “global land grabs,” derived his notion from Karl Marx’s notable analysis of the primitive accumulation of capital.
Recently, Michael Levien, through rich ethnographic involvement with land- dependent communities in rural India, contended that Harvey's analysis is vague and abstract as it fails to address how distinct regimes of dispossession are entwined with specific “agrarian milieux” (Harvey overtly and overly focused on global capital accumulation, missing the variation across different places in the global South). Levien’s analysis is more relevant and cohesive than Harvey’s because the former draws our attention to how states (not only global actors) mediate displacement to take power away from local communities in the global South.
“While displacement must be understood through a political and economic lens (as the question rightly indicated and all major critical scholars of displacement demonstrated), it is imperative to shed light on how it plays out in variegated sociohistorical locations.”
It is valid for research on displacement by climate change and environmental disasters that I lay out in my research on climate change in coastal Bangladesh and the long-term consequences of the Bhopal disaster.
Despite using an overarching framework of neoliberalism in my research in both India and Bangladesh, I show the importance of understanding the differences in the political and economic trajectory of these two South Asian nations. To elaborate, unlike India, Bangladesh has an unpredictable path to its political-economic journey leading to neoliberalism. Specifically, while India entered market liberalization in 1991, the official period of neoliberalism in Bangladesh began in the 1980s, the decade of entrenched authoritarianism led by Hussain Mohammad Ershad, whose rural “development projects” caused massive suffering to rural citizens in Bangladesh. Bangladesh restored electoral democracy in 1991 and entered a period of electoral authoritarianism in the second decade of the 21st century. Notwithstanding such differences, Bangladesh, like India, has seen a variety of development regimes in its time, having been in the iron sights of global development imaginaries for decades.
Bangladesh has and continues to function as a development laboratory. Now, climate change has become an experimental tool to displace land-dependent communities in coastal Bangladesh. Since climate change poses serious “existential” threats to coastal communities, development practitioners use this as an opportunity to initiate the export-oriented shrimp industry to feed global consumers. As extant research shows, the neoliberal globalization project has further opened Bangladesh to foreign intervention and exacerbated its vulnerability to disasters. Top- down climate change adaptation activities exemplify this dynamic. Climate change is the end point of history that began with Europeans colonizing non-European nations. The current market-oriented paradigm to address this planetary crisis is very consistent with the racist heritage of colonialism as it excludes and undermines the views of subaltern people.
How have marginalized communities navigated or organized against climate- induced displacements in your research? What role has the state and transnational corporations played in this regard?
MAH: As I experienced during my boyhood, the marginalized groups of people had bond with the riverine system of Bangladesh and this bond was the core of their livelihood. Community based livelihood was the foundation for their social life. Rich people share their pond’s fish, fruits from garden, and land to poor people as their social responsibility. However, Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) along with
commercial agricultural development changed this community livelihood. State worked in favor of transnational corporations under the framework of SAP. Elite people at local and global level as part of the SAP promote the mega projects such as dams, roads, bridges, and export processing zones for accumulating local resources and capital.
“The state in Bangladesh failed to recognize local voices related to displacements, river bank erosion, and social inequality, and is aligned with the top-down neoliberal perspective: e.g., Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP), Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).”
Based on this growing global governance, the elites are accumulating more from local resources while the disadvantaged people are experiencing the growing concerns such as environmental degradations and displacement which are the major challenges for sustainability.
ND: Bangladesh has become the object of an international examination of potential responses to climate change. In other words, displacements in coastal Bangladesh are not only climate- induced; so-called adaptation (institutional) activities also cause them. The place-specific customary strategies of people already living in coastal areas most affected by climate change are overlooked.
The outlook that Bangladesh doesn’t have the necessary resources to fight the effects of climate change seems to have made it an appealing case to intervene in the landscape of coastal Bangladesh. As Paprocki demonstrates through her research, such a tactless characterization planted dystopic visions into the heads of architects of development: intrusion framed as assistance, the envisioned threat of a worldwide climate dystopia galvanizes the west into action, no matter the consequence. However, such interventions in coastal Bangladesh are not without resistance. Local communities have fought back and even forced powerful actors to back away from commercial shrimp aquaculture. It is evident in rural villages where communities brought back rice agriculture and significant regional agrarian activity. The state and transnational capital see this traditional rice agriculture as a relic of pre- modern times not consistent with
the 21st- century development promise. Such an observation contradicts the importance of localization in climate change shadow yet is not very surprising. Commercial shrimp aquaculture, as a mode of adaption, is not only causing displacement but also is responsible for increasing salinization of soil and groundwater in the region, posing a severe threat to public health. People also mobilized against an open- pit coal mine in southern Bangladesh. While the potential of economic growth absorbed the government, the grassroots communities staged successful mobilizations fearing displacement and environmental destruction and finally forcing the government to jettison the project. Dominant development narratives that rely on a business-as-usual approach, or at best, adopt a few innovative strategies in the market paradigm, are the reason we are in this chaos in the first place. Thus, the lesson we learn from people not standing by the business-as-usual approach will determine how we handle global climate crises. In other words, local communities promote different paradigms at this moment of destabilization of the natural world, opposing endless economic growth and vast inequalities and offering us opportunities for regeneration in this already threatened world.
What advice do you have for graduate students, postdocs, and junior faculty interested in examining the relationship between climate change, environmental disasters, and displacement?
MAH: Policy makers as part of the global governance demonstrate the success in economic growth and GDP but failed to focus on social and environmental issues and concerns due to their accountability to the developed countries and international agencies. If we meaningfully care about the relationship between climate change, environmental disasters, and displacement, locally contextualized understanding of social justice, environmental justice, and empowerment rather than the ongoing top-down perspective need to be
recognized. Otherwise, we need to experience the growing level of displacement as we experienced currently more than 0.5 million people are displacing in Bangladesh every year. Local biodiversity loss is a growing problem. More than 90 percent of our rivers and other waterbodies are polluted; many of them are disappearing from local map. Policy makers do not have any meaningful initiatives to protect nature, environment, and life of the majority people in Bangladesh. Our graduate students, postdocs, and junior faculties need to think about this growing concern over environmental justice and social justice, and develop their own course of action.
ND: We undoubtedly need more and more research in this area, and young scholars can significantly contribute to this line of research. I encourage them to be brave and innovative in a way that speaks to specific aspects of climate justice. While it is tempting to attempt a research topic reflecting on the dominant current of sociology as a discipline, don’t underestimate the importance of researching a
seemingly “local” topic about climate change. We know from the parochial history of our field that the battle against business-as-usual is also academic
JUNE 2022 SPOTLIGHT: GENDER AND WAR ON TERROR
Helena Zeweri
Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia-Vancouver
Najwa Mayer
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and in the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College
Interviewed by Andrea Zhu
PhD Student in Sociology at UCLA
How does the War on Terror exemplify US imperialism? What, if anything, does the US military pull out of Afghanistan mean? What are the racial and gendered dimensions?
HZ: What is particularly revealing about the War on Terror is how it fundamentally alters the epistemology of threat itself–how we recognize and identify that which is seen to harm us. Brian Massumi talks about this in his book Ontopower, in which he argues that the state’s disposition to threat under the Bush doctrine was a markedly pre-emptive one rather than a preventive one. The difference between the two is that preemptive modes proactively look for threat based on no empirically verifiable data, whereas preventive dispositions operate on a predetermined reality (of course, there are multiple layers of power embedded within this–who gets to determine what the ‘reality’ is that is being acted upon, etc.), but in any case, pre-emption is a different mode of apprehending and diagnosing reality that lends itself to generating threat. We saw this quite explicitly when the Bush administration fabricated the notion that there were weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq in order to justify the US military operation. As many scholars of the effects of the War on Terror in Afghanistan (politically, socially, culturally , in terms of knowledge production) have written about, the US presence in Afghanistan was not experienced as benevolent by many and the pre-emptive identification of threat has followed displaced Afghans, who are now always already seen as security and cultural threats to the nation-states in which they seek refuge.
The US military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan does not mean the end of US-sponsored and orchestrated violence in Afghanistan. In fact, just a few days before the last military member left, the US ordered a drone strike on what was thought to be an ISIS-K vehicle in Kabul. In fact, the vehicle was not an ISIS-K vehicle, but rather a group of 10 civilians, two of whom were children. Beyond this, the US military has left behind an inordinate amount of military equipment, and toxic waste and environmental degradation that will continue to haunt the
Afghan landscape in the decades to come. The withdrawal has also activated the global regime of border deterrence and border control which keeps displaced Afghans in prolonged states of confinement on military bases, refugee camps, and detention centers. We see what Andreas Hackl has called ‘conditional inclusion’ very much at play when it comes to the entry of displaced Afghans into either neighboring countries or US military bases in places like Qatar and Germany. The violence of the US state continues through the poor treatment of these populations and those Afghan civilians who were not able to make it out on a government plane to a military base. We should also attend to the ways in which the US and other powers in the region exert their continued economic and political influence on the futures, aspirations, and lives of the Afghan people.
The racialized and gendered dimensions of the mass displacement that followed the Taliban’s takeover and the US withdrawal are undeniable. Within the global refugee regime, Afghan people seeking asylum, especially men, are seen as always already threatening by the US state and other countries in the global North. Scholars like Junaid Rana have talked about the racialized dynamics that position Muslim migrant men in the US as susceptible to all kinds of technologies of policing, which appear even in spaces of supposed inclusion including community policing, which remains rooted in the fundamental logics and premises of the racialized terror industrial complex.
“The whole discourse of ‘saving Afghan women’ has made a resurgence in the wake of the withdrawal and it is a discourse that has dangerous consequences.”
Afghan women are also situated within this global border regime and within the War on Terror more broadly as passive suffering victims whose capacities for action, future-building, and political participation can only be realized through militarized humanitarianism. The whole
discourse of ‘saving Afghan women’ has made a resurgence in the wake of the withdrawal and it is a discourse that has dangerous consequences. Afghan women are becoming objects of curiosity and concern yet again, and in situating them as such, academics, policy leaders, and the general public erase the long history of political engagement, dissidence, and resistance that women in Afghanistan have been engaged in for hundreds of years. What also gets lost is how these modes of resistance are multiple, heterogeneous, and shaped by where people live in the country, their class status, and the forms of governance under which they live at the local level. It is troubling to see how the ‘saving Afghan women’ narrative inhibits an understanding of women as intersectional subjects, whose experiences of oppression, privilege, and life experience in general are shaped by their positionality within multiple matrices of power.
NM: The Global War on Terror (GWoT) continues or expands many historical facets of US imperialism, including: neocolonial occupation and state-building; military and economic interventions in several countries; global regulations of the gendered-racialized Muslim through
surveillance, detention, and war as well as via imperial discourses like “saving” Muslim women from Muslim men; broader gendered-racialized controls over global migration, labor, activism, and incarceration in the name of national security.
“For those within Afghanistan and for generations of our displaced families… this is not the “end” of war or imperialism but another phase of it.”
The US troop exit from Afghanistan carries several significances, but the end of US influence and violence is not among them. As an Afghan refugee and a scholar who researches how discourse and knowledge reproduce material forms of power, I’ll focus on just two issues. First: US officials, popular discourse, and some scholars describe the “end” of US warfare in Afghanistan within a 20-year periodization. For those within Afghanistan and for generations of our displaced families, this US-centric temporality not only erases the last four decades (and beyond) of war experienced by Afghans, but also disguises the US’s own (pre-2001) past, present, and persistent interventions in the country. For Afghanistan, this is not the “end” of war or imperialism but another phase of it. Economic warfare represents just one of the violent continuities of the war on terror in Afghanistan. We need only look to how food insecurity and famine threaten the lives of over half of the population now as a result of US and international sanctions on the foreign aid-dependent economy imposed on Afghanistan over decades. In an act of breathtaking cruelty (albeit imperial consistency), the Biden administration announced in February that the US would sequester Afghanistan’s central bank reserves—that is, Afghan peoples’ money—and distribute it between humanitarian aid contractors and litigation fees for families of the US victims of 9/11. Resource theft, debt relationships, and aid dependency are certainly long practices of modern imperialism. In this case, the US is also using a social logic of grief and debt to privilege American suffering over Afghan suffering. As scholars like Jodi Kim and Neda Atonasoski argue, economic and humanitarian imperialism produce both uneven material and social relations.
Second: Given that US officials named the “liberation” of Afghan women as a rationale for the 2001 invasion, we need to contextualize how current media and humanitarian discourses about Afghan women under Taliban rule continue to frame gender inequality in religious paradigms, rather than as historically contingent and political issues. Narratives that equate Islam with inevitable patriarchy are not only racialized and inaccurate, but also they obfuscate both colonial-imperial and state regulations of women’s bodies as forms of governmentality—which we see globally across states. They also erase historical and contemporary gender justice movements within Afghanistan and within Islam (see Wazhmah Osman and Marya Hannun’s work on Afghanistan). Lila Abu-Lughod’s Do Muslim Women Need Saving remains ever-relevant on emphasizing gender analysis beyond liberal feminist tropes. For example, in recent western media there is a resurgence of coverage on Afghan women’s dress and education, which is certainly important. Yet there is little coverage of Afghan women facing some of the world’s highest rates of food insecurity, child mortality, and infrastructural devastation enabled by decades of war, enforced reliance on foreign aid, and current international sanctions. I recommend Anila Daulatzai and Helena Zeweri’s writing on how Afghan women are disciplined within western imperial and humanitarian regimes.
What do you think are researchers’ scholarly, ethical and practical responsibilities regarding the War on Terror and the U.S. military in the Middle East?
HZ: There are several ethical questions to think about when researching these topics. They are all pretty broad and entangled in many ways, but I’ll focus on the War on Terror, which encompasses the latter two (and of course, it could be the other way around too depending on your point of departure). I think one key step is to recognize that the production of knowledge is not apolitical, that the choices we make around what to study are situated in and emerge from certain conditions of possibility. After situating these choices, we can then reflect and try to understand the affective level at which these topics germinate as interesting to us. I try to ask myself, why am I interested in this topic and not something else? What imaginaries, curiosities, and personal experiences shape my interest? What is the role of Orientalism and racialized imaginaries of the Other at play in the formation and articulation of these interests? I think this is especially important given that oftentimes in academic conferences, visits, and lectures, one might hear that an individual naturally gravitated to one topic or another, when in reality, their interests are produced through where they are situated in the world, what choices they feel are available to them–on a very material level at times–and that they have inherited, and what their social and cultural worlds have deemed as interesting and valuable.
Something I’m continuing to think about is, to whom is this research accountable? There are multiple ways to ‘study up’ regarding War on Terror issues, but there is also much work that looks at how the war has impacted people who are not in positions of political power at the local level. What does access mean in relation to these communities, and who should be reading our work? I think the answer to that is complicated in that it produces another question: What does engaging with this work entail for that individual’s life, time, labor, and energy? Oftentimes as scholars we are told that once we release our work into the ether, how it is consumed is out of our control. While to some extent that is true, I think that we can take steps to say what our work is and is not designed to do, represent, and accomplish. That requires getting a better understanding of how our work might land in different spaces. For me, this means making sure I can engage with communities outside of academia around things that matter to me. This allows me to think more closely about how my work will come to matter to other communities who are also affected by the War on Terror in multiple ways.
NM: I hope that we continue to research and organize against the GWoT because it’s not over. The GWoT is/was never only in the Middle East, of course. Furthermore, its perpetrators include both transnational and corporate actors. For example, I recommend reading Samar Al-Bulushi’s work on the multinational dynamics of the GWoT in East Africa. While Asian and African countries have disproportionately suffered some of the most brutal consequences of war and displacement, the GWoT has touched and affected transnational modes of governance, warfare, surveillance, labor, policing, border control, and more through “anti-terror” security tactics. Within the US, nonwhite people are disproportionally subject to security infrastructures created or expanded in the GWoT era—from TSA to ICE to hyper-militarized and anti-Black policing. As several scholars demonstrate, the production and management of the “terrorist” subject itself (see Junaid Rana and Sohail Daulatzai) materially connects US militarism in the GWoT to policing within the heart of empire, not only against Black and brown Muslims but also against movements like Black Lives Matter (see Donna Auston) and Indigenous sovereignty (see Joanne Barker).
The transnational impacts of the GWoT position us to rethink politics, praxes, and geographies of solidarity against state and imperial violence. As someone who thinks about the relationships between race, religion, and [state] power—and, specifically, Islam in/and the US—I study the “Middle East” as just one site within a so-called “Muslim world,” which is violently imagined by imperial, state, and other authoritarian logics while also critically summoned by anti-imperial, feminist, and transnational Muslim activisms informed by Islamic ethics and epistemes. Just a small selection of scholars whose work teach me include Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Fatima El-Tayeb, Sylvia Chan-Malik, Saadia Toor, Evelyn Alsultany, Donna Auston, Saba Mahmood, Zareena Grewal, Jean Beaman, Shaista Patel, Junaid Rana, and Sohail Daulatzai. I also learn from global race and gender approaches to Middle Eastern diasporas, including from Sarah Gualtieri, Neda Maghbouleh, and Nadine Naber, among others.
What advice do you have for graduate students, postdocs and junior faculty regarding pursuing, and trying to publish, this kind of GATS-related (global and transnational) work?
HZ: I am still very much learning about and navigating this space. I think it’s important to caveat that I’m offering this advice from a position in which I am not facing precarities around the job market in the way I did a few years ago, and am also speaking from a position of privilege regarding my citizenship status and access to income, housing, and other resources and rights. I say this because I think how graduate students and junior scholars can or cannot engage with this advice is deeply shaped by where they are situated vis-a-vis these structures of power.
I think that the production of global and transnational scholarship is incredibly relevant in this moment because it offers an understanding of why and how historically different experiences of marginalization are interrelated. For example, some of my work has looked at how Australian border control policies are becoming increasingly globalized – how the discourses, material technologies, and policies are being shared with other countries in the global North at conferences and security summits across borders. Beyond that, I’m also working on a project that looks at how Afghan American and Afghan Australian diasporic activism are historically related and currently being influenced by global movements for refugee rights, Indigenous sovereignty, and the Movement for Black Lives. Creating a relational history of social movements is important because it allows us to trace how technologies of power tied to seemingly separate issues (i.e. border control and Indigenous rights as one example) are actually quite related (and not just in a discursive way, but materially as well). I would also encourage anyone who is involved in collective organizing and/or advocacy to continue to do this important work, as those are the spaces where the connections between these issues emerge (of course, time, energy, and labor are huge considerations here). I have found that continuing to go to area studies conferences and events that facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration are important. I also think that while working on something to publish, it could be useful to get a sense of what other scholars outside the US academy think of these issues by joining global list-serves or international working groups. This helps me to defamiliarize my own approaches even if I end up returning to them—just knowing that there are multiple approaches is important.
NM: The decision of the organizers in this ASA series to commune multidisciplinary scholars is one model for GATS research. I thank the organizers for inviting me into this conversation, as someone who is not a sociologist but rather an interdisciplinary scholar of race, religion, gender, and sexuality. In that spirit, my advice is that we follow our questions rather than our disciplines.
As a junior scholar who is learning, I’ll share my own relationships to interdisciplinary and GATS research. I was trained in US-based ethnic studies and gender and sexuality studies with research on Muslims/Islam that put me in conversation with religious/Islamic Studies. Simultaneously training in transnational feminist methods helped me to interrogate not only the global reproduction of US power but also the limits of the US and Euro-American epistemes. I study both the governance and cultural politics of Muslims/Islam within the US and its empire as a way to analyze the longer relationships between race, religion, sexuality, capital, and the state—as well as resistant formations therein. For instance, my dissertation used interdisciplinary methods to examine the formal production and transnational markets of so-called “Muslim American” popular cultures as contested subjects of global capital in the GWoT era—circulating various conceptions of race, religion, secularism, and sexuality through markets and genre traditions.
Pragmatically, I’d add that depending on one’s archives, transnational research can be expensive. During grad school, I financially needed to work multiple jobs at a time and didn’t have the kind of travel grants that would also support basic needs during long research trips. As such, I used media archives and virtual conversations with interlocutors (who, ultimately, were my co-analysts) in addition to traveling for on-site research. These methods, particularly the use of interviews (which are relatively less common in humanities approaches to cultural studies as compared with social sciences), also critically informed the kinds of questions I asked about the uneven economies of transnational cultural production. In addition to archives, I understand GATS research to constitute multiple reading practices and reflexive analytics—including reading beyond our regional, disciplinary, or linguistic bounds.
Finally, the most profound lessons I learned from critical race and transnational feminist methods was critically situating myself in relation to disciplines and practices of research: Often, that means betraying the discipline. Research in many of our disciplines have extractive legacies, which are ongoing. Ethical research practices should begin by asking what kinds of knowledge we are re/producing and to whom we are responsible.
Select References:
Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2013. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Harvard University Press.
Al-Bulushi, Samar. 2020. “Making Sense of the East African Landscape,” in The Project on Middle East Political Science 40.
Atanasoski, Neda. 2013. Humanitarian Violence. University of Minnesota Press.
Auston, Donna. 2017. “Prayer, Protest, and Police Brutality: Black Muslim Spiritual Resistance in the Ferguson Era” in Transforming Anthropology.
Barker, Joanne. 2021. Red Scare: The State's Indigenous Terrorist. University of California Press.
Daulatzai, Anila. 2008. “The Discursive Occupation of Afghanistan,” in British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.
Daulatzai, Sohail. 2012. Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black
Freedom beyond America University of Minnesota Press.
El-Tayeb, Fatima. 2011. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. University of Minnesota Press.
Hannun, Marya. 2020. “From Kabul to Cairo and Back Again: The Afghan Women’s Movement
and Early 20th Century Transregional Transformations” in Genre et. Histoire.
Khabeer, Su’ad Abdul. 2016. Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States. New York University Press
Kim, Jodi. 2022. Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries. Duke University Press.
Osman, Wazhmah. 2020. Television and the Afghan Culture Wars. University of Illinois Press, 2020.
Rana, Junaid. 2011. Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora. Duke University Press.
Zeweri, Helena. 2017. “The Specter of Failure: Rendering Afghan Women as sites of Precarity in Empowerment Regimes,” in International Feminist Journal of Politics.
APRIL 2020 SPOTLIGHT: Global Islamophobia
In this April 2020 GATS spotlight, Council Member Victoria Reyes poses a set of questions to Neda Maghbouleh, Erik Love, and Jean Beaman about their work on global Islamophobia and promising directions in the field. This spotlight was inspired by a panel, moderated by Eman Abdelhadi, on anti-Muslim sentiment at the Critical Migration Studies mini-conference at ESS 2020.
NEDA MAGHBOULEH
Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in Migration, Race & Identity; Department of Sociology, University of Toronto Mississauga; Graduate Appointment in Sociology, University of Toronto St. George
ERIK LOVE
Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, USA
JEAN BEAMAN
Assistant Professor, Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara
Interviewed by VICTORIA REYES
Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of California, Riverside
Facilitated by EMAN ABDELHADI
Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago
INTERVIEW
VR: What is global Islamophobia? How can we conceptualize it, and what does it look like?
NM: Following a really exciting panel on anti-Muslim sentiment at the Critical Migration Studies mini conference at ESS 2020, I’m trying to theorize global Islamophobia by tracing “sensorial” patterns of Islamophobia across societies. How are the five senses engaged to identify, name, tame, and other “Muslims?” Through what sensorial registers? For example, through our sense of taste via food prohibitions or preferences or fixations, touch and smell via norms in sacred and profane spaces, psychosomatic norm images “seen” with our eyes and “heard” with our ears a la “see something, say something.”
“I’m trying to theorize global Islamopobia by tracing ‘sensorial’ patterns of Islamophobia across societies. How are the five senses engaged to identify, name, tame, and other ‘Muslims?'” Through what sensorial registers?
As a teacher, I think it’s always useful to come back to Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) for a foundational postcolonial understanding of the history of phenomenon. I feel it’s also important to acknowledge that much recent scholarship in Sociology, Anthropology, and cognate disciplines actively reframes Islamophobia as “anti-Muslim racism” across different national and transnational contexts. This has been an important conceptual move for several reasons; I encourage anyone who is interested to see www.islamophobiaisracism.wordpress.com to learn more.
And finally, as someone who comes to the study of Islamophobia from a Soc of Race and Ethnicity perspective, I’m drawn to political philosopher George Fourlas’ formulation of the correspondence between racism and Islamophobia: “racist synecdoche reaches beyond Islamophobia, making the raced group a social reality that an anti-religious or xenophobic explanation cannot illuminate. The racist gaze is not so careful. What matters is one’s assumed proximity to the raced epicenter” (2015: 113). This is how a range of ethnic, racial, and national groups become raced as “Muslims” in an increasingly globalized environment.
EL: Here are two statements that are both true. One: Islam is not a race. Two: Islamophobia is racism.
How can this be? Well, the term “Islamophobia” causes a lot of confusion. The problems with the term “Islamophobia” start with how much it obscures. The term became dominant about twenty years ago, and today it remains the most common term for racism affecting a wide range of groups and communities. Islam—the religion—and Muslims, of course, endure many of the effects of the structural, institutional, and interpersonal racism called “Islamophobia.” At the same time, myriad communities around the world have been ascribed with a “Muslim” racial identity, even when those groups are not Muslim.
In short, Islamophobia affects Muslims, and many more communities racialized as “Muslim.” The key question for understanding global Islamophobia, then, is finding theories of global race and racism. How is it that communities become racialized as “Muslim?”
“The key question for understanding global Islamophobia, then, is finding theories of global” race and racism. How is it that communities become racialized as “Muslim?” Fortunately, we have a wealth of scholarship on questions of race from a global perspective.”
Fortunately, we have a wealth of scholarship on the question of race from a global perspective. Moreover, recent scholarship has looked at the question of global Islamophobia in detail. Consider the foundational work of Edward Said, Nadine Naber, Nasar Meer, and Junaid Rana for a start. The key, in my view, is to understand how Islamophobia demonstrates that “domestic” and “foreign” spheres have been merged in terms of culture and policy. Racism has clearly exerted transnational influences on cultures and migration, security (and so-called counter-terrorism), and labor—just to name a few. While observing those outcomes is fairly straightforward, it seems to me that much work remains to be done in understanding the methods by which Islamophobic, anti-Muslim racism affects so many issues across the globe.
JB: I like political scientist Erik Bleich’s definition of Islamophobia as “indiscriminate negative attitudes or emotions directed at Islam or Muslims,” so that a rejection of Islam is extended to rejecting Muslims or those seen to practice Islam. Considering how Muslims live in every part of the globe, such a definition reminds us how Islamophobia is global.
My own approach to the study of global Islamophobia is through a study of race, racism, and global white supremacy. For example, I am interested in how Islamophobia as my co-panelist, Erik Love reminds us, is a form of racism and therefore it is crucial to examine how they are intertwined for populations racialized as Muslims. In this regard, I’m inspired by work by scholars such as Howard Winant, David Theo Goldberg, Ramon Grosfoguel, Leti Volpp, Saher Selod, Nazli Kibria, Paul Silverstein, and Nasar Meer.
My research on Maghrebin-origin individuals in France (a population racialized as Muslim even if there is great variation of religious identities and practices among this population), demonstrates how Islamophobia is part and parcel of the social construction of an ethno-racial hierarchy in France. The construction of Muslims as a racialized category means that they cannot be seen as French as other French citizens. This is not just true in France – with its particular Republican ideology disavowing identity-based categories – but around the world, as Muslims in predominately non-Muslim societies are kept on the margins of such societies.
VR: What are the exciting new directions in research in this topic?
NM: Sociologists interested in measuring, theorizing, and understanding global Islamophobia will want to keep their eyes out for an energetic cohort of early career faculty who are beginning to release fascinating research findings: Eman Abdelhadi, Aneesa Baboolal, Heba Gowayed, Atiya Husain, and Hajar Yazdiha are five such scholars. Another example is my UofT Sociology colleague Tahseen Shams’ important new book, Here, There, and Elsewhere (Summer 2020, Stanford Univ Press), which demonstrates the significance of a global “elsewhere” – beyond the “homeland” or “hostland” – for understanding Islamophobia and its effects on Muslim immigrant diasporas.
EL: Global Islamophobia has, belatedly, become an area of intense focus for the discipline of sociology. For decades, research on Islamophobia remained outside the mainstream in American and European sociology, but times, fortunately have changed. Work that enhances our understanding of global Islamophobia has recently emerged from critical migration studies and the study of race and ethnicity, and from the study of globalization. I am particularly fascinated by ongoing work that looks ethnographically and qualitatively at the effects of racist security and “counter-terrorism” policies enacted and expanded in recent decades. Recently, I’ve read outstanding new work along these lines by Aneesa Baboolal, Louise Cainkar, Sohail Daulatzai, Keith Feldman, Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Neda Maghbouleh, Sunaina Maira, Nicole Nguyen, Junaid Rana, and Saher Selod.
JB: Besides the work of my co-panelists, as it relates to the intersections of racism and Islamophobia, I highly recommend the work on Su’ad Abdul Khabeer (University of Michigan), whose 2016 book, Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States (NYU Press) explores the intersecting identities of Black Muslims. As Black Americans are not a monolith, neither are Muslims a monolith. And I’m excited about research the pushes us as scholars to take these kinds of heterogeneity seriously. I am also really excited about scholarship that engages questions of empire and the (post)colonial, and therefore allows us to have more comparative analyses of Islamophobia (i.e. not just tied to the United States).
“As Black Americans are not a monolith, neither are Muslims a monolith…I’m excited about research that pushes us as scholars to take these kinds of heterogeneity seriously. I am also excited about scholarship that engages questions of empire and the (post)colonial, and therefore allows us to have more comparative analyses of Islamophobia”
VR: What advice do you have for graduate students, postdocs and junior faculty regarding pursuing, and trying to publish, this kind of GATS-related work?
NM: Even (or especially if!) you are doing long-term research for a book-length project, do carve out small parts of your project that you can write up and revise early in order to enter the conversation with an empirical contribution. This will only enhance your virtual and in-person intellectual exchanges as you move forward in your career. And although major U.S. sociology conferences like ASA and ESS are indeed hosting invited panels on the topic of Global Islamophobia in 2020 and 2021 (which is awesome!), the topic has had greater traction up to this point in other disciplines like Anthropology, Black Studies, Middle East Studies, and Religious Studies. Don’t hesitate to read, engage, and be inspired by scholars from those fields even if you need (or want) to publish in Sociology venues.
EL: The main advice I would give—even if it’s obvious or not particularly helpful—is to stay committed to the truth. There are many pressures on early-career scholars, but I have seen again and again that remaining focused and dedicated to the truth is necessary to succeed and move forward with complex projects like research on global Islamophobia. I have found a great community of scholars who support that search for truth in the study of anti-Muslim racism. It’s an interdisciplinary, multi-generational, international and transnational community, and it is always looking for new folks to engage with.
JB: As a diehard ethnographer, I always want to encourage this type of research! I think ethnography is invaluable, particularly for conceptualizing the experiences of those targeted by Islamophobia. Secondly, while there is more and more attention to Islamophobia within the discipline of Sociology, I still think it is crucial to engage with work and scholars from other disciplines, including Global Studies, Anthropology, Political Science, etc. I would suggest getting involved with organizations and presenting at conferences besides the typical sociology ones, i.e. Middle East Studies Association or the Council for European Studies. Finally, I will paraphrase what a graduate student professor of mine told me years ago, which is to make the field come to you. Do not focus on chasing what the “sexy” topic is in Sociology (or cognate disciplines), focus on what you are inspired by or interested in, it is actually what will sustain you in the long run.
JANUARY 2020 SPOTLIGHT: Global Urban Sociology
In this GATS spotlight, Council Member Victoria Reyes poses three questions to Marco Garrido, Xuefei Ren and Liza Weinstein about their work on advancing a global urban sociology.
MARCO GARRIDO
Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago.
XUEFEI REN
Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Urban Studies at Michigan State University.
LIZA WEINSTEIN
Chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department and Associate Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University.
Interviewed by VICTORIA REYES
Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of California, Riverside
VR: You have a forthcoming special issue in City & Community on “Reconceptualizing Urban Sociology from the Global South – Keywords” – can you share with the membership a bit about what you mean by this and your vision for the special issue?
MG, XR, LW: We see our special issue as contributing to the work of building a more global urban vocabulary. We selected five keywords in urban sociology: eviction, segregation, suburbs, violence, and gentrification. These concepts have been largely elaborated in the context of American cities, but they are routinely applied, sometimes wholesale, to cities in the Global South. These cities are structurally different, however, and depicting them with a vocabulary derived from US cities can lead to misunderstanding. Hence, we set about reconstructing these keywords in light of the places we study, including India, China, Colombia, Mexico, the Philippines, and South Africa. Our approach is to derive the meaning of a keyword from its urban situation, and then to consider this meaning alongside other meanings derived from other urban situations. This approach represents an effort to build a global urban sociology. It advances a conceptual framework that is fundamentally and irreducibly comparative. We emphasize keeping in mind different urban trajectories and forms and different ways of being urban around the world. In our view, it is being able to comprehend these differences—in the sense of recognizing them and taking them into account—that makes urban sociology global.
“We emphasize keeping in mind different urban trajectories and forms and different ways of being urban around the world. In our view, it is being able to comprehend these differences…that makes urban sociology global”
VR: How did the three of you come together to work on this?
MG, XR, LW: As scholars of cities in the Global South, we knew each other through conferences and being on the same panels. Xuefei’s book workshop brought us all together in Chicago. It was in the course of a conversation over coffee that this project was born. We were lamenting the parochial scope of American urban sociology, and how a number of urban “keywords,” as defined in the subfield, failed to capture the reality of corresponding phenomena in the cities we studied. These terms were too narrowly defined, and deeply rooted in the American urban experience. We agreed on the need to “open up” these keywords and furnish a conceptual vocabulary better able to accommodate urban experiences in the Global South.
VR: What advice do you have for graduate students, postdocs and junior faculty regarding pursuing, and trying to publish, GATS-related
MG, XR, LW: First, we would say to keep at it. It is only by continuing to insist on the importance of our work, particularly for theory building, that we become more central. Second, take up common cause with other scholars engaged in work outside the US and oriented similarly. There are more of us doing GATS-related work than they might think. This means actively engaging them in discussions and collaborating on projects and panels, special issues and symposia. Our case is stronger with numbers and organization.
“Take up common cause with other scholars engaged in work outside the US and oriented similarly … Our case is stronger with numbers and organization”