This track focuses on various forms of power (political, economic, social, religious and cultural) that shape and reproduce Arab societies. What are the features of current regional power struggles and how do they intersect with the internal social, political and economic dynamics of different states? How can we interrogate the imaginaries informing such powerful processes and ask how they materially and symbolically translate power into practices and into change on the ground? What are the politics of scale that link the body, community, state, the national, the regional and the transnational?

The following topics are addressed under this sub-theme:

Actors: Multiple actors are negotiating, elaborating, implementing or obstructing change on the ground. How do actors interact with each other, and under which conditions do these interactions induce collective action or, conversely, lead to splintering and conflict? How is the political re-configured through the actions of a range of actors—formal and informal, groups and individuals—across scales and geographies? What are the repertoires of action that actors mobilize, at what times, in what places, and according to which strategies? How do they legitimize these actions and how are they held accountable, if at all, by their constituencies?

Policies: In any location, field or state, the elaboration and implementation of policies includes governmental actors (ministries, public agencies), elected actors (local and regional governments, parliamentarians), international actors (UN bodies, INGOs), professional actors (syndicates, industrialists), private sector actors (banks, firms, universities), civil society actors (NGOs, CBOs), experts and consultants, and others. Rarely is the process of policy-making rational or linear. Rather it is much more about muddling-through antagonisms and tensions, leading to blockages, delays and conflicts, but also to negotiations and bargaining. Another aspect of policy-making is its normative bias. Thus policies often address what should happen, rather than what actually is happening. Accordingly, policy analysis often remains confined to a normative, technical sphere, and consciously avoids an investigation of actual social, economic and urban practices and experiences— which are said to be too political. By whom, how, why, where and for whom are policies elaborated and implemented? Which governance (dis)continuities can be identified, and how do these vary across time and place? How can we understand the political through processes of policy making?

Publics: An array of publics are involved and impacted by power, policies and their agents. This includes citizens, sojourners, refugees, and other forms of collectivities. People are often categorized according to gender, sexuality, age, income, education, profession, race, sect, geography, etc. In other words, power always abstracts and homogenizes publics into end-users or beneficiaries, insufficiently taking into consideration their differentiated agency, thus often yielding to exclusions and inadequate policies. How do diverse actors and different sets of policies represent various publics, and impact their everyday lives? How do these publics navigate these representations and negotiate their impacts?

This theme pushes us to explore political ecologies that are generative and dynamic even in ongoing conditions of devastation and fragmentation. Political ecology brings together analytically the various strands of the environmental and the political. It questions the separation of the “natural,” the “social” and the “political,” emphasizing instead the interrelationships between these domains. Poverty, marginality, inequality, racial and gender discrimination are all instantiations of violent structural conditions that are too often construed as “natural” environments. Here we seek on the one hand to destabilize the naturalized complacency of such environments, and on the other to explore the possibilities and dimensions of life and sociality in violent environments like war-zones, militarized landscapes, occupied places, spaces of intensive capitalist exploitation and extraction, degraded places and polluted polities in an era of impending climactic catastrophe.

In an Arab region overburdened by a plethora of violent environments, this theme encourage papers that touch on some of the following:

Landscape and Power: Militarized, polluted, fragmented, divided, degraded, protected, colonized, exploited landscapes embody various configurations of power that express themselves spatially, temporally, affectively and materially. How can Landscape Thinking that is non-reductive and heterogeneous open up fresh avenues of understanding stale concepts and spaces by pushing us to grasp new configurations? How is power immanent in landscape? Environment, environs, here is that which surrounds, a gathering, assemblage of the heterogeneous elements that vitally (be)come together, matter, coalesce in certain times and places: material, social, human, non-human, “natural,” and human-made, sentient and otherwise.

Resistance and War: War is an environment that many contend with and live with in the Arab region. How do they do so? “Steadfastness” expresses the ability to remain despite the difficulties of war, occupation and other violent conditions and formations. How is steadfastness expressed by the subjects of oppressive and destructive forms of violence that foregrounds their everyday struggle to pursue their lifeways without succumbing to death or displacement? What are the modalities of resistance taken up by actors opposing oppressive and violent forms of power, including: guerrillas, freedom-fighters, revolutionaries, resistors, activists?

Politics and Pollution: Garbage crises, stinking politics, sewage seas, deadly natural or industrial disasters are among the various manifestations of violent and violated environments that we commonly encounter. Polluted environments are simultaneously material and metaphorical, poisoned worlds and words pertaining both to the “natural” world and socio-political, reverberating and rupturing across those heterogeneous yet entangled fields. What is the nature of these entanglements and how can we think in new ways about the political and the social when we widen the scope to include more-than-human actors and forces?