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Event Date: 1 December 2011
Royal Holloway University of London
2 Gower Street
London WC1E 6DP

City/ State/ Resistance: Spaces of Protest in the Middle East and Mediterranean

Interdisciplinary workshop from Royal Holloway University

Sponsored by The British Academy

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Jeremy Anderson (International Transport Workers Federation)
The Labour Movement in Egypt

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Event Date: 1 December 2011
Royal Holloway University of London
2 Gower Street
London WC1E 6DP

City/ State/ Resistance: Spaces of Protest in the Middle East and Mediterranean

Interdisciplinary workshop from Royal Holloway University

Sponsored by The British Academy

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Yair Wallach (Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East, SOAS)
Space for change – Opening up? Closing down? The 2011 Israeli summer protests

Space for change – opening up? closing down? The 2011 Israeli summer protests
This paper will locate the 2011 summer social protests in Israel in spatial-political terms. Paying attention to the sites of protests in Tel Aviv and other places, I will highlight differences with the more monumental settings protests of previous years. The civic-social banner of the protests, as well as their urban locales, allowed an expansion of public debate beyond the strictly “social justice” framework. At the same time, the space for other protests against the occupation continued to narrow down both metaphorically and physically. How are we to explain the contradiction between these two trends?

Yair Wallach is a lecturer in Israeli Studies at SOAS. Previously he studied integration, segregation and “shared spaces” in Jerusalem from the late Ottoman period to the present day, as part of the “Conflict in Cities” research project at the University of Cambridge.

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Event Date: 1 December 2011
Royal Holloway University of London
2 Gower Street
London WC1E 6DP

City/ State/ Resistance: Spaces of Protest in the Middle East and Mediterranean

Interdisciplinary workshop from Royal Holloway University

Sponsored by The British Academy

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Adam Ramadan (Geography, Cambridge)
Blogs, Bodies, and Camps

One of the common features of protests from Tahrir Square to St Paul’s has been the camp. The occupation of urban space, and subversion of the normal political order within those spaces, has been key strategy for protest movements to articulate an alternative future. Much has been written in recent years about the return of the camp into contemporary geopolitical orderings and biopolitical strategies. But what if the camp can be a space of freedom rather than intensified biopolitics, a space beyond the control of the state in which a more progressive politics can be forged? This paper will reflect on these protest camps as assemblages of people, politics and technologies that embody and make possible alternative value systems and political orders.

Adam Ramadan is a political geographer at Downing College, Cambridge. His research addresses everyday geopolitics, seeking to understand how ordinary people understand and negotiate their position within broader geopolitical dynamics of conflict, insecurity and displacement. His work has focused particularly on refugees and refugee camps as geopolitical spaces, bodies and lives. His book ëPalestinian refuges camps in Lebanon: the everyday geopolitics of exileí will be published by IB Tauris.

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Event Date: 1 December 2011
Royal Holloway University of London
2 Gower Street
London WC1E 6DP

City/ State/ Resistance: Spaces of Protest in the Middle East and Mediterranean

Interdisciplinary workshop from Royal Holloway University

Sponsored by The British Academy

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Lorenzo Trombetta (Independent Researcher, Beirut)
Anti-regime protesters and loyalist forces in Cairo. A dialectical confrontation

Discussant: Laleh Khalili (SOAS)

From the last days of January to early February this year, the urban landscape of Cairo became the battleground for anti-regime activists and government forces. Underpinning the bloody street skirmishes, which claimed hundreds of victims in just a few days, was the use of techniques by the young protestersí, new to the local context, by which they succeeded in taking by surprise the prevailing system of government control. The immediate reaction of the latter was to employ traditional methods of repression, followed quickly by an attempt to adapt its strategy to that of the activists. In this article, I intend to illustrate the dialectical confrontation which took place between January 25 and February 3 in some of the Cairo suburbs (in some of the peripheral/outlying areas of Cairo) and in the heart of the city, between the leaders of the revolt and the regime, represented in those ten days by the Ministry of the Interior. The first mass demonstration which threw the traditional system of repression into crisis took place on January 25. During the night of February 2/3, the army sided definitively with the protesters, ready to protect them from the armed loyalist gangs and plain-clothed security forces, who had replaced the regular uniformed police withdrawn from the streets from January 29. The objective of this paper is to analyse the modalities of confrontation and the dialogue implicit between the two opposing forces and to demonstrate how both sides studied the methods of the other, readjusting their approach accordingly in an attempt to outwit each other. At the heart of the confrontation was the Internet, defined by many as the Deus ex machina of the Arab uprisings: the use of the Internet was without doubt a determining factor, but its suppression by the regime brought to the fore the use of traditional means of communication (i.e. relying on family, friends and communiti networks) by the protesters which have their roots in microurban contexts. This reconstruction, which avails itself of detailed maps and video footage of four key episodes that happened in four different areas of the city between January 25 and February 2, will highlight the role of the army: both player and arbitrator during those days, emerging subsequently as victorious political actor.

Lorenzo Trombetta is specialized in Arab studies with a particular focus on contemporary Syria. A professional journalist, he has lived in Beirut since 2005, where he works as a correspondent for Ansa News Agency and the geopolitical magazine LiMes. He also writes for Italian and international newspapers. His degree thesis dealt with an analysis of Syrian propaganda from 1970 to 2000. He defended his doctoral thesis at Paris Sorbonne (2008), dealing with the structure of the al-Assadsí system of power from the time of Hafiz father to his son Bashar. Last January and February, he covered the Egyptian Uprising in Cairo for Ansa, LiMes and other media outlets.

Laleh Khalili is a senior lecturer in the Politics of the Middle East at the School of Oriental and African studies.  She is the author of Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge 2007) and Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Incarcerations (Stanford, 2012 forthcoming), the editor of Modern Arab Politics (Routledge 2008) and co-editor (with Jillian Schwedler) of Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion (Hurst/Columbia, 2010).  Her current research interests are in colonial warfare, counterinsurgencies, and militarism.

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Event Date: 1 December 2011
Royal Holloway University of London
2 Gower Street
London WC1E 6DP

City/ State/ Resistance: Spaces of Protest in the Middle East and Mediterranean

Interdisciplinary workshop from Royal Holloway University

Sponsored by The British Academy

————————————————————

Sara Fregonese (Geography, RHUL)
Beyond the domino. Transnational (in)security and the 2011 protests

Beyond the domino. Transnational (in)security and the 2011 protests
In 2011, several expert analyses of the the Arab Spring have employed the spatial metaphor of the falling domino pieces to indicate its spread from country to country. The paper questions this type of representation and highlight its implications for understanding the political geographies of protest in the Mediterranean.
The paper first presents a number of critical and even subversive uses of the domino theory in popular culture, notably by political cartoonists. Secondly, it complicates the linear geographies of the domino with non linear networks of transnational uprising and solidarity, and ìgrammarsî of urban security. These non-linear threads reach beyond the Arab region, and highlight trans-Mediterranean spaces of protest where the relationship between State and resistance is coming increasingly under pressure. Ultimately, the transnational recontextualisation exposes the limited nature of those understanding of change which consider change in the Arab world as merely agency-less pieces of dominos, falling along a pre-determined path of democratisation.

Sara Fregonese is British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is a political geographer with a background in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Studies. Her research is on urban conflict and sovereignty in the Middle East, particularly Lebanon. Her book ‘War in Lebanon: an Urban Geopolitics’ is currently in preparation.

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Event Date: 1 December 2011
Royal Holloway University of London
2 Gower Street
London WC1E 6DP

City/ State/ Resistance: Spaces of Protest in the Middle East and Mediterranean

Interdisciplinary workshop from Royal Holloway University

Sponsored by The British Academy

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Lynn A. Staeheli (Geography, Durham)
Youth and citizenship: Struggles on and off the Street

Young people may well represent the greatest potential and greatest challenges for democratic participation and change. In countries around the world, they are imagined as capable of effecting dramatic social and political change. As a result, a range of institutions and agents expends considerable effort to foster, but also to direct that potential. Citizenship education and civic engagement programmes, for instance, often promote pedagogies of active and responsible citizenship to be enacted in families, communities, and civil society.  Yet recent youth-led protests in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East make clear that youth often take the ëlessonsí of active citizenship into the streets, challenging and making demands on the state. The result is often an activist, insurgent pedagogy of citizenship, as compared to the active but depoliticised citizenship developed through education and civic engagement programmes.  The paper draws from examples of student activism in Lebanon and the UK to outline a framework for understanding efforts to shape young peoplesí citizenship on and off the street.

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