Political Authority in the Ruins

Successive wars following the Arab uprisings have profoundly weakened the states of the Middle East. In countries like Syria, Yemen, and Libya—but also, going back further, Iraq and Lebanon—security, material aid, and public services like water and electricity are frequently provided by foreign-backed armed groups, local civic associations, or diasporic networks. These actors compete to control territory and gain the allegiance of local populations primarily in urban space. The dominant conceptual scheme, typically modelled on the ideal Weberian state, with a presumed monopoly on the legitimate means of violence, thus offers limited guidance. This project proposes that the city, rather than the state, should be the starting point for understanding struggles over governance. An urban lens can provide new theoretical insights and methodological tools to help scholars make sense of these transformations through its attention to the multiplicity of authorities and scales, including local non-state informal as well as national and transnational actors, and to the co-production of space and political order. This project will build on the long tradition of ‘seeing like a city’ (Magnusson 2011) and the emerging broader literature on conflict and post-conflict cities. It will bring together a multidisciplinary group of social scientists—many of whom work at institutions in the Global South and all of whom have deep local expertise—for a workshop aimed at producing a journal special issue outlining an urban approach to wartime and post-war governance. The project will make theoretical and empirical contributions to scholarship on political orders, cities and the state in the Middle East and on wartime and post-war governance more generally, using case studies from the Global South to ‘theorise back’ to the Northern-dominated disciplines it will engage. These will also be of value to practitioners, which it will engage through policy briefings.