Lefebvre's ‘right to the city’ was an expression of a new politics of citizenship, residency and above all the right to urban life. We thus build our argument in this paper on the Lefebvre concept and through the case study of Kufr Aqab, the northernmost neighbourhood of the occupied city of Jerusalem. In order to systematically displace Palestinian Jerusalemites and to achieve the Judaisation of Jerusalem, the right to urban life and any sort of ‘right to the city’ have been completely denied. In fact, through the spatial–demographic policies practised by Israeli authorities, Kufr Aqab has been aggressively excluded from the central area of Jerusalem (by the separation wall and the military border crossing) and progressively ethnically segregated. Kufr Aqab is highly populated by displaced Palestinian Jerusalemites since it is the only alternative that allows them to maintain their Jerusalem residency and their few civic rights. Ongoing unregulated urban development and deliberate informality has rendered Kufr Aqab a space of legal and civic exceptions and an insecure environment suspended within a notion of ‘permanent temporariness’
Questions of identity, belonging and place are heightened in societies under protracted military occupation. Bridging scholarship on territorial justice and settler colonialism, this paper examines the impacts of, and responses to, the misrecognition of Arab residents enacted by the Israeli state in the occupied Golan Heights. The injustice of misrecognition entails the imposition on the indigenous population of a Zionist ethnogeography consolidated through Jewish settlements, forced citizenship and discriminatory land and water policies. Focusing on the distinctive agricultural practices by which a Jawlani (Syrian Golani) identity is forged, we highlight the role of sumud ("steadfastness") as a strategy of non-violent resistance. Sumud here rests on the mobilization of communal norms of land and water management, evident in the creation of counter-infrastructures and water collectives 2 supporting apple orchards. In the face of settler colonial misrecognition, Jawlani rootedness expresses a distinctive ontology on land with a conjoined right of resourcehood.
This paper is motivated by the pressing need to understand how water use and irrigated agriculture can be transformed in the interests of both social and environmental sustainability. How can such change come about? In particular, given the generally mixed results of simplified, state-initiated projects of social engineering, what is the potential for transformations in societal regimes of governance to be anchored in the everyday practices of farmers? In this paper, we address these enduring questions in novel ways. We argue that the concept of bricolage, commonly applied to analysing community management of resources, can be developed and deployed to explain broad societal processes of change. To illustrate this, we draw on case studies of irrigated agriculture in Saharan areas of Algeria and in the occupied Golan Heights in Syria. Our case analysis offers insights into how processes of institutional, technological and ideational bricolage entwine, how the state becomes implicated in them and how multiple instances of bricolage accumulate over time to produce meaningful systemic change. In concluding, however, we reflect on the greater propensity of contemporary bricolage to rebalance power relations than to open the way to more ecological farming practices.
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