The State, Sewers, and Security: How Does the Egyptian State Reframe Environmental Disasters as Terrorist Threats?

Arefin, Mohammed Rafi

doi:10.1080/24694452.2018.1497474

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…By analyzing clientelism as an arena and a means through which the state manifests itself in relation to urban hazards, we reveal the mutually reinforcing production of hazardscapes and hazardstates. The study shows how state making and clientelist governance, including multifaceted forms of political favoritism, create urban hazardscapes, as much as the management of urban disasters motivates new configurations of clientelist governance within contemporary hazardstates (Arefin 2019). Hazardscapes thus imbricate with hazardstates on the basis of clientelist relationships that determine the uneven exposure to environmental hazards and unequal experiences of state making across social groups.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…A similar history is common to many urban agglomerations within the 2,000-km-long mountains of the Serra do Mar, with each rainy season bringing destruction of abodes of poor residents under torrents of rain and slides of mud, as inundated valley floors paralyze life and livelihood along the river margins. The catastrophization of natural disaster risk serves state making through its repression of narratives of causation in capitalist urbanization and the everyday political-ecological realities of hazardous urban margins, simultaneously enabling the mobilization of claims to authoritative state scientific expertise (Valencio 2014;Arefin 2019).…”

Section: Researching Clientelism In Flood-prone Citiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Urban Floods, Clientelism, and the Political Ecology of the State in Latin America

Coates

Nygren

2020

Annals of the American Association of Geographers

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In this article, we examine the coproduction of hazardous urban space and new formations of clientelist state governance. Work on hazards and vulnerability frequently demonstrates how hazardous urban spaces are produced, but a critical understanding of state power is often left untouched. Correspondingly, scholars analyzing clientelism and state formation habitually discuss the configuration of new forms of governance and the consolidation of state power without intersecting these processes with the production of vulnerabilities and "hazardous nature." Drawing on ethnographic research in urban areas susceptible to serious floods and landslides in Brazil and Mexico, we argue that clientelist governance and state making, including complex forms of political favoritism, create urban hazardscapes, as much as the management of urban disasters acts to reconfigure patron-client relations within "hazardstates." The article contributes to an emerging body of literature analyzing linkages between urban environmental governance, state authority, and the reproduction of vulnerability.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Researching Clientelism In Flood-prone Citiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban Floods, Clientelism, and the Political Ecology of the State in Latin America

Coates

Nygren

2020

Annals of the American Association of Geographers

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“…While these authors focus on conflicts around sanitation in order to analyze (urban) politics more broadly (see also Arefin, 2019b), in this text my intention is to examine the configuration of power relations that contribute to the failure of sanitation and river cleanup policies and initiatives in Mexico. Key to the explanation I wish to posit is the notion of "duplication" (Mbembe, 2001;Mbembe and Roitman, 1995;Larkin, 2013).…”

Section: Wwtps As Processes Of Urban Metabolismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wastewater and wishful thinking: Treatment plants to “revive” the Santiago River in Mexico

McCulligh

2022

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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This article grapples with issues of urban wastewater sanitation in one of Mexico's most polluted river basins, through an analysis of a river restoration project centered on the construction of municipal wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). Taking an ethnographic approach to the study of infrastructure, the main argument is that, beyond their possible contribution to reducing pollutant loads, in this context municipal WWTPs can best be understood through the concept of “duplication,” whereby the infrastructure works serve as a vehicle for the transfer of public resources to the private sector, through construction and operation contracts. At the same time, these plants also fulfill objectives related to their symbolic value, in this case as indicators of a commitment to resolving one of the state's main socio-environmental conflicts, while studiously avoiding its root causes, including industrial pollution sources. From an urban political ecology perspective, the paper also examines how investment in wastewater treatment infrastructure in the basin continues to reinforce social and environmental inequities, particularly for peri-urban communities along the Santiago River.

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“…In seeming contradiction, authoritarian regimes also have the power to not govern resources, creating gray zones of environmental chaos (21). In Alexandria, Egypt, failing urban infrastructures allowed a 2015 storm to quickly flood parts of the city and left seven dead; the military-backed regime (22) blamed terrorists, shifting blame from government neglect and climate change to outsiders (23).…”

Section: Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

Contemporary Populism and the Environment

Ofstehage

Wolford

Borras³

2022

Annu. Rev. Environ. Resour.

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This review engages with literature on authoritarian populism, focusing specifically on its relationship to the environment. We analyze hybrid combinations of authoritarianism and populism to explore three themes from the literature: environmental governance, social and political representations of nature, and resistance. In the environmental governance section, we analyze how governments have increasingly resorted to populist politics to expand extractivism; certain commodities with national security implications have become key commodities to be protected; and borders, frontiers, and zones of inclusion/exclusion have become flash points. In the social and political representations of nature section, we analyze settler colonialism and sacrifice zones as organizing principles for relations with the environment. In our final section on resistance, we review literature highlighting pushback to authoritarian populism from peasant, indigenous, and worker movements. Variants of populism and authoritarianism are likely to persist amid increasing competition over resources as components of responses to environmental and climate crisis. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Volume 47 is October 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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The State, Sewers, and Security: How Does the Egyptian State Reframe Environmental Disasters as Terrorist Threats?

Cited by 8 publications

References 27 publications

Urban Floods, Clientelism, and the Political Ecology of the State in Latin America

Urban Floods, Clientelism, and the Political Ecology of the State in Latin America

Wastewater and wishful thinking: Treatment plants to “revive” the Santiago River in Mexico

Contemporary Populism and the Environment

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