A View from the Bridge

6 October is Cairo’s longest overhead highway corridor. As such, its function is to “transport vehicles from one place to another,”⁸ enabling unimpeded movement that bypasses the complex urban fabric of a mega-city like Cairo. Egypt’s successive governments seem to believe that highways and roads are awe-inspiring projects that reflect the regime’s projected might, technical advancement, and ability to participate in global standards of modernity and progress.⁹ The regimes’ emphasis is on infrastructure as a spectacle observed from a distance. I focus instead on temporal and sensorial interactions with the Bridge as a conduit of mobility on the one hand, and as a static and concrete presence on the other. Due to the Bridge’s length, limited exits, and frequent congestion, a commute from start to finish can last anywhere between 45 minutes to almost two hours, but this time is not empty time, nor is the view from the Bridge uniform and unchanging. Large and small billboards punctuate the journey, as they emerge at the horizon and fall behind the rear-view mirror. They advertise tv shows, films, consumer products, and foodstuffs. Most remarkably, ads in English showing leafy suburbs promise an escape from Cairo’s congestion and pollution, much like the Bridge itself. The Bridge cuts through populous districts, sometimes mere meters away from residential buildings. Commuters I have interviewed shared their experience looking directly into a family’s home while being stuck in traffic. What reflections emerge from this kind of proximity and visibility? What desires and fantasies are stored in¹⁰ and (re)produced through the commuter’s engagement with the billboards? What rhythms of thoughts and feelings occur between moments of stillness and moments of unimpeded travel along the Bridge? (Figure 1)¹¹

View Full Size

Real Estate Billboard, Sapphire, against a mosque.

Citation: Middle East Law and Governance 17, 2 (2025) ; 10.1163/18763375-20251565

photo by author

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

6 October offers its commuters hypermobility. Following Farha Ghannam, I identify mobility as liminal;¹² what makes mobility liminal is its condition of being in-between. Originally associated with Victor Turner’s work on rites of passage and social rituals, liminality may refer to a time, or space,¹³ where social structures are temporarily suspended. As a general and capacious concept, it can be translated into other contexts.¹⁴ Wherever and whenever subjects are in motion (i.e., not in spaces of fixed social structures), they experience events and encounters “that may transform their identities, realign social hierarchies, or reinforce power inequalities.”¹⁵ Nothing about the Bridge as a concrete structure offers such encounters to commuters, but the billboards’ messaging, proximity to buildings and families, and social messaging regarding the Bridge’s efficiency in bypassing congestion, can create these encounters. I understand such encounters to produce affective responses in the subject, i.e. responses that impress on and emerge from mind and body, modifying the subject “through the idea of desire and potential.”¹⁶ In other words, what do people experience in their body, and what attendant ideas emerge as they move along the Bridge? How does this affect their mood and how they relate to the city? What atmosphere emerges from these affective encounters, and what kinds of ideas about the city, the self, and the other, are produced, reinforced, or ruptured?

Most of my commuting interlocutors were upper middle class university students and young professionals who drove to the other end of the city to study or work. Many drove their own cars, while others employed private chauffeurs. Tarek,¹⁷ an engineer living in Dokki, commuted daily to his New Cairo office along the Bridge. He recalled exhaustion and boredom on more congested segments, ruminating on advertisements for gated communities, thinking about where to move should he prepare for marriage, and expressed little interest in those parts of Cairo that he crossed. Yet, he recalled moments when, during heavy congestion, he looked through a building meters away from his car. He described comic scenes of families in intimate settings, perhaps oblivious to his gaze, and felt uncomfortable about the invasion of privacy the Bridge created. He also wondered about the Bridge’s efficiency, and how its design and limited exits not only failed to alleviate congestion, but also caused more traffic, as, for example, vehicles breaking down on the Bridge could not be easily towed away (Figure 2).

View Full Size

Safia North Coast Project, by Cazar Developments atop buildings.

Citation: Middle East Law and Governance 17, 2 (2025) ; 10.1163/18763375-20251565

photo by author

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

Maisa was a lot more abrasive about those areas the Bridge allowed her to bypass. A recent graduate who commuted from New Cairo to Downtown Cairo where she worked for an international ngo, she loved the shortcut. “To be honest, I do not think much about all the neighborhoods that I cross through. At this point where I am just trying to get to and from work, they are an inconvenience that I need to fly over; I just do not have the time to be stuck in that kind of traffic.” Maisa’s observation shows how the Bridge has turned many of Cairo’s inner neighborhoods into enclaves. Ashoub and El-Khateeb have argued that flyovers across Heliopolis produced middle-class enclaves that are “spatially disconnected and made suspicious about the ‘unfamiliar city.’”¹⁸ By contrast, this case is one of enclave reversal: it is the inner neighborhoods that are quartered and written off by the Bridge, as it produces the same affective register of unfamiliarity and alienation.

Tarek often finds himself in a subjunctive mood, in which his concrete experiences along the Bridge produce troubled affect that unsettles the accepted rhythm of inequality and violence throughout the city. His experience confirms Turner’s claim that “through liminality, a society is able to evaluate itself, to reflect upon its structure and the possibilities of changing it; [and that] due to this quality liminality can be a threat to the social order.”¹⁹ One should be cautious not to overstate the probability of such an outcome. There is, after all, an end to liminality, and liminal subjects are eventually reintegrated into their social structures. Commuters end their journey by reaching work or home, back to business as usual. Like the billboards, interactions at home or workspace produce a counter desire for the very exclusion and inequality that troubles Tarek (Figures 3 and 4).

View Full Size

A view from the Bridge.

Citation: Middle East Law and Governance 17, 2 (2025) ; 10.1163/18763375-20251565

photo by author

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

View Full Size

Downtown Corridor.

Citation: Middle East Law and Governance 17, 2 (2025) ; 10.1163/18763375-20251565

photo by author

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

Similarly, Maisa’s appreciation for the purpose of 6 October reinforces her unfamiliarity with other neighborhoods. I argue that national discourses about the Bridge and its functionality reinforce conceptions about Cairo’s inner neighborhood disorderliness, congestion, and nuisance, ironically feeding into the billboards’ promises of cleaner, quieter desert suburbs. Bearing in mind the social profile of the average commuter, an upper middle-class citizen who owns a car and lives in such districts as New Cairo, it is clear how affective interactions with the Bridge play “a crucial role in the politics of urban space”²⁰ by reinforcing conceptions about class, the “classed” other, and Cairo’s different neighborhoods.

To Whom the Billboards Speak

What about those who are denied the experience of liminal mobility along the Bridge? For those residing near 6 October, ranging from middle to lower middle classes, the Bridge is a violent imposition on their right to the city: they are dispossessed of a clear view of the sky, exposed to intensified pollution and to the commuter’s wandering gaze. I walked along the length of the Bridge, speaking to doormen and their wives in Abbasiyya. A particularly welcoming woman led me to her rooftop room and opened the window. The Bridge was very close, and the noise was incessant. The dust was worse. She cleaned apartments and knew how much dirt accumulates in the rooms near the Bridge.

Further west, I made my way up a building located near Ramsis and Ghamra, just outside of Downtown Cairo. The place was decaying, and apartments seemed empty. As I extended my arm out of a window, I could almost touch the Bridge. In a local coffeeshop, I chatted with an older man drinking his morning tea. I asked him if he was a resident, how long he had lived here, and if he remembered a time before the Bridge. He complained about the proximity of the Bridge to the buildings, insisting that the residents were here first. Above us two massive billboards showed a very expensive car and a new development on the North Coast. I asked him what he thought of the billboards, and he replied with dismissive detachment as he turned his face the other way, “these do not speak to me,” he said. “These things they show, they are not meant for me.” Seen from the Bridge, billboards reproduced social relations and cultivated desires. Seen from street level, they were exercising the same ideological function by reinforcing social exclusion.

For those riding minibuses, Cairo’s most popular form of transportation,²¹ street level experience was often similar. The Bridge narrowed the space available for travel, contributing to the very congestion it was meant to spare its users from. Long commute time onboard a minibus or a rickshaw offers a view of other vehicles and the looming concrete Bridge. Affect here is of narrowness and contraction,²² reproducing the struggle for mobility across the city. Street vendors often populate space directly underneath the Bridge as a shield from the sun and to target pedestrian crowds. Other spaces exhibit diy advertising, hand painted ads, or repair shops’ phone numbers. Sometimes the space is used for off-street parking, either informally or through local neighborhood associations. If the Bridge violently encroached on residents and pedestrians, then these examples perhaps speak to moments of “quiet [counter]-encroachment of the ordinary.” (Figures 5 and 6)²³

View Full Size

ned Real Estate Advertisement.

Citation: Middle East Law and Governance 17, 2 (2025) ; 10.1163/18763375-20251565

photo by author

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

View Full Size

Minibuses beneath the Bridge, Ramsis Sq.

Citation: Middle East Law and Governance 17, 2 (2025) ; 10.1163/18763375-20251565

photo by author

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

Flyover Country: The Sovereign Gaze

I have proposed an analysis of Cairo’s largest flyover and considered the entanglement of urban policy, “political rationality, administrative techniques, and material systems”²⁴ to understand infrastructure as an ideological apparatus and a producer of affective subjectivities. Since my 2017 fieldwork, the military regime has carried out the National Roads Project, including the construction of hundreds of flyovers and highways across the country.²⁵ I now look at what infrastructure can reveal about modalities of governance congealed in infrastructure.

Despite regime change, the current infrastructural project seems more of an extension of, rather than a departure from, the Egypt 2050 development plan proposed in 2008.²⁶ Ashoub and El-Khateeb show that this plan imported a Gulf model, with its emphasis on widening roads and the creation of boulevards and other aesthetic features attractive to an international clientele.²⁷ The current appeal to foreign financing and debt follows the same model. Like 6 October, today’s flyovers were built through urban violence and dispossession. Building 6 October demanded the demolition of the All-Saints Cathedral, which sat behind the Egyptian Museum;²⁸ a replacement Cathedral was built in Zamalek. More recently, public squares and gardens in Heliopolis have been replaced with multiple flyovers, despite the opposition of the Heliopolis Heritage Initiative and various petitions. The Firdaws Axis caused outrage after it “sliced through” the city of the dead and graves were razed to the ground.²⁹ A corridor in Giza caused a stir after residents shared pictures of scaffolding inches away from their balconies.³⁰

What is new about these developments? The official response is quite telling. A newspaper article relays the Minister of Transport’s comments that those buildings were illegal and “violating the buffer division line.” Not only would residents receive no compensation for damages, but these buildings would also be demolished and their owners fined.³¹ As for the Firdaws Axis, the governor of Cairo said that registered graves were left untouched. This language reflects a much more aggressive intolerance of informality, and an overriding desire by the regime to reassert sovereignty and to construct the image of a “New Republic” controlling land, laws, and urban expansion. Similarly, the regime’s disregard for Heliopolis protests highlights the erosion of neighborhood organizing across Cairo and the devaluation of sites that have historically acted as stores of social and cultural capital. Recent flyover construction across Heliopolis and the cancellation of the metro line that would have connected it to the airport hint at a reconfiguration of socio-economic capital, as the regime attempts to shore up the New Administrative Capital’s value, return on investment, and prestige instead.³² It is the regime who decides which of Cairo’s districts are “hot spots,” and which are merely for transit.

Finally, the past few years have seen the rise of a new phenomenon: lands underneath new flyovers have become populated with cafes, shops, and other services. The governor of Cairo, a retired military officer, claimed that the idea was introduced by a private citizen who sought cheap rent space.³³ Others observed that this new trend reflected the regime’s attempt to replace public or open urban spaces with rent generating schemes,³⁴ consolidating a hyper-extractive governance model. Moreover, the Ministry of Defense (mod) and the Armed Forces have played an expanded economic role under the New Republic, which has blurred the line between public entities and private agents. Yezid Sayegh shows that the mod has been granted full usufruct rights to 21 intercity highways and the adjacent land strips, generating rent through tolls, as well as any franchises built along the land strip.³⁵ Those interested in renting the space underneath Cairo’s flyovers must process their application and fees through the National Company for Road Construction, Development, and Management, a subsidiary of the National Service Products Organization, itself a subsidiary of the mod.³⁶ If the space underneath 6 October was “ambiguous”³⁷ enough to allow for the counter-encroachment of ordinary citizens, the land beneath new flyovers is rigidly structured and managed by state entities either heavily infiltrated or influenced by retired military personnel or belonging to the mod itself.

It remains to be asked what affective conditions will result from these recent developments, as multiple flyovers become a recurrent, concrete reality in the lives of more residents and commuters. What feelings are induced in the body as it moves through and experiences the city in terms of frequent flyovers? What affect of contraction or expansion does the removal of greeneries and the closure of public spaces produce? What consequences do such affective states have on the politics of urban space and the participatory civic imaginary? What do commuters recall or fail to recall when passing over or below the flyover that has replaced Rabaa Square and other areas, which are latent with revolutionary history and subversive meanings? What functional logics, what desires, sensibilities, and forms of attunement are produced, and others atrophied, by the hypermobility resulting from the frequent use of flyovers? What subjectivities are forged in the constant experience of motion and the loss of stillness, pause, and rest? What gaze are Egyptian citizens subjected to when facing signs along new flyovers that say “With you, wherever you are”?³⁸

Infrastructural Power and “Numbing” in Iraq: The Struggle over Sadr City

Ansar Jasim

Otto Suhr Inistitute of Political Science, Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

ansar.jasim@fu-berlin.de

This article takes infrastructural power in Iraq as a lens to examine state-society relations. Studying infrastructure means not only looking at the “concrete ingredient”³⁹ that produces neighborhoods but also focusing on semiotic practices of meaning-making and representation. Citizens of Baghdad recognize and criticize infrastructure projects as a numbing strategy of the state. Through the notion of takhdir (numbing), this article looks at how infrastructure mediates hegemonic and counter-hegemonic practices at the heart of state-society relations in authoritarian contexts. Drawing on 11 months of ethnographic and archival fieldwork in Baghdad, I focus on the case of one of the biggest infrastructure projects in Iraqi history, the neighborhood of Madinat al-Thawra (Revolution City), officially called today Sadr City (Madinat al-Sadr) to show how Iraqi governments have used infrastructure projects as a hegemonic practice.

Infrastructural Power and Semiotic Practices

I build here on Michael Mann’s concept of “infrastructural power”⁴⁰ while linking it to the concept of hegemony to examine how Sadr City was constructed by several hegemonic regimes along semiotic-symbolic practices of numbing.

Mann defines “infrastructural power” as the “institutional capacity of a central state […] to penetrate its territories […]. This is collective power, ‘power through’ society, coordinating social life through state infrastructures.”⁴¹ As Sidney Tarrow points out, Mann’s structural notion bears conceptual similarity to Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony.⁴² Gramsci’s concept draws on the question of how power can be constituted through consent rather than force.⁴³ Reading his concept of hegemony through an infrastructural lens, I study how consent can be generated through infrastructure. I argue that infrastructural power is the capacity to organize consent both materially and semiotically. I argue that this consent, which is produced through the “concrete ingredient” of infrastructure, also depends on a symbolic-semiotic level that reveals hegemonic strategies by the regime to organize consent through takhdir (numbing) but also counter-hegemonic practices by the people, for instance by mocking infrastructure projects.

Numbing Through Asphalt

The poet and investigative journalist Ihab Sheghedel⁴⁴ describes takhdir as one of three ways Iraqi prime ministers have tried to pacify the population. Takhdir “help[s] […] converting asphalt into a political achievement […].”⁴⁵ However, the taxi driver said that, if the prime minister’s politics is only about infrastructure, then this is a mere attempt to numb people. Takhdir is also the knowledge and understanding of infrastructural politics. It is a way to read how consent is supposed to work. By naming the current politics of prime minister Al-Sudani as takhdir, the taxi driver described how current and previous Iraqi governments thought of state-society relations. According to this working, takhdir is simultaneously a hegemonic and counter-hegemonic practice. On the one hand, takhdir is a practice used to pacify people by bribing them through infrastructural projects with promises of a better life and better future, while the moment this is recognized and named as takhdir, the working of infrastructure as a hegemonic practice is exposed and becomes a counter-hegemonic practice. Hence, takhdir appears as a dialectical concept used to express or make unconscious processes visible.⁴⁶ Accordingly, infrastructural politics in Iraq can be understood, not as the achievements of individual prime ministers, but as the result of historical processes, and takhdir is a claim-making dynamic through infrastructure that reveals the agency of people.

In this sense, takhdir seems similar to what Adela Zhang has described as “populist infrastructures” in Lima.⁴⁷ Zhang shows how the politics of meaning-making through specific aesthetic forms like coloring bridges adopted by one specific political party to produce popular legitimacy, is a “fundamentally unstable political practice.”⁴⁸ As the same forms can easily be re-signified by critiques to express disapproval. Hereby, Zhang shows the instability in the meaning-making process. Still, despite this variability, “numbing through infrastructure” appears as a strategy of the government to avoid the far more cost-intensive need to repress protest on the streets. As “You give them electricity, you pave the roads, you build bridges,” as a friend describes, is the government’s plan to gain legitimacy at the popular level to avoid an uprising despite the socially unbearable situation in Basra. Penny Harvey and Hannah Know describe “enchantments of infrastructure” as the link between the “legitimacy of rule” and “the construction of built infrastructures; […] roads come to endure as enchanted sites of contemporary state-craft despite their capacity to disappoint and/or the likelihood of generating negative consequences.”⁴⁹ I also argue that takhdir in authoritarian contexts is far more than a process of “enchantment:” it is also a way to generate consent.

Long before 2003, Iraqi prime ministers used large infrastructure projects to project power and pacify potential constituencies. One of the most outstanding infrastructural projects of the 1960s was a housing project for rural migrants: Madinat al-Thawra (Revolution City), today officially called Sadr City. Neighborhoods as infrastructure are “material components of structures, which enable, mediate or hinders social processes, modes of relationship and forms of organization or are newly shaped in social processes.”⁵⁰ Madinat al-Thawra is today one of the largest and most densely populated neighborhoods of the Iraqi capital. I argue that successive political regimes and prime ministers claimed “rule” over this multimillion-inhabitants district by not only implementing specific policies onto it, but also renaming it. Amina Nolte writes, “[This] is crucial to understand how approaches to infrastructure relate to the ‘political’ with regards to the past and future […]. Infrastructures carry past hegemonies […] and entail promises for the future.”⁵¹ I suggest however, along with Zhang, that material politics are in need of “semiological assistance.”⁵²

Semiotic Practices and Hegemony

Naming⁵³ is a form of symbolic power. The different naming practices and their significance to the hegemonic project in this city reveal how semiotic practices relate to the materiality of infrastructural power.

Thawra (Revolution) has been used as a shortcut for Madinat al-Thawra (Revolution City). It is one of the first names given, after the 1958 Revolution, to the large infrastructure project known as the “Eastern Baghdad Slum Clearance Project.” There is a strong popular belief that it was the revolutionary leader Abdelkarim Qasim who granted⁵⁴ lands to Baghdad’s rural migrant population living in mud and reed houses (sarifa pl. saraʾif). The 1958 Revolution happened in a context of mass organizing for workers and housing rights in the saraʾif settlements.⁵⁵ My interlocutors often share their family narratives, according to which it was thanks to Qasim that people would live in their city: Revolution City.

In 1955, three years before the toppling of the monarchy, Athens-based architectural and urban planning firm Doxiadis Associates⁵⁶ was hired by the Iraqi Development Board to develop a housing program through “slum clearance.”⁵⁷ Doxiadis designed a grid system with square sectors⁵⁸ and state-built brick or concrete houses and public services, including public parks and kindergartens.⁵⁹ The program was not to be realized before the 1958 Revolution, and the resettlement of sara ͗if dwellers did not take place until the 1960s. The new regime of Abdelkarim Qasim (1958–1963) embraced Doxiadis’s plans and implemented the Eastern Baghdad Development Project. Madinat al-Thawra came into being on a much bigger scale. The initial area of al-Thawra was 5800 dunums of state land, on which the Ministry of Public Works and Housing first built 911 housing units in 1960–1961 to house low-income civil servants.⁶⁰ The remaining land was divided into 144 m² plots⁶¹ and public infrastructure was supposed to be developed.⁶² During the time of Qasim, political activity and publications were allowed, at least in theory.⁶³ Madinat al-Thawra was a material-semiotic expression of Qasim’s hegemonic project, as became clear when oppositional Baʿthists mocked it as the “Revolution Village” (qariyat al-thawra) in leaflets they distributed amongst saraʾif dwellers.⁶⁴ The project became an object of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic narratives.

However, while land was distributed and saraʾif dwellers started building houses, much of the promised infrastructure did not see the light of day until the anti-Qasim February 1963 coup. Qasim’s government enjoyed popularity among impoverished saraʾif dwellers and residents of al-Thawra, who protested the 1963 coup. A communist movement, organized around military officer Hassan Al-Sari ͑ in the saraʾif settlements and al-Thawra,⁶⁵ attempted a putsch against the new Baath regime on July 3, 1963. The government then brutally relocated the dwellers, during what came to be known as the “black night” (laila soda),⁶⁶ to Al-Thawra district, which at that moment of time and within the context of the new political regime appeared to many as dangerous and empty, located at the Eastern edge of Baghdad with kilometers of empty land between Al-Thawra and Baghdad and hardly any developed infrastructure.⁶⁷ However, it is precisely through this practice of resistance against the putschists that the neighborhood and its name became synonymous with “infrastructural power” in favor of Abdelkarim Qasim.

Being forcefully displaced to the new neighborhood, many could only afford to build a house made of clay and straw. Some lived in these until the late 1970s while others had to wait until the 1990s to build brick houses. After the distribution of land, residents were left to themselves, although supervision by government engineers was available, at least in theory.⁶⁸ Self-build dwelling was fully underway, and the government complained about the new dwellers violating construction codes.⁶⁹

The post February 1963 coup government of Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr was dethroned by another coup in November 1963, led by Abdul Salam Arif and supported by the cia. Arif banned all political parties and started a violent repression campaign that did not spare Madinat al-Thawra.⁷⁰ His government renamed the area Hayy Al-Rafidain (Mesopotamia district) to remove any trace of Abdelkarim Qasim’s past projects and the strong connection to the 1958 Revolution. However, the name Hayy al-Rafidain did not stick in people’s memory. None of my interlocutors associated Arif with any infrastructural projects in the neighborhood. Once again, people were left to their own devices to develop basic infrastructures.

Coups had clear implications on how the respective political regimes claimed hegemony through the realized infrastructure projects: “With each new coup and regime that followed, the political considerations that influenced the rehousing of the saraʾif dwellers shifted, with implications for how the neighborhoods were realized on the ground.”⁷¹ Indeed, there was a significant drop in planned public infrastructure provision in the area.⁷² It seems that rather than “subsuming the inhabitants of the new neighborhood through asphalt” (takhdir), “the politics of abandonment” (ihmal) prevailed.⁷³ At that time, the neighborhood’s incomplete infrastructure meant backwardness to people from other areas, as my interlocutors recall. In that sense, ihmal too is part of infrastructural power: it structured local lives around nonexistent water provision, sewage systems, or pavements, and constructed them as socially backward within the ideological understanding of different political regimes. This is in accordance with Gramsci who sees the production of “backwardness” as a result of hegemonic strategies in the present.⁷⁴

Around 1968, the name of the neighborhood changed back to Madinat Al-Thawra. Some argue that after the Baʿthist takeover of 1968 – which was framed as “revolution” – the name “Madinat al-Thawra” was reintroduced⁷⁵ by the government of Ahmed Hassan Al-Bakr.⁷⁶ However, the provision of public infrastructure was poor, and the main streets leading into the neighborhood were only partly paved. Names for streets, such as ra ͗s al-tableet (end of pavement), allude to a semiotic-material geography of the district as perceived by the people. Madinat al-Thawra during that time is the hegemonic naming, not as a Baʿthist project, but rather within the understanding of Abdelkarim Qasim’s revolution. This was reified by an intense cultural development in the neighborhood during the time of the National Progressive Front (1973/74–1979) – a coalition between the Baʿth party, which was then in power, and such smaller oppositional actors as the Iraqi Communist party and others – which allowed for a certain degree of free political action: “We were playing theater while still walking in the mud” is how one interlocutor described this time, alluding to a contradiction between the infrastructural and cultural realities in which he was living.

Becoming Saddam City

To keep the effects of war away from Baghdadis,⁷⁷ the government launched several prestigious urban development projects during the early days of the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988). Most of Madinat al-Thawra at that point did not have running water or paved roads. Only the main streets where double decker buses from Baghdad were running seemed to be paved.⁷⁸ Some people were still living in the mud-houses that they had built 20 years earlier.

In 1982, Madinat al-Thawra gained attention within the Baʿth leadership. An urban development project was planned during that year but appears to be implemented only in a few areas.⁷⁹ For the inhabitants affected by these changes, it seemed to have made a huge difference as the history of the neighborhood was often narrated in terms of its infrastructural changes. My interlocutors recall when their streets were paved or the sewage established and generally connect these developments to the names of the prime ministers rather than years.

The neighborhood’s name changed from Madinat al-Thawra to Madinat Saddam through an April 1982 official decree (Amanat Baghdad 1982). While it is often argued that Saddam Hussain did so solely out of hate for the districts’ inhabitants,⁸⁰ hate does not organize consent. Rather, I argue that we can better understand the renaming in the context of infrastructure power. To put a claim to the massive infrastructure project of Madinat al-Thawra – as Saddam’s predecessors tried to do – state officials had first to introduce infrastructural changes that would affect everyday lives in a noticeable manner (new roads, sewage systems, water infrastructure, etc.). The neighborhood at the time of this urban upgrading was neglected with almost no running water and no sewage system, wastewater running openly in small canals on the streets. Decorating himself with an infrastructure project in the state of decay or ihmal, would not have had a prestigious effect for Saddam Hussain. Only through infrastructural development project could the renaming operation be translated into political power.

How does this relate to the notion of takhdir? The name Madinat Saddam, for the first time, directly linked the neighborhood to the name of the head of the state. While many other places were renamed during the reign of Saddam Hussain with direct relation to his name (for example “Saddam Village”)⁸¹ and new projects were built, Madinat al-Thawra was the most densely populated area in Baghdad and Iraq. Building a similar housing project to stage infrastructural power was neither planned⁸² nor possible considering the growing resources being invested into the war efforts.⁸³

The above quote points to another form of takhdir in the context of authoritarian rule. On the one hand, the neighborhood had to appear worthy of the name of the president while, on the other hand, people would not dare to criticize it, since it bore the president’s name. In a hegemonic understanding, any critique would mean disrespect of Saddam Hussain.

Hence, takhdir is generated through hegemony. Even during the time of Saddam Hussain, the new name competed with the popular name of Madinat Al-Thawra, showing the ineffectiveness of takhdir and the complexity of how to generate consent. Furthermore, the persistence of the name Madinat Al-Thawra bears the still working traces of the past hegemony of the regime of Abdelkarim Qasim through the semiotic-symbolic practice of naming of the district. Those traces continue to work today.

Conclusion

In April 2003, very shortly after the fall of the regime, the district was officially called Sadr City while Madinat al Thawra, Thawra, and lately just Al Madina continues to be used widely. A narrow focus on the new name, which alludes to the new Islamist dominance in Iraq, runs the risk to confuse the official naming with actual power and veils the continuity in the claim making to the neighborhood through infrastructural power. Post-2003, the district gained new semiotic meaning through the resistance against the US occupation and the following repeated sieges on the district. Subsequent governments have planned a new district for the inhabitants, to lower the population density by choosing the name “New Sadr City” hereby again trying to employ infrastructural power. By showing the successful and unsuccessful politics of renaming of the district, I have shown how past hegemonies left material and semiotic traces on the neighborhood and how infrastructural power is interlinked with the politics of takhdir and ihmal. This adds nuance to our understanding of state-society in Iraq before and after 2003. An analysis of these relations through infrastructural power reveals continuities in Iraq on a material-semiotic level. This aligns with Peter Harling’s⁸⁴ critique advocating for an understanding of Iraqi history that transcends ruptures, focusing instead on enduring patterns and continuities. At the same time, the proposed understanding of infrastructural power also invites a rethinking of the semiotic and material aspect of infrastructure as a lens for scrutinizing power relations in authoritarian contexts and post-dictatorship societies.

Dams, Decay, and Droughts: Waiting for Water in Northeastern Tunisia

Dhouha Djerbi

| orcid: 0000-0003-1245-2082

Department of International Relations/Political Science, Geneva, Switzerland

dhouha.djerbi@graduateinstitute.ch

As the sun rises over a smallholding in rural northeastern Tunisia, I accompany A. and her sister – two small farmers – to their shared well. This well, inherited decades ago, serves the siblings who have divided their family-owned land among themselves since their father’s passing. The well used to meet the irrigation needs of their plot, which spans just under four hectares and is home to citrus trees, olive orchards, and a few other small exploitations. Now, the land is partitioned into uneven sections for each sibling – some live on the land while others reside nearby but return periodically to tend to their plots. Over the years, the well has become less reliable, primarily due to the increasing salinity of its water, making it unsuitable for citrus irrigation in this key citrus-producing region. As A. explains, the well is now a last resort for watering crops, although it can still be used to replenish animals’ water supply and clean their enclosures. Further compounding A.’s predicament is her barely functional electrical pump, without which the well cannot bring water to the surface. As a result, each morning, A. and one of her sisters perform a sort of ritual to coax water from the well. One sister pours water from a nearby concrete storage enclosure, called a jebia in Tunisian Arabic, into a container, which is then transferred into a long pipe reaching the well’s depths. The other sister ensures the pipe is correctly positioned and does not stray away from the well’s mouth. This labor-intensive process is repeated until, on the rare occasion that the pump functions, the water bursts forth to the cheers of A., her sister, and myself. This method, though unreliable, was essential during my fieldwork in Slimane when temperatures soared between 40 and 45 degrees Celsius and state-subsidized irrigation water from the local water impoundment [referred to as barrage] was inconsistent in its release and opaque in its governance.⁸⁵

A. hails from a family farming tradition and is one of thousands of small-scale farmers finding themselves devising creative ways to maneuver around what has been widely described as Tunisia’s water crisis.⁸⁶ Decades in the making, the crisis has gained new impetus in the past five years as the country grapples with consecutive droughts. Tunisia, classified as arid and water-scarce, relies heavily on precipitation for its water supply. Frequent water service interruptions have far-reaching implications for national food production, the environment, sanitation, health, and overall quality of life. As such, the right to water quickly became a focal point for new social movements and a topic of everyday concern for Tunisians.⁸⁷ The agricultural sector – siphoning 75 to 80 per cent of the water from reservoirs for irrigation⁸⁸ – has been named one of the biggest culprits in this crisis, especially since it consumes less than 1 per cent of renewable water. The Ministry of Agriculture responded in kind, announcing a multi-dimensional water rationing policy that curbs water for households as well as limits crop irrigation and digging below 50 meters.⁸⁹

Persistent droughts are cited as the main driver of water scarcity in public debates about the crisis. However, critical voices, including those from local civil society groups, have challenged such monocausal explanations. They argue that while these droughts have been devastating – causing estimated losses of approximately 905 million usd in 2016⁹⁰ – they have only worsened the long-standing degradation of hydrological resources in an environment where competition over these has consistently favored large-scale producers.⁹¹

These factors have converged to create a crisis that leaves farmers, including A. and her family, in a precarious state of waiting for water. Within this context, the present intervention examines waiting as a structurally induced yet sociologically heterogeneous condition⁹² shaped by the vagaries of water distribution, infrastructural breakdown, and the climate emergency. It does so by chronicling the experiences of one family farmer, A., as she adapts to, maneuvers around, and negotiates the conditions of her waiting, situating her experiences within the broader national context. Employing an ethnographic approach – consisting of laboring alongside and living with A. in her homestead in Slimane in July 2023 – this intervention positions itself within the broader body of work on the “politics of waiting” – or “engagements with the structural and institutional conditions that compel people to wait.”⁹³ I treat waiting not as a phenomenon isolated from global economic forces but as one that is shaped and continually reproduced by them. Yet, my focus remains on how these forces trickle down and manifest locally – through institutions, bureaucracies, policies, and the infrastructures of the Tunisian state – in ways that both induce and mediate different modalities of waiting. Waiting, I argue, is not merely a residual effect of state policies but also a “technology of governance,”⁹⁴ one that organizes citizens into queues for service provisioning, normalizes unfilled promises for development or (more cynically) infrastructural decay, and serves as a mechanism for crisis management. Rather than superficially interpreting the absence and delay of previsioning as a marker of “weak governance,” shifting the analytical lens toward the waiting reframes the analysis within an ‘uneven state power’ paradigm.⁹⁵ Here, the state’s presence is not solely characterized by its measurable capacity for provisioning but also by its ability to regulate, ration, and defer access to resources. Lastly, I emphasize that waiting as a socially differentiated condition, one which incurs costs that are unevenly distributed among the waiting population, thereby summoning, for example, a host of labors, much like the labor performed by A. and her sister to extract water from their well, to fill the cavities it leaves behind.

The Queue for Water

The history of irrigation agriculture in Tunisia predates the independent state, driven by the extractivist ambitions of French colonialists who integrated water management into their production regime.⁹⁶ Following Tunisia’s formal independence, the new state embarked on an ambitious agenda of public water works, constructing large-capacity dams, canal networks, reservoirs, and various water capture and control infrastructures. These efforts were designed to transfer water from the hydro-rich North to the more arid regions of the country, aiming to redistribute resources in a manner that supported national goals of food security, potable water access, and improved health outcomes – key indicators of modern development. International development banks played a critical role in this process, providing sums of the funding, designs, and directives that shaped Tunisia’s hydraulic infrastructure.⁹⁷

This extensive water infrastructure was closely linked to broader agricultural modernization initiatives that extended the colonial legacy of irrigation development. The state promoted the expansion of irrigated areas, and the adoption of advanced irrigation techniques tailored to high-yield crop varieties, presenting irrigation modernization as the panacea for rural backwardness. Ironically, these efforts, while intended to combat climate variability and reduce reliance on rain-fed agriculture, also incentivized farmers to specialize in water-intensive, export-oriented crops. This shift led to an uptick in agricultural water consumption, with irrigation areas expanding from 50,000 ha to half a million ha over five decades.⁹⁸

The creation and management of this vast infrastructure necessitated a new class of technocrats, engineers, and specialized institutions operating at both national and local levels, all centralized under the Ministry of Agriculture, Hydraulic Resources, and Fisheries. Underpinning this control is a legislative framework that simultaneously enshrined water use rights while transferring ownership of water resources to the state.⁹⁹ The rise of Tunisia’s hydraulic bureaucracy, or “hydrocracy,”¹⁰⁰ formalized water allocation practices, notably institutionalizing the system of queuing for water – a mechanism that became a cornerstone of the national water allocation plan. This plan, determined annually, assesses available resources, agro-climatic conditions, and allocates water regionally based on various, often competing, needs.¹⁰¹ Within the agricultural sector, priority is given to strategic crops – those deemed critical for agro-exports and domestic demands – ensuring that their irrigation needs are met first, while other farmers wait their turn.

Yet, even under the most favorable climatic conditions, any notion of fairness within the water queuing system quickly unravels when confronted with the mere existence of large-scale farmers and landed elites who routinely appropriate more than their allotted share. This inequity is rooted in a broader agricultural policy that has, since the 1970s, consistently linked government input to farm output and size, thereby reinforcing the power of those who already possess substantial resources. In addition to their inherent advantage in the queuing system, large-scale farmers and agro-investors further manipulate the allocation system by clandestinely tapping into deep aquifers, thus draining groundwater reserves in the process. The financial burden of drilling 200 to 300 meters below the surface is prohibitive for poorer farmers,¹⁰² and the associated energy costs of operating powerful generators to sustain such operations make such endeavors out of reach for all but the wealthiest.

Such informal accommodations, however, are not exclusively the preserve of the ultra-wealthy, despite their undeniable material and political advantages. Many farmers have resorted to illegal well-digging out of sheer necessity, as the queuing system that governs water access has become fundamentally broken.¹⁰³ In the Northeast, the proliferation of wells often dug far beyond legally permitted depths has reached staggering levels; the number of wells surged from 60,415 in 1980 to 151,850 in 2015, with the Cap Bon region, where I conducted fieldwork, reaching a density of four wells per hectare in the post-2010 period.¹⁰⁴ The resultant overexploitation of groundwater is environmentally deleterious, including soil degradation and increased water salinity – costs that disproportionately affect farmers like A. who cannot afford to flout the law. Indeed, they share in the negative outcomes borne of the cyclical nature of well-digging. In Tunisia, this relentless pursuit of water has led to increasingly desperate measures, where the environmental toll worsens as farmers dig ever deeper in search of dwindling, less saline water. The financial and legal risks associated with such practices preclude any short-term gains that deeper wells might offer. Instead, she is left to contend with the high salinity of her inherited well, waiting for usable water to arrive.

The drought crisis has further complicated the drafting of the water allocation plan, with the introduction of rations straining the distribution of irrigation water, now spread even more thinly among users. In these new calculations, citrus fruits, which hold a marginal share in agricultural exports¹⁰⁵ and are not as central to the nation’s food security politics as cereals, receive the least consideration. In 2019, for instance, citrus farming produced 440,000 tons of fruit but required about 320 million cubic meters of water – an amount that could have covered 20 percent of Tunisia’s cereal needs.¹⁰⁶ Furthermore, because the European Union – Tunisian’s foremost export destination – has demanded less citrus production in recent years, the entire region of Cap Bon was downgraded in the national water allocation plan.¹⁰⁷ As a result, A.’s water quota has been slashed, and under the new rationing law, her ability to irrigate non-strategic crops, such as some vegetables, is now formally prohibited. Meanwhile, large-scale citrus producers, who are already equipped with private wells, continue to operate with minimal regulatory oversight.

The sense of injustice that pervades A.’s tone when discussing the rationing policy extends beyond her reduced quota. It is also reflected in the erratic and opaque manner in which water is released, making it difficult to plan her farming duties and anticipate her irrigation needs. The schedule, never communicated to her by any regional water authority, is unpredictable and seemingly governed by no clear rules. Sometimes water is released in the dead of night, at other times not at all, and occasionally in the middle of the afternoon, forcing frantic efforts to irrigate crops before the water evaporates in the heat. A., along with neighboring farmers who have formed a network of solidarity, relies on phone calls – often in the middle of the night – to alert each other when water is released. This leaves her constantly speculating about the release schedule and, by extension, where they stand in the queue. Because A. and I shared the same sleeping quarters, I was able to witness her constant vigilance for the arrival of water. Phone calls in the middle of the night from neighboring farmers alerted her to water releases, prompting her to quickly activate her irrigation system before returning to sleep. Even when neighboring farmers relay information about water availability, the anticipated release does not always materialize. A. then returns to her spot in the rotational allocation system, with the hope that the next day will bring the promised water.

Psychologically taxing, the information asymmetry also incurs material implications for water conservation efforts. Citrus cultivations in Tunisia are generally characterized by excessive irrigation and water wastage.¹⁰⁸ This issue is exacerbated by the uncertainty surrounding water availability; when water is eventually released, A., uncertain of when the next release will come, feels compelled to irrigate more generously.

Underdevelopment and Decay

Though each single iteration of A.’s waiting for irrigation may appear short-term, its cyclical nature reflects and is symptomatic of a broader and chronic waiting – one tied to the promises of development in which rural Tunisia has been seldom seriously integrated. Though the rural milieu has been the object of considerable infrastructural intervention particularly in hydraulic capture and management systems, the responsibility for maintaining these infrastructures has progressively declined, with efforts instead centralized on large water transfer from the interior regions to the coasts. Moreover, Decades of structural adjustment policies have severely constrained the state’s capacity to invest in the upkeep of public works. The downsizing of the public sector, a direct consequence of these policies, was accompanied by budget reductions that often translated into delayed or deferred maintenance.

To illustrate, the irrigation water that reaches farmers like A. comes from the Mejreda Cab Bon canal, traveling through an aging network of pipes, some of which date back to the early years of Tunisia’s independence. The 2010 uprising – itself a moment of popular demand for development in the forms of dignified livelihoods and jobs – did not bring about the necessary updating of the water systems. As a result, over a third of the water is lost in transit within the National Company for the Exploitation and Distribution of Water’s (sonede) network, and approximately 40 percent is lost within the irrigation systems.¹⁰⁹ According to government statistics cited by the oecd, the rate of water wastage increased from 17.7 percent in 2008 to 21.1 percent in 2012, with the number of leaks more than doubling during the same period.¹¹⁰ The expanding length of pipelines, the growing complexity of the infrastructure, and the increasing number of users each year have not been met with corresponding maintenance efforts. Consequently, the water systems are no longer able to fulfill the functions for which they were originally designed, leaving lingering questions about the capacity of dams to retain water and about the ability of pipes to deliver it.

This neglect is not limited to the physical infrastructure but extends to the institutional framework that governs it. Tunisia’s hydrocracy, much like its broader public institutions, has remained allergic to the political reforms reflecting the inertia that has characterized much of the Tunisian institutional landscape in the post-uprising decade. Ecologically minded civil society groups have also pointed out that water governance strategies have failed to incorporate traditional techniques for water management, such as mountain lakes, ponds, and other naturally occurring bodies of water. Much of this technical heritage, as Houimmel notes, has been lost because the new water policies prioritized the mobilization of water resources without preserving the land or the natural patterns of water table rejuvenation, leading to its shrinkage and increased salinity.¹¹¹

With decades of development promises betrayed, it is difficult to ascertain whether A. and family farmers in her position are still waiting for the fruits of the development or merely bracing for infrastructural collapse. The unreliability of A.’s irrigation water schedule, her inherited well with its defunct pump, and the tangled network of drip irrigation pipes winding through her smallholding are just a few components of a broader system that is buckling under the weight of neglect. Without veering too far into what scholars of waiting dub Bourdieusian pessimism – where chronic waiting oscillates between “fantasy and surrender”¹¹² – the potential for prolonged waiting to catalyze “political projects”¹¹³ is undermined by the common refrain of the drought as an omnipresent and all-encompassing force of nature. The latter narrative obscures the reality that the crisis is fundamentally structural – a blend of flawed policies, dilapidated infrastructure, and the compounding effects of climate change – not merely the product of environmental happenstance.¹¹⁴

Appeals to the Divine

The different forms the state takes in A.’s small slice of the northern Tunisian countryside – whether through interrupted and delayed service provision or the absence of development – are not the only sources of her waiting. A practicing Muslim, she confided that she includes pleas for the rain in her daily prayers, adding a theological dimension to livelihood struggles that have otherwise been largely material throughout this discussion. The practice of waiting for rain as a theological, religious, or otherwise spiritual act is not new, and neither are explorations of various communities turning to divine power in times of environmental distress.¹¹⁵ The focus here is on how appealing to the divine functions as a practice of active waiting for those facing delayed access to water, while also serving as a tool for managing the crisis.

With droughts becoming a recurring event since 2020, the Tunisian Ministry of Religious Affairs has organized Salat-al-Istisqa’ (rain prayers) in response to regional authorities’ requests, elevating these prayers from individual supplications to a nationally coordinated effort for divine intervention to, in the words of the minister, “seek mercy by supplicating and praying to God to grant us beneficial rain and to lift the drought and famine from us.”¹¹⁶ Under the Ministry’s directives, all Imams are instructed to perform rain prayers on a designated day. Although the practice of rain prayers has long been a part of Tunisia’s religious and cultural tradition, the recent iterations have been notable for their annual or near-annual frequency and the controversy they have sparked in Tunisian public discourse, where they are often criticized as spectacles that undermine the scientific understanding of drought as a natural phenomenon.¹¹⁷

Though I am less interested in the religion versus scientism debate these prayers have generated, I am more intrigued by how rain prayers simultaneously and paradoxically exist both within and outside state control. This distinction becomes clearer when we consider A.’s individual prayers as a mode of “active waiting,” which forms part of her broader repertoire of responses to uncertainty, in contrast to the rain prayers as a state-sanctioned technology of governance. Droughts as devastating as the one Tunisia has been experiencing are indeed problems of national concern that require nationally coordinated responses. The state-sanctioned rain prayers, however, feed into the deception that droughts are a great equalizer, symbolically distributing the burden of managing the crisis across the different population strata, implying a collective responsibility while remaining silent on the resulting heterogeneity of such crises. Put differently, these rituals distribute the burden of waiting equally even though the burden of waiting is rife with social hierarchies. The way state-managed religion intervenes in waiting for the rain, to borrow from Dobler, lowers the opportunity costs of waiting, thereby rendering it more difficult to rationalize investments in alleviating the wait itself.¹¹⁸ This dynamic reinforces the status quo of political inertia, where the virtues of “patience as a political stance” become a tool for assuaging tensions and managing social anxieties that prolonged waiting engenders, and serving as a means of fostering a sense of collective endurance in the face of crisis.¹¹⁹

Some Concluding Thoughts

Tunisia’s multi-year drought has had devastating effects on farming households and beyond; prolonging queues for water, further disrupting service provisioning, and embedding a pervasive uncertainty in irrigation planning, crop selection, and the future viability of family farming. The prolonged droughts gripping Tunisia have unquestionably deepened the water crisis, but the resultant waiting that permeates daily life is born of more than an environmental inevitability; it is built-in to the structure of hydrological governance of the Tunisian state, which has, over time, favored water capture by large-scale interests, turned a blind eye to elite abuses, and allowed essential infrastructure to decay through chronic underinvestment. This waiting is thus structurally induced, and as is the case of the rain prayers, deployed to assuage a crisis-ridden polity. This waiting is also laden with inequalities, whereby delays and deferrals of services intersect across multiple axes of social differentiation and encapsulate class-based, regional, gendered, and generational costs. The discussion has foregrounded class – land size, crops cultivated, access to political networks – as determinants in this differentiation. Put another way, in Tunisia’s rotational water system, waiting becomes a proxy for assessing where different farmers stand: who gains timely access and in what quantities, who receives approval for well digging and who is forced into clandestine measures, and who bears the responsibility of securing water in times of scarcity, like A. and her sister who must experiment with all manners of infrastructural maneuvers each morning to secure water from their shared well. Thus, the question extends beyond who waits and under what conditions, to whose time and labor are appropriated to fill cavities in provisioning.

The Rumblings of Water: Differential Governance and the Politics of Water Trucks in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley

Peter Habib

orcid: 0009-0003-8186-5865

Department of Anthropology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

∵“This is how you can tell the water’s clean,” Tariq shouted, holding up the field test’s transparent tube against the white tarpaulin tent to establish visual contrast. He raised his pointer finger to the test’s reading, discerning the correct value associated with the color-coated gradation. The roar from the water truck was drowning out Tariq’s voice, but the visual result of the test – just filled from the truck’s hose – was clear: the pH and chlorine content of the water was within range, making it verifiably potable (drinkable) for the Syrian residents of this informal tent settlement.

I joined Tariq and his ngo to observe water distribution in the Bekaa Valley in 2022. This narrow agricultural region is a borderland located at the foothills of mountains that define Lebanon’s eastern border with Syria. Due to this proximity to Syria, the Bekaa Valley holds the highest number of Syrians in Lebanon, a significant portion of whom reside in informal tent settlements scattered throughout the region. Based on Lebanese regulations aimed to prevent permanent residence,¹²¹ such tent settlements are mandated off-grid: concrete cannot be poured, cinderblock structures cannot exceed a meter high, and piped infrastructure cannot be installed. To access water, hundreds of thousands of Syrians¹²² depend on water trucks that make weekly deliveries to the households’ 1000-liter plastic tanks provided by humanitarian organizations (Figure 7).

View Full Size

Humanitarian Worker Reading a Field Test.

Citation: Middle East Law and Governance 17, 2 (2025) ; 10.1163/18763375-20251565

photo by author

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

While humanitarian water trucks assist Syrians living off-grid, similar trucks also service on-grid Lebanese municipalities. Lebanon, like much of the Global South,¹²³ lacks water infrastructure to maintain consistent pressure in pipes between distribution centers and domestic faucets. Households are therefore dependent on 1000-liter rooftop cisterns; these intermediary vessels, positioned between the network and household pipes, are refilled weekly by the regional water authority. Suspended and stagnant in these tanks, this piped water becomes non-potable and is, therefore, reserved for washing and cleaning. Yet cracked pipes, aged pumps, and expensive fuel make water delivery an uncertainty in many regions of Lebanon. When distribution is delayed and the tank runs dry, residents call upon water trucks to quench their need. Lacking regulation and, to lower costs, often drawing from untested private sources, these domestic trucks operate on reputation and goodwill as they deliver their non-potable cargo to Lebanese municipalities. As water trucks become fundamental modes of water provision for both Lebanese and displaced Syrians alike, they are crucial and curious sites to consider the political implications of infrastructure.

This article looks at two forms of water trucks with different target consumers: domestic trucks, which deliver non-potable water to Lebanese municipalities, and humanitarian trucks, which distribute more costly potable-quality water to Syrians living off-grid. The distinction between domestic and humanitarian water trucks reveals an unexpected contradiction of governance in Lebanon beyond issues of water’s plurality¹²⁴ and (non-)potability. While domestic trucks servicing Lebanese populations remain unregulated, delivering uncertain water quality for domestic use, humanitarian potable water trucks receive close oversight and daily testing by a range of international ngo s. On the one hand, these differences suggest that displaced Syrians are offered more qualitative guarantees of resource provision – while also experiencing heightened degrees of governmental involvement – through humanitarian assistance compared to Lebanese populations, for whom the state often fails to provide basic services or regulation. On the other hand, trucked water for Syrians – chemically purified and therefore altered in taste – becomes an ambivalent substance, and one that reflects the biopolitical logics of humanitarianism which prioritize quantifiable distribution over the qualities of water’s desirability.

As both Lebanese and Syrian residents become increasingly dependent on the servicing of water trucks – infrastructure normally used for exceptional need – questions of long-term dependence and sufficient provision rise to the surface.

The Workings of Domestic Trucks

“I’m not sure what the problem is,” Mariam said, as we stood on her rooftop while the hose filled her tank. I was standing next to Ahmed, a seventeen-year-old Syrian worker who was gripping the wide composite tube, leaning against the tank while periodically glancing in to make sure the flow was filling properly. The water sounds shifted, from a loud waterfall against the plastic to a gentle trickle as the tube’s head submerged underwater, signaling the tank’s nearing capacity. Customers usually stayed in their homes while we filled their tank, to avoid having to climb stairs and cross a rooftop covered in exposed rebar and webs of satellite cables. Yet, it was the second time delivering water to Mariam this week, and she joined to verify the tank was being properly filled. “When I realized the water wasn’t arriving, I called the Water Establishment, but they still haven’t come out. They said it might be a broken pipe somewhere in the area, but I don’t see water leaking in the streets, so I don’t know …”

“They’re always driving around, trying to fix pipes,” Ahmed said, having heard stories from clients during his nine months working with Tony, the truck driver currently operating the pump, three-floors down at the building’s base. “But there’s always a problem with the water establishment,” Ahmed added as he waited for the tank to fill. “So we drive around too.” (Figure 8)

View Full Size

Attaching the Rope to the Hose.

Citation: Middle East Law and Governance 17, 2 (2025) ; 10.1163/18763375-20251565

photo by author

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

As Lebanon experiences protracted and compounding crises, including economic hyperinflation since 2019¹²⁵ paired with sectarian political impasse,¹²⁶ residents learn that standard piped infrastructures become too costly for the regional water authority to adequately operate, maintain, and repair. Yet, infrastructures are more than pathways for delivering material goods and services. They also shape and guide the functioning of everyday life.¹²⁷ As the expected operations of infrastructures that lubricate life’s daily actions fail, the veil is lifted. Through breakdown, not only is the supposed hidden quality of infrastructure rendered visible,¹²⁸ but the illusion of an everyday life untethered from infrastructure’s spatiotemporal structuring is also shattered. In Lebanon, water trucks exist as an answer to standard piped infrastructure’s shortcomings and as auxiliary actors bringing temporary relief to the burdens of water’s scarcity.

Domestic water truck operations are straightforward. The trucks themselves are composite entities, defined by a large water tank, a pump to draw out the water, and a hose to direct the flow. Many truck owners own their water source through a private well, while others acquire their cargo at a filling station. The truck owner is often its driver, who hires a small crew of one or two (usually) Syrian laborers. To reach a rooftop tank, one of the crew members goes up the building’s stairs, a rope in hand. Once on the roof and above the truck, they throw one end of the rope, which the driver then ties to the water hose. The crew member pulls the hose to the roof, inserts it in the water tank, and signals to the driver to begin the pump. When the water reaches the tank’s capacity, the crew signals for the pump to close, and they carefully lower the hose back onto the truck before climbing down the stairs, jumping in the truck, and riding off to another delivery.

The movement and work of water trucks are, therefore, circular and circuitous. Rather than deliver water from one discrete location to another as, say, a fixed water pipe, water trucks are mobile entities with rotating routes. They fill at the source, deliver to a series of residents, wait for requests, return to deliveries, go back to the source, wait again, etc. Mirroring the fluidity of their cargo, water trucks and their laborers have the means to not only traverse a far-reaching geography but ascend and descend structures in accordance with delivery. Yet, as mobile entities, untethered from a discrete source, water trucks exist within a shrouded zone of uncertainty. Rumors abound regarding the quality of a truck’s cargo, whether its source is sufficiently pure, and if the driver is trustworthy to hire. Indeed, as domestic water trucks are entirely unregulated, the driver’s reputation is the central component reflecting the quality of the cargo. Water trucks are, therefore, composites of metal and rubber, fuel and water, flesh and blood. Trucks often include signage on their side, advertising contact information and a company name. In so doing, they become metonyms of their drivers. The reliability of one’s source and a reputation garnered and spread by clients are fundamental to the successful operations of water trucks (Figure 9).

View Full Size

Tony, Working the Truck’s Pump.

Citation: Middle East Law and Governance 17, 2 (2025) ; 10.1163/18763375-20251565

photo by author

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

For Lebanese citizens, access to reliably functioning piped infrastructure is often entangled in and dependent on a series of political, classed, sectarian, and affective realities.¹²⁹ Through taxes, subscription payments, bribes, or informal connections, residents become integrated into “the grid” – a normative framework of connection that is presumed to guarantee and afford additional access and rights.¹³⁰ Infrastructures here represent the promises of modernity through a life integrated into a web of goods and services.¹³¹ Yet, the quality and reliability of services not only depend on continued membership to access material infrastructure (often though continued payment), but the spatial location of one’s social position.

Due to their auxiliary and uncertain nature, domestic water trucks are met with both hesitation and relief. While residents might be hesitant to trust a truck whose water source is untested, they often have no other choice when their tank runs dry. Indeed, the uncertainties and dangers of these supplemental water sources reflect broader affects shaping Lebanese life, particularly following the devastating impacts produced by hyperinflation since 2019.¹³² Therefore, while domestic water trucking offers respite in moments of need, they remain reminders of standard infrastructures’ shortcomings, the added costs for redundant services, and the failures of adequate governance supporting Lebanese citizens more broadly. As piped infrastructures continue to remain insufficient and unregulated water trucking becomes accepted as a necessary mode of distribution, questions of long-term viability and fears of contamination remain.

Humanitarian Logics of Water Provision

“They have it better off,” said Elias, a thirty-year old Zahle native, referring to Syrians living in informal tent settlements. “Back in Syria, they would live in tents, and here they live in tents. But here they also get free water and electricity, and, depending on the size of the family, earn $600, $700, $800 a month.” When I met Elias in May 2022, he was drinking coffee with other young adults at one of Zahle’s cafés. As I placed my order, I was introduced to Elias, a regular of the café, who shared one of my family’s old ancestral names. With my own lineage hailing partly from Zahle, the possibility of familial proximity (however distant or fictive) invited an immediate connection with Elias. I learned that Elias was a graduate student studying chemistry, while also working full time in the Internal Security Forces to make a living, despite abysmal wage reductions because of hyperinflation. Elias, unmarried, lived with his parents while working day and night, he told me, in the hopes of finishing his degree and finding a better job. As I mentioned my research on infrastructure, humanitarianism, and water provision, Elias offered uncensored thoughts on Syrian life.

Elias’ words reflect a common belief among Lebanese citizens regarding the perceived, yet grossly hyperbolic, benefits Syrians receive in Lebanon. Not only do Elias’ comments erase the challenges and traumas of forced displacement, but they also exaggerate the quantity of financial assistance. At the time, Syrian households received at most $80 monthly for assistance, paid in Lebanese Lira with its fluctuating value,¹³³ with most households receiving far less. Yet Elias’ words reflect Lebanese frustrations as well as their own struggle amid disastrous government failures. The ability for Syrians to receive assistance and benefits from ngo s would make their condition, however removed from Elias’ aspiring middle-class family in Zahle, enviable, were Syrian life not so disparaged.

Two days later, I sat in the Bekaa offices of unicef, the agency overseeing all Water, Sanitation and Health (WaSH) programs for Syrians in Lebanon. Speaking with Khaled, one of the primary managers of WaSH programs, I echoed Elias’ statements and asked for additional perspective. Khaled laughed at Elias’ exaggeration, but his smile soon waned as he added: “Since the economic crisis, the regional water establishments haven’t been able to afford frequent testing for their distribution. This isn’t usually a problem because the water is chlorinated and it’s not intended for drinking, although there has been a rise in water borne diseases. Yet, at the same time, given the international standards of water purity that humanitarian providers must meet, displaced Syrians are the only people in Lebanon with provided access to verifiably guaranteed potable water.” Khaled raised and lowered his hand as he said the last four words, emphasizing their significance. The “verifiably guaranteed potable water” that Khaled refers to is not from piped infrastructure or bottled sources, but the chlorinated contents of water trucks.

When displaced Syrians began to seek refuge in Lebanon in 2011, the Lebanese government prevented the construction of formal refugee camps. In other host countries, the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees (unhcr) coordinates the construction of grid-like formal refugee camps. Pointing to the protracted presence of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon – first entering the country during the 1948 Nakba – the Lebanese government declared that Syrians living in informal tent settlements were prohibited from building permanent residence. The imposition of temporary residence prohibited the basics of humanitarian shelter provision, often causing problems: instead of concrete, gravel is laid, which sinks over time, causing problems in the wet winter months; instead of robust walls, unhcr logo tarpaulin hangs against flimsy wooden frames; and instead of piped wastewater, flimsy septic tanks are installed, which can breach the ground surface if heavy rains pour. The imposition of temporary residence correlates with the challenges of achieving a dignified life in displacement.

Existing off-grid, Syrian settlements therefore rely on the provision and removal of water through trucking. Each household in an informal tent settlement receives at least one 1000L tank. Water is standardly delivered twice weekly, for an amount reaching 35L per person daily,¹³⁴ which is the WaSH sector standard in Lebanon. This potable-grade water is used for all purposes: washing, cleaning, drinking, and cooking. The coordination of this water trucking is done by a range of international ngo s, currently overseen by unicef. These groups hire field officers like Tariq, who are tasked with visiting all tent settlements on a rotational basis. They observe the distribution of water and test it using field kits for pH and chlorine. As each informal tent settlement is catalogued and closely monitored, ngo s select a “community volunteer” from within the settlement to assist in this observation. These volunteers are usually educated youth who can read and fill out various forms. They timestamp truck arrivals and ensure that each household receives their allotted amount of water. They receive a small monthly allowance but are never on the payroll of the ngo due to labor prohibitions set by the Lebanese government. Through the data collected by community volunteers, which is saved in the databases of the ngo s, “every drop of water is accounted for,” one humanitarian worker proudly told me.

This extensive coordination of water provision by ngo s reveals the governing dimensions of humanitarianism, which closely resemble the bureaucratic documentary tactics of government welfare institutions.¹³⁵ Furthermore, Khaled’s words, and the overall provisioning of potable water, reveals a particular humanitarian logic.¹³⁶ Here, water quality rests on the scientifically verifiable condition of potability, often achieved through the chemical addition of chlorine. Yet, while chlorine eliminates harmful microscopic lifeforms, it alters water taste with a bitter alkalinity. This effect appeared in my interviews with both humanitarian workers and Syrians, often around the topic of tea. “To them [Syrians], tea is a very sacred tradition,” said one Lebanese coordinator with Save the Children International. “So they’ll make tea from a different source, and use our water for other purposes.” While “sacred” is offered as a sly comment, tea is associated with Syrians in informal tent settlements as a fundamental element of hospitality and relaxation. The sweet drink plays a key social role in the domestic sphere, which is unachievable through the chlorinated water provided by humanitarianism.

The material suspension of water in its storage tank and the aesthetics and form of delivery through trucking further affect its desire for consumption in Syrian settlements. The trucks are noisy and bulky entities, at times unable to easily weave through the narrow paths of the informal settlements. Workers drag the bulky hose from tank to tank, the mixture of leaky water and dirt creating mud that sticks to the exterior of the tube. While the head of the hose remains clean, the overall aesthetics of the truck is industrial and mechanical, reminding Syrians of their position as simply beneficiaries in the web of a humanitarian regime. Infrastructure’s form impacts water’s desirability (Figure 10).¹³⁷

View Full Size

Delivering Water to an its.

Citation: Middle East Law and Governance 17, 2 (2025) ; 10.1163/18763375-20251565

photo by author

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

Therefore, while Khaled’s bold claim remains true – that displaced Syrians are “the only people in Lebanon with provided access to verifiably guaranteed potable water” – such a framing flattens the plurality of water desirability for everyday use. More than simply unifying water variability or measuring water through a scientific framework rooted in the quantitative metrics of survivability, potability becomes an ambivalent and insufficient quality among beneficiaries of assistance, as it overlooks qualitative desirability.

The Leaks and Limits of Water Trucking

I approached the edge of the roof, confronting my fear of heights as my eyes followed the path of the hose – taut from the pressure of its contents, dangling in the air across the courtyard and the fence below, eventually attaching to the vibrating metal vessel. Between the wind blowing in my ears and the roar of the pump below, I couldn’t hear Tony’s words but understood his impatient gesture: the flick of his wrist with his fingers pointed upward, as if twisting a lightbulb in its socket. Is it ready? I responded by grouping my extended fingers together and rocking my hand: A moment, still. I turned around to look at Ahmed, on his tiptoes, his head peering into the client’s tank, checking to see if the water line reached capacity. When the 1000L tank still had a few inches of space left, he shouted out and I raised my hands, as Tony, waiting for my signal on the ground, cut the pump. The grinding roar waned and we were met with water sounds: the swishing of the hose pulled from the tank, the trickle of its residual contents dripping on the concrete floor, the burping of the tube taking in and releasing air as its pressure reached equilibrium.

I helped Ahmed drag the hose to the edge of the roof, and he started to lower it down. Yet, because the truck was parked across a courtyard below, the tube was catching on a fence directly below. Ahmed started to shake the hose up and down as he lowered it to undulate the snake-like tube over the fence. In these shakes – increasingly dramatic and violent – Ahmed began to lean over the edge of the roof, seemingly unconcerned with the perilous four-story fall. I intervened, instinctively wrapping my arms around his torso, nervous about the risk. ʿAdi ʿadi, he laughed at my sudden embrace and concern. It’s normal. Still, unable to witness Ahmad’s precarious labor with the very real possibility of injury – or worse – I awkwardly kept my embrace until Tony, below us, standing on the edge of the truck, finished winding the hose into the oval grooves of its metal surface. With the thick tube stored, Ahmed threw down the remaining rope and we returned to the stairwell, winding down the four flights to the ground floor, through the courtyard, into the truck, and off to another delivery.

This mundane drama of joining a water delivery shines light on the position of Syrian life in Lebanon – relegated to the background, involved in banal and dangerous labor to maintain the everyday functioning of Lebanese life. Yet, Ahmed, after his deliveries, would join his family living in a nearby tent settlement, himself dependent on trucking as the standard form of water access for his off-grid life.

While there are many vantage points to understand the differentiated quality of life between citizens and refugees in Lebanon, analyzing infrastructure, and specifically water trucks, offers a clear perspective. In both of their forms, water trucks reflect the ambivalence of residence amid a ruinous reality. Lebanese citizens are frustrated by their dependence on water trucks, reflecting the failures of piped infrastructure and compounded costs amid hyperinflation. Syrians, already experiencing the indignities of displacement, are frustrated by humanitarian workers’ assumptions that the simple provisioning of water is sufficient, as if the desirable quality of substance were irrelevant. And this water is only received through the integration of Syrians within a broader biopolitical humanitarian regime eliciting biometric data, various degrees of surveillance, and regulations for housing (see essay 5 in this roundtable).¹³⁸ As Lebanon remains gripped by the shortcomings of standard infrastructure, water trucks, with their uncertainties and insufficiencies, will continue to quench their needs – mobile entities delivering life’s most fundamental, if sometimes ambivalent, substance.

Digital Humanitarian Infrastructures and Refugee Governance in the Arab World

Samer Abboud

orcid: 0000-0002-7922-4175

Global Interdisciplinary Studies, Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA

samer.abboud@villanova.edu

When refugees flee war, they become citizens of a country called unhcr until they return to their country or are resettled. Does this country unhcr not have the right to own the data of its citizens?

Imad Malhas, founder of Irisguard¹³⁹

In March 2023 I stood in the Zaʾatari refugee camp beside a Syrian Refugee Affairs Director (srad) official watching as families paid for food allotments from the World Food Programme (wfp). Family members paid through retinal scans powered by EyePay, a hardware created by biometric company Irisguard that verified their identity and documented the transaction through the unhcr’s Building Blocks blockchain platform digital network. As I watched this, the srad official explained that Syrians’ digital identities required to receive wfp aid were distinct from the digital identities that the srad maintained to document and surveil everyday life, which were different from the digital identities and wallets that camp-based organizations who Syrians worked or volunteered for required for them to receive payments. Working age Syrians effectively had three digital identities (humanitarian, security/political, and economic) operated by different actors embedded within different digital infrastructures of care and control. The humanitarian practices these different digital identities engender are enabled by an ever-evolving digital humanitarian infrastructure that tethers humanitarian norms, laws, memoranda of understanding (MoUs), and governance to an expanding array of digital technologies. These are not only providing “better” ways to be humanitarian, but are fundamentally reshaping the norms, values, and practices of contemporary humanitarianism.

I look at digital humanitarian infrastructures as the digital rationalities, norms, materialities, and labor that are invested into humanitarianism to bring human and non-human power into relational, patterned¹⁴⁰ structures of interaction that have subject-making effects¹⁴¹ on the lives of refugees. Digital humanitarian infrastructures are made and remade through what others have called infrastructuring,¹⁴² or the dialectic process through which humanitarian rationalities and material networks create infrastructural effects. Infrastructuring refers to how the material infrastructure of humanitarianism is reconstituted around digital technologies. These technologies allow for the transformation of norms, temporalities, aspirations, and possibilities for humanitarian action. The humanitarian practices around creating digital identities, cash-based payments, and datafication are only made possible through the technologies created by private companies that humanitarian organizations increasingly deploy in their work. Mirca Madianou shows that five logics drive digital developments within the humanitarian field: accountability, audit, capitalism, solutionism, and securitization.¹⁴³ These logics intersect to create new ideas about humanitarian action that are tied to digitization.

The intersecting logics driving digitization reorder populations and reframe humanitarian problems in digitally legible ways. Fleur Johns argues that problems and populations that are unpresentable digitally cause disruptions to existing governance frameworks and institutions that require reorientation – infrastructuring – around digitization.¹⁴⁴ The Zaʾatari camp has emerged as a laboratory for the rearticulation of humanitarian reason¹⁴⁵ and the moral and political practices of care as they are refracted through digital technologies. Thus, the Zaʾatari case can help us think about how digital humanitarian infrastructure bears down on the everyday lives of people. How might we understand digital humanitarianism through an infrastructural lens? What types of discourses and practices circulate within a digital humanitarian infrastructure? How does an infrastructure lens help us understand the networks of private and public actors that constitute power within digital humanitarianism? I argue that an infrastructure lens highlights the relationality and interdependence of private and public actors within the humanitarian field; it points to an emergent political economy oriented toward the sorting, management, and care of vulnerable populations. The digitization of humanitarian work creates entirely new (material and normative) infrastructures that recast humanitarian care around digital possibilities. Zaʾatari’s digital humanitarian infrastructure highlights several subject-making practices constitutive of humanitarian organizations’ objective control over refugee life: the registration of new subjects (getting refugees “into the system”), datafication/data extraction (rendering refugee life as a series of digitizable data points), and identity control (using life events to manage refugee aid access and mobility).

Digitizing Zaʾatari: Registration, Datafication, and Identity Management

Digitization structures how states and the unhcr govern refugee populations. Despite their precarious living conditions as rights-less refugees, Syrians in Zaʾatari are among the most heavily digitized subjects in the world. Syrian displacement coincided with the increasing adoption of digital technologies in everyday humanitarianism work and a new developmentalist policy approach towards aid. While these trends had become apparent before Zaʾatari opened in 2012, mass Syrian displacement provided the conditions for large scale technological experimentation. Jordan’s registered Syrian refugee population is estimated to be around 700,000, of whom just under 20% live in the large refugee camps of Zaʾatari or Azraq or the smaller camps of Mjareb al-Fhood or King Abdallah Park, while the remaining Syrians live throughout the country. Syrian refugees are one of more than 50 different refugee groups in Jordan under the joint protection of the unhcr and the Jordanian government, who maintain separate MoUs for each different refugee group. The digital infrastructures that shape Syrian lives are different from those that other refugees in Jordan are embedded in.

Humanitarian ideas about how to govern refugee populations are increasingly shaped by the possibilities that digitization affords the unhcr. Hundreds of start-ups aimed exclusively at providing digital solutions to humanitarian problems, from water filtration to data analytics, have been formed in the last two decades. Meanwhile, major global companies such as Microsoft have similarly entered the humanitarian field by providing technologies to buttress the unhcr’s global digital network. Corporate digital power, then, is refracted through the administrative capacity of the unhcr and the possibilities and limitations set by MoUs with host governments. Private actors are central to the governance structure of contemporary humanitarianism as they shape humanitarian ideas, data extraction and circulation, computational capacities, predictivity, and so on.

Digitization has ordered the core dialectics of humanitarian action – care/control, securitization/protection, compassion/repression¹⁴⁶ – around a range of technologies that humanitarian actors rationalize as objective and efficient, but which recast humanitarian problems around a set of digital solutions. Digitization is not simply a new “tool” to “do” humanitarianism: the shift away from analog processes (e.g., paper documentation, ration cards, identification cards) towards digitization creates radically new opportunities for humanitarianism’s core dialectics to unfold. Registration, data extraction, and population control are made possible by digital technologies that are deployed in Zaʾatari through public-private partnerships linking unhcr to technology companies while inviting third-party intervention. Digitization thus brings in new, non-humanitarian actors into the field of humanitarian action. Driving much of these interventions is the promise of corporate profit¹⁴⁷ that attracts non-humanitarian actors into the sector as intermediaries whose financial motivations may contribute to eroding core humanitarian tenets.¹⁴⁸

Forced digital registration upon entry into Jordan absorbed Syrians into the unhcr’s digital humanitarian infrastructure, which operates to produce and extract data under the guise of refugee governance. Digital registration is no longer a choice for anyone who wishes to receive humanitarian aid or claim refugee status. Non-registration amounts to a refusal of humanitarian service. These “digital forced intermediations”¹⁴⁹ were first used by the unhcr in 2002 to identify Afghani asylum seekers in Pakistan who were targeted for repatriation. Since then, most of the world’s refugees have been registered and absorbed into a global refugee database. Failure to register constitutes a “digital expulsion” from humanitarian aid¹⁵⁰ while registration places subjects in the “double bind”¹⁵¹ of having to give up biometric data (to receive aid) that can be used to control refugee mobility. This data is neither returned nor deleted if a subject’s legal status changes.

Syrians were digitally registered by both the srad and the unhcr immediately upon entering Jordan. Registration data was uploaded to the Population Registration and Identity Management Ecosystem (primes), creating a unique identifier tied to the person’s biometric data. These digital identifiers serve the dual purpose of aid distribution and identity management.¹⁵² The registration process is thus the first step in producing Syrians as digital subjects. The information collected at registration is transferred to the ProGres_v4 registration and management system developed using Microsoft technology to create an interoperable, common platform for unhcr’s partners to access the data of registered refugees. This system stores all information about a person’s aid assistance, documentation, and life events such as marriage, births, or family deaths (subjects either report these or risk losing status). The ProGres_v4 system replaces analog forms of identification verification and refugee management (ration or asylum cards for instance) and allows for the continuous updating of refugee data based on life events. The system’s interoperability allows for third party technological interventions in the form of applications, “smart contracts,”¹⁵³ and partnerships that provide continued access to refugee data. These third-party interventions have enabled start-ups from around the world to develop humanitarian-focused technologies to help organizations connect to the ProGres_v4 system.

Refugee data is validated through the unhcr’s Biometric Identity Management System (bims) that collects ten fingerprints and iris scans to validate identities at different points of intermediation within the digital humanitarian infrastructure. As the unhcr’s own description of bims states, “the system operates under a wide range of environmental, infrastructure and connectivity conditions” to “secure, preserve and anchor individual identities, ensuring continuity of identity time and across operations.”¹⁵⁴ The biometric data is acquired and processed through eye scanners and software provided by IrisGuard’s EyePay platform.¹⁵⁵ Food distribution is digitally intermediated through the Global Distribution Tool (gdt) that manages both food distribution information and assistance collection through biometrics. The World Food Programme (wfp) developed the Building Blocks (bb) platform first launched in Pakistan with 100 registrants before being implemented in Zaʾatari in 2017 on a larger scale to document food distribution. More than 100,000 Syrians have been entered into the platform that was developed and promoted by Jordanian Houman Hammad, the head of Emerging Technologies at the wfp. The bb platform uses the Ethereum blockchain technology to manage refugee identities and assistance and represents the largest project connecting cryptocurrency exchanges to the humanitarian sector. Blockchain is a technology that functions as a decentralized, distributed ledger that allows for those plugged into the specific system to document and share information. The technology functions as a large database to store transactional information. The specific networks that bring material and blockchain capacities together differ from camp to camp as companies plug into different nodes in the unhcr’s global governance structure.

Figure 11 is taken from the unhcr’s promotional material on the value of the bb platform. Here, the account holder (the refugee) sits at the center of a network of information linking different organizational and humanitarian areas, such as food, education, and shelter. The bb platform allows for information sharing across these areas “to enable various organizations to connect, collaborate and run their global operations with the prime objective to improve the lives of the people served in constrained environments.”¹⁵⁷ Any intermediation between the refugee subject and an organization is logged into the blockchain and produces more data to be circulated within this networked environment. Data has become the connective tissue of the digital humanitarian infrastructure that blockchain enables.

View Full Size

Humanitarian Coordination Network¹⁵⁶

Citation: Middle East Law and Governance 17, 2 (2025) ; 10.1163/18763375-20251565

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

The adoption of this distributed ledger technology was rationalized to establish “trust” through decentralization of humanitarian authority. Access to the platform would allow humanitarian providers to confirm transactions, reduce “inefficiencies” and “waste,” prevent fraud, and ensure that all data related to refugee life could be sufficiently managed. Adopting blockchain technology instead of Excel (which most organizations used before blockchain) or a simple database system highlights the humanitarian technophilia¹⁵⁸ that has contributed to the adoption of these technologies. Private companies who provide contracted humanitarian services have access to all wfp bb infrastructure, codes, and apps to access the system once they have secured a “validator node” on the platform through Amazon Web Services (aws). The bb platform is interoperable with the bims system and allows companies access to this data. Hundreds of developers have created services to help companies integrate blockchain technology into their operations so that they can secure humanitarian contracts. The circulation of data thus demands more (sometimes granular) technological capacities to access and interpret the networked data. Through artificial intelligence (ai) data analytics programs, the data is not only analyzed but oriented towards yielding new problems (such as the required caloric distribution in food baskets) that demand new methods of solving.

These private companies shape the recasting of humanitarian problems from the analog to the digital worlds. The solution to the problem of missing refugee documentation, for example, is recast by humanitarian organizations as a technological problem that identification verification technologies such as blockchain can solve. The id2020 project that links together the United Nations and private companies Accenture, Microsoft, and others represents a globally focused public-private partnership around refugee identification. These projects cast identity as a problem to be “fixed” through self-sovereign identities (ssi) (verified by blockchain) that advocates claim empowers marginalized groups by giving them control over their identities, but which serve to extend bureaucratic and commercial power over the lives of refugees.¹⁵⁹ Refugees do not have “control” over their identities; they simply have a digitally verifiable way of proving who they are for the select few actors (e.g., wfp, unhcr, Jordanian supermarkets) that require such identity validation to deliver services. If they are resettled somewhere, they do not take that identity with them, but the data culled from their lives keeps circulating within the infrastructure. Humanitarian projects such as ssi and id2020 are effectively large data grabs that enhance systems of identity control by private and public actors and provide opportunities for future data use.

These datafication practices recast refugees as digital subjects whose lives and life events must be rendered digitally legible to fit within blockchain ledgers. There can be no real data unless life is turned into something extractable and computational. Olivier Jutel argues that “what is characteristic about projects such as the World Food Program’s Building Blocks and efforts in self-sovereign identity (ssi) is a hedging on future use cases and the assumption that more services will be absorbed by blockchain.”¹⁶⁰ Refugee “consent” is anything but given that digital registration is a prerequisite for receiving aid in Zaʾatari and most other places. Consent extends to future data use allowing organizations and companies to deploy the data in other contexts. ai allows new futures to be imagined for the data extracted from refugees as organizations promote the promise of enhancing the predictive potential¹⁶¹ of humanitarian interventions. Such possibilities rationalize the extracting, hoarding, and future use of refugee data while continuously expanding digital data points that can be absorbed into the analytics system. In this way, data extraction, circulation, and analytics processes shape digital humanitarian infrastructures by creating new possibilities for humanitarian action.

Data extraction and storage pose problems for how to render this data algorithmically processable beyond simple ai applications. The data is, for all intents and purposes, too much for the wfp and unhcr to process and make sense of. Herein lie other financial opportunities for companies to partner with the wfp and unhcr to provide data processing capacities. The wfp has collaborated with a private company, Palantir, that was initially funded by a cia start-up venture capitalist firm In-Q-Tel¹⁶² to process all data from Zaʾatari. Palantir provides “big data analytics” to organizations such as the wfp, Los Angeles Police Department, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ice) that transform their practices and enhance their surveillance capacities.¹⁶³ Another tool, Optimus, developed by research teams in the Netherlands and United States, processes data to determine nutritional, caloric, and dietary “baskets” to distribute to people in both protracted and emergency humanitarian situations. Palantir, Optimus, and the dozens of other tech companies infiltrating humanitarian space crave data¹⁶⁴ that is extracted to enhance the preemptive decision-making of humanitarian organizations. Extracting data, however, requires the surveillable subject to be “re-assembled” to align with the digital infrastructure’s capacities and temporalities.¹⁶⁵ Zaʾatari’s residents were some of the first within this global network of data extraction and circulation to be plugged into these networks.

The emergence of mobile wallets as the infrastructure through which aid payments and wages are remitted is an excellent example of how this reassembly works. A shift in humanitarian practice towards cash payments (instead of food baskets) is justified as restoring the dignity of refugee subjects by giving them market choice over where and how to spend their funds. Such freedom comes with restrictions. Mobile wallets force refugees into a system of digital intermediation that can be quite limiting. The incentive-based volunteer (ibv) regime that provides Syrians in Zaʾatari with temporary work pays volunteers through mobile wallets that can only be spent in markets with the requisite payment infrastructure to process mobile funds, such as the wfp distribution center, bakeries, or the Tazweed and Safeway markets located in the camp. Direct payments to Syrians occur through either the UWallet¹⁶⁶ or Zein Cash¹⁶⁷ applications that can only be spent in businesses connected to these payment infrastructures. The policy of digital “cash” payments is only enabled through the creation of a payment infrastructure to facilitate receiving and making payments that links the refugee subject to digital applications, blockchain platforms, private companies, and biometric hardware.

Infrastructuring Zaʾatari

The digital humanitarian infrastructure bearing down on Syrian lives in Zaʾatari is constantly being made and remade through infrastructuring. The registration, identity management, and datafication practices identified above invite third parties into the humanitarian sphere and promote “sphere transgression”¹⁶⁸ and the inclusion of non-humanitarian actors into the humanitarian sector. The experimental nature of these technologies and the Silicon Valley approach to humanitarian problems encourages companies to develop technologies to demonstrate “proof of concept” on largely vulnerable populations who are forced into digital intermediations to receive aid. Scholars have estimated that there are around 1,500 digital applications developed without refugee involvement, most of which go unused.¹⁶⁹ Techno-adventurism promotes these kinds of unnecessary technological interventions in the name of efficiency and rationalization while introducing new norms and practices that humanitarian organizations are encouraged to adopt. Such companies as Palantir “are vectors of digital logic now pervading practices of government in the humanitarian field”¹⁷⁰ that parallel ideas about developmentalism to produce radically new ways of “doing” humanitarianism. Herein lies the dialectic at the core of infrastructuring. New ideas produce new materialities and experimental sphere transgression by Silicon Valley-esque start-ups, hackathon winners, “innovators,” innovation labs, and the like, thus creating new problems for humanitarian organizations to address through technology.

The territorialization of digital humanitarian infrastructure depends on the national spaces in which digital humanitarian subjects reside. Patterns in refugee governance are thus highly uneven, shaped as much by the specific forms of trendy digitization tools as they are by the national contexts in which humanitarian emergency unfolds. Consider, for example, that Yemenis were denied any support from the unhcr because the Houthi government refused to allow the organization to digitally register potential aid recipients. In Ukraine, however, aid recipients were never forced to digitally register with the unhcr or other aid organizations because of EU laws safeguarding data privacy in a context of Ukrainian candidacy to the European Union. Instead, The unhcr partnered with the Stellar blockchain network to distribute Circle Internet Financial’s usd stablecoin through the company Vibrant’s digital wallets. Ukrainians received these funds without having to ever provide personal data. Syrians in Zaʾatari find themselves in a completely opposite situation: accessing any sort of aid, cash payments, wages, not to mention rights to mobility and residence, is entirely contingent on their being embedded within a digital humanitarian infrastructure. These contrasts between the situations in Yemen, Ukraine, and Jordan suggest that the global south, and the Arab World in particular, provide unique opportunities for humanitarian innovation and experimentation in digitization.¹⁷¹

Infrastructuring of digital humanitarianism requires eye scanners, software to collect and ai to process data, mobile wallets to receive payments, and so on. Herein lies the dialectic of infrastructuring. As new ideas produce new materialities they require new norms, policies, and legalities to make them work thus constantly altering the governance conditions of humanitarian emergency. The humanitarian sector’s appetite for digital technologies is only growing as developmentalist logic and private sector interests shape contemporary norms. As this happens, we are likely to witness a greater trend towards predictive humanitarianism. Data analytics are increasingly future oriented and focused on anticipating humanitarian problems before they happen. The deployment of such predictive tools by humanitarian organizations will certainly facilitate unnecessary interventions into the lives of millions of people whose vulnerability has been predetermined by a dataset. For example, an anticipatory language about future risks and hazards saturates humanitarian reports about how to combat climate change through technology. Orienting humanitarianism around a future rather than a present encourages humanitarian organizations to adopt a different kind of intervention posture that addresses problems-in-the-making. As the humanitarian sector relies on technologies to create data, knowledge, and interventions, there is likely to be a slow adoption of autonomous decision-making and automated interventions in the form of things like drones, farming robots, or ai-powered vehicles that deliver humanitarian aid in emergencies. Removing human agency from the process of humanitarian delivery creates new forms of humanitarian intermediation that will shape the sector for the coming decades.

Electricity for Domination: The Israeli Occupation of Palestine

Ibrahim S.I. Rabaia

| orcid: 0000-0002-0993-4219

Department of Political Science, Brizeit University, Birzeit, Palestine

irabaia@birzeit.edu

Lourdes Habash

orcid: 0000-0003-1658-367X

Department of Political Science, Birzeit University, Birzeit, Palestine

lhabash@birzeit.edu

This article shows how infrastructure – specifically electricity – has been a site of repression and resistance in the context of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine. We examine the changing roles of electricity in the Zionist project before the establishment of Israel in 1948, during the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip after 1967, and after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1993. The article highlights how infrastructure, and in particular electricity, has been an important tool in Israel’s institutional building and the marginalization of Palestinians.

Before 1948, the Zionist movement helped its representatives obtain the concession of generating and transmitting electricity in the Tel Aviv area, while preventing the Palestinians from obtaining a license for their own company in Jaffa, adjacent to Tel Aviv. Electricity turned Tel Aviv into an important industrial model and made it attractive for Jewish immigrants from Europe, while creating a gap with the agricultural and traditional Palestinian economy, which was weaker in terms of structure and capacity. The map of the electricity grid followed the map of settlement and the absorption of immigrants, while Palestinian villages and cities were deprived of similar infrastructure. After 1948, Israel established an official company for generating and distributing electricity, which received similar privileges to those given to the Zionist movement. After 1967, electricity became a tool of Israeli colonial control over the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, where electricity was used by the occupation to punish specific areas and reward others.

Israel worked to restrict the Palestinian ability to produce electricity independently and worked to subject this sector to Israel’s authority. The Palestinians resisted this policy by refusing to join the Israeli electricity grid, supporting the Jerusalem Electricity Company’s concession, and establishing local production companies. Israel’s policy of preventing Palestinians from producing energy continued, even after the 1993 Oslo Accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (pa), which gave the Israelis legal manipulating tools, through the Paris Economic Protocol. Israel followed a policy of draining the Palestinian electricity sector, turning it into a burden on the pa, while keeping it dependent on Israeli production sources. Later, Israel used electricity to deduct funds from the pa, cut off power in some areas, while reframing these power cuts into a conflict between Palestinian citizens and the pa.

Far from being neutral infrastructure, electricity has served as a potent instrument of control within the context of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. It was, and still is, a crucial instrument in the Zionist settlement project. In addition, electricity served to isolate Palestinian communities, hinder their economic growth, and limit their access to essential services. This article seeks to elucidate the complex relationship between electricity, power dynamics, and the ongoing conflict by offering a critical lens through which to understand the enduring challenges faced by Palestinians under Israeli occupation.

Infrastructure Politics in Colonial Contexts

Akhil Gupta stated that “infrastructures are important because the future they bring about always favors one set of political actors over others. There is no such thing as politically neutral infrastructure.”¹⁷² Indeed, material and symbolic infrastructure are mostly related to nation-building phenomena.¹⁷³ Moreover, electricity is considered a major component of national identity and sovereignty, not merely a technical requirement.¹⁷⁴ As such, the construction and maintenance of infrastructure emerged as a powerful tool of colonial power. This political intent, manifested in colonial and imperial contexts, is made evident through basic infrastructure development such as pipelines, ports, railways, roads, and dams.¹⁷⁵ The construction of these infrastructures was undertaken not only to provide practical needs but also to maintain control over colonized areas. Each project intended to facilitate movement of goods, resources, and people, profiting colonizers while marginalizing local communities. Control over infrastructure serves practical functions while also exerting power, shaping the experiences of the colonized and affecting their relationship with the occupiers. In a colonial context, a primary goal of infrastructure development is to establish dominance, which enhances the elite’s position and access to resources. Thus, material inequality is shaped by this dynamic.¹⁷⁶

Inspecting the colonists’ aim to create dependence and integrate colonized societies into their structures unravels the link between infrastructure and colonialism. Gupta wrote that “colonial infrastructure […] was specifically intended to bring about a particular kind of future that was ruinous for the colonized nation-state.”¹⁷⁷ Israel has used infrastructure to control Palestinians in various ways, with the deliberate destruction of infrastructure in the West Bank and Gaza Strip being a major tactic. This strategy not only serves as a form of punishment but also helps maintain control and publicly assert authority. By destroying essential facilities within local communities, Israel imposes significant hardship, disrupts daily life, and compromises basic needs. This destruction reduces vital resources and eliminates economic opportunities for those affected. In addition to causing destruction, Israel uses its power to control and manage Palestinians, creating conditions that feel like living in a large prison. This control is strengthened by surveillance methods, such as checkpoints and controlling important resources. By controlling access to essential services, Israel maintains a constant sense of being watched, which affects the daily lives and actions of Palestinians. Understanding Israel’s use of infrastructure as a tool of power emphasizes its role in governance, significantly affecting people within a broader system of oppression. This complex strategy illustrates the intricate dynamics of control and resistance that Palestinians experience in their daily lives.

The Early Zionist Monopoly on Electrification in Palestine

During the British occupation and the British mandate on Palestine after 1922, the Zionist movement, supported by British authorities, seized upon the importance of monopolizing the energy sector. Energy was a way to build the Zionist colonial project and institutionalize emerging settlements, which later turned into major cities. It also reflected the superiority of the Zionist project in comparison to its Palestinian surroundings and consolidated a developmental gap between production patterns and identities. With the creation of the Palestine and Jaffa Electricity Companies in 1921 and 1923, Jewish capital rushed to control most of its shares. Russian businessman and engineer Pinhas Rutenberg obtained a monopoly on the Auja River to generate electricity and received the project of generating energy by hydropower in the Jordan and Yarmouk Rivers basins. By these concessions, Rutenberg monopolized electrical energy in Palestine – except in Jerusalem.¹⁷⁸

The investment of the Zionist movement, represented by its institutions and business elite, produced an advanced economic system based on industry and employing European technology, in contrast to the Arab-Palestinian agricultural production system, which did not have the opportunity to develop. Energy and its management through Jewish business elite also constituted a necessary entry point for establishing Tel Aviv as an economically advanced city, in contrast to the shackled Jaffa. Palestinian demonstrations erupted in Jaffa in 1923 to protest the Judaization of the electricity sector under the slogan “Rutenberg’s poles are our gallows.” The Haifa Palestinian conference of 1923 condemned the expansion of the electricity network under Jewish monopoly. The conference called on Palestinian workers to boycott this sector.¹⁷⁹

Palestine’s Jews consumed about 90% of the country’s electricity in 1947, or about a quarter of a million kWh. This consumption supported the expansion of settlements and the creation of new ones. In Tel Aviv, the network and its supporting infrastructure facilitated the establishment of 160 plants, while electricity transformed the burgeoning city into an economic incubator and a favorable environment for Jewish immigrants from Europe. Expansion, hegemony, and unilateralism also benefited from the electrification of the farms owned and invested by the Zionist movement and its business elite. This facilitated Zionist penetration of the agricultural sector; their agricultural investments flourished, and their farms expanded due to the intensive use of pumps. Electricity became the competitive advantage that widened the gap between the Jewish and the Palestinian Arab agricultural sector, Rutenberg was the main actor in the electrification. He generated power across the Auja River and through diesel generators and distributed electricity in Jewish settlements of the coastal area of Palestine.¹⁸⁰

By 1939, the Jews, who were 31% of the population of Palestine, held 88% of the industrial investments and 90% of the machinery equipment, with 89% of the total industrial sector.¹⁸¹ With the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and the occupation of West Jerusalem, the Jerusalem Electricity Company and the Public Service Corporation, which had the electricity concession in a 20-mile radius around the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, stopped working, as their generators were in the western part of the city. The company then opened a branch in East Jerusalem in 1950 and gradually supplied Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Ramallah. 1957 marked a shift in the ownership of the concession, as about fifty municipal and village councils in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Jericho established an Arab company that bought the concession from the British company. By 1967, the Palestinians of the West Bank had low rates of electricity consumption, just 22 mw, 2% of the total Israeli consumption.¹⁸²

Israeli Domination of Electricity in the West Bank and Gaza after 1967

The 1967 occupation of the West Bank dealt a blow to the Arab Company. The occupation authorities restricted the development of the company. The company had to expend high running costs on production and distribution, as the Israeli government imposed more costs on fuel and transportation, while preventing the company from getting loans. In contrast, the Israeli company had preferential policies, which allowed it to generate power at a much lower cost.¹⁸³ The Israeli authorities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories drained the company and prevented it from developing its capabilities and producing electricity. Thus, the Jerusalem Company turned into a distributor that relied primarily on Israeli power. The electricity it bought from the Israeli company rose from 30% in 1974 to about 95% in 1988. Fearing the loss of its concession, the company agreed to supply electricity to the settlements, army camps, and occupation expansion projects in the West Bank.¹⁸⁴

Israel implicated the Jerusalem Electricity Company in settlement expansion. The company workers’ number nearly tripled between 1967 and 1980, this increase was needed to expand the grid and its infrastructure. The company was allowed to take loans from Israeli banks, but at a high interest rate of about 27%. In 1978, after settlers constituted a quarter of the beneficiaries in the West Bank, Israel stopped dealing with the Jerusalem Electricity Company and turned to the Israeli National Company. Israel then employed its ministries and judiciary to end the Palestinian company’s concession to the benefit of the Israeli company, but the Palestinian municipalities resisted this. In parallel, the Israeli National Company extended three central networks in the West Bank, supplying the settlements and some local councils affiliated with the village leagues (Rawabet Al-Qura). Former Knesset member David Stern explained the implications of fighting the Palestinian electricity sector in the West Bank when he said, “Energy sources must be in the hands of the government in all circumstances […]. Control over the oversight bodies and the source of electricity enables the provision of electricity to the Jewish settlements and their industrial areas in times of crisis and political fluctuations.”¹⁸⁵ In 1987, Israel restricted the Jerusalem Electricity Company’s concession area by excluding the Jewish areas. The company’s annual losses were estimated at $3.5-4 million annually, with accumulated debts reaching $10 million, mostly to the Israeli Electricity Company.¹⁸⁶

The West Bank leadership of the Palestinian national movement tried to confront this systematic Israeli policy. After meeting in Jerusalem in January 1980, the National Steering Committee and the mayors issued a statement that considered Israel’s attempts to control the Jerusalem Electricity Company as part of the collective punishment through which a national company owned by the Palestinian people was seized. Meanwhile, the Gaza Municipal Council considered this decision part of the occupation’s policies to tighten its grip on Jerusalem.¹⁸⁷

The Jerusalem Electricity Company covered the central West Bank, especially its central cities; villages and cities in the North and South were facing a difficult reality regarding the electricity sector. About 70% of the population of the West Bank lived in villages, 75% of which (or 312 villages) were not connected to the electricity. In 1981, Israel established the village leagues, through which it tried to counterbalance the city mayors. Yet, by 1987, village leagues and local citizens had connected more than 150 villages to the network. The Jordanian-Palestinian Joint Committee also helped many villages create electricity networks, provided that they were not already connected to the Israeli network or to village leagues projects.¹⁸⁸

Electricity was part of the resistance of the Palestinian national movement against projects of domination. In 1982, the Israeli authorities detained 18 workers and engineers working on the Nablus Electricity Company project, which had been created by Nablus mayor Bassam al-Shakaa, who had acquired highly efficient generators and refused to join the Israeli national electricity grid. After Bethlehem refused to be connected to the Israeli grid, electricity poles were burned. Citizens from the village of Beit Kahil in Hebron petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to stop the extension of electricity to the town through the Israeli company; they preferred to rely instead on generators.¹⁸⁹

Meanwhile, Israel gradually connected the Gaza Strip to the Israeli electricity grid, starting with the large cities: Gaza city in 1969, then Khan Yunis and Deir al-Balah in 1970. In a meeting with Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, the mayors and local councils demanded to be disconnected and allowed to purchase generators. Dayan refused: supplying the Gaza Strip with Israeli electricity was meant to facilitate the work of the patrols.¹⁹⁰

The Israeli strategy in occupied Palestine was based on three main pillars: obstructing development and preventing any sector from developing and competing with its Israeli counterparts; exploiting resources for the benefit of the Israeli economy, including the workforce, raw materials, and Palestinians as consumers; and developing the settlement project. These pillars required preventing Palestinians from controlling their resources, the most important of which is energy, which is necessary for development and whose usurpation would lead to developmental impoverishment. The electricity sector was shackled to hit the Palestinian economy and punish resistance activists. As Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan said in 1967, “When Hebron’s power grid feeds off the central [Israeli] grid, and we are able to remove the plug and cut off the electricity, that is, obviously, better than a thousand curfews and riots.”¹⁹¹

Domination Beyond Oslo

After the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference, the promised state of Palestine faced two priorities: state building and correcting the effects of decades of colonial underdevelopment. Under the leadership of economist Yousef Sayegh, the plo designed a General Program for the Development of the Palestinian National Economy for the years 1994–2000. The Program reminded its readers that Palestine lacks the natural resources (oil and natural gas) that would have led to energy sustainability and independence, while hydroelectric, wind, and solar sources are limited, which made the energy sector almost entirely dependent on imports. The Program described Israel as the monopolistic partner imposed on the Palestinian energy sector. The total output of municipal power plants in seven major cities had not exceeded 59 megawatts, less than 25% of total consumption.¹⁹² The Program stated that the relationship between Palestinian and Israeli energy sectors would not be quickly dismantled. It contained two energy-related projects: energy production and distribution on the one hand, and capacity strengthening on the other, to improve institutional capacities, modernize production infrastructure, and expand alternative sources.¹⁹³

The Program recommended adding gas production units instead of diesel in Jerusalem and Nablus, linking them to a national network, creating a temporary diesel station in Gaza, and connecting the Gaza Strip to the Egyptian grid until the completion of a gas plant. The establishment of a 264-megawatt central production plant in the central West Bank, together with a link with the Jordanian grid, brought the production and import rate from Egypt and Jordan to about 420 megawatts, which covers demand growth until the year 2000. It is important to note that the Program proposed the creation of a national electricity company to handle production, distribution, administrative management, and legislative drafting, along with a company investing in alternative energy and energy conservation. Electricity development was estimated at approximately $400-490 million.¹⁹⁴

The World Bank replied to Sayegh’s vision by proposing gradual privatization of electricity companies and transferring them from municipalities to shareholders. The World Bank’s plan considered that the sector’s main issue was a lack of transparency, poor consumption, and weak investment. The plan aimed at enhancing transparency and institution building, increasing service quality, improving cooperation with Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, public bond financing, and attracting domestic and foreign investors. This plan postponed two major issues to the bilateral negotiations: the responsibility for infrastructure, and electricity supply to settlements.¹⁹⁵

This was reflected in the disregard for the role of these networks across the wb and their difficult and rapid disintegration. Sayegh described the strengthening of dependence and the impeding of development in this sector, which was supposed to become a determinant of the interventions of international institutions and donors in Palestine over the following decades. Sayegh’s plan estimated the electricity sector’s need for support at about $7 million in the short term, $357 million in the medium term and $600 million in the long term, including infrastructure investment, technical capacity and regional integration.¹⁹⁶

After 20 years of its establishment, the pa has not achieved energy independence and security. Electricity accounted for an average of 16% of all Palestinian imports from Israel in 2015, and Israel was keen to continue its dominance over the Palestinian energy sector and to make sure the latter remains dependent on Israeli production. Israel has expanded the pre-1993 occupation’s policy towards the Jerusalem Electricity Company and municipal production companies: obstructing production by restricting the creation of new plants, disrupting the maintenance of existing power, blocking access to fuel and spare parts, and restricting infrastructure expansion, especially in area C.

One of the major post-Oslo domination tools on this sector was the net-lending, which refers to the amounts deducted from clearance revenues by Israel to settle debts owed to Israeli companies that provide electricity and water to municipalities and to Palestinian distribution companies and entities. The Israeli occupation exacerbated these limitations on liability and direct friction with municipalities and companies, and transferred this responsibility to the Palestinian Authority, which found itself in a complex electrical reality in which Israel forcibly deducts from taxes and increases the net lending.¹⁹⁷ Net lending was a constant drain on Palestinian revenues and reached US $4.13 billion between 2003 and 2016. The consequences of net lending are intertwined. Local bodies directly linked to Israel’s electricity grid have relied on electricity revenues collected directly from citizens to finance their local projects, while they have traditionally left their debts to be deducted from net lending, which created a sustained crisis in the local governance sector.¹⁹⁸

The compelling dependency crisis is reflected in the gap between Palestinian net lending figures and what was cut. The Ministry estimated that net lending for 2013 was about $80 million, while more than $200 million was deducted, as the Palestinian Energy Authority or Ministry of Finance does not have an outlet for real information and data invoices for consumption in either the electricity sector or water. The crisis of access to information was exacerbated after the 2006 Palestinian split, which was cut from the Palestinian Ministry of Finance without the Energy Authority receiving any reports about consumption, its value, its bills and what is being collected, and without the General Treasury receiving any revenues.¹⁹⁹

As a result of the occupation’s disruption of the distribution companies, the networks have eroded and become damaged in many locations. Israel is enduring disruptions in establishing link points in these areas. This exacerbates the crisis, leading to a loss of about 22% and the theft of about 12% of electricity. Consequently, this costs the Palestinian treasury approximately nis 168 million annually.²⁰⁰

The Jerusalem Electricity Company crisis in 2019 highlighted the reality of this sector, as the company’s purchases from the Israeli producer reached an average of $280 million annually, making it the largest buyer of electricity among the Palestinian distribution companies that buy an average of $540 million annually in total. In addition, the company’s supply of electricity to areas in Jerusalem granted it an exception to deal directly with the Israeli supplier in purchase operations in which the government had no role until 2016, when the company’s debt file was included in the net lending account.²⁰¹

Israel turned the company’s debt crisis, which is a continuation of Israeli restrictions on the company since the occupation in 1967, into a crisis between the company and the Palestinian Authority. The relationship between the Ministry of Finance and the company became tense in 2018 due to a dispute over the size of the debt, until they reached a settlement to be paid within two years. Meanwhile, the company bore the burden of accumulating public electricity debts to the Palestinian Authority, amounting to 1.7 billion shekels in 2019. The Israeli supplier reduced the loads, and the company transferred the crisis to subscribers.

Conclusion

This article examined the impact of infrastructure, tracing its function as a fundamental tool of control in the context of Israeli power dynamics and its impact on the Palestinian population. Referencing Gupta’s assertion, infrastructure is never devoid of political implications. The importance of electricity goes beyond technical necessity; it represents a significant aspect of national identity and sovereignty. Zionist movement’s concentration on electricity production prior the Israeli occupation significantly hindered Palestinians’ ability to improve their own infrastructure and develop the Palestinian economy. In the meantime, Tel Aviv witnessed rapid economic growth. Colonial objectives were revealed by the strategic distraction and construction of essential facilities, such as ports, roads, and utilities, which aimed at consolidating power and imposing dominance over colonized areas.

Intentional destruction of infrastructure in the West Bank and Gaza, has fulfilled the retributive goal and reinforced a surveillance system that profoundly impact Palestinian daily live. Through creating imprisonment conditions, Israel controls basic services while creating a surveillance and dependency status, that benefit occupiers and marginalize Palestinians. This article has shown that infrastructure, particularly electricity, is a significant means of oppression within a colonial framework.