melg 17.2 brings to its readers a diverse issue consisting of a research article, a roundtable, and a fieldnote.
In “The Erosion of a Role? Jordanian mp s and the Weakening of a Political Clientelism System” Camille Abescat explores the impact of neoliberal reforms on clientelism in authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. In doing so she asks ‘what happens when the moral economy of power, in which clientelistic redistribution plays a central role in the relationship between rulers and ruled, is affected? How does this impact the relations between unelected political authorities, political elites, and the population?’ Her case study of Jordan shows how when material resources diminish as a result of neoliberal reforms, but especially their ability to deliver permanent public employment, mp s compensate by investing ‘more time in other functions, such as parliamentary oversight, in order to win and retain loyalty among their voters’. Nevertheless, this invariably destabilizes existing clientelist networks and undermines mp s’ role as intermediaries between their constituents and the state or regime.
The next contribution in this issue is a roundtable on the politics of infrastructure in the Middle East and North Africa. This roundtable takes the politics of infrastructure as a starting point to examine relations of power, repression, and contestation in the region. As May Drawich and Pascal Menoret suggest in their Introduction to the roundtable, infrastructure ‘is a space of power; more often than not, it is also a structure of resistance and dissent’. The balance of the roundtable consists of five papers exploring the politics of infrastructure from different perspectives.
Aseel Azab-Osman looks at the case of Cairo’s Sixth of October flyover as an ‘affective apparatus, serving as a site of socio-cultural reproduction’. Ansar Jasim examines the case of Sadr City to highlight how successive ‘Iraqi governments have used infrastructure projects as a hegemonic practice’. Next Dhouha Djerbi examines the politics of waiting for water in northeastern Tunisian. She contends that waiting for water is not inevitable, but rather ‘built-in to the structure of hydrological governance of the Tunisian state’. Peter Habib uses the example of water trucks in Lebanon supplying off-grid Syrian refugees and on-grid Lebanese municipalities ‘to understand the differentiated quality of life between citizens and refugees in Lebanon’. If, for the former, these water trucks are considered a source of frustration, for the latter they are part of ‘a broader biopolitical humanitarian regime eliciting biometric data, various degrees of surveillance, and regulations for housing’. Samer Abboud uses the case of the Zaʿtari camp in Jordan to show how Digital Humanitarian Infrastructures, or ‘the digital rationalities, norms, materialities, and labor that are invested into humanitarianism’, are ‘reshaping the norms, values, and practices of contemporary humanitarianism’. This infrastructuring of digital humanitarianism will have far reaching future ramifications on humanitarian delivery in the future. Finally, Ibrahim Rabaia and Lourdes Habash show how Zionist settler colonialism uses the production of electricity, more precisely, the lack of it, ‘as a potent instrument of control’ to subjugate the Palestinian territory. The intentional destruction of electrical infrastructure in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is part of a larger strategy to control and marginalize the Palestinians. Taken together, these essays unpack how infrastructure, mobility, and digitization are reshaping power dynamics and state-society relations in the Middle East and North Africa.
The last contribution to this issue is a field note by Mona Harb and Sophie Bloemeke examining the aid response framework put together by the World Bank, the European Union, and the United Nations in the aftermath of the August 2020 Beirut Port explosion. They find fault in this “Reconstruction, Recovery and Reform Framework” (3rf) at three levels: ‘institutional incoherence; the incapacity to break through the political stalemate; and the insufficient involvement of cso s in decision-making processes’. Their field note bears clear implications on the latest reconstruction and reform wave in Lebanon on the morrow of the 2023–25 Israeli war.
