Since the mid-1990s, the Mediterranean sea has become the most dangerous border crossing of the world. The physical fortification of this border has been matched by the rise of ethnocentric nationalisms throughout Europe, that cast this sea as a fault line in a 'clash of civilizations' between Europe and North Africa, and are thus strongly opposed to North African and Muslim immigration to Europe. In contrast to this vision, a series of actors throughout Europe, ranging from immigration activists to local and national politicians, have embraced a Mediterraneanist vision that casts the Mediterranean sea as an area with a rich history of exchange between North Africa and Europe.

I argue, however, that Mediterraneanist projects, by focusing on a-historical and depoliticized notions of cultural exchange, ignore and reproduce longstanding structural inequalities between people of European and of North African descent, and reify ideas of difference between these two populations. I make this argument by analyzing Mediterraneanist projects that have emerged since the early 2000s in Mazara del Vallo, Sicily – commonly known as 'the most Arab city' in Italy, thanks to its long-established Tunisian community and to its long history of economic and political relations with Tunisia. Through an analysis of two types of Mediterraneanist projects – ones focused on regional development and ones focused on migrant integration – I argue that, while Mediterraneanist projects formally celebrate the presence and contribution of people of Tunisian descent to the city, they ignore and reproduce longstanding material inequalities and symbolic hierarchies between these two populations. Far from being unique to Mazara del Vallo, similar tensions characterize other cities and regions in Southern Europe that have embraced Mediterraneanist politics, but that continue to be sites of racialized tension between people of European and of North African descent.

Mediterraneanist projects, however, do not only reproduce inequality, but also reify difference. By framing the challenges of immigration to be ones of 'cultural difference', in fact, both municipal and Catholic proponents of Mediterraneanist projects in Mazara del Vallo assume a long-standing difference between Sicilians and Tunisians, who – in the right context – may be coexist. In particular, they point to turn-of-20th Century colonial Tunisia, a French Protectorate that was host to a large Sicilian population, as a 'model' of coexistence to be reproduced in the present.

In the second part of the dissertation, however, I provide a very different reading of colonial Tunisia. I show that rather than a model of coexistence between Sicilians and Tunisians, French Protectorate Tunisia was a site of differentiation between these two populations – a differentiation that served to define the boundaries of Europeanness. In addition, I show that while, in this context, French colonial authorities celebrated Mediterranean coexistence, this was an assimilatory understanding of coexistence that was perfectly compatible with notions of hierarchy between different populations.

This reading of colonial Tunisia shows that the celebration of Mediterranean interconnection alongside the production of hierarchies and inequalities is not unique to contemporary Southern Europe, but has a long history of defining relations between people of European and of North African descent. Thus, it points to the limits of a celebration of Mediterranean interconnection to create just and equal relations in the Mediterranean region. In addition, this reading of colonial Tunisia shows the fallacies of an assumption of 'cultural difference' between Sicilians and Tunisians. By reframing colonial Tunisia not as a site of coexistence, but as one of differentiation between Sicilians and Tunisians, I show how these two populations are not primarily distinguished by their different 'cultures', but by racialized inequalities produced through long histories of cross-Mediterranean Mediterranean exchange.

By pointing to the uneven power relations perpetuated by notions of Mediterranean mixing, the aim of the dissertation is not to disregard Mediterraneanism as a platform for cross-Mediterranean social justice. Instead, it aims to show under what conditions Mediterraneanist projects may challenge hierarchies and uneven power relations between people of European and North African descent. I argue that in order to do so, Mediterraneanist projects must advocate for equity and redistribution, both within Europe and across the Mediterranean; explicitly reject a politics of assimilation; and shed light on the contingency, and thus possibility of change, of the boundaries of Europe, carefully guarded by the fortified Mediterranean sea.

In post Peace Accords Guatemala, tourism development is engendering new claims and claimants to territory in a climate of land tenure insecurity and enduring inequality. Through ethnographical research, this dissertation explores the territoriality of tourism development through the empirical lens of an archaeological site called Mirador in the Maya Biosphere Reserve. I develop a process-based understanding of territoriality to analyze tourism related struggles over identity, boundary making, land use, heritage claims, and territorial rule at the frontier of state power. In theorizing tourism's territoriality, I argue that the intertwined practices of capitalist spatial colonization and the commodification of place uniquely characterize the industry. I identify five manifestations of tourism's territoriality in the Maya Biosphere: practices of historical and geographical erasure in Mirador tourism imaginaries, territory-based identity production, tourism-enabled practices of enclosure and land dispossession, the "scaling up" of heritage claims through the social construction of global heritage, and the militarization of conservation spaces through tactics of counterinsurgency eco-tourism development.

In conceptualizing tourism's territoriality, this project contributes to the fields of political ecology, critical tourism studies, political geography, and spatial theories of territory. At the chapter level, analytical contributions include analyses of identity formation in contemporary Guatemala, the role of tourism development in driving the global land grab, how implicit ideas of scale in global heritage discourses usurp local claims to natural and cultural resources, and the revival of counterinsurgency methods in the making of paradisiacal places. In Guatemala's booming post-war tourism sector, this dissertation argues that ongoing struggles over territory are taking deceptively innocuous forms of national park creation, world heritage designation, and environmental conservation.

This dissertation explicates the remaking of sovereign rule through land reform in Phnom Penh, Cambodia through moments of social, political and economic reconfiguration. Depopulated by the Khmer Rouge in 1975, Phnom Penh was repopulated after the genocide by a mostly new urban citizenry. Then, in the spring of 1989, the socialist state introduced a comprehensive land reform program, that was critical to the regime’s retention of power in the liberal era. What followed was a brief but highly contentious transitional period in which new land reform policies led to property disputes across the country, becoming especially violent in Phnom Penh. These territorial politics shaped and were shaped by new forms of authority, political economy, and rule of law, articulating shifting conditions of ownership and belonging. Through five empirical chapters, I explore how rupture becomes the basis upon which diverse claims to sovereignty are made. In particular, drawing from in-depth interviews with sixty-four state officials, property owners and informal settlers and archival research in the People’s Republic of Kampuchea/State of Cambodia state papers, and the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia land dispute files, I consider how property and political regimes were co-constituted in the wake of the Cambodian genocide. I argue that by claiming a rupture with past, the state invites new urban populations to claim land in line with new conditions of ownership and belonging. In so doing, claimants confer power onto the regime’s reformed political regime. Critically, these shifting conditions of land ownership in Phnom Penh are deeply entwined with a racialized state rule. In co-producing property and political regime, the state is simultaneously producing the normative national subjects that can rightfully claim a space in the city.

This dissertation examines the production of rural struggle in Guatemala' indigenous eastern highlands, a place where after decades of silence, 36 years of civil war and two centuries of marginalization, the seemingly unthinkable--organized resistance and alternative proposals--became palpable. In the face of crisis, attempts to turn rural producers, into neoliberal subjects of credit resurrected the historical specter of dispossession and catalyzed an unlikely alliance to oppose unjust agrarian debt that transformed into a vibrant movement for defense of Maya-Ch'orti' territory. Yet, the contours of that alliance, its limits, and possibilities, its concrete splits and expansion are deeply linked to both place-based histories and memories of racialized dispossession, specific reworkings of 1990s discourses and practices of development and "peace"-making, and the concrete practice of starting from "common sense".

I sieve a total of 26 months of participant-action research that spanned over four years with this nascent organization through a Lefebvrian method of rereading the past through the light of the present. Through this spatially and historically relational analysis based on critical ethnographic practice, I present an analysis where the present speaks powerfully to the past making three fundamental contributions.

First, I produce an analytic that challenges narratives of spontaneous rebellion and/or seamless neoliberal development, demonstrating concretely how neither adequately address the relationship between racialized dispossession and ongoing rural efforts of repossession and or maintaining possession. Instead I draw attention to how the limits of neoliberal projects shape the contours of rebellion and spontaneous rebellions limit the aims of neoliberal projects: yet how these processes of entailment unfold hinges on particular articulations of past processes of dis/possession, development and difference.

Second, I offer a rereading of the Guatemalan Civil War that hinges on rethinking the connections between the so-called ladino military East and indigenous militant West. In so doing I make break down divisive binaries that pervade Guatemalan common sense and offer a new understanding of Guatemala's 1980-83 racial genocide and creating openings for future alliances based not necessarily on an abstract sense of defense of territory or pan-Mayan identity, but in recognition of shared experiences and analyses of indigenous repression and resistance.

Third, I show how particular articulations of race, class, gender and space are worked and reworked in and through the concrete practices of struggle and acquiescence, reaccommodation and flight that are shaped by the historical production of place. Rebellion past or present is neither unthinkable nor inevitable. And its potential for social change is bound to ongoing praxis.

This dissertation explores contradictions of development within market-based carbon forestry projects that aim to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions associated with climate change. Through the mechanism of the carbon market, forestry-based offset projects are in theory intended to reduce carbon emissions in a cost-effective manner, while also generating development and livelihood co-benefits for communities that participate by growing carbon-sequestering trees. However, I have found that in the multiple dimensions of sustainable development - the economic, social, and ecological - carbon forestry has largely failed to generate sustainable development benefits. This finding largely corresponds with previous empirical studies exploring questions of development through the carbon market. This dissertation, however, takes a different approach, in an attempt to understand not only project impacts but how and why market-based efforts at sustainable development have attracted participants despite failing to meet stated social and environmental goals. Through an engagement with debates on sustainable development, neoliberalization of nature, and agrarian change in Mexico, I draw on a relational approach and political ecology analytical framework. This framework gives attention to the social relations of carbon forestry development in Chiapas, in historical and geographical perspective. And the approach allows for an analysis that goes beyond mere recognition of the failure of development through carbon markets; it also demonstrates the ways in which project contradictions are produced and integrated with earlier and ongoing processes of development and agrarian transformation. I argue that this historical perspective, combined with an understanding of the interconnected relations of power stretching from local rural communities through national and global arenas of policy making and governance, can help better guide political strategies aimed at more just and plausible alternatives for social and ecological change.

Specifically, I examine the Scolel Té carbon forestry project in Chiapas, Mexico, a region with a long history of conflicts over land and resources. I explore the local history of these resource politics to elucidate the conditions that led to the emergence and adoption of the project in the land-conflicted rainforest region of the Lacandon Jungle. I show that, for farmers involved with Scolel Té, carbon forestry emerged as a strategy to maintain land security in the wake of neoliberal agrarian reform policies that in various ways threaten to displace small landholders. In the Mayan Chol community of Frontera Corozal, however, where I carried out ethnographic fieldwork, the project has largely failed to meet the needs of participating campesinos, and in some cases, it has exacerbated tensions within households and the community. Furthermore, based on a carbon analysis of project plots, the ecological benefits of the project as conducted in the Lacandon Jungle are also substantially lacking. While carbon producers participate in the project in part as a means to secure land tenure, carbon forestry has intersected with a national land privatization process that may make peasant access and control over land tenuous in the future. I argue that this articulation of carbon forestry and land privatization constitutes an instance of what David Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession, whereby capital continues to expand through carbon trading and other markets at the expense of poor farmers' access to land. Working through these issues substantively, this dissertation links carbon forestry not to the more recent phenomenon of the neoliberalization of nature, but to the ongoing movement of capital into agrarian spaces, demonstrating the continued salience of agrarian questions concerning the fate of the peasantry. In conclusion, I offer alternative, more effective, and more equitable strategies for development and climate change mitigation.

This Dissertation uses “Green Lines” as a type of Zionist environmental legacy—vision, reason, practice, and expertise, and as an analytical perspective, to explore Zionism as an eco-Hegemony. In the four chapters of the dissertation, I explore how a vision of “Green Lines” shaped two important development projects in two key moments and sites in Israel’s environmental history. The first, the Hula Drainage project in the north of Israel, during the 1950s and the 1960s, and the second the formation of the Wine Route in the Negev/Naqab highlands in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. I argue, that in each of these moments the vision of Green Lines that is deeply rooted in colonial understanding of nature and of nature management, worked as powerful terrain, articulating development and conservation, visions and practices, to support the Zionist hegemony as an ethnic project. It produces and solidify differences and boundaries between Jews and Arabs, and Judaize what is considered as good ecology and good environmental practice. Drawing on scholarship in critical geography and historical political ecology, I employ the concept of “Green Lines” analytically as an alternative to previous scholarship on Palestine and Israel which often analyzed Palestinians, Bedouins, and Jews in a way that separates the histories and societies of these specific social groups, and the histories of these social groups and nature. In this dissertation I focus in particular on the ways historical visions of Green Lines, are reworked into present political economies, and ecological understanding of drylands, and form struggled-over social ecologies where the meaning of good healthy ecologies, environmentalists, and environmental expertise are contested.

My dissertation, Taken for Granted: Geographies of Social Welfare in South Africa, explores the collision between normative assumptions about cash transfers as public goods and the lived experience of cash transfers as private debts. While most global development theorists assume cash transfers are easy, apolitical monetary instruments, I argue that they are not value-neutral at all, and are increasingly used to conscript poor people into a financialized economy through indebtedness. Through three years of fieldwork, I show how South Africa’s cash transfer program was outsourced to a private company, Net1 UEPS Technologies, which compelled recipients into using their grants as collateral for loans. Such loans were risk-free for the lender, who built a segregated and monopolistic banking system and ensured recipients could not default. The financial technologies of the social grant program did not merely bring grantees into the same banking system as the rest of the country, but confined them within an entirely separate domain, and subjected them to private indirect rule without public oversight.

My argument builds on the multivalent meanings of debt embedded within the grant program, as economic, political, cultural, and familial obligations. While the post-apartheid social contract – between citizens and the state – is predicated on equality before the law, the indebtedness produced through the social grant program provided a new basis for racialized and gendered differentiation. Since grants were targeted toward poor Black women in their roles as mothers and grandmothers (85% of all recipients), debts were passed on to this population at the very site of familial care-giving. In post-apartheid South Africa, where political independence has not guaranteed social justice or economic freedom, this redistributive program was intended to consolidate national legitimacy. Yet, the government consistently used social grants to sustain a liberal democratic order that continually reproduces racialized and gendered inequalities. Such contradictions enabled social grant delivery to become a potent struggle over “who owes what to whom?”

Movement. Images. examines the relationship between militant images and social movements in the Arab world in the 1970s and 80s, in comparison to the so-called Arab Spring and our current conjuncture. It departs from questions raised in the process of making my film A Feeling Greater Than Love (FIPRESCI Prize, Berlinale Forum 2017), which revisits the role of women in two major popular uprisings in 1970s Lebanon, a strike at the Gandour chocolate factory in 1972 and a 1973 tobacco farmer uprising in South Lebanon in relation to militant cinema of that era. Gendered Geographies situates ethnographic research into historical on-the-ground organizing with contemporaneous film representations to investigate the changing modes of popular uprising and militant images from the late 1960s until the present, and the political stakes of those shifts. I make three primary interventions. First, I adopt the framework of the “housework of the movement” understood as the range of relational activities that build meaning and sustainability in movements, to highlight the invisible and gendered work which actively develops strategy and tactics by connecting movement praxis with peoples’ everyday lives. I suggest multiple instances in the strikes in which centering strategic insights of movement housework may have prevented setback and even changed the movements’ course. Second, I argue that we cannot isolate questions of representation from material and movement histories; rather, we must read social movements and militant images in relation to each other, and in relation to the interconnected spatially and temporally situated circumstances from which they emerge. Suggesting that resistance is a nonlinear cultural and material landscape of struggle, I consider the ways the strikes and films continue to intersect with ongoing political practice. Juxtaposing distinct moments of Arab militant cinema from the 1970s until the Arab Spring, I demonstrate that in each of these conjunctures, distinct dynamics of financing, circulation and popular discourse enabled certain narratives, movement organizing models, and modes of image production at the expense of others. 1970s and 1980s filmmakers, steeped in the praxes of tricontinentalism, harnessed formal experimentation to critique both colonialism and rigid hierarchies within anticolonial organizations that funded their films. In turn, introducing a framework called “character driven resilience doc,” I show how several critically acclaimed Arab Spring films emphasize personal change at the expense of illuminating structural inequality, subtly but powerfully limiting horizons for imagining social change. Finally, by bringing critical geography into conversation with film theory, I offer an expansive definition of the militant image — one based on an image’s function and active political interpretation with its concrete audience. I conclude by suggesting this relational mode of viewing images and movement histories — bringing images and critical movement histories in dialogue with our present, and through the lens of social movement housework — can help us discern new political directions. Returning to our current conjuncture and the brutal multifaceted war on Gaza, I search for emergent political actors, alliances and configurations that push the boundaries of cinematic and political horizons.

In 2011, the eruption of the Chilean student movement broke open a nation-wide questioning of Chile’s current democracy centering on the ongoing influence of General Pinochet’s seventeen-year dictatorship. My dissertation illuminates central elements of Pinochet’s legacy and points toward possible changes necessary for a more democratic Chile in the present. Many studies examine the continuity and change between the dictatorship and the restored democracy and argue that the democratic potential of Chile’s present is bound by the political-economic inheritances from the authoritarian regime. This explanation, while accurate, stops short; the political-economic model of the dictatorship not only was installed by force, it was installed by force to eradicate a more participatory politics. As such, my research focuses on the contentious relationship between the Chilean path to Socialism and the military coup and subsequent dictatorship to elucidate the contents of this participatory politics and specify the tools of its eradication.

Liberating Forestry is an historical ethnography of a territory of forestry estates in the Southern Andes that Pinochet came to call his government’s most conflictive zone. In the years between the election of Allende in 1970 and the coup in September of 1973, this territory experienced tremendous socio-ecological transformation; through political alliances, marginalized forestry workers pushed the boundaries of Allende’s Basic Program for an institutional path to Socialism and demanded the conversion of the large private estates of the area into a single, state-owned, worker-operated Forestry Complex. In this Complex, forestry workers, forestry engineering students, and governmental experts negotiated a new form of forestry production that integrated the knowledge of uneducated rural workers with the expertise of foresters, and sought to enable the long-term wellbeing of the forestry communities.

Following the coup, the military regime represented the Forestry Complex as a vast guerrilla training camp, the product of outsider extremists’ manipulation of a simple, hard-working rural community. Combining this misrepresentation with the violent repression of workers thought to be leaders within the Complex, the dictatorship sought to erase this experience of worker empowerment and innovative forestry. Although the military kept the Complex as state property, it stripped the workers of any participation in the organization of forestry, and replaced the advances of the previous years with the precarious work forms of temporary contracts, minimum employment programs, subcontracting, and frequent relocations. Across violent repression and the mundane production of alienated labor, these forestry estates became an important site for the dictatorship’s policing of national belonging.

Through archival research and oral histories across fifteen months of fieldwork, I recuperate the lived practices of these rural working class activists and their allies as their political participation pushed through the formation of the Complex, and then, as it was deliberately dismantled following the coup. Using ethnographic methods, I examine not only how these large political changes were experienced at the level of the everyday, but also more importantly, how the everyday practices of these forestry workers had wider significance for political participation and national belonging. My findings suggest that deepening Chile’s democracy will require moving beyond the technical expertise so valued by neoliberal ideology to incorporate more voices into decision-making over the use of Chile’s natural resources.