In-Between Border Spaces in the Levant

Daniel Meier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367632359
• eBook ISBN: 9781000287806
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book focuses on interstitial spaces or in- between borders in the Middle East. Using various case studies, it raises the question how actors living in these regions perform their belonging despite the apparent constraints of history and politics.

In recent years, the Middle East has seen States attempts to shape buffer zones or safe zones in border regions, for example, in Syria's borderlands in the aftermath of the civil war. Typically studies on in- between borders refer to three interrelated aspects: space (territorial, symbolic), power (states or non-state actors) and identity (definition of the self/other). In this volume, the authors investigate these axes of research through the notions of sovereignty and belonging in order to assess how these concepts may highlight in-betweenness through a political dimension. Stemming from a perception of the borders as processes, these various studies aim to explore the theoretical potential of in- between border spaces to re-think sovereignty and identity belonging in such interstitial zones. While notions such as heterotopia, margins, liminality, borderlands, buffer zones, no man's land or frontiers will be explored, each case study highlights how actors, territory and powers relate to each other in order to improve our understanding of historical and political process that are shaping identities under spatial constraints.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Mediterranean Politics.

Bedouins and in-between border space in the northern Sinai

Evrim Görmüş

ABSTRACT

The northern Sinai as interstice space of contestation offers useful insights concerning the relation between the dynamics of power and resistance. This article aims to analyse the complex relationship between the local inhabitants’ belonging and spatial practices by referring to the idea of in-betweenness. The article uses the notion of in-between border space to understand the Bedouins’ changing identity formations within a given spatial situation, as well as to trace the Egyptian State’s spatial variations in achieving social control within its territory. It is argued that the decades-long marginalization and oppression of the Bedouins by the Egyptian State turned their borderland region into a space of resistance and leaded to the forming of spatio-temporal identities in-between border space in the northern Sinai.

Introduction

The case study of the Sinai Peninsula raises several important dimensions related to in-between border spaces. In-between or interstice spaces can be conceptualized as a form of ‘spatial production through territorial transformation’ (Brighenti, 2013, p. xxiii). Located in-between Israel, the Palestinian enclave of Gaza and the Suez Canal, the Sinai represents a spatial situation where various encounters occur in multiple ways, and the boundaries of territorial statehood are constantly challenged by numerous circumstances. The proliferation of the Salafi-Jihadist groups based in Gaza and the recent presence of Islamic State in the northern Sinai highlight that borders and boundaries are products of social and spatial practices, and are constantly being negotiated between contiguous borderland communities within a given spatial situation. The critical potential of the notion of in-between border space is mainly inscribed in the opportunity of conceptualizing the new forms of belonging and becoming.

A large body of work has arisen over the past several decades precisely seeking to understand the relationship between state borders and identity. One of the common approaches to the questions of border and identity involved analysing identities of border dwellers in terms of cultural and ethnic membership (Barth, 1969; Wilson & Donnan, 1998). Contrary to primordialist approach that considers ethnic identity either a constant or stable entity, Barth (1969, p. 14) built his argument on the changing nature of identity. He argued that ‘the cultural features that signal the boundary may change, and the cultural characteristics of the members may likewise be transformed, indeed, even the organizational form of the group may change.’ Identity is understood here as ‘categories of ascription and identification by the actors themselves.’ More recently, the eminent sociologist Bauman (2001, p. 129) focused on the ambivalence of the concept of identity, and described identity as ‘a never ending, always incomplete, unfinished and open-ended activity, in which we all, by necessity or by choice, are engaged.’

Critical political geographers, on the other hand, have contributed much to our understanding of the importance of the spatial element in the development of identities in specific location, such as borderland regions. For example, Massey (2009) conceptualized space as the product of relations and struggles which is produced through the establishment or refusal of relations. She (2005) reminded us that the space and power are intimately intertwined, and power is essential for the construction of spatialized social practices. Massey (1992, p. 69) also elaborated the relationship between spatiality and temporality, and questioned Laclou’s conceptualization of space and time. It is a conceptualization ‘in which the two are opposed to each other, and in which time is the one that matters and of which History (capital H) is made.’ Massey (1992, p. 84) rejected this dimension of space without temporality, and further argued that ‘the spatial is integral to the production of history, and thus to the possibility of politics, just as the temporal is to geography.’ Her emphasis on the spatio-temporal construction of politics offers useful insights into the historically shaped spatio-temporal aspects of identity politics in such liminal configurations.

Thinking of space as the product of relations rather than as an aggregation of territories also questioned the commonly held understanding of the state as a static, coherent and monolithic entity. There has been an increasing recognition of the importance of analysing the everyday practices of the state to understand the state’s capacities and vulnerabilities to exert territorial and social control (Migdal, 2001; Mitchell, 1991; Painter, 2006). Painter (2006, p. 764) introduced the concept of ‘prosaic geographies of stateness’ to reveal the socio-spatial unevenness of state power within the same territorial state, and argued that ‘as statization depends on and proceeds through mundane practices undertaken by thousands of individual state officials and citizens, there is considerable scope for what is seen as failure, disruption, and breakdown, as well as qualitative and quantitative social and spatial variation.’ According to him, the state power is exercised unevenly, and differentiated temporally and sociospatially.

The notion of prosaic statization also allows us to revisit the widely held belief of the state–society dichotomy. Migdal’s (2001) ‘state in society’ approach analysed the state as a multi-layered social organization in order to overcome the analytical dichotomy between the state and society. Migdal (2001, p. 50) depicted society a mélange of social organizations which ‘is marked by an environment of conflict, an active struggle for social control of the population.’ According him, the state is part of the environment of conflict only on a grader scale, which seeks social control by having the individuals incorporate its rule.

The Egyptian State offers a good case for empirical exploration of how the state power differs spatially within the same territorial unit. A case study of the statehood in the northern Sinai contributes a further challenge to state-centric theories which regard states as homogenous entities concerning their power and material capabilities within their borders. The competing relations between the Egyptian State and the Bedouins to achieve social control in the northern Sinai highlight the limits of the Egyptian State in particular statehood and governance. The refusal of the Bedouins to accept state domination in the northern Sinai clearly reveals the Egyptian State’s spatial variations in controlling local social forces. The Egyptian State, despite all its efforts over several decades to control the contentious space in the northern Sinai, failed in its attempt to penetrate local Bedouin populations in any meaningful way.

This article will qualify the Sinai as an interstice space of contestation against more institutionalized bordering spaces to explain the dynamics of power and resistance in North Sinai. The article will analyse the Bedouins’ interactions and affections of multiple actors as the spatial practices associated with community and identity formation, and struggles for recognition, security and rights. It will engage the question of how the Egyptian State’s spatial variations in achieving social control reinforced spatially located inequalities, and empowered liminal positions in the northern Sinai. In turn, Bedouins, as interstitial subjects, transformed their borderland region into a space of resistance, and defied state policies in a myriad of ways. This helps us to conceive the spatial dimension in the dynamics and contingencies of the current alignment of the Bedouins with the transnational violent militant groups who seek to exploit the continuously deepening power void in the northern Sinai. Bedouin’s new form of belonging in-between border space in the northern Sinai illustrates how space traversed and constituted by flows and hence continuously changing (Massey, 2005).

The article is organized as follows: Part one examines the troublesome relations between the state and Bedouins from the 1979 Camp David Accords to the overthrown of the Mubarak regime to depict historical and territorial reconstruction processes responsible for the emergence and resilience of in-between border space in the Sinai. The spatial practices of the socio-economic and political exclusion of the Bedouin population would be analysed as the main dynamic that brought up the space in the middle as a space of struggle in the Sinai. Part two analyses the re-articulation of spatial relations through increasing alignment of local population with the transnational violent militant groups in the security vacuum after the collapse of the former regime in the northern Sinai. This section is followed by a discussion on Islamic State’s franchising strategy and its expansion to Sinai to examine how the various form of flows and connections are reshaping in-between border space in the northern Sinai. The last section analyses the sudden consequences of the Egyptian State’s policy of expanding buffer zone in the re-articulation spatial relations in a more antagonistic way in the northern Sinai.

The process of bordering in the Sinai Peninsula

The present-day boundary of the Sinai Peninsula has a long history. When the Ottoman Empire lost its control over the Sinai Peninsula due to the demarcation of the Egypt–Palestine border in 1906, the Rafah-Aqaba became a boundary line between British-controlled Egypt and British-controlled Palestine and Transjordan. Britain regarded a new boundary line as an international border and enforced strict controls over the cross-border movements. Bedouins of Sinai and the Negev were the first to affected by the closure of the border. Following the 1948–49 Israeli War of Independence, Sinai was under the Egyptian military administration until 1967. The boundary line between Israel and Egypt was almost identical to the demarcation line of 1906, with the exception of the Gaza Strip. This borderland became a contentious zone where 11,650 incidents occurred during the early 1950s.¹ Under the circumstances, the Bedouin population of the border zone either moved to Egypt or to the Beer-Sheba region (Kliot, 1995, p. 10).

After the nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956, Israel occupied the Sinai Peninsula in order to secure its border with Egypt and freedom of shipping in the Gulf of Aqaba and the Suez Canal. Even though the Israeli forces withdrew from the Sinai shortly after, Israel succeeded to break the blockade of her ships through the Gulf of Aqaba and to gain the UN presence in the Sinai (Ehteshami & Murphy, 2011, p. 120). The United Nation Emergency Force (UNEF I) was established in the Sinai on 4 November 1956 and ensured a relative peace along the border until the mid-1960s. Egypt asked for the withdrawal of the UN forces from the border and closed the Straits of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping in 1967. This led to the Israeli occupation of Sinai, the Jordanian West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights in the 1967 Six-Day War. Following Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 war, Sinai was occupied by Israel for 15 years. As a result of staged agreements between 1973 and 1982, Israel gradually left Sinai to Egypt in 1982 under the 1979 Camp David Accords.

The 1979 Treaty, which was designed to delineate the present Egyptian-Israeli border divided Sinai into different zones: In the westernmost Zone A, there would be limited Egyptian armed force of a mechanized infantry division. In the central Zone B, Egyptian border units of four battalions supported by civilian police would be stationed. In Zone C, close to Israel border, there would be only United Nations and Egyptian civilian police (no Egyptian military presence). In a narrow Zone D, there would be limited Israeli force of four infantry battalions. The Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), a multinational military force, from 10 countries were established to monitor the implementation of the demilitarization arrangement in Sinai. (Watanabe, 2015, p. 4).²

The 1979 Camp David Accords were strictly based on the traditional notions of state territoriality and failed in perceiving any liminal configurations which brings diverse spatialities to challenge local and regional territorial dynamics and the orderliness of bordered spaces in the northern Sinai. Borders are evolutionary in nature, and emerge through social construction and a process what Van Houtum, Kramsch, and Zierhofen (2005) used the term ‘b/ordering’ to show the relationship between the ordering (of chaos) and border-making. The bordering process of Sinai, too, not only involves the political projects of the hegemonic powers but also is being affected by contestation and resistance of borderland communities in-between border space. Even though the present physical boundary of the Sinai had been shaped by a number of political developments including the struggle for control over the Sinai between the Ottoman Empire and Britain, and the series of wars between Egypt and Israel, analysing of bordering process of the Sinai calls for the analysis of uneven power relations in-between border space, and ‘the everyday construction of borders among communities and groups, through ideology, discourses, political institutions, attitudes and agency’ (Scott, 2015, p. 28).

The resilience of in-between border space in the northern Sinai after the Camp David accords

Bedouins, longstanding natives of the peninsula offer fruitful insights into the patterns of space/power/identity that is shaping the in-between border space in the northern Sinai. The Sinai Bedouins are group of tribes who arrived from the Arabian Peninsula between 14^th and 18^th centuries. Today around 300,000 Bedouins live in the Sinai, and they constitute about 70 per cent of Sinai’s population.³ Bedouins kept their distinct indigenous identity over the centuries, and challenged state conceptions of sovereignty, territoriality and citizenship by redefining their environment in-between border space in North Sinai intersticed by Egypt, present-day Gaza and Israel.

Bedouin tribes were given Egyptian citizenship in 1906 when the British Protectorate of Egypt took Sinai over from the Ottoman Empire. The regime saw the strong sense of tribal identity as one of the impediments to the consolidation of s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: In-between spaces in the Levant: Conceptual reflections
• 1 Bedouins and in-between border space in the northern Sinai
• 2 Exploring the ‘in-between’ in Nicosia’s Buffer Zone: Local practices of de-bordering
• 3 Stretching the margins: Identity, power and new ‘frontiers’ in Lebanon’s Maronite community
• 4 ‘Disputed territories’ in northern Iraq: The frontiering of in-between spaces
• 5 Endless borders: Detaining Palestinians and managing their movements in the occupied territories
• 6 Borderland studies, frontierization, and the Middle East’s in-between spaces
• Index