Political authority in the ruins – developing an urban lens on wartime and post-war governance of the Middle East

With Jeroen GunningDima Smaira

This project proposes that the city, rather than the state, should be the starting point for understanding struggles over governance. An urban lens can provide new theoretical insights and methodological tools to help scholars make sense of these transformations through its attention to the multiplicity of authorities and scales, including local non-state informal as well as national and transnational actors, and to the co-production of space and political order. This project will build on the long tradition of ‘seeing like a city’ (Magnusson 2011) and the emerging broader literature on conflict and post-conflict cities.