Recent Palestinian Authority (PA) initiatives to help Palestine adapt to climate change help shine light on the role that climate uncertainties play in how political futures can be represented. UN-led adaptation has occasioned opportunities for new networks of actors to make claims about Palestinian futures and to perform PA readiness for statehood. These actors weigh scientific uncertainties about climate against uncertainties over if and when settler colonialism in Palestine will end. How they do so matters because it is the foundation of requests for capital that could be translated into some of the most important institutions and infrastructures of Palestinian governance over the next several years, including those that provide Palestinians with access to water. It also matters because it constitutes the image with which PA officials represent what needs to be “fixed” in Palestine in important international forums such as the UN. Climate change adaptation is a new approach to the management of uncertain environmental futures. This analysis offers insight into how this approach shapes and is shaped by practices of statecraft in places marked by the volatilities of war, economic crisis, and occupation.

This article documents the ḥawākīr of Nazareth. Once widespread in the city, these traditional domestic gardens were integral to households of all economic backgrounds. They served as a space for work and socializing, constituted a center of collective (extended family) life, and provided a wide diversity of crops. However, in recent decades ḥawākīr have disappeared rapidly as new houses were built overtop them and residents’ tastes changed. Today people prefer gardens with green lawns and flowers. Intended strictly for recreation and ornament, this new kind of garden acts as a marker of privacy and economic success. We use ethnographic data to provide detailed descriptions of historical and contemporary examples of the traditional garden. The analysis dwells on the resonances between changing practices around and meanings of ḥawākīr and the changing character of the urban landscape, on the value of ḥawākīr as sites of attachment and identity, and on the potential of their revival to generate urban sustainability.

Depending upon how you approach the matter, it is either humdrum or complicated to ask an architect how he would improve the Gulf region's built environment. Humdrum, because that is what architects do every day: say how they can improve what was done poorly before them. Complicated, because there's a frustrating modern history of experts coming to the Gulf to do just that. In the Arab Gulf countries, architecture is most often assumed to result from imported expertise, certified and purchased abroad. The foundation of that assumption rests in the late colonial British management of Gulf cities. Colonial officers, most often referred to as political agents or political residents, harnessed the built environment to visually convey the bureaucratic order that the British government was instituting where it had suppressed it in the decades before. Modern architecture served as a sleight of optics to foster economic improvement and political stability. It was less style, more content. Literally, the contents of the building: medical machines, cadastral maps, canned foods, air conditioning. In this way, the architect was perceived as a herald and packager of promised technological improvements from afar. And, in many ways, he or she still is perceived as such. And that's a problem worth touching upon.

Trade, mobility, and the sea—as concepts and practices—have, in the last several years, been the focus of superb and fascinating scholarly work. This essay explores some of the themes and arguments linking, and dividing, a body of work that has reinvigorated and shifted conversations about the Middle East toward a recognition of the significance of the Arabian Peninsula and Indian Ocean for our understanding of colonial and economic history. As with any review, this one cannot be comprehensive; these texts are far too rich for these limited pages. Nevertheless, I aim to trace some of the main lines of inquiry of each monograph as well as to note some of the overlaps of and differences between their arguments and approaches.

This article analyzes the restoration of Jordan's UN Dana Biosphere Reserve cottages for ecotourism and home building in the neighboring village of Qadisiyya as competing land projects. Whereas a multimillion-dollar endowment from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) restores Dana's houses as a “heritage” village for a tourist economy, families in Qadisiyya build houses with income from provisional labor to shore up a familial future. Each act of home building articulates a political claim to land. This article argues for attention to the architecture of the environment in the comparison of two, once-related villages. A comparative analysis of Dana and Qadisiyya reveals the competing socio-political objectives of home building for the future of Jordan and the implications of environment in that struggle.

We are living in an age of political turbulence, social division, and resistance. The resistance that formed in reaction to the election of Donald Trump styles itself a force to defend constitutional rights, democratic norms, and the rule of law in the United States. Perhaps the New Republic best explained its advent: the Resistance had been born of partisan—that is, Democratic—fury after “liberalism had been dealt its most stunning and consequential defeat in American history.” “For the first time in decades, liberalism has been infused with a sense of energy and purpose,” with millions of people devoted to a singular cause: resisting Trump.

Traditional frontier literature identifies a positive correlation between land availability and fertility. A common explanation is that the demand for child labour is higher in newly established frontier regions compared to older, more densely populated farming regions. In this paper, we contribute to the debate by analysing the relationship between household composition and land availability in a closing frontier region, i.e. the Graaff-Reinet district in South Africa’s Cape Colony from 1798–1828. We show that the number of children in farming households increased with frontier closure, while the presence of non-family labourers decreased over time. Contrasting with the classic interpretation, we explain this by acknowledging that the demand for family labour was not a function of its marginal productivity and that farmers reacted differently to diminishing land availability depending on their wealth. Poorer households, which made up the majority of this frontier population, responded to shrinking land availability by employing relatively more family labour, while the wealthiest group invested in strengthening market access.

TRANSLATED ABSTRACTS FRENCH – GERMAN – SPANISH

Jeanne Cilliers et Erik Green. L’hypothèse sur la disponibilité de terres et la main d’œuvre dans une économie de colons: richesse, main d’œuvre et composition du ménage à la frontière sud-africaine.

La littérature traditionnelle de la frontière identifie une corrélation positive entre la disponibilité de terres et la fertilité. Une explication courante est que la demande de travail des enfants est supérieure dans les régions frontalières nouvellement établies, par comparaison avec d’anciennes régions agricoles plus densément peuplées. Dans cet article, nous contribuons au débat en analysant la relation entre la composition du ménage et la disponibilité de terres dans une région frontalière en train de fermer, le district de Graaff-Reinert dans la Colonie du Cap en Afrique du Sud, entre 1798 et 1828. Les auteurs montrent que le nombre des enfants dans les ménages agricoles augmenta avec la fermeture des frontières, tandis que la présence d’ouvriers agricoles non familiaux déclina au fil des ans. Contrairement à l’interprétation classique, nous expliquons ce phénomène en reconnaissant que la demande de travailleurs familiaux ne dépendit pas de sa productivité marginale, et que les exploitants agricoles réagirent différemment selon leur richesse à la disponibilité de terres diminuante. Les foyers plus pauvres, qui constituaient la majorité de cette population frontalière, répondirent à la disponibilité de terres déclinante en employant relativement plus de main d’œuvre familiale, tandis que le groupe le plus riche investit dans le renforcement de l’accès au marché.

Traduction: Christine Plard

From arid cities to irrigated fields, hot deserts to Mediterranean mountains, costal enclaves to verdant oases, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) encompasses a range of environments for thinking through the relationships between nature and society, people, plants, and animals, human and nonhuman worlds. Early depictions of the region in terms of patriarchal, tradition-bound, and largely homogenous Muslim populations living in undifferentiated desert spaces has long given way to scholarship that identifies the diversity and dynamism of associational life, political subjectivities, state formations, religious practices, and gender performances. Only relatively recently, however, has a significant subset of scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa picked up newer approaches to environmental issues and taken a renewed look at older topics, such as the relationship between water and the state and local subsistence practices in arid lands. This shift in the scholarship is not necessarily a reflection of rising popular “environmental consciousness” in the Middle East and North Africa, although people of the region have always been living in and thinking about the material worlds around them. For while there have been recent efforts to connect local traditions to global environmental discourses, such as rereading religious texts for their “green” character and celebrating heat-shedding architectural design, “the environment” as a term has a more uneven resonance regionally than it does in some other parts of the world. Rather, this increasing scholarly interest stems from a growing recognition within the euromerican academy of the environment as comprising intertwined social, material, political, biological, and representational worlds, and thus constituting an important focus of study.