Research
Power Failures: Development, Sovereignty, and Environmental Justice in Lebanon
My first book project, Power Failures: Development, Sovereignty, and Environmental Justice in Lebanon, recovers the primacy of river basin development and equitable resource distribution in twentieth-century Middle Eastern conceptions of and efforts to achieve postcolonial sovereignty. In the 1950s, engineers, activists, and village committees across the Middle East argued that water distribution was essential to justice and equality, and building water infrastructure essential to building a sound postcolonial order. However, in recent decades, historians have neglected the powerful resonance of such analyses. Historians of the Middle East and, more broadly, the Global South have interrogated the cultural, intellectual, and diplomatic aspects of how former colonies sought to establish meaningful sovereignty. Simultaneously, historians of empire and development have typically studied the development era from the perspective of international institutions, footloose Western experts, and their archives, but neglected local and regional dynamics.
Power Failures makes this argument through the history of efforts to develop the Litani River in Lebanon. It is a transnational history that analyzes how local stakeholders, national institutions, and global networks each drove postcolonial development. Arab engineers, religious leaders, and rural communities debated and pursued resource development as a means to fuel their different visions of progress, address inequalities, and build self-sufficiency. My research demonstrates how and why these local stakes, debates, and conceptions of progress shaped such projects more durably than international imperatives. It reveals how the long-term life of dams and canals—from design, to construction, to maintenance—create and foreclose opportunities for movements for popular sovereignty and economic rights.
You can learn more about my book project in this blog post for Cardiff University and in this interview at the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies at NC State University.
"A National Vocation: Engineering Nature and State in Lebanon's Merchant Republic." Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 40, no. 1 (2021)
Here's the link for this article, which won the 2023 Martha Trescott prize from the Society for the History of Technology. This article writes engineers into the history of Lebanese political-economic thought. Historians of Lebanon’s post-independence period have emphasized how a narrow, elite “consortium” espoused a national ideology that authorized laissez-faire monetary and trade policies. These intellectuals and businessmen invoked environmental determinism to claim that trade, tourism, and services were Lebanon’s national vocation. This article reveals that engineers formed an influential and under-examined counter- current advocating statist developmentalism. Engineer-bureaucrats saw the post-independence era as an opportunity to claim their professions’ status and redefine bourgeois culture and its relationship to governing institutions according to their conceptions of modernity. By reinterpreting the consortium’s environmental narrative of Lebanese history, the hydrological engineer Ibrahim Abd-El-Al portrayed rational development of water resources and agriculture as an organic expression of national identity. These efforts cultivated a critical and technically literate reading public that favored statism, and shaped how that public understood their national subjectivity and relationship to the natural world.
"Organised Abandonment in Lebanon's Litani River Basin." Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space (OnlineFirst, November 2024)
Here's the link for this article. This article was a chance for me to experiment with the methods of historical political ecology. It argues that the present ecological catastrophe in the Litani River basin derives from the historical constitution of Lebanon's environmental regulatory apparatus as mediators of flows of capital that generate ecological fragility, or “capitalogenic flows.” In 2021, a massive fish kill brought the Litani River basin's spectacular ecological degradation to global attention. In response, the Litani River Authority (LRA), the Lebanese agency that manages the basin, launched a campaign against “environmental crimes” that concentrated on displacing thousands of Syrian refugees and demolishing their homes. This reflects a rebranding of the LRA, which was founded in 1955 to coordinate a World Bank loan for hydroelectric infrastructure on the Litani. Rather than commodify the water itself for irrigation or drinking—which might entail pollution controls—the Bank monopolised the basin landscape as an energy resource. Prevented from accessing the river, Litani communities have repeatedly reasserted popular sovereignty. The paper situates that history in the context of the institutional formation of Lebanon's environmental regulatory apparatus. Unlike postcolonial countries subjected to neoliberal dispossession after 1980, decades of contested institution-building from Lebanon's origins arrayed the state and its regulatory capacities around capitalogenic flows and the organised abandonment of the country's rural surplus population.
Teaching
Spring 2022
Incarceration in the Modern Middle East
This undergraduate colluquium examines the social history of incarceration in the Middle East and North Africa from the late nineteenth century to today. We will consider how carceral institutions have been central to governance and everyday life under colonial rule, independent governments, and military occupation. Adopting a broad definition of incarceration, we will explore institutions like prisons, refugee camps, orphanages, police forces, and conscription armies, and how those institutions have criminalized communities and shaped social movements.
Spring 2022
History of the Middle East and North Africa II: From 1800 to the Present
This course explores the last two centuries of social, political, and economic history in the Middle East and North Africa. We will study how Middle Eastern societies have dealt with questions of justice, freedom, women’s rights, democracy, imperialism, self-determination, and secularism. Our readings will push us to think differently about ideas we often take for granted. For example: How do nations come into being? What does it mean to be a modern society? How have Middle Eastern societies negotiated questions of religion and state?
Spring 2022
Environmental History of the Middle East
This colloquium explores how societies in the Middle East and North Africa have shaped and been shaped by the natural environment from the early modern era to the present. We will investigate the seismic changes in environment and society brought about by empire, nation-state formation, capitalism, and war. By viewing environmental history from the perspective of MENA communities, we will consider urgent questions about the agency of nature, urban environments, environmental orientalism, political ecology, and the climate crisis.
Fall 2021
History of the Middle East and North Africa I: From the Rise of Islam to 1800
This survey course explores change and continuity in the cultural, political, and economic history of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), from the seventh to the eighteenth century. We will identify major dynamics that unfold across this vast region and time period: shared challenges that different societies faced in different ways, institutional formations that persisted through change, ideas and questions that sparked debate among interlocutors across time and space. And throughout we will reflect on how people in more recent times, both in the Global North and in MENA countries, have learned from, used, and abused these histories.
Fall 2021
Social History of Development in the MENA
This research seminar examines the history of development in the twentieth-century Middle East and North Africa. Rather than starting with a fixed definition of “development,” we will investigate the different ideas about development and progress that have animated revolutionary leaders, colonial officials, social movements, and NGOs, and how those ideas have changed over time. We will explore the defining issues of the development era: urbanization, rivers and dams, oil, family planning, infrastructure politics, agrarian change, and the question of neoimperialism. Participants will research in primary sources and write an original historical contribution.
Summer 2018
World History, 1750–2010
This course explores the social, political, and economic forces that have shaped the modern world. We will study issues of power, mobility, rights, freedom, money, environment, law, and culture in a world context. We will consider how historians think about the “world” of world history by examining surprising interconnections between far-flung regions, networks of trade across oceans, empires and colonies, debates about freedom and humanity taking place between cultures, financial crises and wars felt around the world, and transnational political and social movements. This course was developed and taught for Cornell University's Prison Education Program.
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