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80,000,000 tons1980s20072018Waste produced per year in EgyptIntroduction of first recycling machinesExport tax levied on ground plasticChinese regulation on the import of secondary raw materialsSource: Ministry of the Environment in Economic Newsletter, January 2019 The rate of waste recycling in Egypt is remarkable given the lack of investment in this area by public authorities. Salvage, re-use and recycling practices fuel a real economy that is plugged into global networks. This economy is ...

23,000 tons247.8 kg65%Garbage produced per day in 2013 (Greater Cairo)Garbage produced per year per inhabitant in 2014 (Egypt)Percentage of rubbish collected in Greater Cairo in 2013 The collection of rubbish in Cairo has been in the hands of rag-pickers since at least the 16th century. During the 19th century it became the preserve of wahiya, people from the oases who had migrated to the capital. They were gradually replaced from the 1930s by the zabbaleen*, mostly Coptic Christians original...

While several atlases of Ancient Egypt exist, no atlas of contemporary Egypt has yet been published. Thus, this work fills a void and offers the general public an illustrated panorama of Egypt at the beginning of the 21st century. Through the contributions of some fifty researchers, it presents in an accessible form the key facts and challenges that concern present-day Egypt in the realms of politics, economics, demographics, the environment, society and culture, and geopolitics. To this end, the Atlas relies on a wide array of previously unpublished sources, most especially maps, which help to unlock and interpret the results of the official Egyptian census of 2017, providing an up-to-date view of the country and a better understanding of Egypt today.

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23 000 t247,8 kg65 %de déchets produits par jour en 2013 (Grand Caire)de déchets produits par an et par habitant en 2014 (Égypte)Taux de ramassage pour le Grand Caire en 2013 La collecte des déchets au Caire est l’affaire de chiffonniers depuis au moins le xvie siècle. Au cours du xixe siècle, elle devient l’apanage des wahiya (oasiens) issus de l’immigration vers la capitale. Ils sont peu à peu remplacés, à partir des années 1930, par les zabbaline*, en majorité coptes et originaires de Haut...

80 000 000 de tonnesAnnées 198020072018de déchets produits par an en ÉgyptePremières machines de recyclageTaxe à l’exportation sur le plastique broyéRéglementation chinoise sur l’importation de matières premièresSource : ministère de l’Environnement in Lettre éco, janvier 2019 Les taux de valorisation des déchets en Égypte sont remarquables au regard du désinvestissement des pouvoirs publics dans ce domaine. Les pratiques de récupération, de réemploi et de recyclage alimentent une économie ré...

Alors qu’il existe plusieurs atlas de l’Égypte ancienne, aucun atlas de l’Égypte contemporaine n’avait encore été publié. Cet ouvrage vient donc combler un vide, en offrant au grand public un panorama illustré de l’Égypte au début du XXIe siècle. Réunissant les contributions d’une cinquantaine de chercheur.e.s, il présente, sous une forme cartographiée et vulgarisée, les faits saillants et les enjeux de l’Égypte actuelle en matière politique, géopolitique, économique, démographique, sociale, environnementale et culturelle. Il s’appuie, à cette fin, sur des ressources documentaires inédites : les cartes notamment, qui exploitent les résultats du recensement officiel égyptien de 2017, offrent une version actualisée du territoire. Pour mieux connaître et comprendre l’Égypte d’aujourd’hui.

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Disponible en ligne : https://www.afd.fr/fr/du-rebut-la-ressource; International audience

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International audience; This paper explores a case of such land encroachments carried out by waste collectors in the neighbourhood of Manshiet Nasser in Cairo, Egypt. It begins with theoretical debates about the production of urban space, arguing that the de Certeauian paradigm, in which urban marginals poach or hijack others' spaces evanescently, fails to account for the way such encroachments produce permanent new spaces rhizomatically alongside the pre-existing order. The paper then turns to a close examination of the events in Manshiet Nasser. Although in a broad view the actors are marginals living in the 'informal' city, the conditions enabling the encroachments were such that only the wealthiest and most powerful members of the 'commu-nity' benefitted. In a context of generalized 'illegality', the squatters rely on practical norms and de facto recognitions to obtain some degree of tenure security. Since these efforts rely on and play off legal norms even as the squatters violate them, the paper argues that property rights in this context should be understood not in classificatory terms based on the legal/illegal binary, but rather through a trajectory of 'becoming-legal': a 'line of flight' that approaches legality asymptotically.

Through a discussion of Egypt–China trade in PET plastic, this paper seeks to show how contemporary recycling economies do not all conform to North–South directionalities, nor to the other assumptions about agency, vulnerability and environmental damage that inhere in the ‘neo-colonial geographies of inequality’ paradigm. In so doing, it seeks to contribute to developing more optimistic and nuanced alternative framings of global waste flows. The paper follows a two-part structure. The first half provides background on the author’s research methods, the recycling business in Egypt and its ties to China before further outlining the paradigm the paper seeks to nuance, particularly as it has been developed through and applied to e-waste case studies and entrenched in the principal legal instrument governing transboundary waste flows, the Basel Convention. The second half of the paper, after some conceptual notes outlining and locating the author’s approach to the market in the literature, attempts to provide a few details of the Egypt–China PET market from fieldwork, focusing on two price-shaping/making processes: market fluctuations during the global economic crisis in 2008/09 and the quality standards criteria applied by Chinese buyers.

International audience; Through a discussion of Egypt–China trade in PET plastic, this paper seeks to show how contemporary recycling economies do not all conform to North–South directionalities, nor to the other assumptions about agency, vulnerability and environmental damage that inhere in the ‘neo-colonial geographies of inequality’ paradigm. In so doing, it seeks to contribute to developing more optimistic and nuanced alternative framings of global waste flows. The paper follows a two-part structure. The first half provides background on the author’s research methods, the recycling business in Egypt and its ties to China before further outlining the paradigm the paper seeks to nuance, particularly as it has been developed through and applied to e-waste case studies and entrenched in the principal legal instrument governing transboundary waste flows, the Basel Convention. The second half of the paper, after some conceptual notes outlining and locating the author’s approach to the market in the literature, attempts to provide a few details of the Egypt–China PET market from fieldwork, focusing on two price-shaping/making processes: market fluctuations during the global economic crisis in 2008/09 and the quality standards criteria applied by Chinese buyers.

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International audience; This short paper shows how 'neoliberal globalization' is reworked from within by local actors who appropriate its symbols, practices, and ideas—often for ends extrinsic to the logic underpinning them at the origins. In Cairo, public-private partnerships with European waste management companies—a new development over the past decade—are not merely 'neoliberalism from the sky.' They incorporate longstanding aesthetic and symbolic concerns over 'cleanliness' and 'modernity,' recasting them in a vogue idiom, one that plays well with international funders.

International audience; This is the introduction to a special number of A Contrario that I coordinated with Daniel Meier. It has three main parts. First it discusses humanitarianism, in attempt to define it and summarize some of what people have been writing on the topic recently. In the second part it considers the place of faith-based organisations in humanitarianism, as well as historical and other linkages between humanitarianism and religion (e.g. missionary work). Third, it summarizes the articles that will be published in the special number.

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International audience; As Chakrabarty points out in his presentation "Between Globalization and Global Warming: The Long and the Short of Human History" [available in the University of Chicago International and Area Studies Multimedia Outreach Source archive], historians have only just begun to enter the climate change debate. This is my review of one of or perhaps even THE first full-length monograph, translated from the German, to address climate change from a historian's perspective. While I found the book original and interesting, I criticize it for a 'whiggish view of progress' in which challenge after challenge is overcome inevitably by the increasing power of human rationality. I find it ironic to argue that this dialectic will solve our climate change problems, when it seems to me to be more or less what got us into them.

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The development project is a repair project. Schemes and initiatives to improve the human condition are borne from the belief that there is something broken in the status quo that we must fix. Small solar-powered products are one such fix. Portable lanterns and multilight home systems are being distributed across sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in rural areas, as part of efforts to reach universal energy access - a long-standing challenge of development. Yet these products themselves, like all things, break down. This thesis follows off-grid solar products in Kenya from moments of breakdown through sites of use, repair and disposal. The first half of the thesis looks at the historical development of the technology and the market that has grown up with and around it. Assemblage thinking shows that breakdown is more than a material process but is shaped by wider influences such as business and product design as well. The second half of the thesis describes what happens to the broken down solar product as it moves and is moved through Kenya. Despite differences in appearance and process in three different settings – the home, the repair clinic and the company - the thesis finds consistencies in people’s responses to breakdown. These consistencies appear as a form of bricolage as people draw on previous experience and make use of resources at-hand to reach an acceptable, if at times limited, functionality for their products. Disposal of that which is not repaired is found to always be prefaced by an indefinite period of waiting. The thesis is based on 16 months of fieldwork across the country which included observation of independent and company repair practices and rural and urban waste management processes. 44 interviews were conducted with independent repairmen, company representatives and other relevant individuals. Further information is drawn from a telephone survey of 262 users of solar products. If the macro project of international development is to fix the broken world, then this thesis argues it may benefit from closer examination of micro repair practices. By embracing the inevitability of future breakdown and adopting the principles of bricolage development might get closer to the improved world it aims for.

This thesis explores how conflict and closed borders have reshaped transnational mobilities in the Levant since 2011. It draws on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Mafraq, a provincial town in northern Jordan, in 2016/17. At the time of my research, Mafraq was home to ca. 100,000 locals and similar numbers of Syrians. The timeframe of the study coincides with a specific moment of the humanitarian response in Jordan when stricter encampment policies had exacerbated legal insecurity for urban refugees and the dwindling of international aid had heightened the importance of grassroots and faith-based organisations to Syrians’ daily survival. The thesis speaks to recent debates on “mobility” in the Anthropology of Humanitarianism, Forced Migration and Middle Eastern Studies. It captures intersecting transnational networks of two populations that often remain invisible to policymakers and academics: marginalized rural Syrians that come from, migrate and flee to remote borderlands in the Levant, and Evangelical humanitarians who operate mostly under the radar of the mainstream aid industry and host states. To make sense of the spatial deployment of refugees and Evangelical aid workers during the Syrian conflict, current displacement has to be understood in the context of more longstanding mobility schemes in the Middle East and beyond. My thesis examines the experiences of displaced people and those who assist them through a transnational lens. It does so by studying old and new cross-border flows of people, as well as practices and resources that help poor Syrians survive and Christian charities turn into professional aid providers. From an epistemological point of view, my thesis demonstrates that the study of refugees trapped in exile can heighten our understanding of mobilities in territories that have become inaccessible to anthropologists because of conflict. From a conceptual perspective, it helps us comprehend that forced migration is not a one-way street, but often embedded into more complex patterns of movement, including those of aid providers. Lastly, through revisiting connections between transnational mobility, labour and legality, the thesis highlights global convergences between control mechanisms of humanitarian governance of the displaced in the Global South, and the policing of mobile populations in the Global North.

This thesis explores intersecting processes of inclusion and exclusion among Palestinians in Tel Aviv, a city considered to be essentially Jewish-Israeli. It looks at Palestinians from diverse backgrounds and statuses who engage with the city in search of employment, higher education, political activism, or an urban lifestyle. Although this self-consciously liberal city creates social and economic openings, unequal power relations and conflict prevail over urban civility and citizenship. The Palestinians face a paradox: the deeper their inclusion into Tel Aviv’s political economy, the stronger their estrangement and the more serious their dilemmas. Because their urban inclusion is limited, mobility and constant adaptation become obligatory and eventually disempowering. As they oscillate between conflicting desires and senses of solidarity or identification, the Palestinians in Tel Aviv struggle with intersecting forms of cultural and political power. They seek individual opportunities within a political system they oppose, demand recognition of their identity and history but also seek urban anonymity as unmarked individuals. Their balancing acts resemble acrobats: they walk a tightrope between contradictory worlds, unable to reconcile both into a stable balance and simultaneously prevented from ever fully arriving at the other end. They live in exile ‘at home’.

« Surf Life » is term that attempts to describe some of the characteristics and consequences of what I suggest is a new ecology of remembering and forgetting. The forms it takes, and the consciousness it seems to give rise to, cannot be separated from the ways in which we come to live in, and with, time and place as they are conditioned by the new digital technologies that suffuse everyday life. In relation to the everyday habits of contemporary western life, in particular, this « surf life » might be thought of as a kind of « surfacing » – a disengagement from the consequences of living through an excess of present moments that are quickly rendered obsolete by the arrival of new fascinations.