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This thesis analyses the everyday politics of water in N'Djamena, Chad and its implications for various realms in the urbanscape. Water workers and end-users coexist and punctually collaborate with numerous other space-users in public places such as community squares, where water is prominently sourced. I argue that water and social life occupy distinct spaces within the same squares, a dissociative process that leads to "multiplex spaces". The research further demonstrates that water access and supply in peripheral and working-class neighbourhoods of N'Djamena operate as a moral economy characterised by precarity and shifting temporalities but also strong agentive struggles and solidarity. Similarly, agents of Chad's National Water Company engage in "hydraulic bricolages" during maintenance and connection operations. Despite endeavours to build universal infrastructural networks, multiple water supply schemes coexist in N'Djamena, as exemplified by the borehole economy. As such, localised water delivery solutions are likely to prevail, a situation of "reticular urbanism." Furthermore, development projects funded by foreign donors reshape N'Djamena's waterscape. These projects rely on local fieldworkers that engage in community work. Community work undertaken by municipal officers and neighbourhood association members appears as an essential form of relational work that require in-depth social and technical knowledge. Finally, dynamics of water patronage suggest that politicians and local leaders can choose different paths that imply contrasting levels of territoriality; while professional politicians might decide to fund water works to build up their popularity in their constituencies, chiefs tend to rely on water as a profitable business venture.

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’.