 Thank you. So very happy to be here with so many of my favorite colleagues, collaborators, and friends, and to have met some very exciting new PhD and master students. So us is, I think, unquestionably the most interesting place to do work on the modern Middle East from critical interdisciplinary perspectives. So I'm looking forward to a really interesting conversation here. I'll talk about, basically, when I originally talked to Nadia about visiting here, I was thinking my book would have just come out, and I would present that, the Security Archipelago. Once again, because we wanted to keep it updated with some of the things that happened last year in Egypt, it got rolled back for another few months, so it's coming out in May. And I know most of you have read some of the articles that I wrote a few months ago, so what I'm going to do is now present my new research, not the book, the Security Archipelago, nor the gender social movements articles that have been circulating, but some new work on these radical forms of popular sovereignty, which is a term I'm using to frame these new ways of claiming bodies in space and alternative morality regimes in Cairo by actors that would never have been considered for the most part part of civil society during the Mubarak period, and this is based on the project I'm just beginning to work on now in Egypt, so this is a little bit more rough than some of the things you've read, which are already rough enough, if those of you who managed to survive one of my articles. But I would love to talk about this, and I'd also welcome anyone to visit Egypt and visit this project with me if you're working on some of these kind of issues. I know some of you have, of course, worked in these neighborhoods and know them better than I, and I'd love to collaborate. So we'll talk about that later. So first of all, just real quickly. Well, I actually don't need to do this too much, because Nadia's introduction laid this all out. But again, I work on the securitization dynamics, these new forms of gender and moralized class subjects of police and military regimes. It's a way that I do focus on religious politics and morality politics in the urban context, but from a specific way that focuses not on the linear traditionality of these practices or on the cultural authenticity of these practices, but on the globally circulating nature of how subjects of morality, of embodiments of class circulate through public and private sector security and military industries. I am beginning to commit more seriously to looking at issues of popular sovereignty rather than looking at logics of social movement action, which my book is actually more focused on logics of social movement action. Now I'm orange in popular sovereignty, because in this anti-colonial sense and this way of looking at bodies and violence and space in this highly gendered and racialized way. As I'm gonna talk about today, I'm particularly interested in challenging the way that immediately this kind of rough new school of studying local movements in the post-Arab Spring context has focused on basically, and these are many of my friends including myself that do this, I'm not mocking them, but basically focused on kind of neat things that people do at the local level and just kind of bracket the whole idea of the state, policing regimes, political economy and focus on these neat little attempts to fix their own water systems or deal with their own trash or stop sexual harassment. And but I wanna keep those local practices tied in with radical forms of challenging the way the state occupies bodies and spaces. So I don't wanna focus on pragmatic dimensions of local action, I wanna see local action when it's most challenging and subverting of absolutist or repressive forms of sovereignty. So that's my focus is to focus on what we usually call local alternative practices but I use those as a way to rethink of stateness or the state, not as things that are outside or non-state or marginalized. And I also, as you see in any of my articles, usually I try to basically taxonomize and round up different forms of alternative and inventive practices coming out of these global South contexts, not romanticizing them as somehow outside of imperial or global formations, but being able to recognize really when you see some subversive new form of counter hegemonic practice and again, as opposed to some trends in subaltern and social, subaltern and post-colonial theory, I think we can talk about resistance and subversion in this current moment in ways that can recognize something new is going on. All right, so again, I'll come back later and talk about my book, inshallah. All right, so basically let me just introduce the two research projects I'm involved in now. One in Cairo, principal research project in Cairo called societal violence and alternative security practices which involves five 15 youth researchers embedded in local communities in Cairo, each of these communities throughout the police, burned down the police station and took over their own security and local governance. After the uprisings of the 28th of January, 2011, so these range from everything from basically security officials that took off their uniforms and became protection rackets, nothing very revolutionary about that, to social bandit identified, Baltagea gangs that have a progressive social agenda, to Baltagea that just work for the local richest shop owner on the corner who's just basically forcing everyone into their paternalistic or masculinist fold. Two, women's gamayet, social women's organizations that are gamayet tamuelaya or maleya, workers or financial collectives that often establish a social security matrix, such as people like Diane Singerman have talked about in the past, but have a new vitality now because of new forms of transnational circulations of capital. Anyway, many different forms of social movement. We have sex workers unions among Sudanese refugees in Maadi, many different notions of security, the gendering and sexualization of security in these self-ruling communities. So the idea is not to, is to build a vernacular language about safety, conflict resolution, the gendering and class marking of new forms of self-rule, so that instead of using the language of international law and human rights to build a new model for the security state, for a humanized security state in Egypt, we have this very interesting, grounded vernacular language coming out of these practices, the testing of these practices in real time, and with these community participants able to articulate these practices themselves in the public sphere, coming from their own, most case working class sites and communities. So, I mean, again, this is not to romanticize them, this is not to portray any one alternative as a model, but it's to take advantage of really this moment of laboratory, social laboratory going on. So this is based at the Nazra for Feminist Studies, which is a very broad and interesting organization in Cairo, which includes a lot of queer Egyptian activists, includes Nubian Islamic feminists, it includes Sudanese former women, teenage warriors from Darfur. I mean, it is not your typical feminist organization, but it's a very strongly feminist identified organization, but producing this really new kind of collective formation of practices and ideas. There's some of us, da-da-da. All right, the other one, the New Paradigms Factory, based at the Arab Council of Social Sciences in Beirut, which we have one of our esteemed fellows here, Alesha Hebi, is focusing in this six month period on identifying new ways to talk about challenges to sovereignty and new ways emerging from 10 countries across the Arab world of producing new forms of popular sovereignty, sometimes with gender and class critique, sometimes with the social history context. Anyway, so these two projects intersect around these ideas of studying new forms of sovereignty making as alternatives to basically legal juridical notions of where security comes from and where it can be fixed. So that's the New Paradigms Factory. And again, anyone who wants to know more about these projects or try to participate in some way, email me later. So in order to pursue these research projects, I am at this point dealing in terms of theory and method with, again, what I brought up a little bit earlier, challenging what we see as the social turn in what we can start to see as coalescing as this post-Arab Spring movements in political science and political anthropology. Again, you probably being here, you won't be sensing this kind of sense of limitation, but myself going to many conferences of people that work on civil society and urban social movements in Cairo or in Beirut or in Morocco or in France or in Berlin or around the United States. I've seen very much this constant theme amongst those that are doing urban field work focusing on, again, the local, in order to get beyond the secular versus Islamist binary, people focus on pragmatic action, the terms pragmatism, focusing on portraying people's solving problems, acting as rational actors in dealing with non-ideological problems, rejecting ideology, having a kind of horizontal approach to solving pragmatic problems in their communities. So the good part of this is that it gets its sidesteps issues of these binaries around class, binaries around quote unquote secular versus Islamist, which I'm sure all of you can thoroughly critique in which we can talk about after my presentation of my research, when I think inevitably we can talk about things like the crisis around Morsi and the Constitution in Egypt or other questions in other countries where we're dealing with some of these issues. Anyway, so I've seen whether it was this long conference in Cairo for six days in which involved nearly every major project studying social movements and urban actors and urban transformation in the context of revolution or many other conferences have seen this focus on, again, how to solve the representation problems and methodology problems of studying urban resistance. And again, it's focused on the local social movements, pragmatic rationalist action, again, drawing upon people like Asif Bayat, not drawing enough upon people like Salwa and those that have really a much more embedded set of questions and lenses. And the state then, despite all the people that have struggled and died to reveal the complexity of the state, the diversity and the contradictions within its coercive apparatus, within its political, economic embeddedness, we have the return of the state again. Again, in these waves, the state again becomes re-identified with the head of state, re-personalized with a particular constitutional profile. And then again, we lose what we've supposedly learned every round of these uprisings about the contradictions within its class, political, economic and coercive structures, the way these pieces don't match together, the way people have been able to with sheer organizing power, force of will, discursive innovation, managed to wedge them apart, reveal their contradictions and facilitate these breakdowns. But so once again, so we now have the state re-represented as a head of state, of course, not just in the media, but by social scientists themselves, the return of authoritarianism studies, the return of resilience of authoritarianism again. Of course, all those brotherologists that had packed up their bags and finally moved on, they've all moved back in and they're back at the forefront of the social sciences looking again at this very monolithic Islam that is then being reflected through the will of the people by brotherhood's elected power in these states. So we have the return of a monolithic object of the state, represented in its head of state and encoded within a very narrow reading of constitution and how the law is supposedly then really produced by a constitution, not by the forces of coercion, ideological regimentation, regulation, social embodiment, as critical legal scholars have been trying to say for four decades. So we need to have methodologies that are as dynamic and inventive and plural as the Arab Spring social movements themselves. So what we need to do first, in my view, is to start to map out these vernacular political theories that are coming out of these forms of radical social movement, coming out of these youth movements, these radical new forms of feminism. And so tossing some terms around here, but these are some of the, in Egypt, some of the ways to categorize and start to create theories about the different mobilizing strategies and the different self-representations of these social movements. Now this list, as Adam knows, since I presented this a few months ago, is already very old and I desperately need to revive it, but this includes the pragmatic rationalists, those that actually do see themselves in the ways that the social theorists of the Arab Spring tend to see everyone, which is as a pragmatic rationalist actor. The way Asif Bayat, for example, describes most youth movements or quietist social movements in the Middle East. Romantic horizontalists, we have many, again, Britain has been a key site for elaborating notions of horizontal politics, drawing upon the anarchist legacies of Argentina and the Southern Cone, where the term horizontalism came from, drawing upon the work of Hart and Negri. Of course, there's different vernacular sources for how this is described and articulated within Egypt itself, but you obviously have this discourse of leaderlessness, this discourse of the network and the rejection of ideology. Although that has surprisingly become, it was utterly hegemonic for the kind of Tahir period in Egypt, but has almost utterly disappeared at this point as the return of the importance of leaders, the return of making very clear ideological distinctions between one group and the other in order to make politics and political organizing possible has returned. So the horizontalists are suddenly, they disappear just as fast as they appear. The anarchists or the Spartacists, the ones that kind of come from the, increasingly from these lumpen areas of societies, these really increasing them, looking at street children movements. Children as young as nine years old, engaging in radical forms of violent vulgarized politics using, throwing their bodies against the apparatus of the security state, using all kinds of very ironic, very darkly ironic forms of iconography. Of course, graffiti, but also the way, you know, like watching in front of the Hadea in front of Morsi's Palace, these nine and 10 and 12 year olds, chain smoking with gas masks on and SpongeBob T-shirts and, I mean, it's really, it's surreal, but these are real organizations. They've taken over primary schools. I mean, something that's almost never happened, I mean, I'm talking to a lot of people, if you know, movements amongst children that have become this politicized in this, and I think there's political economic reasons for that. If you're in Cairo at 11 o'clock at night, who are doing all the deliveries between the stores? Who are the ones serving all the tea in the shops? Who are the ones carrying the laundry up the stairs to people? These are like 10 year olds. They do actually control public space. They are the networkers of the urban economy. So it's not actually unimaginable that they should actually understand themselves as the rulers of the street at night. And to take on that, of course, we know Victorian London had these kind of movements. And finally, of course, workers have always been a part of these uprisings in Egypt, and are now back, importantly because also in this moment is that many professional syndicates and many of the upper echelon workers, factory workers movements used to be very much controlled by the brothers. They were very much part of the Muslim Brotherhood and its most powerful social presence in societies through syndicates and the upper echelons of labor movement. And now specifically because the brothers have signed a very classic 1980 structural adjustment agree with the IMF and launched an austerity regime, put into the Constitution an elimination of key labor organizing rights that the labor movement had finally went from a barric just two months before he stepped down. Labor movement is turned against the brothers very strongly and they have severed their relationships to the brothers even in the professional ranks. So again, these are different ways to categorize some of the, again, the more radical forms of organization, which again, are the kinds that don't show up. Of course, it's something I'm sure none of you buy into, but the kind of Facebook revolution or the New York Times version of the secular liberal revolution portrayals that these are actually very interesting and radical and always innovative groups that have a vernacular language of their own regarding security, regarding gender and regarding the radicalization of a new deepening class-based challenge to not just the political order, but the social order. So again, as I implied in my dissatisfaction with some of the questions about pragmatism, I want to continue to develop a new framework that rather than stepping out of ideology, stepping out of questions of the dissident and impractical and vulgar and symbolically laden, not practical dimensions of these movements. I want to move in that in this other direction to really look radically, I'm saying the word radical, Amar, to look much more intensively and much more specifically and commit the following the ways that class and gender and youth are embodied in specific ways that do subvert and destabilize and reveal the security apparatus and its moralization, especially in this moment of brotherhood and military alliance. So again, my critique is that a lot of these movements, a lot of these new academic and methodologies for celebrating the pragmatic, non-ideological leaderlessness of civil society are actually the same old neoliberal methods that the World Bank promoted back in the late 80s and early 90s. It said let's celebrate these non-ideological creative problem-solving bootstrapping local actors that don't need an ideology to solve a problem. They don't need labor unions to figure out how to fix their economic problems. They have these local collectives that can bring their own electricity to their slum, they can build their own sewage systems. So that kind of bootstrapping creative, pragmatic action, which my good friend D'Acef Bajat celebrates a lot, I think is just the old neoliberal ideology celebrating these forms of survivalism, which lets us state off the hook, and which very importantly makes coercion and violence and the gender and class essence of coercion and violence unimportant and irrelevant. So the alternative method takes these processes of securitization or sovereignty making as the core object of investigation. So it doesn't take these forms of autonomy as just a celebrated form of pragmatism. It takes that form of autonomy as a process of securitization, of securitization of the self, which produces the subject of gender and class, and so therefore is always gonna be violent. Even when it's successful in producing resistance, it's always going to be on the basis of producing a form of resistant masculinity or femininity, which is always gonna have its dimension of violence. At least it's going to be a distinguishing itself or challenging from other normalized forms of subjectivity. So rather than focusing on the simplified pragmatic little guys versus the monolithic state represented in head of state and constitution, I focus on these peristatal formations, which is again to avoid the neoliberal language of the non-state versus the state. I focus on peristate, like when you're looking in Latin America, when you're looking at Columbia or Central America, you have to understand the paramilitaries or Mexico or Brazil. The paramilitaries are where power really reveals its true face. So the peristates is where power reveals its constructed nature. So again, I look at again these forms of intermediary action in which again the law is produced through particular practices of normalization, regulation and coercion, rather than simply in the jurisprudential discourse in the constitutional assemblies. All right, let's skip critique of that. So now just case studies. So this is for the whole project as a whole. My own case studies will be based on a couple of these communities in the end, which I will decide as the project continues. But basically the case studies that our project are now working on, how many people here know Cairo a little bit or a lot? Okay, good. So we're looking at Mbaba, which is a case that of course has had a long history of where the state has been experimenting with turning forms of self-rule into forms of appropriated peristatal rule, identified with migrants from the Said, identified with forms of Islamist self-governance and popular sovereignty, but also identified very much with informants, minister and mystery of interior extraction, rackets, et cetera. Ardullua is interesting because it's one of the most well-organized popular committees that kicked out the police and exerted self-governance with sometimes rare, which with the participation of women in these popular committees, which is often rare. But it's also interesting now because in Ardullua, they're actually creating a campaign to invite the police back in, working directly with ministries of the state, but setting the exact terms of how the police are going to re-establish their control, according to what they're gonna set these kind of local legal terms, these kind of norms of dealing with gender in the neighborhood, they're going to have members of the women from the Legenda Shabeya, the popular committees, within the police. So it's really interesting in that they're now going from a kind of rejection mode to a, literally, they're setting themselves up as a model for a new kind of Egyptian police. Mahadi is very interesting because it is, in this part of Mahadi, it's an area ruled completely by a group called the Lost Boys, which is a Sudanese gang that is basically a sex trafficking operation. But however, many of its leaders are actually women, and in this case, the researcher of my project, she was a soldier from Darfur who fought there in her teenage years and she's now so organizing the sex worker groups in Ain Shams and in Mahadi. And again, so dealing very much with issues of race, obviously with issues of paramilitarization with the notion of Egypt's imperialist interventions into Sudan. So it's all sorts of very fascinating issues that come out in terms of sovereignty over the body, race, class, sexuality. So I don't know what the implications are yet, but it's gonna be very interesting. Abdeen is the area right next to the Interior Ministry, which I was living in during the Mahmoud Battles of September through November of 2011. And it was occupied eventually by the Ultras, these youth football gang clubs, but there are much more than that at this point. They're like main phalanx of violent resistance to the police and military on the ground. So that neighborhood was occupied by the Ultras. They checked my passport every time I left my building. They interrogated me in their tents regularly. So I got to, and during that time, they still had a very rigid gender protection discourse. They didn't allow women in the streets or in the camp at night, but then they eventually changed that and you started to see women Ultras participating in this, but of course, according to a very female masculinity model, right? They assimilated into a particular kind of ultra-mask immunity. Anyway, so it was very interesting because Abdeen is associated with, of course, Mukhberin, Mosheedin, the informants for the Interior Ministry, often leading the gangs that area. So I don't know again exactly what's gonna come out of that, but the point is to look at this changing negotiation in particular amongst Ultras in relationship to issues of protection of gender, and then, of course, amongst the new class of female Ultras, this idea of kind of female-mask immunity or however that tends to play out in this contradictory way. So Izbeta Mukharna is an interesting site because it had one of the most famous cases of a Baltagi, a thug, who burned down the police station, chased out the police, then was captured by the police and put in jail, and then the whole community got up, ran to the other jail, burned it down, liberated him, brought him back, and then he somehow got on a talk show and explained the whole process and became a national figure, the only kind of Baltagi that became a Robin Hood figure that really kind of became a social bandit in the true sense. And so I'm working with Muhammad Said, who's an amazing guy at CUNY during a dissertation on these kind of social banditry practices. Anyway, so, and then also finally, these more traditional forms of informal conflict resolution are also changing. And in relationship in particular, we're looking at the between self-conflict resolution and then these women identified social security mechanisms around gamayet and how those social security and then kind of legal mechanisms offer different forms of security. Anyway, so getting a lot out there, but the multiplicity is important because none of these can be reduced to simply pragmatic problem solving. They're all symbolically rich, they're all incredibly gendered in their essence, they're all embattled class positions. And each in their own way is on some level offering itself as an alternative to the way the Egyptian security state works. So, I wanna kind of wrap up this introduction so they can go in whatever direction you guys wish, but the goal then of this coming research, which hopefully I'll finish the writing of in October, 2013, but it's to locate participatory practice practices of democratization or this kind of opening up of the security state to local languages and symbolic logics and different gender and class positions, but not as a kind of just portrayal of resistance or as a kind of celebration of local autonomy, but in order to relocate where the state is and where the state could be, because that's I think what popular sovereignty is, that's what democratization is. It's relocating the proper subjects of participation amongst the improper or perverse processes of subversion and resistance. Second, the challenge of this project is to really interrogate the dark side of these more humanitarian or human security practices that have been to protect or rescue or preserve these kind of vulnerable and at-risk populations and instead of like Muhammad Morsi's current regime, Tandif al-Baled cleaning the city, cleansing the city of its thugs and its whores and its outside infiltrators. Instead, of course, this is a goal of re-embracing different kinds of vernacular security being produced from below. And finally, in terms of theory and methodology, my priority is to identify new forms of securitization coming self-consciously out of movements grappling with the question of morality, respectability, and gender in the spatial context in order to then translate that into real policy into, of course, law is never enough, but actual policy that can shape a new public sphere and that can create new subjects for gender and class intervention that I think mirror the potential of these Arab Spring uprisings. So thank you very much for your attention.