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This article introduces the special section on "Circuits of production, crisis and revolt: The environment and capital in the Middle East and North Africa," featuring four articles. Each one examines cases where imperial and hegemonic state powers exert power over the environment, while forms of agency and resistance emerge in response. The introduction identifies some of the problems that exist within the study of the environment in the Middle East and North Africa. The Orientalist tendency continues to lead to distortions that exceptionalize and mislead. A redress to these problems is the development of a political ecological framework that identifies the power differential within social relations over resources. The introduction explains how these are represented within the four articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview of settler-colonial imaginaries of water and how they have cast the area of Sahl al-Battuf as the imagined site of a reservoir and a critical junction for the realisation of the Israeli National Water Carrier. Focusing on the events surrounding the construction of this project, I show how Palestinians inside Israel, at that time living under Israeli military rule, engaged with the state to protest and negotiate their claims over land and water. The findings reveal how settler-colonial imaginaries produce uneven waterscapes and have an enduring impact on Palestinian environmental imaginaries. Narrating and analysing water histories from below allows for a better exploration of indigenous opposition and reclamation of their water use and management. Palestinian struggles for water and land reveal how such mobilisation was shaped by the state's relationship with its estranged Palestinian populations in the midst of citizenship claims, and therefore show how such resource struggles were being constituted through water as a vessel for making claims of recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lefebvre's ‘right to the city’ was an expression of a new politics of citizenship, residency and above all the right to urban life. We thus build our argument in this paper on the Lefebvre concept and through the case study of Kufr Aqab, the northernmost neighbourhood of the occupied city of Jerusalem. In order to systematically displace Palestinian Jerusalemites and to achieve the Judaisation of Jerusalem, the right to urban life and any sort of ‘right to the city’ have been completely denied. In fact, through the spatial–demographic policies practised by Israeli authorities, Kufr Aqab has been aggressively excluded from the central area of Jerusalem (by the separation wall and the military border crossing) and progressively ethnically segregated. Kufr Aqab is highly populated by displaced Palestinian Jerusalemites since it is the only alternative that allows them to maintain their Jerusalem residency and their few civic rights. Ongoing unregulated urban development and deliberate informality has rendered Kufr Aqab a space of legal and civic exceptions and an insecure environment suspended within a notion of ‘permanent temporariness’. This case study poses important questions to the relevance of Lefebvrian concepts, even if the ‘point of departure of this urban problematic’ is not industrialisation but the Israeli occupation, and the ‘critical point’ is not within a western context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]