This paper examines the recent history of peasant farming in a Moroccan oasis to reflect on the relationship between agrodiversity, labor and tradition in contemporary smallholder systems. Many agrarian scholars and food sovereignty activists emphasize the role of peasant farmers in protecting agricultural biodiversity. This paper argues that certain kinds of agrodiversity may in fact be ‘new', a product of recent agrarian transformations that adapt and in some cases reject agricultural traditions. Ethnographic research in pre-Saharan Morocco found that some households used migration remittances to experiment with new crops and produce for the market for the first time. In recognizing the ambivalent relationship peasant farmers may have towards tradition, this paper contends that it is important to locate a political economy of agrodiversity in the larger context of the contemporary agrarian question and to relate agrodiversity to the changing labor regimes that enable peasant farming systems.

This paper explores rural poverty through a relational lens, arguing that new spatial patterns of poverty stemming from global economic transformations call for a relational approach; one that draws attention to the importance of global integration while recognizing that places are absorbed differently and unevenly into circuits of capital accumulation. The spread of neoliberalism has reconfigured rural spaces, and the production of poverty knowledge reinforces this uneven spatiality. We address recent literature extending the critical analysis of poverty and welfare in the Global North to the production of poverty knowledge and development practice globally. We examine the various technologies of power that ask the subjects of rural poverty to be empowered, moral, and market‐oriented subjects. This attention to how rural poverty is governed and how rural subjects are inserted into the project of development highlights the distinct role of rural spaces in relation to poverty studies. We emphasize the spatially and temporally disjointed ways in which rural spaces and subjectivities are reconfigured, calling for greater attention to ethnographic accounts of the lived experiences of poverty. We argue for a reconsideration the " global rural " in processes of uneven development.

Investigating minority and indigenous women’s rights in Muslim-majority states, this book critically examines the human rights regime within international law. Based on extensive and diverse ethnographic research on Amazigh women in Morocco, the book unpacks and challenges generally accepted notions of rights and equality. Significantly, and controversially, the book challenges the supposedly ‘emancipatory’ power vested in the human rights project; arguing that rights-based discourses are sites of contestation for different groups that use them to assert their agency in society. More specifically, it shows how the very conditions that make minority and indigenous women instrumental to the preservation of their culture may condemn them to a position of subalternity. In response, and engaging the notion and meaning of Islamic feminism, the book proposes that feminism should be interpreted and contextualised locally in order to be effective and inclusive, and so in order for the human rights project to fully realise its potential to empower the marginalised and make space for their voices to be heard. Providing a detailed, empirically based, analysis of rights in action, this book will be of relevance to scholars, students and practitioners in human rights policy and practice, in international law, minorities’ and indigenous peoples’ rights, gender studies, and Middle Eastern and North African Studies.

Border walls permeate our world, with more than thirty nation-states constructing them. Anthropologists Margaret E. Dorsey and Miguel Díaz-Barriga argue that border wall construction manifests transformations in citizenship practices that are aimed not only at keeping migrants out but also at enmeshing citizens into a wider politics of exclusion. For a decade, the authors studied the U.S.-Mexico border wall constructed by the Department of Homeland Security and observed the political protests and legal challenges that residents mounted in opposition to the wall. In Fencing in Democracy Dorsey and Díaz-Barriga take us to those border communities most affected by the wall and often ignored in national discussions about border security to highlight how the state diminishes citizens' rights. That dynamic speaks to the citizenship experiences of border residents that is indicative of how walls imprison the populations they are built to protect. Dorsey and Díaz-Barriga brilliantly expand conversations about citizenship, the operation of U.S. power, and the implications of border walls for the future of democracy.

Bringing together historians of US foreign relations and scholars of Iranian studies, American-Iranian Dialogues examines the cultural connections between Americans and Iranians from the constitutional period of the 1890s through to the start of the White Revolution in the 1960s. Taking an innovative cultural approach, chapters are centered around major themes in American-Iranian encounters and cultural exchange throughout this period, including stories of origin, cultural representations, nationalism and discourses on development. Expert contributors draw together different strands of US-Iranian relations to discuss a range of path-breaking topics such as the history of education, heritage exchange, oil development and the often-overlooked interactions between American and Iranian non-state actors. Through exploring the understudied cultural dimensions of US-Iranian relations, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in American history, international history, Iranian studies and Middle Eastern studies.

Despite themselves suffering different forms of violence at the hands of the Myanmar military, Myanmar’s masses have resoundingly endorsed the military’s ethnic cleansing of its Rohingya minority. Why? We analyze collective dis-identification with the Rohingya plight by exploring histories of state violence in Myanmar, arguing that mass violence against Rohingya and other ethnic groups has taken two different forms in Myanmar’s symbolic milieu. Specifically, the violence leveled against the Rohingya has been expulsive, directed at their belonging and existence itself, while both the violence against other ethnic groups and the structural violence against the majority Burmans has been, somewhat paradoxically, incorporative, drawing them – under conditions of domination – into the polity. The effect of the violence on the latter has interpellated them as members of the polity (in a diminished, graduated sense) meaning that they have been targeted as subjects to be governed. Rohingya, by contrast, have been killed as objects, as others to be eliminated. The physically and symbolically expulsive violence suffered by the Rohingya both buttresses and secures the standing of the other Myanmar subjects, even as it justifies itself in the eyes of the broader polity as protective of the entire multi-ethnic nation. Prasse-Freeman, Elliott, and Andrew Ong. "Expulsion/incorporation: Valences of mass violence in Myanmar." Political Violence in Southeast Asia since 1945. Routledge, 2021. 41-55.

This is the introduction to a book on Race and Rurality in the Global Economy that was just published by the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University and SUNY Press (October 2018). http://www.sunypress.edu/p-6616-race-and-rurality-in-the-global.aspx