NPF Cycle One Fellows and Projects
Ahmad Hosni: Sovereignty, Territorialization, and Tourism in Sinai
Abstract: The recent militant resurgence in Sinai has posed serious challenges to the post-Mubarak political establishment in Egypt. Between a discourse of “war on terror and Bedouin disenfranchisement on the other the situation in Sinai is rather opaque. This three-part essay argues that in order to understand the current situation in Sinai one needs to look at the history of relation between territory and the Egyptian state, between the center and the periphery. The essay examines a long arc of such a relation since the reign of Muhammed Ali Pasha and argues that Sinai did not come as a geopolitical entity until the second half of the nineteenth century. Its birth was tied to geopolitical conflict, first between the British and Ottoman and latter Egypt and Israel. Such a history of territorial conflict ushered a tradition of hyper-securitization, which in effect resulted in the distancing between Sinai and the mainland, or in other words the “compartmentalization” of the territory. The advent of tourism in the south was probably the most important factor in shaping spatial formation in Sinai, especially in the South. More significant was the fact that tourism was employed by the state as a tool for territorialization and Egyptianization. In other words, it was a tool for the expansion of statal dominion on the space and its inhabitants during the years that followed the Israeli withdrawal in 1982. According to this essay, sovereignty is the territorialization or the charting of space.
That policy was to some extent successful, but it was focally so. That is to say, those areas where tourism was in operation, such as the South East were largely brought into the state’s apparatus of security and management. Areas where tourism did not exist are still largely beyond the government control, namely the hinterlands and the north. It is no wonder that all of the current incidences of insurgence take place in the northeast of the peninsula. The irony here is that while government policies that aimed to re-connect Sinai to the mainland also resulted in its further compartmentalization: there exists two Sinais as to say, one is the tourist territory and the rest. These two spaces are divided according to relation to the center, discrepancy in income as well as ethnic difference where the Bedouin community is increasingly shifted inland and into poverty. And that sounds like a recipe for trouble.
Relevant Publications
Ahmad Hosni is a physician and photographer based in Barcelona. You can learn more about his work on his blog: http://thewhiteboard.info.
