In 2011, the year of the Arab uprisings, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing hit the bookstands. The concept precariat describes the condition of life and labour among educated urbanized youth in the twenty-first century more lucidly and persuasively than the key policy literature on the region, as exemplified in The Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) 2016: Youth and the Prospects for Human Development in a Changing Reality. This paper argues that any meaningful conceptualization of youth in North Africa and West Asia going forward should incorporate the notion of precariat and the condition of precariousness.

Ines Braune <br>is an assistant professor at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies (CNMS) at Philipps-University Marburg. She holds a PhD in Arabic Studies from Leipzig University and has a background in media studies. Her current research is on Parkour as a mediatized cultural practice in the Arab world. Her research interests include cultural studies, media, youth and inequalities in the Arab world. She is coeditor of the open access journal Middle East Topics and Arguments (META).

Neoliberalism is a widely used term in social science in order to refer to processes as privatization, deregulation, commodification and austerity. Quite often, in this interpretative framework neoliberalism is also associated with the dismantling of the welfare state, opening up of free trade and investment and an increased emphasis on the private sector. In the academic discussion, different authors criticize the use of the term because it lacks analytical clearity and/or that it is used as a political slogan to denounce social and economic change (Willgerodt 2006). The aim of the article is neither to question the analytical dimension nor to develop an irrefutable definition but to give insights into the strength of a place and time sensitive discussion of neoliberalism. What does this mean for the urban development of cities in MENA?

It is commonly claimed that infrastructures are so banal and taken-for-granted that they only become visible when they collapse or cease to function. Indeed, the exclusion or disconnection of certain areas from infrastructural services has been termed ‘infrastructural violence’. In East Jerusalem, where infrastructure has long been underfunded and Palestinian Jerusalemites are excluded from access to many urban services, infrastructure also became apparent as a political question when it appeared in the form of a new light rail connection – and even more so when this ostensibly useful public service was attacked by residents. The violent disruption of the light rail, the piece argues, called attention to the manner in which Jerusalem’s light rail serves to normalise both Palestinian urban space and movements, thus feeding into an agenda of annexation. The expansion of infrastructural networks, and the resulting connectivity of previously marginalised areas, then, can also act as a form of violence rather than ‘atonement’ for past neglect.

In this paper I will argue against the idea that infrastructures are normally invisible and only become visible in certain moments. This notion is problematic because it is based on the idea that in the Western world things work smoothly and normally, while in the rest of the world breakdown is assumed to be a normal state of affairs and makes infrastructures visible. Rather, I will instead focus on the more individual, less visible–although not invisible–micro-modes of infrastructural breakdowns. The approach envisaged will be theoretically grounded by thinking (along) with the work of Martin Heidegger with particular regard to his widely interpreted § 16 of Being and Time on tools and “tool-being.” In this text, Heidegger outlines three existential modes of concern, namely conspicuousness, obtrusiveness and obstinacy, which will be helpful for understanding infrastructures as conflictual terrains as well as for thinking through people’s reconfigurations of aspirations in general. In other words, Heidegger describes three different modes of possible breakdowns that interrupt the course of everyday life in such a way that one is compelled to reflect upon one’s subjectivities and, equally important, upon the things themselves. The article will thus focus on how these in/visibilities are mobilized and situated within ethnographic accounts which I am drawing from readings and fieldwork experiences in South Africa.

Starting in the 1920s and 30s, youth came to be seen, in colonial Algeria as elsewhere in the Arab world, as a social category that educators, academics and politicians had to deal with in one way or another. Modernizers and many young men and women established a host of youth movements from the 1920s onwards: cultural circles and student associations, sports teams and scout troops as well as youth wings of political parties. In this contribution I examine such youth movements and the generational conflicts they brought with them in French Algeria from around 1930 until the achievement of independence in 1962. Based on theories by Johan Huizinga and José Ortega y Gasset about the generative potential of generational communities centered around play, I will demonstrate the importance of allegedly non-political youth groups for the social and political transformations in late colonial Algeria.

The scholarship on late Imperial Russia's Oriental studies is divided by a disagreement over the applicability of Edward Said's Orientalism to the Russian case. Moreover, in a broader sense, since the mid 1990s, Western scholarship has not been unanimous on the applicability of the underlying Foucauldian notions to late Imperial and Soviet Russia. While presenting a systematic study of Soviet and post-Soviet scholarship (mostly unfamiliar to Western readership), this article offers an assessment of the institutional and individual practices adopted within Russia's Oriental studies from the late nineteenth century to the present. The article aims to provide an analysis that goes far beyond the Saidian restrictive East-West dichotomy and his concept of two-vector relations between knowledge and state power. It offers a new reading, based on the deconstruction of the interplay of the manifold multi-vector power/knowledge relations that is clearly identifiable in Russia's long twentieth-century Iranian studies.

This article reviews Haidar Eid's "'Worlding' (Post)Modernism: Interpretative Possibilities of Critical Theory."

The article examines the significance of informal economic practices, e.g. street vending and informal commerce, for young merchants from Ettadhamen, a neighborhood situated in the northwestern periphery of the Greater Tunis area. It further addresses cross-border trade in the Tunisian-Libyan and Tunisian-Algerian border regions in which some of these merchants are indirectly involved. Peripheralization therefore does not imply complete socio-spatial exclusion. Peripheries rather offer important, albeit limited possibilities, to acquire resources through practices that are situated in the interstices between legality and illegality. As these possibilities often avoid state regulation and control, the article also addresses the ambivalent nature of the state-society relations that shapes everyday encounters between inhabitants and state agents, especially the police.