Zachary D Cuyler | University of Illinois at Chicago (original) (raw)
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Papers by Zachary D Cuyler
Century International, 2023
The scramble for electricity has produced new interest groups that will shape the evolution of Le... more The scramble for electricity has produced new interest groups that will shape the evolution of Lebanon’s decaying power sector—and the country’s future.
Translation credit to the staff of L'Orient-Le Jour
Historical Materialism, 2020
https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/journal/volume-28-issue-4-2020 This paper examines a 1969 ... more https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/journal/volume-28-issue-4-2020
This paper examines a 1969 infrastructure-sabotage campaign by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) as reported in the pages of its weekly newspaper, al-Hadaf. While academic and policy discourse conceptualises sabotage in a way that emphasises its disruptive effects and sometimes obscures the positive political ends toward which acts of sabotage are directed, the PFLP conceptualised sabotage as a practice of revealing the political and economic relations that infrastructures sustain by disrupting them and marking progress toward an alternative political-economic order. For the PFLP, sabotage constituted a kind of concrete critique, a communicative act that conveys a theoretical analysis of processes of extraction, exploitation, and dispossession by physically interrupting them.
Labor History, 2019
This article examines anti-sectarianism and the technopolitics of labor mobilization at the facil... more This article examines anti-sectarianism and the technopolitics of labor mobilization at the facilities of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline (Tapline) company in Lebanon between 1950 and 1964. It argues that although Tapline helped sustain a Lebanese elite strategy of cross-sectarian power-sharing, it also unintentionally fostered specifically anti-sectarian labor mobilization. Pursuing a line of inquiry into the technopolitics of worker mobilization around oil infrastructure opened by Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy, this article specifically examines how Lebanese Tapline workers construed their actions, and did so in anti-sectarian terms. It also proposes that similar studies of labor and the technopolitics of infrastructure could offer productive avenues for inquiry into the origins of anti-sectarian politics in Lebanon.
Touraj Atabaki, Elisabetta Bini, and Kaveh Ehsani, eds., Working for Oil: Comparative Social Histories of Labor in the Global Oil Industry (Palgrave Macmillan 2018)., 2018
Based on MA thesis completed at Georgetown University's MA program in Arab Studies in May 2014. ... more Based on MA thesis completed at Georgetown University's MA program in Arab Studies in May 2014.
This essay examines the politics of the technical and anti-colonial nationalism in the labor history of the Trans-Arabian pipeline, or Tapline, in Lebanon. It covers the period between 1950, when Tapline was completed, and 1963–1964, when the company’s Lebanese workforce unionized and participated in a successful nationwide strike. After reviewing the purposes Tapline was built to serve, this essay examines the technical systems that enabled and regulated the flow of oil through the pipeline and the managerial strategy Tapline pursued to prevent worker mobilization that could disrupt those systems. It then shows how Tapline’s Lebanese employees unionized, secured coordinated control over the flow of oil through the pipeline, and used their resulting power to contest the terms of their labor. In doing so, this essay aims to illustrate the unpredictable ways in which technology distributes agency, and the complex and seemingly contradictory ways in which labor activism engages with the managerial strategies it opposes.
Middle East Report, 2016
Though mainstream coverage projects a linear transition away from fossil fuels to technologically... more Though mainstream coverage projects a linear transition away from fossil fuels to technologically advanced renewable energy in the Arab world's electricity sector, a review of planned power plants suggests that the transition that is currently underway will be much more complex, and that coal and nuclear power are likely to be much more important than renewables to this transition.
MERIP online
On February 17, Syrian Minister of Oil Muhammad al-Lahham warned Parliament that the price of fue... more On February 17, Syrian Minister of Oil Muhammad al-Lahham warned Parliament that the price of fuel would have to increase. This announcement came just one month after the government raised the official price of diesel by more than 50 percent to 125 Syrian pounds (70 cents) per liter, the largest single hike since the uprising of 2011 and an eightfold increase since May of that year. As economic conditions continue to deteriorate for Syrians in government-held territory, the regime risks popular backlash by abandoning its long-standing guarantee of cheap energy --one of the last traces of the old Baathist populist commitment to Syrians' economic welfare.
Conference Presentations by Zachary D Cuyler
Graduate research paper on the history of Nasser-era Egyptian social scientific writing on the Be... more Graduate research paper on the history of Nasser-era Egyptian social scientific writing on the Bedouin communities of Egypt's Western Desert, focusing on writing by Mohammed 'Awad and Ahmad Abu-Zeid. Awarded 2014 American Anthropological Association Middle East Section Student Paper Prize, and presented at the 2014 AAA conference in Washington, DC.
Book Reviews by Zachary D Cuyler
International Labor and Working-Class History, 2022
This review article proposes new directions for the field of labor studies in the Middle East and... more This review article proposes new directions for the field of labor studies in the Middle East and Islamic world. It does so by examining a diverse array of recent works that are not framed as studies of labor and class per se, but that illustrate what this field might look like through their respective concerns with space and materiality. Taking such concerns together unites these otherwise disparate studies of class, oceanic connections, gender, urban transformation, and the environment. We have organized this essay around the themes of space and materiality because of the utility that they hold for the study of labor and class in the Middle East and Islamic world. They enable us to attend to the basic aims of older scholarship on labor and political economy while also internalizing the critiques of that tradition mounted by scholars of race, gender, and colonialism. We moreover suggest that the theoretical developments outlined here can inform scholarship on labor and class across regional divides.
Arab Studies Journal, 2020
Century International, 2023
The scramble for electricity has produced new interest groups that will shape the evolution of Le... more The scramble for electricity has produced new interest groups that will shape the evolution of Lebanon’s decaying power sector—and the country’s future.
Translation credit to the staff of L'Orient-Le Jour
Historical Materialism, 2020
https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/journal/volume-28-issue-4-2020 This paper examines a 1969 ... more https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/journal/volume-28-issue-4-2020
This paper examines a 1969 infrastructure-sabotage campaign by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) as reported in the pages of its weekly newspaper, al-Hadaf. While academic and policy discourse conceptualises sabotage in a way that emphasises its disruptive effects and sometimes obscures the positive political ends toward which acts of sabotage are directed, the PFLP conceptualised sabotage as a practice of revealing the political and economic relations that infrastructures sustain by disrupting them and marking progress toward an alternative political-economic order. For the PFLP, sabotage constituted a kind of concrete critique, a communicative act that conveys a theoretical analysis of processes of extraction, exploitation, and dispossession by physically interrupting them.
Labor History, 2019
This article examines anti-sectarianism and the technopolitics of labor mobilization at the facil... more This article examines anti-sectarianism and the technopolitics of labor mobilization at the facilities of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline (Tapline) company in Lebanon between 1950 and 1964. It argues that although Tapline helped sustain a Lebanese elite strategy of cross-sectarian power-sharing, it also unintentionally fostered specifically anti-sectarian labor mobilization. Pursuing a line of inquiry into the technopolitics of worker mobilization around oil infrastructure opened by Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy, this article specifically examines how Lebanese Tapline workers construed their actions, and did so in anti-sectarian terms. It also proposes that similar studies of labor and the technopolitics of infrastructure could offer productive avenues for inquiry into the origins of anti-sectarian politics in Lebanon.
Touraj Atabaki, Elisabetta Bini, and Kaveh Ehsani, eds., Working for Oil: Comparative Social Histories of Labor in the Global Oil Industry (Palgrave Macmillan 2018)., 2018
Based on MA thesis completed at Georgetown University's MA program in Arab Studies in May 2014. ... more Based on MA thesis completed at Georgetown University's MA program in Arab Studies in May 2014.
This essay examines the politics of the technical and anti-colonial nationalism in the labor history of the Trans-Arabian pipeline, or Tapline, in Lebanon. It covers the period between 1950, when Tapline was completed, and 1963–1964, when the company’s Lebanese workforce unionized and participated in a successful nationwide strike. After reviewing the purposes Tapline was built to serve, this essay examines the technical systems that enabled and regulated the flow of oil through the pipeline and the managerial strategy Tapline pursued to prevent worker mobilization that could disrupt those systems. It then shows how Tapline’s Lebanese employees unionized, secured coordinated control over the flow of oil through the pipeline, and used their resulting power to contest the terms of their labor. In doing so, this essay aims to illustrate the unpredictable ways in which technology distributes agency, and the complex and seemingly contradictory ways in which labor activism engages with the managerial strategies it opposes.
Middle East Report, 2016
Though mainstream coverage projects a linear transition away from fossil fuels to technologically... more Though mainstream coverage projects a linear transition away from fossil fuels to technologically advanced renewable energy in the Arab world's electricity sector, a review of planned power plants suggests that the transition that is currently underway will be much more complex, and that coal and nuclear power are likely to be much more important than renewables to this transition.
MERIP online
On February 17, Syrian Minister of Oil Muhammad al-Lahham warned Parliament that the price of fue... more On February 17, Syrian Minister of Oil Muhammad al-Lahham warned Parliament that the price of fuel would have to increase. This announcement came just one month after the government raised the official price of diesel by more than 50 percent to 125 Syrian pounds (70 cents) per liter, the largest single hike since the uprising of 2011 and an eightfold increase since May of that year. As economic conditions continue to deteriorate for Syrians in government-held territory, the regime risks popular backlash by abandoning its long-standing guarantee of cheap energy --one of the last traces of the old Baathist populist commitment to Syrians' economic welfare.
Graduate research paper on the history of Nasser-era Egyptian social scientific writing on the Be... more Graduate research paper on the history of Nasser-era Egyptian social scientific writing on the Bedouin communities of Egypt's Western Desert, focusing on writing by Mohammed 'Awad and Ahmad Abu-Zeid. Awarded 2014 American Anthropological Association Middle East Section Student Paper Prize, and presented at the 2014 AAA conference in Washington, DC.
International Labor and Working-Class History, 2022
This review article proposes new directions for the field of labor studies in the Middle East and... more This review article proposes new directions for the field of labor studies in the Middle East and Islamic world. It does so by examining a diverse array of recent works that are not framed as studies of labor and class per se, but that illustrate what this field might look like through their respective concerns with space and materiality. Taking such concerns together unites these otherwise disparate studies of class, oceanic connections, gender, urban transformation, and the environment. We have organized this essay around the themes of space and materiality because of the utility that they hold for the study of labor and class in the Middle East and Islamic world. They enable us to attend to the basic aims of older scholarship on labor and political economy while also internalizing the critiques of that tradition mounted by scholars of race, gender, and colonialism. We moreover suggest that the theoretical developments outlined here can inform scholarship on labor and class across regional divides.
Arab Studies Journal, 2020