ABSTRACT
Cities across the Middle East have for centuries been ensconced in battles over sovereignty, dating back to the Ottoman Empire and indeed much earlier. To a certain degree, in those periods the Middle East was not that different from other parts of the world caught in imperial or colonial orbits. The role that violence and coercion play in buttressing national-state sovereignty underscores the importance of our leading questions about the normative implications of moving from urban to national sovereignty. In today’s world, the idea that sovereignty is exclusively embodied in the nation-state remains relatively undisputed, with very few exceptions. For precisely this reason, asserting sovereignty at the scale of the city would be easier said than done, particularly when such aspirations contradict the priorities or longstanding normative values of both national authorities and citizens.
