Invisible Territories: A Story of a Monastery, a Well and the Formation of the Sovereign in Egypt

Through ethnographic fieldwork, my research tackles a recent legal and political conflict: a major monastery versus a Bedouin family over a charity well. This dispute immediately reveals the nested sovereignty (Simpson, 2017) that exists at the local level between state and non-state entities in Egypt. Crucially, I show that local sovereign non-state actors don't publicly claim their governing role. Instead, they try to protect their sovereign rights through property formation. In other words, forming and protecting property is a method of compensating for a decaying governance role and protecting sovereign territorial existence.

This dynamic grows highly complicated when the claims concern common resources, especially water, and particularly invisible bodies of water such as wells. This pressure leads the non-state actors to actively use sovereign, national, and territorial language to support their property claim. By placing this local case in conversation with both colonial archives (British Foreign Office archives) and current state narratives of one of its regional mega-projects, this project poses critical questions about property, commons, sovereignty, and territoriality in our current moment.

Speaker:

Alaa Attiah Mitwaly 
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology, SEA, and PhD Candidate in Anthropology, University of Toronto

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