The Dictionary of Human Geography

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Its importance was further increased by the

terrorist attacks on the United States on 11

September 2001 and the US-led invasions of

Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 (see

terrorism).

CENTCOM articulates a highly particular

imaginative geography of the region (Morris-

sey, 2009), but the invasions of Afghanistan

and Iraq were underwritten by, and also

extended, a series of cultural formations that

could be traced back through the long history

of British and American interventions in the

region to a deep-seated Orientalism (Gregory,

2004b). In doing so, they confirmed that the

‘Middle East’ is a profoundly ethnocentric

construction, as Bernard Lewis (1999) once

had it, ‘meaningless, colorless, shapeless, and

for most of the world inaccurate’. This

reached its nadir in portrayals such as this,

from Fareed Zakaria, writing inNewsweek

soon after 9/11: ‘This is the land of suicide

bombers, flag-burners and fiery mullahs.’ In

one astonishing sentence, the various, vibrant

cultures of the region were fixed and frozen

into one diabolical landscape (Gregory, 2004b,

p. 60). And yet this (in)sensibility captured

the accumulatedrhetoricaleffect of con-

structions of the Middle East with dismal fi-

delity. For the ‘Middle East’ as a concept has

been constructed, both geopolitically and dis-

cursively, largely from the ‘outside’: and yet its

problems and predicaments are almost always

assigned solely to those on the ‘inside’. As

Mamdani (2002) put it, within the optic of a

Euro-Americanethnocentrism, the world is

divided into two, ‘so that one part makes cul-

ture and the other is a prisoner of culture’.dg

Suggested reading

Khalidi(1998);Lockman(2004);Scheffler(2003).

migrancy The state or condition of being a

migrant; ‘migrancy’ generally emphasizes the

cultural, social and political constructions and

experiences of migrant groups and displaced

people (cf.migration). Historically, the slow

and discontinuous process of sedentarizing

populations and fixing politicalbordersand

boundarieswas often accompanied by a sus-

picion of those who remained constantly on

the move. Thus, for example, the figure of the

merchant forever travelling to fairs and distant

markets occupied an ambiguous position

within the territorializations offeudalismin

much of medievaleurope, even though such

movements provided essential functions for

trans-regional economies.mobilitywas often

a privilege, to be sure, and it was threaded in

to wider circuits ofpowerand authority, so

that it was (and remains) those who were

homelessand forced to move (through dis-

ease orpoverty, for example) who attracted

the most suspicion and even hostility. Some

social groups regarded migrancy as a cultural

formation constitutive of their veryidentity:

‘travelling peoples’ such as the Roma

(‘Gypsies’), the tramping artisans of nine-

teenth-century Britain (Southall, 1991) or

the hobos of late nineteenth- and early twen-

tieth-century America (DePastino, 2003).

Even thoughglobalizationandmodern-

ityare predicated on movement and depend

on migration, these capacities are still subject

to social discrimination. Under neo-liberal

globalization, the world may be ‘flat’ for busi-

ness travel and international tourism, but

those who travel under other, no less legitim-

ate, signs are subject to policing, restriction

and even detention: the Roma continue to

encountersocial exclusion (Sibley, 1998;

Bancroft, 2005) and groups such asasylum-

seekers andrefugees, and guest-workers in

europe, the Gulf, Asia and Canada, find

their living conditions and civilrightscircum-

scribed by their very migrancy. The suspicion

of migrancy is shared by colonial and post-

colonial states alike, whose governments

often view migrant populations as threats to

their ordering design and apparatus of control.

Pastoralists and shifting cultivators were (and

continue to be) seen by states as lesser produ-

cers whose activities thwart efficiency, erode

environments, and undercut the positiveex-

ternalitiesthat putatively attach to private

propertyand sedentary agriculture (seepas-

toralism). Lurking in these assessments is a

sense that migrancy equates to vagabond con-

duct, an equation that is frequently sharpened

throughracialization: thus the Bedouin in

Israel have been constructed by the Israeli

government as inimical to thepropertyand

political regimes of thesettler stateand,

through their supposedly aberrantspatiality,

left literally ‘out of place’ and ‘suspended in

space’ (Shamir, 1996; Mair, 2008).

In counterpoint to these bleak assessments,

however, and the unilinearteleologyof a

singular Western modernity that sustains

some of them, Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan

(2003)have emphasizedthat the subject-

positions produced through migrancy cannot

be axiomatically reduce to passivity or victim-

hood and that, in particular circumstances,

these mobilities – often marginalized in con-

ventional accounts – may be vehicles for cul-

tural and political assertion. To recover the

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MIGRANCY