Contested Mediterranean Spaces: Ethnographic Essays in Honour of Charles Tilly

The contributors in this volume, which is inspired and dedicated to Charles Tilly, deal with the manner in which particular Mediterranean spaces (at regional, state, and neighbourhood levels) are being reconfigured in the light of struggles over rights, resources and identities. Political processes driven from the ‘top’ (of state and municipal political hierarchies, for example) and processes of resistance from the ‘bottom’ (in the shape of environmental movements, popular artistic and decorative events and expressions, for example) are described in such a way that challenge any simple assumption about the nature and constitution of political power in the region. Our authors have approached their field sites from the viewpoint of an intellectual tradition generated by Charles Tilly and others: a tradition that we might term in shorthand the political economy of cultural geography. From this viewpoint the contested reworking and renegotiation of Mediterranean spaces and political landscapes becomes a matter not only of the activities and rhetorical/bureaucratic announcements from state or EU authorities, but also of the increasingly potent agency of a variety of other actors and institutions. These include environmental activists in Malta, cultural entrepreneurs in Crete, producers of posters and graffiti in Beirut, as well as globally affiliated cross border social and political interest groups mobilising in the streets and communities of Ciutat de Mallorca, Bethlehem, Ferrara, and Istanbul and, from there across the region and beyond.