5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Cities and regions of Southwest Asia / the Middle East and North Africa are shaped and disrupted by many forces related to the Anthropocene (disasters, climate change), as well as state structures (settler-colonialism, apartheid), political systems (authoritarianism, sectarianism, oligarchies), market structures (capitalism, growth/rent economies), international aid programs and mobilities. These disruptions often rely on strategies of wars/conflicts, financialization, privatization, land grabbing, gentrification, extraction and rent-seeking. They generate a range of adverse effects on cities and regions: crises, forced displacement/migration, unemployment, demographic shifts, ecological degradation, impoverishment and precarity. Yet, cities and regions are also shaped by collective actions, struggles and/or resistant ecologies seeking emancipation and justice (Nucho 2021, Swilling 2020, Lipietz and Bhan 2022, Foster and Iaione 2019, Borch and Kornberger 2015), whereby people organize to imagine, co-produce, and advance rights to urban, infrastructural, data or ecological commons—even imperfectly and transiently.

In this panel, we invite papers examining forces of disruption reconfiguring power and governance modalities in cities and regions, and/or urban, infrastructural, data and ecological commoning efforts and experiments--and their propensity to be co-opted, canceled, subverted or un-commoned by political, aid, and/or market systems.