Unsettled Earth: Masha’a as Method: On Agrarian Resistance as Political Infrastructure

This workshop builds on an ongoing collective inquiry into histories of popular organizing, resistance economy, and agrarian struggle across Bilad al-Sham (the Levant). The workshop brings together practitioners whose work responds to conditions of dispossession, siege, and ecological violence through grounded, land-based praxis; from everyday forms of refusal and steadfastness in South Lebanon; to grassroots organizing and food sovereignty initiatives in the West Bank; to experiences of smuggling and preserving heirloom seeds in Syria as a means of resisting starvation; and efforts to rebuild food sovereignty in Gaza amid ongoing devastation. Together, these interventions foreground how resistant agrarian practices operate not only as modes of sustenance, but as political infrastructures that enable continuity, autonomy, and collective endurance. 

Situated within Masha’at—an ongoing project that explores the masha’a (commons) as praxis and political horizon—the workshop opens a space to reflect on shared struggles, solidarities and future pathways. The session asks how we can continue to build and sustain networks of knowledge and resource-sharing toward horizons of return and liberation.

Munira Khayyat is an anthropologist whose research revolves around life in war, intimate genealogies of empire, and theory from the South. Her first book, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (University of California Press 2022) examines resistant ecologies in a world of perennial warfare. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in frontline villages along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, she examines war not only as a place of death and destruction, but also necessarily, as an environment of living.

Adham Karaja is a member of Ard Al Yas agricultural cooperative in Saffa Village, West Bank.

The Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN) is an independent non-profit organization concerned with the protection of the environment and natural resources of Arab countries against all hazards, including the destructive impacts of wars and foreign occupations. APN was established in April, 2003 by a group of motivated people who aim to protect the Arab environment alongside regional and international organizations.