Adam Ramadan

From Tahrir to the world: The camp as a political public space

The year 2011 was when the camp defeated the dictator. At Tahrir Square, the camp was a space of freedom, resistance and liberation, beyond the control of the state and outside the normal political order, in which a more progressive politics was forged and made real. In the months that followed, political protesters across the Middle East, Europe and North America emulated the tactics of the Egyptian protest camp. In light of these transnational events, the protest camp deserves attention as a specific political act and vehicle for political change. The occupation of urban space, and subversion of the normal political order within those spaces, is a key strategy for protesters to articulate an alternative political future.

Hotel Geopolitics: A Research Agenda

This article sets a new agenda for research into the geopolitics of hotels. Moving beyond the study of hotels as neutral sites of leisure and tourism, hospitality mediated by financial exchange, we argue that hotels need to be researched as geopolitical sites. Hotel spaces – from conference rooms to reception halls, from hotel bars to corridors and private rooms – are connected to broader architectures of security and insecurity, war- and peacemaking. We present six themes for this research agenda: hotels as projections of soft power, soft targets for political violence, strategic infrastructures in conflict, hosts for war reporters, providers of emergency hospitality and care, and infrastructures of peace-building. We conclude that the geopolitical potential of hotels emerges from two spatial dimensions of the relation of hospitality: hotels’ selective openness and closure to their surroundings, and their flexible material infrastructures that can facilitate and mediate geopolitical processes. Research on geopolitics, and its engagements with the everyday materialities that shape war and peace, must take seriously the hotel as a geopolitical space.