Interviewed by Michelle McKinley, CSWS Director and Professor, School of Law, and Alice Evans, CSWS Managing Editor 

 With a new book forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, Angela Joya is pressing forward with more projects focused on the Middle East and North Africa. An assistant professor in the UO Department of International Studies, Joya was born in Afghanistan, lived for twelve years as a refugee in Pakistan, and immigrated with her family to Canada when she was sixteen.

Q :Tell us about your book project.  

Joya: The title of the book is The Roots of Revolt: A Political Economy of Egypt from Nasser to Mubarak. I started this project as part of my PhD in 2003 at York University in Toronto. My intention was to understand the kind of social change Egypt was going through in the 1990s. Egypt had signed a structural adjustment package with the IMF [International Monetary Fund] in the early 1990s, and I was interested in learning how that was going to impact different social layers in Egyptian society. When I first arrived in Egypt in December of 2005, the Egyptian housing question was my entry point as to how spatial organization was happening because the government was reforming the housing laws, especially tenure security, and that meant property rights were also going through rapid change.  

I later decided to focus on struggles around land and property rights in rural and urban Egypt: the tenure reform, liberalization of rent control laws, and how that was redistributing resources, especially land and land tenure as property to different layers of elite, and who was being dispossessed in the process.

Over the years, the book project has come out of a broader political concern of economic liberalization and its impact on different social classes and different political groups in Egypt. The book has been a dramatic transformation of my doctoral thesis; with a lot of new material. I updated it in light of the Arab uprisings. And so the word revolt in my title reflects that tracing: the various social change processes, the political change processes from Nasser to Mubarak, but predominantly focusing on the period of Mubarak's rule and how the economic policies that were implemented in that context shifted the balance of power in society, the nature of citizenship in Egypt, the way peasants and workers perceived their place in Egyptian society, and the way they related to the state. All of that went through a massive disruption and a redefinition in so many ways.

CSWS: Under Mubarak?

Joya: Yes.

CSWS: You would say that they were more empowered under Nasser and then became disenfranchised?

Joya: Yes. Nasser implemented a project of populist statism right after the revolution in Egypt post 1952. Part of establishing legitimacy of his regime, which was a military regime, was to also implement a set of populist reforms that extended rights to groups that had never experienced such rights before. For instance, women were granted generous maternity leave, generous benefits, but also free education, healthcare. Workers received generous packages through their unions. Peasants, most of whom never had any land before, received land through a program of national land reform. This was unprecedented in the history of Egypt, where a predominantly landowning class had held 99 percent of the land. It was the first time that land was being taken away from the big landlords and given to landless peasants.  

These changes were not unique to Egypt, though. In the context of decolonization, similar trends were happening around the global south. Nasser was implementing his Egyptian brand of statism, which he called Arab socialism, and that almost transformed Egyptian society in the course of the next three decades in fundamental ways. Peasants felt that this was their right, the land that they had received now.  

CSWS: After Nasser, did you include something on Anwar Sadat?

Joya: I have a chapter on Nasser and Sadat. Some of the reforms, which Nasser had put in place, were contested under Sadat. Sadat started opening the Egyptian economy briefly as he shifted away from the Soviet Union, from a planned economic model towards liberalizing the economy. He was gearing toward Arab capital, hoping they would receive more investment from Arab capital, which combined with Egyptian labor and Western technology, would usher in the new model of development in Egypt.

Sadat’s policies of Infitah, or economic liberalization, facilitated the establishing of a foothold for Arab capital in Egypt, but his policies did not fundamentally dismantle Nasserist reforms. The tenure laws to a large extent remained in place; workers continued to enjoy the benefits they had enjoyed. Sadat actually expanded the bureaucracy of the state, which allowed for mass hiring of people in the state. For instance, the policy of hiring graduates guaranteed jobs for graduates in the state sector was still in place. Despite adhering to a private sector-led economy, he did not manage to dismantle social protection measures and employment policies of the public sector. In fact, the only thing he attempted to liberalize was the price of bread in 1977, which was faced with massive riots forcing Sadat to reverse it. I guess what's mostly left of Sadat is the peace deal he signed with Israel. That's the trademark of his regime.  

The 1980s was the period when Egypt went through a slower shift because of the economic crisis the country faced. The context of oil crisis basically slowed down the remittances that Egyptians could send back home. That put strain on the Egyptian state in generating revenue that would allow them to actually sustain the public sector and the jobs that they were promising for the youth.

CSWS: People talk about how large the public sector is. One in every three workers works for the state, right?

Joya: Egypt did have a huge public sector in the 1980s. And it still does. Now it’s been revived, under the military rule. In the major cities, in Cairo and Alexandria and Port Said, predominantly the public sector is the main employer. The private sector now, even after three decades of private sector-led economy, remains quite marginal, in terms of jobs offered. The informal sector and the public sector have remained dominant in absorbing most of the labor market entrants. The private sector has been very capital intensive, investing in energy or in real estate. Itís a complex relationship the way private sector businesses established ties with the informal sector, where they would contract out part of their services. So officially, the official private sector in general has failed to create well paid, decent and secure jobs; in many ways, it has adopted the unsavory features of the informal sectors, i.e. precarious jobs that are not desirable by the educated youth of Egypt.  

CSWS: I presume that what you're going to talk about coming into Mubaraka - I don't know what your discipline would call it but a kind of resentment in sedimentation and rank.

Joya: Absolutely. It’s clear that over the course of economic liberalization, there has been a buildup of resentment among the youth, but in general among workers, peasants, students, and many other marginalized groups. When I was doing my fieldwork in 2007-2008, across Egypt in rural areas but also in urban places smaller towns, bigger cities people were already articulating their disgust with the government; they were very angry at the government because these policies of dispossession were underway, happening as I was moving from city to city and I could see them, I could hear the stories from the people who had experienced them, right there and then.  

Once, I found myself in Luxor in the midst of a government planned demolition of a housing complex inhabited by many families. When I arrived at the complex, there was a gathering of people, and they looked very alarmed. I spoke with some of the people to find out what was happening. A young man explained that they were anticipating the arrival of bulldozers anytime that day; he invited me to go and see their apartments to demonstrate that they were not dilapidated, unsafe housing the excuse that the local government had offered to justify the order for their demolition but that they were in great condition. After I went through some of the apartments, which all looked in perfect living condition, they asked me if I thought they were considered a slum and deserved to be demolished, the way the government had argued.

So, it’s interesting that the government managed to use concepts such as slum upgrading, regularization of irregular housing, etc. that came from the UN, to try to dispossess people. The government had argued that this housing was not safe, but what I observed from inside these apartments contradicted the government's account.  

CSWS: But did they rebuild?

Joya: No, the Luxor governor had plans for building a massive mall, and a parking lot, in order to expand tourism in Luxor. This was a new development model that they had put in place, about expanding tourist revenue in Luxor. In the process, space was being reorganized and remodeled to basically serve the interest of these others, mostly tourists and private investors, not the working-class residents of Luxor. The people I met were quite angry. I asked if these new projects for tourism would create local jobs. The young men responded that they would not be hired by the tourism companies, which preferred to bring people from Cairo who spoke English and were considered more cosmopolitan, who knew about the world and could make jokes about New York City. They told me, they will not hire local people because they do not think that we are cultured enough.

CSWS: They were not going to hire them, and they were left with no place to live?

Joya: That was the sentiment felt by many I spoke with in that gathering that particular day in Luxor. Some of the families were told they would be moved to a different part of town. These residents were not too happy about that as they had heard about the small size of the new apartments, which were unfit for the traditional families of Luxor.  

I visited some of those apartments, and they were indeed tiny little boxes of apartments for Egyptian families in rural areas, and even in smaller cities or extended families, and it was completely disrupting of the flow of the family life, of social life. People were quite upset and angry. I remember a young man who told me that Mubarak is worse than the Israeli government. And I said, Well why would you say that? And he said, Because Mubarak is a Muslim president of a Muslim country, and the way he acts is worse than how the Zionists treat Palestinians. So, we now feel worse than Palestinians, in this instance, as we would be dispossessed by one of our own.  

CSWS: Before we get further along, I wanted to know, just why did you select Egypt?

Joya: I actually wanted to research Egypt and Syria, and this is because I had deep interests in learning about the post-colonial moment and what kind of alternative histories could have emerged from that context. And the fact that Arab socialism was taken up by both Egypt and Syria and how that became a model that inspired other countries in the region. That personally interested me about this radical moment of potentially a different kind of society that could have emerged, that they attempted building, and why it did not last long enough. I was mostly trying to learn about that and exploring it more.

CSWS: How long do you think it lasted?

Joya: I think it was probably pretty short, because of the 1967 war. It drained all the resources from Nasser's government and nothing much was left afterwards. The forces of the conservative right wing that supported Sadat eventually became quite powerful and vocal in pressuring Nasser, which then led to his heart attack and his sudden death. He personally felt responsible that they basically undermined everything. I guess it could have lasted long, but these developments were not isolated from regional developments, from broader global developments. The Suez Canal nationalization by Nasser was never forgiven by the former colonial powers and Israel. So when the 1967 war happened, it was just like the signs were clear that this is the end of Arab socialism.

CSWS: Did you include Syria in this book?

Joya: No, my adviser advised me against it. He said two books are impossible.

CSWS: What do you want people to know about the book that you're writing? In a way it's a very Egyptian story, but it could be Tanzania under African socialism, it could be different experiments. I'm struck by what you said about the alternative history and what it could have been. Do you want your readers to know about this history?

Joya: Yes, absolutely. When I did more fieldwork on the period under Mubarak, that's when it struck me to interview with the peasants. They were quite shocked when the land reforms of the 1990s were happening, and they were being told by the landlords or the security forces that this land is not yours and you move off. Those stories offer an opportunity to understand where peasants and small farmers saw their place, how they were talking about Nasser, how they talked about themselves belonging to this country under Nasser. And now they no longer felt they belonged there. They were being excluded. They were still in shock. They didn't believe that these laws were going to affect them, and that the tenure reform laws were real. And they thought, No, we have had this land, we have worked on this land, my father worked on this land, Nasser gave it to us, no one is going to come to take it back from us.  

CSWS: They had no titles?

Joya: They didn't have titles. That was the problem. And the old landlords had kept their deeds. So the old landlords came back, and went to court with their deeds. The peasants and small farmers who had customary land or had received land through land reform after the revolution were encouraged by local government representatives to actually go and register their land/property.  

Upon arrival at the registration offices, often they were told that since they had no deed or title to the land, they had held the land illegally. And in this manner, the officials would set up offices of land registration, which were from the point of view of people, the offices of dispossession. People would arrive there, and the officials would say, You don't have a deed. Well, we know where you are. That land is not yours, you move off.  And so, the very process of registration paved the way for a systematic way of violently, actively, pushing people off the land.

CSWS: And then they’d go to the cities, or they would stay in a small town?

Joya: That has definitely spiraled up the level of rural urban migration toward Cairo and toward Alexandria, two of the major cities. Predominately in Cairo. Around 2000, you could see a lot more women, and children, people on the periphery of Cairo just arriving from rural areas and doing odd sorts of jobs as hawkers selling things on the sides of the street trying to make a living. That was becoming more and more a feature of the urban landscape. Egyptians in Cairo would refer to them as country bumpkins and say that because of their rural culture they didn't mix with the urban dwellers very well.  

In Cairo, I did some interviews in slums, where many people had moved because they were dispossessed. A significant number of new arrivals from rural areas settled in the City of the Dead, and other similar informal housing areas on the periphery of major cities. In the City of the Dead, people created living spaces with the dead. The City of the Dead, for instance, is a massive old graveyard of the Ottoman period. Each grave has a compound around it, and is about the size of a small room. There would be a grave there, and the dispossessed people would set up a little place to cook, and a little place for a washroom, and the children would play. Despite the residents' efforts, hygiene conditions were lacking and most of the compounds were infested with mosquitoes due to the dampness of the structures.

CSWS: Is it like a mausoleum?

Joya: Yes, mausoleums. So then, the relatives of these dead people who were buried would allow them, if they took care of the compound of the mausoleum, they could live there. These grave sites had become the new shelters for these people.

CSWS: This was 2007, 2008?

Joya: Yes. Many of these people talked about how they came from other places, other parts of the country, where they had basically lost livelihoods. This was the new reality they were living. A lot of people I spoke with were actually women, quite strong, powerful, amazingly articulate, not afraid to point out the mistakes of the government, talked about how often they would fill out forms, go and try to get electricity, or water, and how often they would have to fight for it. They would say, We are not afraid. Now we're just stealing. Look over there, those wires. We’re stealing and we're not worried about Mubarak coming here and seeing this. We’ll just tell him how his government has failed to provide the services we need despite our demands and efforts.

It was an interesting moment. People, especially foreigners were not allowed to go to the City of the Dead. There were a lot of security checks and so on. We would get on the back of these little vans and arrive there, with our heads covered, which made us pass as Egyptians. That's how I managed to get entry and get a chance to speak with these people.  

CSWS: You've been talking about women and children arriving on the outskirts of Cairo. In your book, do you have a focus on women and children?  

Joya: No, I have not necessarily just looked at that. I've looked at families. I've included interviews in the chapters on peasants and the chapter on workers, and those interviews are diverse. There are men and there are women, and there are different age groups. And itís not necessarily that I chose them. It’s because of who I came across when I was traveling around different parts of Egypt. I would arrive in a village, and I would knock on a door and see who is available to talk. There were times that women were willing to sit down and talk. Men, actually, a lot of times were not comfortable sitting down to talk, or would just tell me what they thought I wanted to hear. So the stories that are included in the interviews the snippets here and there represent different segments of society.

CSWS: Could you talk about what you did when you were a Morse Fellow?

Joya: At the time I received that fellowship at Wayne Morse, I had developed a new project beyond the book on Egypt. The new project was mostly around migration and globalization and part of it stemmed from looking at the changes that were happening in Egypt and partly building on Tunisia. While that project doesn't look at Egypt, it was inspired by Egypt. I was interested in what happens when these processes of dispossession affect people to the degree where they're dislocated. Sure, initially they arrive in urban centers, but then, what happens after that. In the context of economic liberalization, most governments in the Middle East and North Africa have cut down so much on social services, on providing jobs even for the existing population. How are the new arrivals going to cope in the urban centers? What kind of livelihoods will they seek? That's where I was trying to draw the links between global economic policies and the forced dispossession and forced movement of people out of these countries and across the Mediterranean.  

Part of my interest was to learn the stories of these people prior to their departure from their place of origin. Specifically, I'm looking at Morocco and Tunisia. Some of these processes of dispossession that happened in Egypt, are happening in different ways in Morocco and Tunisia.

In Tunisia, it's more in the mining towns, where the health of the workers and local communities is devastated because of the chemicals that spread through the air, and the poisoning of the soil. In Morocco, it's some of the liberalization policies that have just gotten underway in the last five to ten years, so they're relatively recent. In different ways, in the past ten years or so, people are now being dispossessed, forced off their land, or left with no other ways of dealing with problems in the region, being pushed off to search for some sense of dignity in the kind of activity they will do to earn a living.  

Increasingly it is the educated who are told that education is the solution. They are the ones who are disillusioned, and they think that this was the big scandal sold to them because they were told you need to be educated. Many have multiple degrees, but no jobs. Or the jobs that are there are short-term and underpaid. There is high unemployment in the region, and this has fostered a sense of lack of dignity overall that has disrupted the social progression of becoming independent, moving out of one's parents' house and establishing a family.

CSWS: This is a problem, the delayed ability to start a family. You were in Greece as well? You went to interview people who had already relocated, or were being held?

Joya: I was in Greece and France because Tunisia and Morocco do not give official permits for research on these topics yet.  I was doing research to find out where I could meet and speak to those who have arrived from Tunisia and Morocco and North Africa in general. I talked to some in Athens in a woman’s shelter called Melissia's Network and some others in a hotel called City Plaza that anarchists had taken over not far from this shelter. This hotel was populated and run by refugees from across the Middle East and some international anarchists. I just learned that as of July 10, 2019, the hotel has been evacuated and all the refugees have been placed in alternative residences.

Greece has been in such a tough situation financially for years now. I don't feel comfortable criticizing Greeks because of what they have to go through themselves. But it's amazing to witness the sense of solidarity towards refugees and immigrants in Greece. This shelter for women is run by a Greek woman, who doesn't count on the government funding but goes after other organizations to get funding from them to keep the center running and provide a safe place for women to come. They do art; they do various ways of therapy, because a lot of these women have gone through massive trauma in their life, going through the Mediterranean in the middle of the night. People who have never seen rivers, for example, all of a sudden find themselves in a tiny boat and about to drown. The stories of how much they are willing to support refugees and migrants are so inspiring and will definitely be part of the project as I write it this fall.

CSWS: So this is the new project?

Joya: It is one of my new projects. I have two other projects. Broadly, they're all projects of how people on the one hand and how institutions and states on the other hand are responding, to the failures of the neo-liberal development model.

I was in Tunisia in early June to learn more for a project on unemployment, youth, and migration. I plan to visit Morocco and Algeria in the fall of 2019 for a third project on anti-extractivist movements that are proposing radical alternative models of development.  

CSWS: Do you ever feel unsafe doing fieldwork?

Joya: Of course. I was probably quite naive in 2014, when I was in the Sinai. I took a taxi from Cairo. The hotel where I was staying in downtown Cairo offered to take me there for a fee.   And I said, Okay, I want to go to the Sinai. And they said, Okay, be up early and we’ll take you there. I went, and it was eerie. Sinai, this was South Sinai, I could see the north but I couldn't get there because the military had basically blocked access to the north parts with their vehicles and would stop people. They wouldn't let visitors go there. But even in South Sinai I could not see anyone. No people, no traffic, no shops. It was like a place on another planet. You could see quarries, and then mining happening, and then the military. That's all you could see.  

South Sinai is quite a vibrant place otherwise. I don't know why that particular day there was nobody. And when I said to the military I needed to go to one of the areas where there was some activity,  they said, We suggest you get in your taxi and go back and don't turn around. And then I left.

CSWS: Who told you that?

Joya: The military told me that.

CSWS: How far a drive is it?

Joya: It was about three hours from Cairo to South Sinai. So, in 2008 when I did fieldwork, I think I was too young and probably not calculating enough. I didn't have kids, and so I could take risks, and explore all parts of the country without any concerns despite some risks of being stopped by the police. For instance, once traveling between two governorates in the south of Egypt, a police man stopped our car and hopped in the front seat next to the driver. He checked our passports and announced that because I was holding a Canadian passport, he was going to chaperone us until our destination in the next governorate, a distance of possibly three hours. That was the first time that I was very concerned as I was sure no one would talk to us if they saw police around us. That would have sabotaged the possibility of visiting the villages or speaking with peasants or workers. So we tried to dodge the police and come up with a strategy of what to do. I told the police at one point that I needed to get some cigarettes from the shops  and then I would come back. I was with an Egyptian girl from Cairo, who was teaching me colloquial Arabic in Cairo. The two of us just took off on the pretense of buying cigarettes. We just walked off and found a different path and went to some villages and talked to people. By the time we came back, the policeman who was chaperoning us wasn't there anymore. I think he got bored, and left. You just have to think in that moment what you will do and be very quick.

CSWS: Do you work with local researchers? How do you know where you will find people to talk to?

Joya: Yes since 2014, I have relied on local researchers' help. However, for my doctoral research I tried to do it all on my own, which was crazy. I will never do that again. But I had the time. I had three years of figuring out, talking to people, getting some ideas, and then going on my own and exploring, which made it fascinating, because I did not go and talk to people who had been interviewed before. Fresh perspectives. First time they had spoken to somebody who was doing research. Often times, other scholars would go talk to an organization and ask them the same questions over and over. They would get generic answers. There was that advantage.

For my current projects, I have established contacts with researchers in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. I find this collaboration and conversation very fruitful and important, as a way of exchanging knowledge and in the process coming up with ideas that are the product of a collaborative and deliberative process. I am also considering co-authoring with possibly one or two local researchers in North Africa on one of my projects.

CSWS: This almost sounds like ethnography.

Joya: Yes, more like that.

CSWS: What is your core discipline?

Joya: Political science.

CSWS: This doesn't sound like political science at all.  

Joya: I did quite a lot of archival work before going into the field. I had a sense of where things had happened, which governorates had experienced a rise in protest or violence by the state, which laws the Egyptian government had implemented and how the people had responded to these laws. I had looked into local organizations that advocated for peasants and workers rights and had read their accounts of these processes of social change from their early stages in the early 1990s up to the 2000s.But I did the fieldwork without any blueprint of where I was going to go and who I was going to speak with. I wanted to visit as many governorates as I could to examine the scope and scale of the effects of the land tenure reforms across the country. I also carried out in-depth interviews once I learned where the law had taken effect and where it had been resisted and where the state had resorted to violence. So the plus side of doing this type of fieldwork was that I got firsthand experience about how people's lives were shaped and transformed because of the land reforms that were part of the neoliberal shift in the country. I learned about a wide range of struggles they were facing. The stories were genuine and very fresh. I wouldn't have gotten that if I had actually talked to my peers and said, Hey, where did you go and do your research, and then said, Well I should go there.  

And it also meant a lot of uncertainty. For instance, once I arrived in a house in one village in the Delta. I knocked on the door. A male voice said, Come on in. I saw some dogs, and I said to myself, These dogs look vicious. Dogs in the Middle East are not just there to be friends, they are there to protect property. I didn't know the man. He was wearing a galabia, a local outfit that men in rural, and sometimes urban, areas wear. He asked us, And so, you do research? You are students?

My Egyptian friend had previously advised that it would be safe to say that we were students from Cairo, just doing some research on this land law reform the government had passed. We asked if the land reform had affected him and his family. And he told us, Mubarak is great. You want to see my grain silos? Come in the back, Iím going to show you. He had stocks of everything. All kinds of food. And he said, See? The laws are great. Everything Mubarak is doing is great. And then eventually, towards the end of our visit, he told us that he was the local police chief.

CSWS: Why did he have all that food stock? Because he could sell it?

Joya: No, I think because he could afford it. He had stocked it up for himself. And he said, There is no poverty. What are you talking about? Food prices haven't gone up. Rents are affordable. In so many ways he was giving this other story. When he told us towards the end that he was the local police chief, we were taken by surprise and not sure what else to ask. At this point, we were keen to get out of his house and get back in the car and be far from him. But he started asking us questions, inquiring why two girls were out without their fiancés or husbands or brothers, talking to strangers. At this point, we quickly thanked him and left his house without looking back. We  walked out of that village across the fields as fast as our feet could carry us without raising any suspicion, and we found the car and got out of there.  

CSWS: The person you were with?

Joya: This was the Egyptian girl who came with me...and so she had her head covered, and all that.

CSWS: Did you cover your hair?

Joya: I did. It made it easier to travel around in villages without sticking out, raising suspicion, and making people uncomfortable.

CSWS: You just described three other projects you're working on...do you see any of those as your next book project?

Joya: Yes, definitely. It will be a comparative study of three cases across three countries in North Africa-Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. I will carry out a first leg of fieldwork for this project in the fall of 2019.  

This project is about grassroots responses against neo-liberalism, where I'm seeing the emergence of something resembling the alter-globalization movement. I am interested in learning move about anti-extractivist movements in these countries that have emerged in the recent decades. Their discourses of resistance draw on anti-colonial discourses as a way of mobilizing the support for their movements. The activists and local community members talk about their struggle mostly as a struggle against this continuum from coloniality or colonial domination, to post-coloniality, where they see the same elite doing the same sort of development projects that are extractivist in nature, that are subordinating people, and that are marginalizing local communities. That knowledge is generated not to help people; that knowledge is generated basically to subordinate them.

In Algeria I am looking at fracking. In the south of Algeria there is a movement around that that has emerged over the last five years or so.  That had a big role in this recent uprising in Algeria.

In Tunisia there is phosphate mining where a lot of momentum has been built by local communities. It is mostly local community driven, and activists are bringing Frantz Fanon’s work back to the conversation and using anti-colonial rhetoric in very interesting and creative ways. They are mobilizing people so that they could take sovereignty and charge of development in these places. And they are rejecting the extractivist model which they see as part of the colonial, post-colonial, and neoliberal models of development.

Similarly in Morocco there is a silver mine, the second largest in Africa, that has actually been shut down for the last eight or ten years. They have established shacks around the mine where they live and people regularly take turns to stop the flow of water, which they think is hugely wasted by the silver mine. They have shut it down for years now successfully.  

It’s amazing that this momentum has built, and these activists are all linking across the region and building this kind of transnational movement, which I find quite inspiring in context of the Arab uprisings. Itís a shift away from a model of development that they found did not serve the interests of the region, was ecologically disastrous, and allowed for the continuation of an authoritarian model of rule, which they see as a legacy of colonialism. Now, they are demanding genuine grassroots led democracy, but also they want to play an active role in the production of knowledge that will meet the needs of local populations in the context of climate change, crisis, and various overlapping concerns that have emerged. That is the project that really excites me because it has so much hope and potential.  

I'm writing a preliminary book chapter for Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University in Qatar. They invited me to do the opening talk for their conference in February 2018, which involved the establishment of a working group focused on Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East. They wanted somebody, a female, who did critical political economy. My talk was titled “Neoliberal Policies in the Post-2011 Middle East.”

This brings up another point I wanted to make sure I mentioned. Much of my project was personal, but there was also the intellectual desire to make a break in this male-dominated field of political economy that has been treated in a very top-down manner-for example in the way the questions are addressed, and in the way the research is done. I wanted to open it up, and do it differently. Like you said, there's an ethnographic component to it. And there are other stories to be told, grassroots stories. I think that's the part that I’m quite happy and proud of, and that I pulled off in a field that is still predominately male-dominated.

CSWS: Did you have women who mentored you when you were coming up?

Joya: No, I didn't, and I often reflect on that. I think it's because I wanted to do political economy. And at the time there were no women teaching political economy. Especially political economy of the Middle East. And so political economy has been so much a men’s field, even at York University [Joya's alma mater], which has a very progressive, critical department, there were no women doing political economy as such, except for a couple of scholars who did feminist political economy focused on the global north.

CSWS: The only person I knew who did political economy of the Middle East was Deborah Gerner, and she died.

Joya: There's one woman on the East Coast, I think in Smith College, one of the universities there, and she’s post-retirement now. She was in the U.S. That was kind of out of my reach back then. But in the Middle East, in Europe, in Canada, there was nobody that I knew of then.

CSWS: Very male-dominated, now that you mention it. Maybe in France it might not be. I’m trying to think who are the big names in that field, and they are men.

Joya: And the other part of it was, that I think production of knowledge, in the field of  international political economy, or political economy, in itself the characteristics of it are very male-oriented, where if women studied it they too would reproduce the same way that males conducted research or did the research, very much state-centric, very much elite centric, and not necessarily breaking the mold, and trying to actually expand, broaden the horizons, and bring other voices into it. That's part of my training as a critical Marxist, where I thought I needed to bring in these other stories from bottom up. That's how I understand political economy, it's always the struggles, waged by different groups, and it's the intersection of these struggles that fascinates me.

CSWS: When you were trying to build up a literature review, did you have a huge emphasis on men who were the authors that you cite?

Joya: Yes, yes. Especially I think the first historical chapters that I did, almost everything was written by men. Even the economic histories predominantly are written by men. Either men from outside the Middle East, or men in the Middle East.  

CSWS: Do you mention this in the book?

Joya: I have not actually thought about it in those terms, to mention it, but maybe I will mention it.

CSWS: It’s really important to focus, write about why you're doing the kind of modeling of political economy that you're doing, and how you didn't have many women to cite. You want other people to cite you, so that you can be not just doing a model of political economy that you would like to read, but that you would like to see reflected in the field.

Joya: Exactly.

CSWS: In a different direction, would you tell us a little about your background? You were born in Afghanistan, and you left as a baby?

Joya: No, I was four. Kind of a baby, I guess. But in Afghanistan you grew up so fast.  

CSWS: And then you were in Pakistan for twelve years. But you haven't focused on those countries at all in your research. I wondered about that.

Joya: Afghanistan was too close, too personal, and there was a lot of trauma involved in that. We lost family members. They were leftists, but were arrested by the Communist government and executed. Close family members. My uncles were jailed, and one of my uncles who was very close to me was executed. He was twenty-five or twenty-six at that time. I never wanted to do any research or anything to do with Afghanistan for that reason. It was too messy in my head, also. I don't think I would have gotten things as straightened out to that degree. And so I wanted to study a country far away, but also that fascinated me and intrigued my political imagination, which was why I picked Egypt.

As for Pakistan, the experience of refugee life, is something I was dreading, and I wanted to leave. We felt that we were in a state of limbo; I felt that, as a young teenager, every day. My early childhood formation was in Pakistan. I learned all the Pakistani history, national anthems, songs, novels, and it became another part of my identity, which is so deeply still part of my identity, I can never give that up. My first boyfriend, who I fell in love with, he was in Pakistan. Those are things that stay with you. But, I wanted to escape it because I felt that this was something we didn't want to do.  

We were stuck there. We had no identity cards. We had nothing that would give us the right to go study. I could not qualify to go to a college or university. There was only one spot for an Afghan student per year in a Pakistani university. And that was often bought by one of the warlords, one of the rich people. Every day it was a struggle to think, How can I get out of this place, and go where I can study? I sincerely wanted to go and study, forever.  

I didn't want to go get married, which was the only other option. If I stayed I knew I was going to end up getting married. People were already knocking on our door, since I was fourteen, asking for my hand. I thought to myself that this was awful; it would be a nightmare scenario if this happened. My life, the way I imagined it, would come to an end.  

CSWS: But then, your parents got visas to Canada.

Joya: An old friend of my father sponsored us with the help of a church in Montreal, so it was mainly the church that supported him, because his job and income were not sufficient to sponsor us. He got the church to put up the funds, mobilize support, and get us sponsored. It took three long years for the sponsorship process and after that we arrived in Montreal, Canada.

CSWS: How old were you at that time?

Joya: Sixteen.

CSWS: And you went to high school?

Joya: In Montreal, the adults in the family were placed in a full-time French language program, My younger siblings went to regular school. We all became fluent, but my Mom and Dad didn't. They decided after ten months in Montreal that we had to leave, go to Toronto. Then we went to high school. I did grades 11, 12, 13 in Toronto, and then started university from there.