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MENA is pleased to present a roundtable discussion on Zoom, featuring Brahim El Guabli (Williams College), Hamza Hamouchene (Transnational Institute), and Lydia Barnett (Northwestern University).  The discussion will be moderated by Ekin Kurtiç and Mariam Taher, Northwestern University.

Only a few days after Morocco’s Al Haouz province was hit by a severe earthquake, the port city of Derna in eastern Libya was destroyed by heavy flash floods and the collapse of two dams. Against the backdrop of severe and worsening regional political and economic crises, the flood and earthquake-led ruination in Morocco and Libya compel us to rethink political ecologies throughout the MENA region via the lens of critical disaster studies. In this interdisciplinary conversation, scholars will denaturalize the concept of the natural disaster. Hosting social scientists and humanists, this roundtable will discuss the unevenly distributed impacts of recent and longer-term devastation in the area. Building upon scholarly perspectives that conceptualize ruination as a process rather than an event, the conversation will examine historically sedimented power differentials and injustices that are foregrounded and exacerbated in the unfolding of these political ecological disasters, tracing the enduring and often overlooked repercussions that map onto existing structural inequities and produce new ones. Throughout the roundtable discussion, speakers will reflect on how the examination of disasters in the MENA region offers broader conceptual insights into questions of urgency, responsibility, decay, and resilience.