We are pleased to announce that the winner of the 2024 SAFN Student Research Award is Majeed Malhas. Malhas won with a project entitled “Arab Nationalism and the Value of Bread: The Political Economy of Food Sovereignty in Neoliberal Jordan.” The reviewers thought that this was a timely project that uses food — in this case, bread — as a lens for thinking through identity, dependence and sovereignty, and post-colonial nationalism. Majeed’s project focuses on the efforts of a local grassroots organization to revive wheat farming and bread-making in Jordan in the context of the state’s increasing financial dependence on global markets. We appreciate Majeed’s commitment to decolonized research methods and his sensitivity to the value of extended participant observation “to foster the trust needed to navigate politically sensitive questions [in the context of] the Jordanian state’s repression of free speech.” We look forward to watching this project unfold!
Majeed Malhas is a Palestinian-Canadian freelance journalist and second-year PhD student in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Having grown up in Amman, Jordan, the experience of the 2011 Arab Spring during his formative years sparked his interest in how nationalism can both challenge and reinforce state power and transnational capitalism. While nationalism fueled unrest in other countries across the region, Jordan’s relatively quiet Arab Spring was shaped by nationalist rhetoric that tempered political grievances. This contrast inspired Majeed’s anthropological interest in nationalism and governmentality, leading him to research the genealogical political-economic origins of Jordanian nationalism in his master’s dissertation at the London School of Economics.
Now pursuing his doctoral research, Majeed’s project seeks to examine food sovereignty in the context of financialization, political populism and post-colonial nationalism. His project aims to explore how nationalist narratives frame the complexities of financialized agricultural production and consumption, extending beyond economic concerns to encompass ethical issues of cultural preservation and post-colonial sovereignty.
His research specifically focuses on the recent emergence of grassroots food sovereignty movements in Jordan, responding to the country’s increasing reliance on imported wheat—now accounting for 96% of its supply, a sharp decline from the self-sufficiency the Kingdom once maintained. Majeed seeks to capture how and why domestic farming practices are valued not only for their economic and nutritional benefits, but also as a key component of Jordanian national identity and food heritage. Through ethnographic fieldwork, Majeed’s research examines how governments, farmers, and consumers are politically and culturally responding to growing discontent over food security amid global farmers’ protests. He plans to investigate the motivations of organizers and consumers involved in these food sovereignty movements, as well as how governmental officials, NGO members and other political actors frame the (dis)alignment between financialized economic imperatives and domestic sociopolitical expectations.
In this endeavor, Majeed seeks to capture the contradictions that financialized agriculture poses for post-colonial nation-states, where sovereignty is performed by the state through the nationalist appropriation of pre-colonial cultural symbols. These performances not only conceal the erosion of sovereignty caused by financial dependence on foreign capital and imports but also provide cultural and political legitimacy to the state, even as they undermine both food and broader political-economic sovereignty. The decline of wheat farming and the volatility of bread prices in Jordan reflect and threaten to expose these contradictions, where financialized supply chains make it increasingly difficult for the state to maintain its nationalist performance of sovereignty in the subsidized provision of bread, bringing to light the destruction of agrarian heritage and ecological knowledge under its governance. As a material symbol of the agrarian heritage of the Levant—a heritage the Jordanian state is legitimated and claims to be nationalistically guided by— bread holds a special sanctity beyond the material demand for it as a commodity. The cultural significance of bread in the Middle East, where inflated bread prices and agrarian decline have historically fueled political unrest, politically amplifies economic grievances surrounding its affordability. The question of how wheat comes to be scarce wheat in a region where it has been cultivated since the dawn of agriculture weakens nationalist narratives that position the state as sovereign and culturally representative.
The consumption and subsidization of wheat in Jordan, therefore, serve as a focal point for Majeed’s broader examination of how historical and contemporary epistemologies of value—economic, cultural and political— shape the tense dynamics’ of internationally informed, state-facilitated and locally embedded relations of production, consumption and governance posing global agrarian issues. In doing so, his research seeks to explore the decolonial potential of agrarian production and consumption as a site of political contestation against transnational financial structure.
Majeed holds a BA in Anthropology from the University of British Columbia and an MSc in Sociocultural Anthropology from the London School of Economics. His journalistic work has been featured in Jacobin, +972 Magazine, Jadaliyya among other publications.
