Wael Gamal's Recently Published "Why Does the Neoliberal Project Persist in the Arab Region?"2/18/2016 Check out Political Economy Project member Wael Gamal's recently published article "Why Does the Neoliberal Project Persist in the Arab Region?" on Khoyout. Gamal's article is one section of a larger work entitled Social Justice in the Arab Countries: Between Popular Mobilization and Political Tracks. Click here to visit the site and read the article! click above image to read the article
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Submit to the 2016 Political Economy Book Prize Competition! (Deadline: 26 February 2016)2/16/2016 Read the following reminder about the Political Economy Project's 2016 Political Economy Book Prize Competition and enter your work into the competition before it is too late: The Political Economy Project (PEP) is pleased to invite nominations for our 2016 Middle East Political Economy Book Prize. PEP aims to recognize and disseminate exceptional critical work on the political economy of the Middle East. While the book must have a political economy theme, we welcome nominations from across academic disciplines. Submissions will be read and judged by a committee drawn from PEP’s membership. Eligible texts must have been published in 2013, 2014 or 2015 and can be either Arabic or English language. The book must make an original contribution to critical political economy research. The author(s) of the winning book will receive a prize of US$1000 and will be invited to give a talk at a PEP affiliated University. The author(s) will also be interviewed by PEP’s affiliate Audio Journal, Status/الوضع. Deadline for submission is Friday 26 February 2016. If you intend to participate, please email us at: bookprize@politicaleconomyproject.org and send three copies of the text should be sent to the following address: Arab Studies Institute 4087 University Drive Commerce Building, 3rd Floor, Suite 3200 Fairfax VA 22030 USA Two copies will be returned once the committee has reached a decision. If mailing three texts presents a financial hardship to the author s/he should send a request for financial assistance to: bookprize@politicaleconomyproject.org Click here to read the above announcement on Jadaliyya. Official Announcement Letter:click here to download this announcement letter
Check out Political Economy Project member Adam Hanieh's recently published article "A Brief History of ISIS" on Jacobin. Click here to visit the page and read the article! click on the above image to read the article
Sherene Seikaly's Recently Published "Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine"11/21/2015 Check out Political Economy Project member Sherene Seikaly's recently published Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, November 2015). For more information or to purchase visit the book's page on the Stanford University Press website.
Book Description: Men of Capital examines British-ruled Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s through a focus on economy. In a departure from the expected histories of Palestine, this book illuminates dynamic class constructions that aimed to shape a pan-Arab utopia in terms of free trade, profit accumulation, and private property. And in so doing, it positions Palestine and Palestinians in the larger world of Arab thought and social life, moving attention away from the limiting debates of Zionist–Palestinian conflict. Reading Palestinian business periodicals, records, and correspondence, Sherene Seikaly reveals how capital accumulation was central to the conception of the ideal "social man." Here we meet a diverse set of characters—the man of capital, the frugal wife, the law-abiding Bedouin, the unemployed youth, and the abundant farmer—in new spaces like the black market, cafes and cinemas, and the idyllic Arab home. Seikaly also traces how British colonial institutions and policies regulated wartime austerity regimes, mapping the shortages of basic goods—such as the vegetable crisis of 1940—to the broader material disparities among Palestinians and European Jews. Ultimately, she shows that the economic is as central to social management as the political, and that an exclusive focus on national claims and conflicts hides the more complex changes of social life in Palestine. About the Author: Sherene Seikaly is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Check out Political Economy Project member Joel Beinin's recently published Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (Stanford Briefs, November 2015). For more information or to purchase visit the book's page on the Stanford University Press website.
Book Description: Since the 1990s, the Middle East has experienced an upsurge of wildcat strikes, sit-ins, and workers' demonstrations. Well before people gathered in Tahrir Square to demand the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, workers had formed one of the largest oppositional movements to authoritarian rule in Egypt. In Tunisia, years prior to the 2011 Arab uprisings, the unemployed chanted in protest, "A job is a right, you pack of thieves!" Despite this history, most observers have failed to acknowledge the importance of workers in the social ferment preceding the removal of Egyptian and Tunisian autocrats and in the political realignments after their demise. In Workers and Thieves, Joel Beinin corrects this by surveying the efforts and impacts of the workers' movements in Egypt and Tunisia since the 1970s. He argues that the 2011 uprisings in these countries—and, importantly, their vastly different outcomes—are best understood within the context of these repeated mobilizations of workers and the unemployed over recent decades. About the Author: Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University. He has written or edited ten books, most recently Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa, co-edited with Frédéric Vairel (Stanford, 2013) and The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt(2010). His articles have been published in leading scholarly journals, as well as The Nation, Middle East Report, The Los Angeles Review of Books, South Atlantic Quarterly, Le Monde Diplomatique, and others. Read Political Economy Project member Max Ajl's invitation to submit papers and panel proposals for a conference entitled "Development in Question: Challenges for the 21st Century," organized by Cornell University's Department of Development Sociology at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY from 6-8 October 2016. Consult the document below for submission guidelines and participate in the conference! Conference Description: This is a time of critical re-thinking about the nature and meaning of Development. Contemporary challenges such as climate change, global food crises, growing populations, widespread environmental degradation, geo-political instability and concerns over energy management have heightened uncertainty around – and contestation over – the future. In October 2015, the United Nations unveiled the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of ambitious, much-discussed goals that follow on the heels of the prior Millennium Development Goals (2005–2015). According to the website, the SDGs “converge with the post 2015 development agenda.” This raises the question: what is the post-2015 development agenda, who is included and how are the boundaries constructed? Notwithstanding the billions of dollars, thousands of consultants and considerable institutional infrastructure, development work raises as many questions as it answers. Thinking of development as a policy, a set of objectives, groups of people, or a national and international set of goals, raises old and new questions of inequality, social change, colonialism, war, rights, environmental degradation, distribution, and more. To address the questions of what is development, what or who is to be developed and why, Cornell University is hosting a conference on “Development in Question” to be held October on the Cornell campus in Ithaca, NY. The conference organizers invite papers that think critically and creatively about contradictions, challenges and opportunities within the concept and practice of development. Contributions that engage in original ways both empirically and theoretically with key ideas, practices and categories of Development at different or multiple scales will be privileged. Throughout the conference, there will be keynote plenary talks or panels on the following topics: The 2015 Sustainable Development Goals: Sustaining what, whom and why? Doing Development: The international community, national state and emerging actors The Tools of Development: Definitions, measurement and (e)valuation Development in Movement: From migration to refugees, the demographics of development Marketing Development: Commodity chains, global trade and the commodification of everything In addition to the plenary sessions, the conference will consist of parallel paper sessions on a wide range of topics. We welcome abstracts from all scholars, including academics, activists, organizers and policy-makers. The following themes will guide the selection of abstracts although we are open to all work on Development, particularly from a sociological perspective: • Development, Conflict and War • Trade Flows and Illicit Economies • Doing Development Differently: Activists, Policy and Academics • Pedagogies of Development • South-South Development: Genealogies and Implications • Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) • Privatization • Social movements and mobilization • Gender, race and ethnicity in the new development era • Climate Change and the Nature of Development • Infrastructure and Extractive Development • Knowledge, Expertise and Power • Precarity and the Politics of Poverty • Migration, Mobility and Environmental Change • Urban infrastructure and lives
Watch the first edition of City Talks below! Political Economy Project member Timothy Mitchell discusses his latest work on urban political economy and his term capitalization with Political Economy Project member Omar Jabary Salamanca and Nasser Abourahme. Visit Jadaliyya for more information.
City Talks: Timothy Mitchell on the Materialities of Political Economy and Colonial History
Theme and Time Markers: 00:00:07 | Representation, colonialism and the city 00:01:54 | Political economy, capitalization and the city 00:14:35 | Capitalization vs. renterism or rent economies 00:21:14 | Provincializing materiality 00:26:09 | The “material turn” and colonialism 00:32:47 | Methodological encounters with the archive 00:39:43 | Reading the archive in non-representational ways 00:43:15 | Arab Uprisings and public space 00:50:26 | Urban (and rural) informality Check out Political Economy Project member Melani Cammett's recently published, fourth edition of A Political Economy of the Middle East (Westview Press, February 2015). For more information or to purchase visit the book's page on the Westview Press website.
Book Description: "A Political Economy of the Middle East is the most comprehensive analysis of the political economy of development in the contemporary Middle East over the past several decades, examining the interaction of economic development processes, state systems, state policies, and social actors in the Middle East. The fourth edition, with new authors Melani Cammett and Ishac Diwan, has been thoroughly revised, with two new introductory chapters that provide an updated framework with which to understand and study the many changes in demography, education, labor markets, urbanization, water and agriculture, and international labor migration in the recent years. The new edition also includes: a new chapter that charts the political economy of the Gulf states and in particular the phenomenal growth of oil economies; a new chapter on the growth of the private sector and its effects in the region; a new chapter on the rise of “crony capitalism;” and increased coverage of the changes in civil society and social movements in the region including an exploration of the causes, dynamics, consequences, and aftermath of the Arab uprisings." About the Authors: MELANI CAMMETT is professor of government at Harvard University. She is the author of Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon, and the co-editor of The Politics of Non-State Welfare. ISHAC DIWAN is a visiting researcher at the Paris School of Economics and directs the Economic and Political Transformation Program at the Economic Research Forum. He is the author of Understanding the Political Economy of the Arab Uprisings. ALAN RICHARDS is professor of economics and environmental studies, emeritus, at the University of California at Santa Cruz. JOHN WATERBURY is William Stewart Tod Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Emeritus, at Princeton University. Read the following message and join us for the Political Economy Project Inaugural Reception at MESA on Saturday, November 21st! Political Economy of the Middle East: Continuities and Discontinuities in Teaching and Research11/5/2015 Please join us for Political Economy of the Middle East: Continuities & Discontinuities in Teaching & Research on Friday 6 November 2015 at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Conference Agenda: Panel 1: Field Research : : 3:00 pm Melisande Genat, Stanford University From Agrarian Experiments in the Context of Socialist ''Villagization'' to Population Displacements: Iraqi Kurdish Collective Towns During the Seventies Max Ajl, Cornell University Event and Conjuncture : Braudel, Political Economy, and the Tunisian Uprising Panel 2: Teaching the Middle East : : 4:30 pm Omar Dahi, Hampshire College Against the Grain: Syrian Refugees and the Political Economy of Survival Shana Marshall, George Washington University Do not go quietly: Human agency, contingency, and the push to formulate a structural explanation of the Arab Spring Ziad Abu-Rish, Ohio University Revisiting the Merchant Republic: Lebanon in Comparative Perspective Samer Abboud, Arcadia University The World Bank, the Arab Uprisings, and the Poverty of Neoliberal Repetition Bassam Haddad, George Mason University Incorporating Class and Capital in Teaching the Middle East: The Case of Syria, Then and Now for more information, visit MEIS.GMU.EDU Sponsored by Middle East and Islamic Studies, Arab Studies Institute, Political Economy Project, AVACGIS, SPIGIA, and Global Programs click above image to view conference schedule
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