Pete Moore

Topics of Interest:
Political Economy of War, State-Society Relations, Sub-state Conflicts

Countries/Regions of Interest:
Levant, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, the UAE, Gulf

List of Publications

Selected Publications:
“Fiscal politics of enduring authoritarianism,” for The Arab Thermidor: The Resurgence of the Security State, Project on Middle East Political Science, December 2014.

"Before and After Uprising: Political Economies of the 2011 Uprisings," Taiwan Journal of Democracy 10 (1) July 2014.

"Comment on Gordon L. Clark and Ashby Monk, “Modernity, Imitation, and Performance: Sovereign Funds in the Gulf,” Business and Politics, 15 (4) 2013.

“The Bread Revolutions of 2011: Teaching Political Economies of the Middle East,” PS: Political Science and Politics, 46 (2), April 2013.

Beyond the Arab Spring: Authoritarianism and Democratization in the Arab World, (with Rex Brynen, Bassel F. Salloukh, and Joelle Zahar), Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2012.

"Guilty Bystanders: Jordan, Kuwait, and the Iran-Iraq War," Middle East Report, Winter 2011. 

“The Bread Revolutions of 2011 and the Political Economies of Transition,” The Changing Security Architecture in the Middle East, Issue 4, joint project with Woodrow Wilson Center and United States Institute of Peace, April 2013.

“Why not Jordan?” MERIP blog, 13 November 2012.

“Washington’s Bahrain in the Levant,” MERIP Blog, 23 May 2012.

"Sovereign Wealth and Ruler Loot," Jadaliyya (online) 11 October 2011

“Beyond Boom and Bust: External Rents, Durable Authoritarianism, and Institutional Adaptation in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan” (with Anne Peters), Studies in Comparative International Development, 44 (2) 2009.

“Making Big Money on Iraq,” Middle East Report, Fall 2009

“HAMAS inside the Beltway,” Middle East Law and Governance, (1) 2009.

“Struggles under Authoritarianism: Regimes, states, and professional associations in the Arab World,” (with Bassel F. Salloukh) International Journal of Middle East Studies, February 2007.

“HAMAS inside the Beltway,” Middle East Law and Governance, (1) 2009

“The War Economy of Iraq,” (co-author Christopher Parker) Middle East Report, Summer 2007

Pete Moore is the Marcus A. Hanna Associate Professor of Politics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He is a native of Atlanta, Georgia, received a B.A. from the Virginia Military Institute, an M.A. from the University of Virginia, and a PhD from McGill University, Montreal. Prior to coming to CWRU, he held positions at Dartmouth College, Concordia University (Montreal), and the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. He has served on the editorial board of MERIP and in 2008-2009 he was a Senior Fulbright Fellow at Zayed University in Dubai, UAE. In 2010 along with several colleagues he founded the Northeast Ohio Consortium for Middle East Studies (NOCMES), a collaborative educational initiative of several local universities.

His research focuses on issues of political economy, state-society relations, and sub-state conflict in the countries of the Gulf and the Levant. His primary countries of focus and field research have been Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, and the UAE, with less extended research efforts in Turkey, Lebanon, and Egypt. One focus of his early work was business-state relations in Kuwait and Jordan. In his resulting book, Doing Business in the Middle East: Politics and Economic Crisis in Jordan and Kuwait (Cambridge University Press, 2004), he employed theories emphasizing the importance of “embedded” state-society relations to issues of state capacity and economic adjustment.

Professor Moore is currently completing two comparative political economy projects. One book manuscript effort examines war and regional economies, so called “war economies.” The primary case is the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, a country linked to nearly major regional case of violent conflict since the 1930s. Parts of this research, examining Jordanian-Iraqi relations under conditions of war, have been published in the Middle East Report.

A second project in the form of a journal article, explores arguments for the 2011 uprisings. In the aftermath of those momentous events, economic arguments for revolt proliferated. Professor Moore argues the attempt to find an economic smoking gun is likely a dead end because these arguments may confuse economic symptoms with political causes. One of the important political economy conditions shaping rebellious grievance in the Arab World has been the maturation of fiscally weak states. Take the unlikely cases of Jordan and Egypt. Though Egypt unseated its long ruling president while the ruling Hashemites of Jordan remain, these cases share more than they differ. Both have endured long running fiscal declines and periodic revolt starting in the late 1970s. Both leaderships attempted to manage fiscal crisis through similar cooping policies, searching for new sources of revenue and revising public spending. Far from alleviating symptoms, new sources of revenue and spending shifts deepened inequality in new ways, metastasized new forms of public-private corruption, and entrenched labor insecurity; all prominent grievances voiced before, during, and since 2011.