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Sherene Seikaly's Recently Published "Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine"

11/21/2015

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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.
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Joel Beinin's Recently Published "Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt"

11/21/2015

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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.

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Call for Papers: "Development in Question: Challenges for the 21st Century" at Cornell University 6-8 October 2016

11/21/2015

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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
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Timothy Mitchell on "the Materialities of Political Economy and Colonial History"

11/18/2015

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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 
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Melani Cammett's Recently Published "A Political Economy of the Middle East"

11/17/2015

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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 m
ost 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.
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Join Us at PEP's Inaugural Reception at MESA!

11/6/2015

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Read the following message and join us for the Political Economy Project Inaugural Reception at MESA on Saturday, November 21st!
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Political Economy of the Middle East: Continuities and Discontinuities in Teaching and Research

11/5/2015

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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
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Men of Capital in Mandate Palestine: An Interview with Sherene Seikaly

11/4/2015

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Sherene Seikaly interviewed by Ottoman History Podcast. Listen to the interview here.

"In Episode #206 of Ottoman History Podcast, we had the opportunity to talk to Dr. Seikaly about this new work and explore how her analysis of class formation in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s helps diagnose the current moment of interrupted Arab revolutions. While many Zionists alleged that Palestinians had not done enough to build their own state, Seikaly’s protagonists—her “men of capital” and “women of thrift”—suggest otherwise. Without access to the state apparatuses, she argues that Palestine’s Arab population could never be proper political subjects under British colonial rule in the same way as the yishuv. Instead, Palestinian capitalists made politics in the realms left available to them: personal profit and, in the case of Fuad Saba, funding the armed struggle against the mandate."

Click the image below to view the book details
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Ziad Abu-Rish on "Electricity in Early Independence Lebanon"

11/2/2015

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Political Economy Project member and Jadaliyya Co-Editor Ziad Abu-Rish discusses the history of electricity in Beirut during the early independence period with the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies.
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click here to read the interview
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