​The Spring 2017 issue of Arab Studies Journal (Volume XXV, no. 1) is available for purchase online now. Read the editor's note below, visit Jadaliyya to peruse the table of contents, and head to TadweenPublishing.com to subscribe: 

EDITOR'S NOTE

Since the November 2016 elections, the dying gasps of US exceptionalism has meant the intensification of attacks on the lives and movement of people from the Arab world. The travel ban constitutes a US policy to sanction the very people that previous administrations as well as the current one have bombed. As borders close, the number of refugees fleeing the horrors of war in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq increases. In this tautology, the new US administration has resoundingly adopted policies of blaming the victims of decades of US war and hegemony. Within this constellation, the production of knowledge as well as higher education more broadly are more crucial than ever. In an era when the status of the fact has eroded at rapid speed, scholars and educators are on the frontlines of guarding the need for empirically grounded and theoretically sound research and scholarship. It is in this spirit that we offer our most recent issue of Arab Studies Journal.

Ghenwa Hayek sheds new light on the notion of the “ordinary” and provides an innovative view on contemporary Beirut by tracing a young generation of novelists. Geoffrey P. Levin traces the trajectory of the Organization of Arab Students in the United States as it shifted from mainstream Arab nationalism supportive of US-Arab ties to anti-imperial radicalism. We are also honored to include a special section on the state in Lebanon. The past few years have featured renewed elite and popular mobilizations around particular state institutions and services: waste management, municipal elections, taxes, and more. The existence, nature, and role of al-dawla (the state) has been a persistent feature of public discourses about contemporary politics in Lebanon. In this special section, we feature a number of historical, contemporary, and theoretical considerations of the Lebanese state. Jamil Mouawad and Hannes Baumann, this special section’s co-editors, introduce the articles by considering the need for and stakes of taking more seriously this ephemeral and nebulous network of institutions and individuals. The section features three articles, each making a unique and productive intervention into the broader scholarship on Lebanon as well as that of the state. Complementing the special section is a critical assortment of book reviews of recent works on Lebanese history, contemporary politics, and their implications for the state in Lebanon.
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​For more information visit Jadaliyya:
Arab Studies Journal Announces Spring 2017 Issue: Editor's Note and Table of Contents

2017 BOOK PRIZE COMPETITION

The Political Economy Project (PEP) is pleased to invite nominations for our 2017 Middle East Political Economy Book Prize. The book prize 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 2016 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 the Arab Studies Institute’s Audio Magazine, Status/الوضع.

EXTENSION: The deadline for submission is 30 June 2017. 

If you intend to participate, please notify us at: 
bookprize@politicaleconomyproject.org. 

To be considered, you must send an electronic copy of the book to bookprize@politicaleconomyproject.org or two hard copies of the text to the address below. One copy will be returned once the committee has reached a decision. 
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Arab Studies Institute
4087 University Drive
Commerce Building 
3rd Floor, Suite 3200
Fairfax VA 22030
USA

In some of the earliest editions of Al-Hadaf, the journal of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, there is explicit mention of the myriad similarities between the “racist, settler colonial regimes” occupying the antipodes of Africa and the crossroads of the Levant. The Popular Front in theory and practice understood their struggle as linked to that of the South African liberation movement. It is against that rich trove of reflection, penned by revolutionaries fighting for their lives, that Andy Clarno deliberately situates his important study of the post-Oslo/post-Apartheid systems in Palestine and South Africa, Neoliberal Apartheid.

Clarno wishes to bridge political economy and modern settler-colonial studies. Such a bridge is necessary because the modern scholarly sub-field has developed basically in isolation from earlier work on South Africa, Algeria, Australia, Tunisia, and elsewhere, which insisted that Western settler-colonialism was part of the political history of imperialism and capitalism. As Clarno points out, “much of the recent scholarship” on settler-colonialism “has emphasized colonization rather than capitalism.” There is another literature concerned with the economics of settler-societies, but little congress between such inquiries and what has come to be broadly known as settler-colonial studies. Of course, in a strict sense, there need not be, since settler-colonialism has existed outside capitalism. But the overwhelming bulk of modern scholarship has dealt with settler-colonialism linked to Western European states and their offshoots, where capitalism has been a central dynamic.

The newly constituted discipline has often taken as its touchstone Patrick Wolfe’s “logic of elimination,” the phenomenon that makes settler-colonies different from other colonies or social formations. Formally – and one might also say pro forma – Wolfe linked this logic to the internal social dynamics of settler-societies and the metropole. Be that as it may, in both his work and those who have applied his framework, such dynamics gradually fell from the analysis. Class, imperialism, and accumulation are rarely found in the journals explicitly treating the topic. It is against this context of scholarly knowledge production that one must understand Clarno’s contribution.

Clarno argues for a new term to account for the victories and limits of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, and the recharged peace-processed apparatus of domination in Palestine. That is “neoliberal apartheid,” in which there are “social formations marked by: extreme inequality, racialized marginalization, advanced securitization, and constant crises.” He also uses the umbrella neologism (de)colonization to reference “the continuation of colonization in Palestine/Israel and the limits of decolonization in South Africa.”

The stories Clarno tells to substantiate his case are effective and revealing. Crisp and analytically cutting ethnographies stud the study, sweeping geographically from the political economy of counter-insurgency in Palestine to the deployment of carceral technologies in South Africa. Here Clarno places his work clearly in a line of older scholarship, especially that on South Africa and Palestine, which means to “contribute to the constitution of broader movements against global, neoliberal apartheid.” And just as that older work traced the umbilical relation between the United States and South African and Israeli settler-colonialism, Clarno follows the vasculature which connects the US to outlying extremities of control, colonialism, and accumulation.

Some of the very best parts sketch the political economy of Bethlehem. Israeli tour agencies, charging fixed costs, push their guests to stay in cheaper hotels in Bethlehem, enhancing their cut. Tourism is one of Bethlehem’s few industries. Meanwhile, the souvenir stores literally have to purchase customers from Israeli tour operators, cutting into the shops’ margins and thus the portions of capital that can remain in the Palestinian circuit. Furthermore, until the recent past, Clarno notes, small factories made handicrafts for the local market. That is no more. The second intifada and the opening of the market to Chinese imports undercut such industries. Thus tourism and the commerce with which it is tied is pushed entirely to the tertiary circuit, with Israeli capital aggrandizing and reducing the space for Palestinian commerce linked to Palestinian production. The other major Bethlehem industry is stonecutting. Israel has encouraged its companies to open quarries in the West Bank, and refuses new permits for Palestinians, as well as the exports of their products. Israeli settlements are the Palestinian quarries’ major markets, while a surfeit of stones drives down prices and leads to ever-fewer factories as they find themselves unable to secure operating margins. Israeli development leads to Palestinian de-development. This is the dialectic of settler-capitalism.

Clarno is less convincing in discussing racial capitalism and racialization, at least as applied to Palestine. He raises it in part to bring in political economy to settler-colonial analysis of the Zionist project. As he makes clear, modern settler-colonial studies, in stark contrast to an entire earlier generation of dissident scholarship, does not really contend with capitalism or imperialism. In part, this is because the new field has sought out a logic that can explain non-Western colonialisms. Be that as it may, the methodology and theoretical architecture of the field has made it difficult for it to deal with the bread-and-butter of materialist social science – class, production, contradiction, commodity flows, and accumulation. Clarno attempts to use the concept of racial capitalism to bridge the moat surrounding the discipline. I am not sure it carries the weight.

Racial capitalism in the work of the South African radicals who coined the concept was a mid-level term mapping a discrete social formation – South Africa. Cedric Robinson developed his theory in conversations with some of those activists, but broadened it into a theory of white civilization(s), “no matter the structures upon which they were formed.” Clarno’s concept sits between the two formulations: the “recognition that racialization and capital accumulation are mutually constitutive processes that combine in dynamic, context-specific formations.” He also notes that it draws “attention to…colonial conquests,” and works through “Dispossessing people of their land and resources.” But the concept of settler-colonialism already covers these aspects of racial capitalism. If meso-level historical concepts, particularly those crafted in dialogue with social movements, can help chart a social formation in order to identify pressure points and weak links, what work does the concept do here?

For example, if racial capitalism is meant to analogize the structural position of the Black middle class, either before or after apartheid, or the Black elite after the end of political apartheid, with the Palestinian Authority-linked upper class, the concept is stretched to the breaking point – “We don't want two occupations. Leave us with one occupation,” a labor and women's rights organizer says. And how do racialization or racial capitalism shed light on the deployment of PA security forces to block both redistributive and anti-colonial struggle in the West Bank? Clarno also extends racial capitalism to the Jewish Israeli class structure. But the concept ends up loosely descriptive, rather than a map of a social formation that informs political struggle – for as he notes, in Palestine, internal Jewish class conflict is contained by and unfolds within settler-colonial modes of control. And how does racial capitalism address the refugees, the most dispossessed of all – which also raises the limits of limiting parallels to the territorial box of historic Palestine? An excess of theoretical lenses, stacked atop one another, makes history fuzzy rather than focused.

This blurriness is unfortunate, since Clarno’s ethnography beautifully and clarifyingly complicates a tendency in modern settler-colonial studies to sideline capitalism and imperialism. In the process, his case studies rise above his theoretical ambiguities. What he shows is a process of imperial-linked settler-capitalism, relentlessly gorging and accumulating. Colonial-capitalism is a holistic process. Colonialism cannot be decanted from capitalism in the history of Western expansion. Indeed, some of the best indigenous scholars of settler-colonialism like Glen Coulthard and José Carlos Mariátegui have made this clear. Furthermore, there is a long history of work explicitly treating settler-capitalism, from Donald Denoon comparatively, to Nahla Abdo and Riyad Mousa in Palestine. Only some of this work appears in the text’s footnotes, and it makes little appearance in the theoretical architecture, perhaps because it deals with the Mandate period.
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Clarno made things difficult by attempting to reinvent a theoretical wheel rather than building on existing approaches. Still, he has made a signal contribution to the very important effort to write accumulation, class, and empire back into settler-colonial studies. This is crucial work for all struggling to interpret and hopefully change the world in front of us. 

Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and Political Economy Project Present
Political Economy of Development Series 

FOUR EVENTS 
(LECTURES AND RELATED WORKSHOPS)

LECTURE
1. Development Under Authoritarian Rule
by Bassam Haddad

Tuesday, February 21, 12 pm
Johnson Center, 3rd Floor, Room A
George Mason University

This lecture examines the character and strategies of economic development in authoritarian regimes. 
It emphasizes state-business relations and the combination of neoliberal prescriptions, class, and institutions of authoritarian control.Pizza and Drinks!


WORKSHOP
2. Workshop on Development
February 28, 12 pm, JC, Room A
by Bassam Haddad

The workshop is intended to serve as a space where students can interact with the instructor and each other 
on matters related to their interests and/or research on the topic

———————————————————————————————--

LECTURE
3. Political Economy of Oil
by John Warner

Tuesday, April 4, 12 pm
Johnson Center, 3rd Floor, Room B
George Mason University

This lecture addresses the intricacies and intersections of oil, authoritarian rule, and regional/international relations in the Arabian Peninsula. The focus will be on the structures of oil economies and implications thereof.
Pizza and Drinks!

WORKSHOP
4. Workshop on Oil 
April  11, 12 pm, JC, Room B
by John Warner
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The workshop is intended to serve as a space where students can interact with the instructor and each other 
on matters related to their interests and/or research on the topic

Co-sponsored by Middle East Studies Program, Arab Studies Institute, Schar School for Policy & Government
FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT PPE.GMU.EDU and MEIS.GMU.EDU

Political Economy Project member Max Ajl recently published the second edition of his series "Critical Readings in Political Economy" on Jadaliyya. In this edition, "Mechanisms of Imperialism," Max discusses Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik's A Theory of Imperialism (Columbia University Press: 2016).

Exactly 70 years ago, Hubert Humphrey stated, “If you are looking for a way to get people to lean on you and to be dependent on you, in terms of their co-operation with you, it seems to me that food dependence would be terrific.” Humphrey expressed something simple: the centrality of food production to dependence and independence, sovereignty and servitude. Of course, the United States and other temperate countries have always had a problem. It is often cold. When it is cold they cannot grow many crops, and some crops they cannot grow at all, be it warm or cold. As much as the United States has sought to impose food dependence on tropical and sub-tropical countries through the PL-480 food aid program or other mechanisms and manipulations, it has run into this simple natural-spatial fact.

Departing from this fact, and investigating its enduring overlap with that loose conceptual dyad, the North-South or core-periphery, Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik have composed a capstone work, A Theory of Imperialism. They define imperialism as “a coercive relationship exercised by the capitalist sector on the ‘outside’ world to ensure, first, that it obtains the products that it needs from this ‘outside’ world and second, that it does so at nonincreasing prices.”
Their argument at first and second sight is counter-intuitive, but in fact is sequential and noetic. At its core, it is about “certain phenomena that have always characterized capitalism,” how they fit together, and how they relate to persistent and puzzling features of the world system. The first is the need for a global reserve currency as a permanent store of wealth. An expectation of persistent inflation could undermine any currency, precipitating a pell-mell scramble to gold, or another commodity perceived as a reliable repository of value. For this reason, they argue, an enduring pattern of the world system is to construct and maintain relationships which stave off systematic inflation.

This is where space comes in. The global South countries can produce tropical commodities that the global North cannot. But at a certain point, they can only be produced at an increasing supply price. An increasing supply price produces inflation, which then imperils the “value of money.” Given both the need for a reserve currency and the relationship between the reserve currency and global power, there is an urge to safeguard money’s value. The primary, but not sole, mechanism for this is income deflation. Such deflation is needed in order to compress internal demand and prevent the domestic market in the periphery from absorbing these non-fungible commodities which global North consumers demand – coffee, spices, to some extent sugar, many fruits.

Imposing reduced demand on the warmer and poorer countries conduces to decreased domestic use of both export crops, as well as reduced demand for basic food crops. Such reduced demand, in turn, means that in the face of any increased demand due to accumulation in the global North, producers will match their supply to meet those needs – again, without running into the tripwire of increasing supply price.

In the pre-WWII era, colonialism contained mechanisms aplenty to suppress peripheral demand. Deindustrialization created larger labor reserves, accelerating the surplus drain. Through various chicaneries, the physical produce and wealth of the South went on to flow from its direct producers to the global North. At the same time persistent losses in the terms-of-trade for agricultural goods vis-à-vis manufactured goods – the classic Prebisch-Singer thesis – were another manifestation of contained supply price. Massive labor reserves in the global South, linked to deindustrialization and underuse of agricultural land, also led to persistent deflation, putting constant downwards pressure on wages – incidentally pushing back against persistent conceptions of capitalism as a production-enhancing system. The Patnaiks highlight the constant presence of violence in maintaining these relationships, stating: “Capitalism without imperialism is an impossibility.”

Decolonization put paid to many mechanisms for income deflation, leading to global demand increases, alongside some supply increases through agricultural intensification across the global South. This was the interregnum of global dirigisme. At the same time, the United States developed large current account deficits towards the end of the latter period as it overspent in the War on Vietnam. The Bretton Woods system foundered on these obstacles. But the post-Bretton Woods system still has the dollar as the reserve currency. Neoliberalism had involved many a mechanism for income deflation – manifest in reduced food consumption across the global South. Violence is present, too, amidst kinetic and regulatory attacks on any state seeming, threatening, or even retaining the capacity to emplace projects which increase incomes. The value of money is again secure.

Although they observe that both Lenin and Keynes insisted on the importance of maintaining currencies’ values, their innovation is to build a theoretical skeleton around this observation, and then place considerable empirical flesh upon it. Furthermore, their insistence on the importance and centrality of agriculture is a departure from industry-centric notions of development and underdevelopment which consistently discount the agricultural sector and the struggles possible within it.

Along this tour-de-force, they parry numerous objections to their theory. One is that tropical products are so monetarily light amidst the weight of global GDP or Northern consumption baskets that they cannot matter to the system’s functioning as the Patnaiks propose. But the Patnaiks first note that the low prices of tropical commodities are themselves the product of coerced exchange relationships. They further observe that their relative composition in the import-export balances is less to the point, than what would happen to the global North’s consumption without the global South’s agricultural products.
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Some will take issue with the theory. Among them has been David Harvey, whose rebuttal and thereupon the Patnaiks’ riposte is included in the book. He suggests that their theory relies on a crude geographical determinism. He insists on the co-constitution of nature and space, and that the tiny weight of tropical products in various trade aggregates anyway makes the argument moot on its face. He also accuses them of having an “obsession with agriculture,” a charge they readily accept. And he suggests in place of their specification of this mechanism of imperialism Giovanni Arrighi’s “preference to abandon the idea of imperialism,” given the complexity of global production chains. Both Harvey’s critique and the Patnaiks’ rebuttal are worth reading, not least for the Patnaik’s sharp comment on Harvey’s, and metropolitan Marxists’ more broadly, “failure to perceive contemporary imperialism,” in truth a legacy of their failure to see colonialism. Whether and to what extent this is the case ought to be left to the judgment of the reader. This reader, at least, found the Patnaiks compelling, convincing, and a corrective that is urgently indeed.

Hannes Baumann is a member of the Political Economy Project, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Politics at the University of Liverpool, and the author of Citizen Hariri: Lebanon’s Neoliberal Reconstruction. His recent article "Donald Trump: America's Berlusconi (or Thaksin, or Hariri, or...)" discusses the the rise of tycoon-politicians since the 1990s in Italy, Lebanon, Thailand, and most recently, the United States. Check out the article below and visit his profile for further reading!

When the Cold War ended neoliberalism triumphed. Deregulation and privatisation buoyed new business empires in real estate, media, finance and telecommunications. After seizing economic opportunities, many of these new business emperors also sought political opportunities. Italian media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, Lebanese contractor Rafiq Hariri, and Thai telecommunications giant Thaksin Shinawatra became prime ministers in the 1990s and 2000s.

These individuals are prominent examples of the new tycoon-politics. They describe themselves as 'self-made men' but their rise had much to do with being in the right place at the right time during deregulation or an oil boom. Trump’s background is similar. He multiplied his father’s wealth through property deals in Reagan-era New York. Debt-fuelled expansion nearly pushed him into bankruptcy in the 1990s. Since 2004 he has concentrated on TV shows and product licensing.
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Tycoons run as insurgents against faltering political systems and old economic oligarchies. The implosion of Italy’s ruling Christian Democrat party in the early 1990s “Clean Hands” anti-corruption campaign opened the gates for Berlusconi. Lebanon’s civil war cleared the way for Hariri. Thaksin entered politics in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis played a similar role for Trump. He channelled the discontent of America’s white middle class outside the major coastal metropolitan areas by mixing economic nationalism with xenophobia, racism, sexism, and Islamophobia.
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Tycoons offer politics-as-business as an alternative to politics-as-usual. They run family businesses where top-down decisions are taken in a tight-knit circle of advisors. Berlusconi put a school friend at the head of his media holding company while Hariri made a school friend head of one of his banks and later finance minister. They both relied on former employees or associates to fill positions of state. Trump is also filling key government posts with people who stayed loyal even when his campaign foundered, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner appears set to be a key advisor. Yet tycoons' background in business does not equip them to deal either with the bureaucratic Leviathan that is the modern state, nor with the give-and-take of democratic politics.

Conflicts of interest abound with tycoon-politicians. Rafiq Hariri was a major shareholder of the development company that was reconstructing central Beirut and Berlusconi prevented regulation of his media conglomerate. Trump is handing control of his business empire to his children who are also part of the transition team which picks top officials. Berlusconi spent much of his energy as prime minister fighting “communist judges” who were bringing charges against his businesses. Trump is set to have a similarly testy relationship with the judiciary, having accused a judge presiding over one of the astonishing 3,500 lawsuits he has been involved in of bias due to his Mexican heritage.
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The highly personal style of ruling extends to international relations. Some tycoons rely on foreign backing on their way to power. Rafiq Hariri had been a Saudi envoy during Lebanon’s civil war and grew rich on royal contracts. While Trump may not be similarly beholden to outside powers, US intelligence agencies have pointed to Russia as the likely culprit in an e-mail theft from the Democratic National Congress, which benefited Trump when it was published on Wikileaks. America’s NATO allies have noted the billionaire’s embrace of Vladimir Putin with great alarm. Berlusconi had a similarly cosy relationship with Putin.
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Tycoons can still have some policy successes. Hariri rebuilt central Beirut, albeit as a ghost town. Thaksin’s low cost healthcare provision was so popular that the coup plotters who deposed him in 2006 kept the policy. However, tycoons cannot meet the overblown expectations they raise in their election campaigns. The economic record of a Berlusconi or a Hariri was lacklustre at best. Trump’s promise to boost GDP growth to 4% a year is unlikely to be met.

Few tycoons just fade away, some establish dynasties. After Rafiq Hariri’s assassination in 2005 the mantle passed to his son Saad. Following the 2006 coup that ousted Thaksin, his sister Yingluck fought her way back to the post of prime minister in 2011. What is most troubling about the Thai and Lebanese episodes are the tycoons’ divisive legacies. Saad Hariri led the “March 14” coalition against “March 8” around Hizballah. The two parties brought Lebanon to the brink of civil war. Post-coup politics in Thailand saw popular mobilisation and violence between “red shirts” supporting Thaksin and “yellow shirts” opposing him.
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Trump may turn out to be the most dangerous tycoon yet, and not only because the USA are so powerful. Saad Hariri and Thaksin Shinawatra used divisive popular mobilisation only after they had come under violent attack through an assassination and a coup respectively. What sets Trump apart from the other billionaire politicians is that divisive race and gender politics are at the very heart of his project.

The Political Economy Project is proud to announce the release of Status/الوضع Audio Magaine Issue 3.2 on its brand new platform! Check out the new issue and customize your experience by logging in: StatusHour.com

The latest issue of Status/الوضع Audio Magazine includes an interview with Political Economy Project member Zaki Mehchy on "Economy in Syria" for the program Syria Now. In this three-part interview, Zaki Mehchy is joined by Evlin Salah Al Mustafa and Ahmed Haj Hamdo to discuss the economic impact of the conflict in Syria as well as the role of economic journalism in Syria's war.

Listen to the interview here: Economy in Syria

For more information on the latest issue of Status/الوضع Audio Magazine visit Jadaliyya: Status/الوضع Launched! A New Bilingual Audio Platform and Issue 3.2!

Join the Political Economy Project at MESA 2016! The Arab Studies Institute will hold a reception for the announcement of the Knowledge Production Project on Friday, November 18th from 9-10:30 pm in Salon D on the Fourth Floor. Be sure to also visit the Arab Studies Institute's booth at the MESA Book Bazaar (booths 14-15) to learn more about the project and its ongoing activities. Looking forward to seeing you all there!