Rentier Migration and the MENA State
A new issue of POMEPS Studies, new journals, a new podcast, and so much new in the MENA Academy Weekly Roundup!
Welcome to this week’s edition of the MENA Academy Weekly Roundup!
First up, I’m thrilled to announce the publication of POMEPS Studies 50: The Politics of Migration and Refugee Rentierism in the Middle East. It’s hard to believe that we’ve reached the fiftieth issue of the open access journal we started at the Project on Middle East Political Science way back when. This collection more than stands up to the best of the collections we’ve released. It’s based on a workshop at the University of Glasgow that I organized with the indefatigable Gerasimos Tsourapsas. It brought together a truly outstanding set of scholars who have been engaged with questions related to labor migration and refugees in the Middle East over the last decade. The theoretical focus of the collections, as elaborated both in the introduction which Gerasimos and I wrote and in the framing piece Gerasimos authored with Helene Thiollet, is the role of the rentier dynamic in state (and non-state) actor policies towards refugees and labor migrants.
The all-star group of contributors (some POMEPS alumni and many new participants in our network) explore this theme through a wide variety of contexts and issue domains, drawing out connections between dynamics and policies which might otherwise seem unrelated. Jordan features prominently in the collection, as it should given both its centrality to modern refugee regimes and its manifestly renteir behavior (as well as my own long-time research interests in the country); contributors on Jordan include Reva Dinghra, Elizabeth Parker-Magyar, Lillian Frost, Shaddin Almasri and Sigrid Lupieri. Other essays touch on the Gulf (Zahra Babar, Froilan Malit, James Worrall), Libya (Alexadnre Bish), Turkey (Ezgi Irgil), Morocco (Ilyssa Yahmi), Iraqi Kurdistan (Abdullah Omar Yassen and Thomas McGee), and the donor side of the equation (Nicholas Mickinski and Kelsey Norman).
This is a rich and rewarding collection, theoretically innovative and unusually coherent even by our standards. It should probably be a book (publishers, call me). In the meantime, download and read POMEPS Studies 50 here for free!
Book of the Week
The book of the week is Marika Sosnowski’s Redefining Ceasefires, published last year by Cambridge University Press. Sosnowski explores the politics and design of ceasefire agreements over a decade of fighting in Syria, developing a useful typology and drawing out the implications of different types of ceasefires. She argues that ceasefires do far more than stop the fighting temporarily, although they do sometimes do that (and other times fail spectacularly). Ceasefires, she argues, are productive of wartime orders, enabling the evolution and consolidation of power relations in specific locations and times. Ceasefires reflect underlying power realities in the conflict, with the balance of power and interests on the ground shaping how specific and compelling the agreement might be. They are also generative of wartime orders, setting of battles for control over smuggling routes or institutionalizing local control. In the Syrian case, local-level ceasefires too often became cover for rebel surrender and liquidation, rather than any kind of humane pause in the killing. It’s all thought provoking for my own research on the political effects of MENA warscapes.
I had the opportunity to chat with Sosnowski about Redefining Ceasefires for the podcast last week. Listen here!
New Publications
Finally, here’s a few new academic publications. First, the first issue of the Palestine/Israel Review dropped a few days ago. It’s an important new open access journal focused on “scholars who share the relational, integrative, and wholistic approach to the study of Palestine/Israel.” As Tamir Sorek and Honaida Ghanem explain in the opening manifesto, the journal aims to open up new discursive space for the production of knowledge about Palestine/Israel. The issue is full of great, thought provoking articles. The great Ian Lustick leads with a review essay of three recent books about structure and agency in the struggle for political change in Palestine and Israel. His conclusion after close readings of the three books bears quoting:
“Jamal, Sand, and Cohen share deep disappointments, though no surprise, at the consequences of Zionism in Palestine—structures of power and arrays of hegemonic beliefs and identities that have privileged all Jews over Palestinian Arabs and some Jews over others. They also share an appreciation of structures as circumstances that agents cope with by deploying strategies whose effectiveness varies with slow-moving patterns of structural change. While none of them is confident of a future more attractive than the past or the present, each holds out hope, even if the time frame for its realization must be measured in decades or generations rather than months or years. Their hopes spring, in part, from the inability of anyone to act effectively in Palestine/the Land of Israel without recognizing the one-state reality that de facto annexation has created, a transformation in the structure of the problem that pushes all agents within the matrix of Israeli–Palestinian relations to explore new, or at least unfamiliar, strategies for sharing a space once again filled with both Arabs and Jews. Where the authors differ is on where to look for promising strategies: to Palestinian civil society and Gramscian theory, to castaway versions of binational Zionism, or to suppressed visions of Jews and Arabs as natural co-inhabitants of a Middle Eastern country.”
Next, there’s a new issue of Syria Studies out today, with the theme “From Governance to Refugees”. Here’s what it offers: “This issue contains articles spanning the spectrum from Syria’s pre 2011 politics and governance to the role and impact of refugees during the Syrian Uprising. First, Ahmad Mamoun explores the role of the military in politics in the 1954-58 period, when there was a unique interaction—a duality of power--between military activism and semi-democratic politics in the country. This paper provides an exceptionally rich insight into the complexities of Syrian politics. Equally nuanced is the penetrating analysis by Armenak Tokmajyan of “authoritarian conflict management” i.e. the “mechanisms of domination” deployed by the Syrian Ba’th regime, which he shows to be a subtle combination of threat of violence, co-optation and use of local intermediaries. In the third contribution, Line Khatib analyses how the regime has sharply centralized and institutionalized its mechanisms of control over the Sunni religious field since the Uprising and Iranian intervention. In their paper, Umut Ozkaleli and Sean Byrne examine opposition governance under Local Councils and the Syrian Interim Government through the lens of the perceptions of Syrian refugees of their performance. Finally Ahmad Barakat continues the focus on refugees, specifically critiquing perceptions in Europe of a security risk from them by looking at the experience of Syrian refugees in Germany.”
Finally, a quick tour around the journals.
Yuree Noh and Marwa Shalaby, “Who Supports Gender Quotas in Transitioning and Authoritarian States in the Middle East and North Africa?” Comparative Political Studies (March 2024). ABSTRACT: What are the drivers of citizens’ support for electoral gender quotas in transitioning and authoritarian states? Despite extensive research examining public support for women in politics in democracies, we know little about how the public perceives them in less democratic settings. To address this shortcoming, we use original survey data from authoritarian Morocco and transitioning Tunisia – two Arab countries hailed for their progressive gender policies. We argue that in these countries where citizens lack political information, they instead rely on their assessment of the government’s performance to form attitudes toward gender quotas. Furthermore, electoral legitimacy plays an important role in shaping citizens’ support for quotas, which are closely linked to how elections and legislatures operate. The findings offer strong support for our theoretical expectations and uncover important gender differences.
Özge Kemahlıoğu and Oya Yegen, “Surviving the Covid-19 Pandemic under Right-wing Populist Rule: Turkey in the First Phase,” South European Society and Politics (March 2024). ABSTRACT: Turkey survived the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic relatively successfully. Compared to some other populist governments, the AKP did not deny the seriousness of the crisis or the importance of medical expertise. The demographics of the population helped, but precautionary measures and the healthcare reform implemented earlier also contributed to this relative success. As a right-wing populist party, the AKP implemented healthcare and economic policies that appealed simultaneously to business and low-income groups. Populist rhetoric blaming the opposition and exclusion from policymaking of unfavourable sectors including opposition-run municipalities deepened the existing polarisation. The crisis response also revealed how the personalised and centralised nature of the executive in the new presidential system can lead to inconsistencies and arbitrariness.
Alexis Montambault Trudelle, “Towards a sociology of state investment funds? sovereign wealth funds and state-business relations in Saudi Arabia,” New Political Economy (March 2024). ABSTRACT: While sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) are making significant incursions into global financial markets, various countries are increasingly establishing funds geared towards national development. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) is the fastest-growing SWF, with most of its assets deployed domestically. Beyond restructuring the economy, deploying the PIF intrinsically implies balancing political and business interests. Yet, there has been little reflection on how socio-political relations with socioeconomic actors shape sovereign wealth allocation. Who gets access to SWF resources, and how? What kind of power relations are maintained or established in the process of SWF development? This article unpacks PIF activities to argue for a microfoundation of how domestic politics influence SWF decision-making. To do so, I introduce a sociology of SWFs using the tools of social network analysis. I find that the PIF mainly targets companies linked to family-owned conglomerates connected to merchant elites with long-standing personal connections to the Saudi state. This article contributes to rentier state debates and broader political economy scholarship by showing how beyond decision-making and asset allocation models, state investment funds also hinge on ancillary networks of social institutions, often generated from ingrained formal and informal interactions between states and society.
Owen Brown, “The Underside of Order: Race in the Constitution of International Order,” International Organization (March 2024). ABSTRACT: While there is increasing recognition of the role of race in shaping global politics, the extent to which the construction and operation of international order is entangled with race remains underexplored. In this article, I argue for the centrality of race and racialization in understanding the constitution of international order by theorizing the constitutive connections between race and international order and showing how the two can be examined as intertwined. I do this, first, by articulating conceptualizations of both international order and race that center on processes of regulation and regularization. Second, I bring these together to suggest that race be understood as a form of order that functions to reproduce a historically emergent form of hierarchy and domination across a range of spaces and contexts. Third, I operationalize these conceptualizations by outlining and historicizing some of the key features of this racialized and racializing international order, specifically coloniality, the racial state, and racial capitalism, and thereby illustrate important aspects of the persistence of this order. Centering race in the study of international order, I suggest, helps us better understand how racializing hierarchies and racialized inequalities persist in the present and are reproduced through structures and practices of international order.
That’s it for this week — we’ve got some great stuff coming next week, so stay tuned!