Middle East

Locked Out of Development: Insiders and Outsiders in Arab Capitalism

BY STEFFEN HERTOG. Cambridge University Press, 2023, 75 pp.

This brisk, clear, and devastating portrayal of the consequences of decades of misguided economic policy in the Arab world is a bracing, if deeply disheartening, read. Arguing that the Middle East’s welfare states of the 1950s and 1960s failed to address the challenges of increasing populations and declining resources, Hertog traces the development of a two-tiered economy in most of the countries of the region, particularly republics such as Algeria, Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia. The insiders in the formal economy—big business and official labor unions—continue today to benefit from their privileged access to everything from regulatory exemptions to generous pensions, while both entrepreneurs and workers in the swelling informal economy are deprived of the legal status that provides such benefits. This dynamic distorts the labor market and inhibits investment in education, promotes cronyism, and blocks genuine reform. Hertog provides data from several monarchies, including Morocco and Jordan, that suggest a version of this dynamic also obtains there. He doesn’t extend his analysis to the Gulf states, but he doesn’t need to: there, most of the population—well-heeled expatriates and migrant laborers alike—is officially locked out of the world of the insiders.

The One State Reality: What Is Israel/Palestine?

EDITED BY MICHAEL BARNETT, NATHAN J. BROWN, MARC LYNCH, AND SHIBLEY TELHAMI. Cornell University Press, 2023, 372 pp.

An unusually matter-of-fact, sober, and dispassionate exploration of the political institutions and arrangements governing the territory once ruled by the British in their Palestine Mandate, this book is a model of scholarly engagement with challenging political issues. The editors argue that the continued embrace of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse obscures realities on the ground and promotes increasingly irresponsible wishful thinking on the part of policymakers in the United States and Europe. They present a powerful case for fresh and frank analysis. The volume brings together uniformly strong essays by a variety of scholars and experts that explore the religious arguments for Jewish control of the entire territory, the historical dynamics of settler colonialism, the complex rationales for limited and partial citizenship regimes, the Palestinian Authority as a mechanism of indirect rule, and the changing perspectives of the American Jewish community, Arab governments, and U.S. policymakers. Insisting that there is nothing to be gained in continuing to foster the illusion that a two-state solution is possible, the authors urge a candid and clear-eyed acknowledgment of reality: the existence of one state, Israel, governing the entire territory through multiple, separate, and unequal legal and administrative regimes.

The Economic Statecraft of the

Gulf Arab States: Deploying Aid, Investment, and Development Across the MENAP

BY KAREN E. YOUNG. I.B. Tauris, 2023, 192 pp.

Over the last 15 years, Gulf states have begun to exercise their considerable economic power more boldly in the Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan—a region known as the MENAP. The impact of their grants, loans, and investments—both public and private—looms increasingly large. Not only has their engagement with countries in Africa and South Asia furthered growing South-South economic links; it has also helped them eclipse the United States, Europe, and the allied international financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as donors, investors, and even as political models. Although the Gulf sometimes competes in these recipient regions with an equally audacious Chinese economic statecraft, both China and the Gulf are exporting a model of state capitalism and unapologetic authoritarianism quite at variance with the free market and liberal democracy promoted by the West after the Cold War. Young’s detailed and sharp description of the economic paradigms and policies of the Gulf states is an invaluable guide to a complex challenge to the now threadbare economic order promoted by Washington.

Beyond the Lines: Social Networks and Palestinian Militant Organizations in Wartime Lebanon

BY SARAH E. PARKINSON. Cornell University Press, 2023, 270 pp.

Many countries in the Middle East have collapsed in recent decades into multiparty civil wars fueled by region-wide contests. Parkinson seeks to examine how such prolonged strife shapes and reshapes patterns of social identity, affiliation, and agency. She studies an early forerunner of such conflict in the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–90, with its varied and evolving cast of insurgents and occupiers, proxies and patrons. Focusing particularly on several Palestinian militant groups, she traces the relationships forged and reinforced under duress, as extended families regrouped when they lost members and camps, and villages mobilized to provide health care not because they wanted it but because they needed it. When the soldiers are not uniformed officers of the state and the battlefront is not a distant prospect, war becomes part of everyday life: sisters turn into comrades and villages produce battalions. Perhaps not surprisingly, women took on unaccustomed, and often unacknowledged, roles in militant operations, serving as couriers, informants, and occasionally combatants. When the guns fell silent, peacemaking required the difficult unraveling of multiple layers of pride, fear, loyalty, and betrayal.

Order Out of Chaos: Islam,

Information, and the Rise and Fall of Social Orders in Iraq

BY DAVID SIDDHARTHA PATEL. Cornell University Press, 2023, 240 pp.

The increasing number of states whose governments have splintered, dissolved, or simply disappeared in the twenty-first-century Middle East raises questions about how people organize themselves when centralized authority vanishes. In this examination of social and political organization in Basra in the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion and the subsequent collapse of the Iraqi government, Patel provides a subtle, persuasive answer in documenting the rise of Shiite political leaders and movements in the city. By assessing the results of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2003–4 and subsequent visits in 2011, as well as geospatial analysis and electoral data, he shows that the introduction of Friday sermons in Shiite mosques after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government allowed congregants to cooperate in addressing both local concerns such as trash collection and national issues such as elections. The novelty of these sermons, the physical distance of the mosques, and the hierarchical structure of Shiite practice all helped mobilize residents in a way that the bonds of tribe, ideology, and Sunni practice could not.