This book offers the first critical engagement with the political economy of the Middle East and North Africa. Challenging conventional wisdom on the origins and contemporary dynamics of capitalism in the region, these cutting-edge essays demonstrate how critical political economy can illuminate both historical and contemporary dynamics of the region and contribute to wider political economy debates from the vantage point of the Middle East. Leading scholars, representing several disciplines, contribute both thematic and country-specific analyses. Their writings critically examine major issues in political economy-notably, the mutual constitution of states, markets, and classes; the co-constitution of class, race, gender, and other forms of identity; varying modes of capital accumulation and the legal, political, and cultural forms of their regulation; relations among local, national, and global forms of capital, class, and culture; technopolitics; the role of war in the constitution of states and classes; and practices and cultures of domination and resistance. Visit politicaleconomyproject.org for additional media and learning resources.

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.

Before the 2011 uprisings, the Middle East and North Africa were frequently seen as a uniquely undemocratic region with little civic activism. The first edition of this volume, published at the start of the Arab Spring, challenged these views by revealing a region rich with social and political mobilizations. This fully revised second edition extends the earlier explorations of Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, and adds new case studies on the uprisings in Tunisia, Syria, and Yemen.
The case studies are inspired by social movement theory, but they also critique and expand the horizons of the theory's classical concepts of political opportunity structures, collective action frames, mobilization structures, and repertoires of contention based on intensive fieldwork. This strong empirical base allows for a nuanced understanding of contexts, culturally conditioned rationality, the strengths and weaknesses of local networks, and innovation in contentious action to give the reader a substantive understanding of events in the Arab world before and since 2011.

Before the 2011 uprisings, the Middle East and North Africa were frequently seen as a uniquely undemocratic region with little civic activism. The first edition of this volume, published at the start of the Arab Spring, challenged these views by revealing a region rich with social and political mobilizations. This fully revised second edition extends the earlier explorations of Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, and adds new case studies on the uprisings in Tunisia, Syria, and Yemen.
The case studies are inspired by social movement theory, but they also critique and expand the horizons of the theory's classical concepts of political opportunity structures, collective action frames, mobilization structures, and repertoires of contention based on intensive fieldwork. This strong empirical base allows for a nuanced understanding of contexts, culturally conditioned rationality, the strengths and weaknesses of local networks, and innovation in contentious action to give the reader a substantive understanding of events in the Arab world before and since 2011.

This book offers the first critical engagement with the political economy of the Middle East and North Africa. Challenging conventional wisdom on the origins and contemporary dynamics of capitalism in the region, these cutting-edge essays demonstrate how critical political economy can illuminate both historical and contemporary dynamics of the region and contribute to wider political economy debates from the vantage point of the Middle East. Leading scholars, representing several disciplines, contribute both thematic and country-specific analyses. Their writings critically examine major issues in political economy-notably, the mutual constitution of states, markets, and classes; the co-constitution of class, race, gender, and other forms of identity; varying modes of capital accumulation and the legal, political, and cultural forms of their regulation; relations among local, national, and global forms of capital, class, and culture; technopolitics; the role of war in the constitution of states and classes; and practices and cultures of domination and resistance. Visit politicaleconomyproject.org for additional media and learning resources.

After the 1993 Oslo Accords people across the world anticipated the onset of peace and an end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For Israelis, the Accords generated massive economic growth and a sense of security. For Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, they led to a dramatic rise in poverty and unemployment due to a complex array of closures, militarized checkpoints, and bypass roads, and a vast expansion of the settlement project that fractured Palestinian territories and communities. In 2000 popular Palestinian rage with the new shape of the Israeli occupation erupted in a second uprising or intifada. In this volume, prominent scholars and journalists examine the dramatic political changes in Palestine and Israel from the Oslo Accords through the second intifada and the death of Yasser Arafat. Their essays address the political economy of the Oslo process, social and political changes in Palestine and Israel, United States foreign policy, social movements and political activism, and the interplay between cultural and political-economic processes. The volume also includes documents, maps, poetry, and graphic art. Contributors: Ammiel Alcalay, Lori A. Allen, Marwan Barghouti, Joel Beinin, Robert Blecher, Elliott Colla, Catherine Cook, Jonathan Cook, Richard Falk, Khaled Furani, Rita Giacaman, Lisa Hajjar, Jeff Halper, Rema Hammami, Sari Hanafi, Adam Hanieh, Islah Jad, Penny Johnson, Rela Mazali, Emma C. Murphy, Issam Nassar, Ilan Pappe, Yoav Peled, Mouin Rabbani, Shira Robinson, Sara Roy, Rosemary Sayigh, Charmaine Seitz, Adam Shatz, Rebecca L. Stein, Gary Sussman, Salim Tamari, David Tartakover, Graham Usher, Sharif Waked, and Oren Yiftachel

The 2011 eruptions of popular discontent across the Arab world, popularly dubbed the Arab Spring, were local manifestations of a regional mass movement for democracy, freedom, and human dignity. Authoritarian regimes were either overthrown or put on notice that the old ways of oppressing their subjects would no longer be tolerated. These essays from Middle East Report the leading source of timely reporting and insightful analysis of the region cover events in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen. Written for a broad audience of students, policymakers, media analysts, and general readers, the collection reveals the underlying causes of the revolts by identifying key trends during the last two decades leading up to the recent insurrections."

In this wide-ranging history, Joel Beinin examines fundamental questions of ethnic identity by focusing on the Egyptian Jewish community since 1948. A complex and heterogeneous people, Egyptian Jews have become even more diverse as their diaspora continues to the present day. Central to Beinin's study is the question of how people handle multiple identities and loyalties that are dislocated and reformed by turbulent political and cultural processes. It is a question he grapples with himself, and his reflection on his experiences as an American Jew in Israel and Egypt offer a candid, personal perpective on the hazards of marginal identities. This text focuses on the life of the majority of the community, which remained in Egypt from the 1948 Arab-Israeli War until the aftermath of the 1956 Suez/Sinai War; the dispersion and re-establishment of Egyptian Jewish communities in the United States, France, and Israel; and contested memories of Jewish life in Egypt since President Anwar al-Sadat's visit to Jerusalem in 1977. Beinin argues that the experiences of Egyptian Jews cannot be adequately accounted for by either Egyptian nationalist or Zionist narratives. Fusing history, ethnograph

The working people, who constitute the majority in any society, can be and deserve to be subjects of history. Joel Beinin's state-of-the-art survey of subaltern history in the Middle East demonstrates lucidly how their lives, experiences, and culture can inform our historical understanding. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the book charts the history of the peasants and the modern working classes across the lands of the Ottoman Empire and its Muslim-majority successor-states. Inspired by the approach of the Indian subaltern Studies school, the book presents a synthetic assessment of the scholarly work on the social history of the region for over thirty years. Students will find it rich in detail, and accessible in presentation.

After the 1993 Oslo Accords people across the world anticipated the onset of peace and an end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For Israelis, the Accords generated massive economic growth and a sense of security. For Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, they led to a dramatic rise in poverty and unemployment due to a complex array of closures, militarized checkpoints, and bypass roads, and a vast expansion of the settlement project that fractured Palestinian territories and communities. In 2000 popular Palestinian rage with the new shape of the Israeli occupation erupted in a second uprising or intifada. In this volume, prominent scholars and journalists examine the dramatic political changes in Palestine and Israel from the Oslo Accords through the second intifada and the death of Yasser Arafat. Their essays address the political economy of the Oslo process, social and political changes in Palestine and Israel, United States foreign policy, social movements and political activism, and the interplay between cultural and political-economic processes. The volume also includes documents, maps, poetry, and graphic art. Contributors: Ammiel Alcalay, Lori A. Allen, Marwan Barghouti, Joel Beinin, Robert Blecher, Elliott Colla, Catherine Cook, Jonathan Cook, Richard Falk, Khaled Furani, Rita Giacaman, Lisa Hajjar, Jeff Halper, Rema Hammami, Sari Hanafi, Adam Hanieh, Islah Jad, Penny Johnson, Rela Mazali, Emma C. Murphy, Issam Nassar, Ilan Pappé, Yoav Peled, Mouin Rabbani, Shira Robinson, Sara Roy, Rosemary Sayigh, Charmaine Seitz, Adam Shatz, Rebecca L. Stein, Gary Sussman, Salim Tamari, David Tartakover, Graham Usher, Sharif Waked, and Oren Yiftachel

The working people, who constitute the majority in any society, can be and deserve to be subjects of history. Joel Beinin's state-of-the-art survey of subaltern history in the Middle East demonstrates lucidly how their lives, experiences, and culture can inform our historical understanding. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the book charts the history of the peasants and the modern working classes across the lands of the Ottoman Empire and its Muslim-majority successor-states. Inspired by the approach of the Indian subaltern Studies school, the book presents a synthetic assessment of the scholarly work on the social history of the region for over thirty years. Students will find it rich in detail, and accessible in presentation.

The 2011 eruptions of popular discontent across the Arab world, popularly dubbed the Arab Spring, were local manifestations of a regional mass movement for democracy, freedom, and human dignity. Authoritarian regimes were either overthrown or put on notice that the old ways of oppressing their subjects would no longer be tolerated. These essays from Middle East Report-the leading source of timely reporting and insightful analysis of the region-cover events in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen. Written for a broad audience of students, policymakers, media analysts, and general readers, the collection reveals the underlying causes of the revolts by identifying key trends during the last two decades leading up to the recent insurrections. -- Indiana University Press

Once upon a time, Baghdad was home to a flourishing Jewish community. More than a third of the city's people were Jews, and Jewish customs and holidays helped set the pattern of Baghdad's cultural and commercial life. On the city's streets and in the bazaars, Jews, Muslims, and Christians-all native-born Iraqis-intermingled, speaking virtually the same colloquial Arabic and sharing a common sense of national identity. And then, almost overnight it seemed, the state of Israel was born, and lines were drawn between Jews and Arabs. Over the next couple of years, nearly the entire Jewish population of Baghdad fled their Iraqi homeland, never to return. In this beautifully written memoir, Nissim Rejwan recalls the lost Jewish community of Baghdad, in which he was a child and young man from the 1920s through 1951. He paints a minutely detailed picture of growing up in a barely middle-class family, dealing with a motley assortment of neighbors and landlords, struggling through the local schools, and finally discovering the pleasures of self-education and sexual awakening. Rejwan intertwines his personal story with the story of the cultural renaissance that was flowering in Baghdad during the years of his young manhood, describing how his work as a bookshop manager and a staff writer for the Iraq Times brought him friendships with many of the country's leading intellectual and literary figures. He rounds off his story by remembering how the political and cultural upheavals that accompanied the founding of Israel, as well as broad hints sent back by the first arrivals in the new state, left him with a deep ambivalence as he bid a last farewell to a homeland that had become hostile to its native Jews.

The essays and case studies collected here--featuring some of the best material from "Middle East Report" over the past decade as well as much original material--challenge the facile generalizations about what Western media and political establishments usually call "Islamic fundamentalism." The authors demonstrate the complexity of these movements and offer complementary and contrasting interpretations of their origins and significance. The material included covers a broad range of themes--including democracy and civil society, gender relations and popular culture--as they have emerged in countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

Was the Red Flag Flying There? examines the Palestinian/Arab-Israeli conflict through the lens of Marxist politics. Joel Beinin asks how the proposal to partition Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state--a solution endorsed by international consensus in 1947-49--became an obscure and even unthinkable option by the mid-1960s. As the most consistent adherents of the two-state solution both before and after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the Marxists serve as the focal point of his analysis. Beinin discusses three Marxist political formations in Egypt and Israel: the communist movement in Egypt; the Communist Party of Israel (MAKI); and the United Workers' Party of Israel (MAPAM), which attempted, but ultimately failed, to sustain a dual commitment to Marxism and Zionism. The failure of these movements and their progressive abandonment of an internationalist orientation toward resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict is explained as a consequence of the ultimate hegemony of nationalist politics in both Egypt and Israel. Employing both the analytical methods of political economy and a discourse analysis informed by insights drawn from Antonio Gramsci's conception of hegemony, Beinin offers a new interpretation of the significance of Marxist politics in Egypt and Israel. This work builds on and extends the scope of the revisionist history of the Arab-Israeli conflict developed by Israeli scholars during the 1980s, challenging traditional Marxist conceptions of the relationship between anti-imperialist nationalism and the struggle for socialism.

In July 2011, Israel passed legislation outlawing the public support of boycott activities against the state, corporations, and settlements, adding a crackdown on free speech to its continuing blockade of Gaza and the expansion of illegal settlements. Nonetheless, the campaign for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) continues to grow in strength within Israel and Palestine, as well as in Europe and the US.

This essential intervention considers all sides of the movement including detailed comparisons with the South African experience and contains contributions from both sides of the separation wall, along with a stellar list of international commentators.

Contributors: Merav Amir and Dalit Baum, Ra anaan Alexandrowicz, Hind Awwad, Mustafa Barghouthi, Omar Barghouti, Joel Beinin, John Berger, Angela Davis, Nada Elia, Marc Ellis, Noura Erakat, Ran Greenstein, Neve Gordon, Ronald Kasrils, Jamal Khader, Naomi Klein, Mark LeVine, Ken Loach, David Lloyd and Laura Pulido, Haneen Maikey, Ilan Pappe, Jonathan Pollak, Lisa Taraki, Rebecca Vilkomerson, Michael Warschawski, Slavoj i ek.

Egypt is at the axis of the Arab world. With the largest population, the largest industrial economy and the longest tradition of modern political activity it has profound influence across the region. But there have been few attempts to understand contemporary Egyptian society, in particular growing internal pressures for change and their implications for the Middle East and the wider world. This book is the first for over 20 years to offer and accessible examination of contemporary issues in Egypt. It offers the reader analyses of its politics, culture and society, including contributions by several Egyptian academics and activists. This unique new book addresses the turmoil created by imposition of neo-liberal economic policies, the increasingly fragile nature of an authoritarian regime, the influence of movements for democratic opening and popular participation, and the impacts of Islamism. The authors argue that Egypt has entered a period of instability during which the 'low-intensity democracy' embraced by the Mubarak regime faces multiple challenges, including demands for radical change. This unique new book assesses the ability of the state to resist the new movements and the latters' capacity to fulfill their aims.