Political Economy: WestAsiaNA

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

The course provides an introduction to the political economy of the Arab countries in the West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region, often referred to as Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in the 20th and 21st centuries. It emphasizes the structural characteristics of their economic development in light of colonial legacy and post-independence developmentalist policies while examining their human and natural resource endowments, their institutional factors, social classes, labor markets and the effects of international actors and their penetration of the region. The course covers a wide range of topics, including but not limited to issues associated with paradigms of development, underdevelopment and de-development, colonial imperial capitalism, racial capitalism, economy of independent state-led growth, political economy of oil and resource extraction, state-society relations in light of unruly neoliberalism, political economy of globalization and global finance capitalism, political economy of the securocratic state and accumulation by repression, political economy of the 2010-11 Arab uprising, political economy of gender and migration, inequality and struggle for food sovereignty and against land grabbing, among other themes. This course moves away from dominant discourse that seeks to provide a mainstream sanitized version of the political economy of WANA narrowly and biasedly centered on rentierism, economic diversification, monetarism, econometric, and macroeconomic indicators, among other conventional notions that not only have characterized most of the academic curriculum but most importantly failed to explain the widespread poverty, deterioration of standards of living, rising consumer prices and lack of employment opportunities, among other issues. Instead, this course is deeply grounded in a complex approach of a critical political economy perspective of WANA seeking to pay more attention to the structures of global capitalism and its role in the uneven distribution of wealth, its articulation and deployment across the region in the pre and post-colonial era while emphasizing its congruent connections to class, identity, capital and markets in their gendered, racialized, and socially hierarchized forms in order to better capture the region’s socio-political dynamics and challenges that it is facing. It provides a window into economics as a field and how it has interacted with the development of capitalism as a social system and its inherent tendency to generate exploitation, hierarchy subordination, racialization and inequality. By examining the historical roots of capitalism and looking at how they shape societies today, the course seeks to challenge myths surrounding capitalism as the main, dominant and unavoidable form of human society across the WANA region. Through an interdisciplinary approach—drawing from economics, history, anthropology, political science, sociology, geography ...— this course aims at bridging economic theory, history, and real-world policy while providing the epistemic tools to envision and design alternative futures to literally rethink capitalism and its implications for the WANA region. The course is grounded in comprehensive theoretical perspectives and empirical debates. It relies on scholarships accessible to undergraduate students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and who are interested in political economy and development of the WANAregion.