The Violence of Petro-dollar Regimes

The Violence of Petro-dollar Regimes PDF Author: Luis Martínez
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231800808
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
The creation of oil "rents" in the 1970s put Algeria, Iraq, and Libya on the fast track to modernization. Massive revenues turned Algeria into the "Mediterranean dragon," Libya into an "emirate," and Iraq into the preeminent "rising military power" of the Arab world. From a political perspective, the progressive socialism of these countries would seem to have engendered profound, promising change: increased rights for women, positive urbanization, and improved education. Yet the realities of oil wealth are beyond disillusioning. The international community now wonders whether reform can ever penetrate such nations and if the West will ever enjoy secure access to gas and oil. Offering the first global evaluation of these issues, Luis Martinez considers the nature of oil-sponsored violence in Algeria, Iraq, and Libya and its ability both to weaken and bolster their respective regimes.

The Violence of Petro-dollar Regimes

The Violence of Petro-dollar Regimes PDF Author: Luis Martínez
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231800808
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Get Book Here

Book Description
The creation of oil "rents" in the 1970s put Algeria, Iraq, and Libya on the fast track to modernization. Massive revenues turned Algeria into the "Mediterranean dragon," Libya into an "emirate," and Iraq into the preeminent "rising military power" of the Arab world. From a political perspective, the progressive socialism of these countries would seem to have engendered profound, promising change: increased rights for women, positive urbanization, and improved education. Yet the realities of oil wealth are beyond disillusioning. The international community now wonders whether reform can ever penetrate such nations and if the West will ever enjoy secure access to gas and oil. Offering the first global evaluation of these issues, Luis Martinez considers the nature of oil-sponsored violence in Algeria, Iraq, and Libya and its ability both to weaken and bolster their respective regimes.

The Violence of Petro-dollar Regimes

The Violence of Petro-dollar Regimes PDF Author: Luis Martínez
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231703024
Category : Algeria
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The creation of oil rents in the 1970s put Algeria, Iraq, and Libya on the fast track to modernization. Massive revenues turned Algeria into the Mediterranean dragon, Libya into an emirate, and Iraq into the preeminent rising military power of the Arab world. From a political perspective, the progressive socialism of these countries would seem to have engendered profound, promising change: increased rights for women, positive urbanization, and improved education. Yet oil wealth's realities are beyond disillusioning. The international community now wonders whether reform can ever penetrate such nations and if the west will ever enjoy a secure gas supply. Offering the first global evaluation of these issues, Luis Martinez considers the nature of oil-sponsored violence in Algeria, Iraq, and Libya and its ability both to weaken and bolster their regimes.

Oil Money

Oil Money PDF Author: David M. Wight
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501715747
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
In Oil Money, David M. Wight offers a new framework for understanding the course of Middle East–US relations during the 1970s and 1980s: the transformation of the US global empire by Middle East petrodollars. During these two decades, American, Arab, and Iranian elites reconstituted the primary role of the Middle East within the global system of US power from a supplier of cheap crude oil to a source of abundant petrodollars, the revenues earned from the export of oil. In the 1970s, the United States and allied monarchies, including the House of Pahlavi in Iran and the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia, utilized petrodollars to undertake myriad joint initiatives for mutual economic and geopolitical benefit. These petrodollar projects were often unprecedented in scope and included multibillion-dollar development projects, arms sales, purchases of US Treasury securities, and funds for the mujahedin in Afghanistan. Although petrodollar ties often augmented the power of the United States and its Middle East allies, Wight argues they also fostered economic disruptions and state-sponsored violence that drove many Americans, Arabs, and Iranians to resist Middle East–US interdependence, most dramatically during the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Deftly integrating diplomatic, transnational, economic, and cultural analysis, Wight utilizes extensive declassified records from the Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations, the IMF, the World Bank, Saddam Hussein's regime, and private collections to make plain the political economy of US power. Oil Money is an expansive yet judicious investigation of the wide-ranging and contradictory effects of petrodollars on Middle East–US relations and the geopolitics of globalization.

The “Resource Curse” in the Persian Gulf

The “Resource Curse” in the Persian Gulf PDF Author: Mehran Kamrava
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000727092
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
The "Resource Curse" in the Persian Gulf systematically address the little studied notion of a "resource curse" in relation to the Persian Gulf by examining the historical causes and genesis of the phenomenon and its consequences in a variety of areas, including human development, infrastructural growth, clientelism, state-building and institutional evolution, and societal and gender relations. The book explores how across the Arabian Peninsula, oil wealth began accruing to the state at a particular juncture in the state-building process, when traditional, largely informal patterns of shaikhly rule were relatively well established, but the formal institutional apparatuses of the state were not yet fully formed. The chapters show that oil wealth had a direct impact on subsequent developments in these two complementary areas. Contributors discuss how on one hand, the distribution of petrodollars enabled political elites to solidify existing patterns of rule through deepening clientelist practices and by establishing new, dependent clients; and how on the other, rent revenues gave state leaders the opportunity to establish and shape institutions in ways that solidified their political control. The "Resource Curse" in the Persian Gulf will be of great interest to scholars of Middle Eastern studies, focusing on a variety of subject areas, including human development, human resources, clientelism, infrastructural growth, institutional evolution, state-building, and societal and gender relations. This book was originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Arabian Studies.

Revolution and Authoritarianism in North Africa

Revolution and Authoritarianism in North Africa PDF Author: Frédéric Volpi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197547990
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This book offers a much-needed corrective to dominant approaches to understanding political causality during episodes of intense social mobilisation in North Africa. Drawing on analyses of routine governance and of 'revolutionary' mobilisation in four countries of the Maghreb - Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya - before, during and after the 2011 uprisings, Volpi explains the different trajectories of these uprisings by showing how specific acts of protest created new arenas of contention that provided actors with new rationales, practices and, ultimately, identities. The book illustrates how the dynamics of revolutionary episodes are characterised by the social and political de-institutionalisation of routine mechanisms of (authoritarian) governance. It also details how post-uprising re-institutionalisation and/or conflict are shaped by reconstructed understandings of the uprisings by actors, who are themselves partially the products of these episodes of phenomena.

Statebuilding in the Middle East and North Africa

Statebuilding in the Middle East and North Africa PDF Author: Irene Costantini
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351121332
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This book examines the regime changes in Iraq and Libya to unravel the complexity of statebuilding in countries emerging from authoritarianism and conflict in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Framed in a comparative study of post-2003 Iraq and post-2011 Libya, the book examines changes in key state dimensions – representation and political authority, security, and wealth creation and distribution – in a continuous dialogue with past trajectories in these two countries. To grasp the nature and degree of these changes, the mechanisms of state formation are explored in light of a statebuilding agenda that, in its application from Iraq to Libya, has adapted to different political prerogatives. The analysis of Iraq and Libya serves the book’s ultimate goal to address the debate on statebuilding from a regional (MENA) perspective and to lay the ground for the study of other contemporary cases undergoing radical and violent process of changes, such as in Syria and Yemen. The book grapples with problems associated with the difficult process of transition from authoritarianism through conflict and towards peace by focusing on the state, its structure and function. The work is informed by a large quantity of materials collected over the past five years, including secondary literature, policy papers and reports, and semi-structured interviews with key informants on Iraq and Libya. This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, Middle Eastern studies, peace and conflict studies, and International Relations in general.

The Blood of the Colony

The Blood of the Colony PDF Author: Owen White
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674248449
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The surprising story of the wine industry’s role in the rise of French Algeria and the fall of empire. “We owe to wine a blessing far more precious than gold: the peopling of Algeria with Frenchmen,” stated agriculturist Pierre Berthault in the early 1930s. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Europeans had displaced Algerians from the colony’s best agricultural land and planted grapevines. Soon enough, wine was the primary export of a region whose mostly Muslim inhabitants didn’t drink alcohol. Settlers made fortunes while drawing large numbers of Algerians into salaried work for the first time. But the success of Algerian wine resulted in friction with French producers, challenging the traditional view that imperial possessions should complement, not compete with, the metropole. By the middle of the twentieth century, amid the fight for independence, Algerians had come to see the rows of vines as an especially hated symbol of French domination. After the war, Algerians had to decide how far they would go to undo the transformations the colonists had wrought—including the world’s fourth-biggest wine industry. Owen White examines Algeria’s experiment with nationalized wine production in worker-run vineyards, the pressures that resulted in the failure of that experiment, and the eventual uprooting of most of the country’s vines. With a special focus on individual experiences of empire, from the wealthiest Europeans to the poorest laborers in the fields, The Blood of the Colony shows the central role of wine in the economic life of French Algeria and in its settler culture. White makes clear that the industry left a long-term mark on the development of the nation.

From Deep State to Islamic State

From Deep State to Islamic State PDF Author: Jean-Pierre Filiu
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190264063
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Details the rise of ISIS, which developed as autocrats in the Middle East sought to undermine the Arab Spring.

The State in North Africa

The State in North Africa PDF Author: Luis Martinez
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197536093
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Ever since independence, revolts and riots in North Africa have structured relations between society and the state. While the state has always managed to restore order, the unexpected outbreak of the Arab Spring revolts has presented a real challenge to state stability. Taking a long-term historical perspective, this book analyses how public authorities have implemented policies to manage the Maghreb's restive societies, viewed at first as 'retrograde' and then as 'radicalised'. National cohesion has been a major concern for post-colonial leaders who aim to build strong states capable of controlling the population. Historically, North African nations found colonial oppression to be the very bond that united them, but what continues to hold these communities and nation-states together after independence? If public interest is not at the heart of the state's actions, how can national loyalties be maintained? Luis Martinez analyses how states approach these questions, showing that the fight against jihadist groups both helps to reconstruct essential ties of state belonging and also promotes the development of a border control policy. He highlights the challenges posed by fragile political communities and weak state instruments, and the response of leaders striving to build peaceful pluralistic nations in North Africa.

Inside the Arab State

Inside the Arab State PDF Author: Mehran Kamrava
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190934913
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
The 2011 Arab uprisings and their subsequent aftermath have thrown into question some of our long-held assumptions about the foundational aspects of the Arab state. While the regional and international consequences of the uprisings continue to unfold with great unpredictability, their ramifications for the internal lives of the states in which they unfolded are just as dramatic and consequential. States historically viewed as models of strength and stability have been shaken to their foundations. Borders thought impenetrable have collapsed; sovereignty and territoriality have been in flux. This book examines some of the central questions facing observers and scholars of the Middle East concerning the nature of power and politics before and after 2011 in the Arab world. The focus of the book revolves around the very nature of politics and the exercise of power in the Arab world, conceptions of the state, its functions and institutions, its sources of legitimacy, and basic notions underlying it such as sovereignty and nationalism. Inside the Arab State adopts a multi-disciplinary approach, examining a broad range of political, economic, and social variables. It begins with an examination of politics, and more specifically political institutions, in the Arab world from the 1950s on, tracing the travail of states, and the wounds they inflicted on society and on themselves along the way, until the eruption of the 2011 uprisings. The uprisings, the states' responses to them, and efforts by political leaders to carve out for themselves means of legitimacy are also discussed, as are the reasons for the emergence and rise of Daesh and the Islamic State. Power, I argue, and increasingly narrow conceptions of it in terms of submission and conformity, remains at the heart of Arab politics, popular protests and yearnings for change notwithstanding. Much has changed in the Arab world over the last several decades. But even more has stayed the same.