For the past four decades, political economy approaches were used in the study of Middle Eastern states and societies in view of explaining MENA’s dismal developmental record. Political economists dismissed exceptionalist explanations like culture and religion, inherited largely from area studies. They rather stressed institutional and structural factors, firmly based on universalist assumptions, considering MENA as a region in an increasingly globalized and interconnected world. On the right, Neo-liberals counted MENA among “the rest” that lacked the right institutions available only in the “West” (De Soto, 2002). MENA was a variant of the neoclassical institutionalist law of private property-based democracy, without which nations would fail (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2009). Abundant oil rents, authoritarianism and a legacy of a bloated public sector impeded the rise of free market development and instead created cronyism, state capture and rampant corrupt that together undermined the positive impacts of globalization (Springborg and Henry, 2010; Chekir and Diwan, 2015). To the left, it was a different kind of universalism. Neoliberalism and globalization served multinationals and/or core states perpetuating patterns of insertion into the world order inimical to development. Once again, the Middle East, because of rent dependency and colonial state legacies, was a variant of a universal pattern of accumulation by dispossession and the upward redistribution of income and wealth, visible in the West and the Rest alike (Harvey, 2007; Glassman, 2006; Hanieh, 2013; Achcar, 2013). This paper is critical of both schools. It argues that both right-and left-wing universalisms have limits. Neither seems to get a balanced dosage of domestic versus global factors in explaining MENA’s failure to develop (with notable exceptions like Roccu, 2013). This paper tackles how domestic institutional, historical and socio-economic factors can be brought in without risking exceptionalism or essentialism. How can MENA’s dismal developmental record be diachronically captured and how can it be assessed in a comparative perspective with other parts of the Global South? After all, many countries could upgrade their position in the global division of labor despite lacking the “right set of institutions”, thought to be quintessential for economic development according to neoclassical institutionalism. In the meantime, globalization-cum-neoliberalism allowed economic development in parts of the Global South (e.g. East and Southeast Asia). And, how can it develop a model that accounts for the variations within MENA instead of a generalized verdict of failed development efforts?