Today, the government of people, things and places throughout the MENA-region is being transformed by powerful models of thought and action derived from “the laws of the market” and neoliberal logic while the study of democratic transition—and, more specifically, the study of the institutional parameters that might explain the non-occurrence of transition in the Arab world—almost exclusively focuses on phenomena situated at the interfaces of state and society. The “Arab regime” is constructed as an endogenous set of institutional structures, interests, and dilemmas that holds back objective, global forces of transition and newness. It is taken for granted that the specific obstacles along the universal path to globalization are to be attributed to the force of endogenous institutions and norms. In other words, the culpability of endogenous institutions for aliberal outcomes is simply deduced from the non-occurrance of transition. The assumptions that underpin contemporary notions of the global—and the work that has gone into their making— have been left outside the scope of critical analysis. But what if the globalist assumptions underlying this plan of action are wrong? What if the apparent pathologies of contemporary political life in the Middle Eastern reflect not endogenous resistance to global forces of transition and newness, but rather the authoritarian underbelly of global liberal modernity itself? In this paper we want to identify map new modalities of government being forged outside the scope of state-society interplay as classically understood. New landscapes of power are being produced via projects engineered to mobilize private agencies in the pursuit of public goods, and to refashion political subjectivities in ways congenial to neoliberal modalities of government more generally (as is reflected in the rise of Special Economic Zones, Qualifying Industrial Zones, Development Regions, projects addressing “Pockets of Poverty” and slums, Urban Regeneration Schemes, and the private sector led development of both luxury gated communities and low-income residential cities on the outskirts of existing urban centers). Academic accounts have by and large sought to measure the impact of these reform-oriented projects in terms of change at the level of formal governing institutions. However, beyond the usual slogans of empowerment and “good governance,” we want to focus instead on what such globally sanctioned initiatives really imply for meaningful democratic political development.