Economic issues underpinned the 2011 uprisings that swept through the Arab world with calls for social justice at the forefront of protestors’ demands for change. Despite this centrality, the economic dimensions of uprisings in the region remain relatively unexplored by scholars. Transitions in the region raise important questions about the nature of shifting power structures and their relationship to divergent outcomes in the region. What is the relationship between uprisings in the region and the economic interests of domestic and international actors? How have economic demands shaped political outcomes? What influence have regional and international pressures had on the kind of domestic political transformations that have occurred thus far? This paper considers these questions through the lens of economic change in Egypt since 2011. Examining the politics of aid and economic reform since Mubarak’s departure underscores the complexity of interests both domestic and international competing to shape a new Egypt. Egypt’s leaders have since struggled to reconcile domestic demands for change with those of stabilization and adjustment. Groups challenging the economic policies and strategies of previous governments have been excluded from government negotiations, particularly those with the IMF. The invocation of security threats has insured the continuance of aid whether from Western donors or those from the Gulf, shaping a political economy reflective of the Mubarak era. Situated at the intersection of the literatures on political economy and democratic transitions, this paper leverages new data on investments in Egypt with interviews with domestic and international actors engaged in economic debates in the country to examine how subsequent regimes have used incentives and entitlements to manage economic change since the revolution. Research undertaken underscores the importance of examining how elites, aid institutions, and experts are shaping the post 2011 environment with potentially perverse outcomes for those who have played an active role in pushing for alternative economic and political frameworks.

In 2005 the Syrian government announced that the country was transitioning from a socialist economic system to a “social market economy.” The move was part of a broader economic reform process initiated under Bashar al-Asad’s leadership. While scholars have examined the regime’s motivations for launching reform and the ways in which it was implemented, one crucial aspect of this process has not been critically examined: the unprecedented incorporation of international networks of experts, consultants, and technocrats into Syria’s authoritarian modality of governance. In this paper I map the transnational expertise networks that were integral in developing and implementing Syria’s reform agenda, and examine the ways in which these networks helped to shape a new political configuration in Syria. I contend that economic reform, far from a depoliticized technical sphere, helped to constitute a new mode of authoritarian rule that served the interests of both domestic ruling elites and (global) economic elites. Unlike prevalent narratives that focus on the core regime elite (or one-man rule) in authoritarian politics, I treat technocratic policy-making as a site of power and governance, and experts as significant political actors. Specifically, by tracing the flows of foreign technical assistance, the paper brings to light a connection between Syria and Germany, whose support of the Asad regime has never been critically examined or scrutinized. Before Syria’s adoption of the “social market economy” paradigm in 2005 this economic model had only ever formally existed in Germany. The exportation of this paradigm to Syria was only the most visible manifestation of a more profound technocratic alliance between the two countries. As a testament to the endurance of these expertise networks, almost four years into the political and humanitarian crisis in Syria, the same networks remain critical to distributing aid, channeling humanitarian relief, and planning for post-war reconstruction. Rather than becoming immaterial, these networks of expertise have been reconstituted and repurposed in the context of Syria’s civil war. As evidence for this argument, I draw on interviews with consultants and technocrats involved in the Syrian economic reforms. I also analyze a diverse array of technical documents and assessments, government reports, public speeches and statements, and statistical data on aid grants and loans. The research contributes not only to a more fine-grained understanding of authoritarian control in Asad’s Syria, but also to how networks of expertise may come to shape the political possibilities for post-war Syria.

While the challenges of doing business in the Arab world are well known, the costs are especially pronounced for the region's small and medium size enterprises (SMEs). Never the less, small business is the largest source of private sector employment in a region plagued by unemployment (Nasr and Pierce 2012). SMEs, defined as firms with fewer than 100 employees, represent up to 90 percent of total businesses in most Arab countries, and up to 40 percent of all employment (Saleem). Yet despite their economic weight, and shared challenges, small business owners remain politically marginal and inactive in the region. Understanding the causes of this collective inaction can speak to the political dynamics and economic outcomes that pervade the Arab world. Combining cross-country survey data with fieldwork in Jordan, I argue that small business owners' collective inaction stems from their dependence on state and the collective mistrust it breeds. . I test this argument using Arab Barometer data on the region's small business owners. To my knowledge, this is the first effort to leverage survey data to examine the collective political behavior of Arab shop owners. Through a series of model specifications, I find that small business owners are consistently less likely to engage in collective action than average survey respondents. I dig deeper into this argument's causal mechanisms through a case study of small business politics in Jordan. Drawing upon over sixty interviews with Jordanian small business owners, civil society members, and NGO officials, I find that small business owners are less collectively active because they lack institutional alternatives to illicit and personalistic solutions to their collective problems. Sources: Nasr, S. and Douglas Pearce. "SMEs for Job Creation In The Arab World: SME Access to Financial Services." Washington DC: World Bank (2012). Saleem, Qamar. “Overcoming Constraints to SME Development in MENA Countries and Enhancing Access to Finance,” International Financial Corporation, IFC0513

Debates over the role that Islam plays in women’s economic empowerment are widespread both globally and among Muslims themselves. Some scholarship takes an orientalist tone, arguing that Islamic doctrine and/or culture is inherently restrictive to women. More recent scholarship argues that Islam is open to diverse interpretations, many of which are empowering for women. The contention that Islam provides a mixed heritage in terms of women’s empowerment raises an interesting puzzle – how does religiosity impact Muslim women’s economic self-efficacy and success? The current paper examines the relationship between religiosity, self-efficacy, and entrepreneurial success among Tunisian women entrepreneurs using an interdisciplinary approach combining the “toolkit” model of culture in sociology and affect theory in psychology. Statistical analyses on data collected on 138 Tunisian women entrepreneurs from August 2013 to February 2014 suggest, contrary to essentialist scholarship, that religiosity is positively associated with both self-efficacy and entrepreneurial success. Further, results show trait negative affect moderates the relationship between religiosity and self-efficacy; religiosity has a negative relationship with self-efficacy for women with high negative affect but a positive relationship with self-efficacy for women with low negative affect. This suggests individual personality traits are important determinants for how women interpret the mixed messages they receive in religious discourses.

Across the Middle East and North Africa economic reform has been a common theme amongst an array of other social and political developments since the 1980s, yet both popular and academic debates have tended to highlight the persistent state involvement and lack of opportunities that have limited the impact of new policies. Financial markets are no exception. Given the prevalence of state-owned banks, liberalizing the allocation of credit has been a major concern, but academics, practitioners, and policy-makers have also begun to take note of growing equity markets in countries from Morocco to Oman. Drawing inspiration from mainstream economic theories in North America and Europe, these studies have analyzed these emerging markets in order to assess their economic performance and compliance with norms of corporate practice. Unsurprisingly, the results have been mixed. Not only is there enormous variation in the size and institutional development in MENA stock exchanges, but the social, political, and economic environments they inhabit might limit the applicability of economic ideas developed to fit, for example, the American ideal type of publicly traded corporations with widely dispersed private ownership. My study follows the lead of works on other regions such as East Asia and post-communist Eastern Europe in bridging the gap between normative economic theory and cross-national variation by describing the social structure of publicly traded firms in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Oman, and Saudi Arabia. My analysis has two stages. First, it uses data on ownership and boards of directors to construct a regional network of corporate control as a formal representation of the connectivity and density of corporate elites and their firms. Statistics from this network are used both to compare countries within the region while also providing a contrast to observed patterns in other areas of the globe. Next, it uses methods from network analysis such as community detection to offer preliminary explanations of the observed structure. It concludes by arguing that despite substantial movement toward Western norms of corporate governance, the social structure of public firms in MENA has several distinct features, such as regionally cohesive structure anchored by firms and directors from Gulf countries, and by proposing a strategy for investigating how this structure has evolved in tandem with qualitative changes in political, economic, and regulatory environments.

Between the 1970s and 1990s much of the Discourse around development in Egypt revolved around framing the country as a victim of demographic misfortune, requiring the intervention of economic and technical experts. During this period much of the focus of development work undertaken in the country has been in the southern region known as the Sa’id or Upper Egypt (Zaalouk, 2004, Unicef, 2007). This mainly agricultural area is by most accounts home to some of the poorest governorates of the 27 that make up the republic, making it one of the poorest regions in the country. Beyond its human development profile, Upper Egypt has occupied a very unique place in Egyptian nationalist narrative since the end of the colonial period. Egypt’s Cairo-centric national development priorities have historically produced initiatives aimed at eradicating behaviors deemed ‘backwards’ or ‘pre-modern’ at the provincial levels. This paper argues that despite a strong central government in Egypt with virtually no decentralized bureaucracy, the neoliberal reforms of the 1970s have created the conditions for NGOs (international and Egyptian) to replace the national government as loco-parentis, particularly with regard to the delivery of services associated with social and economic development. Drawing on interview data, textual analysis, and six months of ethnographic fieldwork gathered while embedded with a leading Cairo-based American NGO, this paper reveals the ways in which a new rural-urban dualism at the provincial level has emerged during this most recent period. This poststructural analysis argues that along with the aforementioned historical developments, prevailing development logics of “empowerment” (particularly those concerning women), embody what Foucault (1969) as citied in Mills (1997) calls discursive formations. This framework uncovers the systematizing effects Discourse has on the ways people think and behave within a particular social, cultural, and historical context (Mills, 1997). In the context of this study, this framing reveals the ways in which NGOs have become not only responsible for delivering “development” services previously the charge of the national government, but more importantly an integral part of Cairo’s cultural war on rural Upper Egypt as a whole. These developments suggest that culture remains the primary unit of analysis, and affecting it through intervention continues to be a preoccupation of the development community.