For centuries urban hubs around the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean have been linked together by a system of informal money transfer known as hawala. Initially developed as a system for financing long-distance trade, a hawala network is constituted by a diverse set of trusted brokers who send and receive money from each other on behalf of their customers. Today this network continues to function, despite the expansion of formal banking channels, the introduction of new systems of exchange and communication, and intensified efforts to regulate its activities, and is used for purposes as diverse as remittance transfers, import/export financing, and most recently the provision of aid in conflict areas such as Libya and Syria. An important way in which hawala brokers have managed to maintain and extend their transnational networks has been through the incorporation of various technological devices into their practices. This paper will map out the socio-material arrangements in these informal value transfer practices and document the technological artifacts that mediate hawala brokers’ networks and transactions: smart phones, online messaging and currency exchange applications, television screens, and (physical) notebooks among others. Brokers have integrated these diverse technologies for purposes as diverse as: delegating risk (of fraud, getting caught, incorrect debt settlement claims by other brokers), evading state surveillance, communicate within the network, keeping records of their transactions, and tracking fluctuations in market prices. Examining these practices will help us unpack how technological artifacts and infrastructures shape informal economic activity and mediate cross-border economic transactions in the Middle East. Existing scholarship on hawala in various contexts has mostly focused on the interpersonal and communal trust in informal economic networks. However, these studies fail to capture the broader moral economy of risk and trust in which hawala operates. In fact, I argue, technological artifacts are a central part of these moral economies. In conducting their operations, hawala brokers act with technical artifacts, which mediate not only cross-border transactions but also relations of trust. As such, this paper will adopt an approach that emphasizes the “social shaping of artifacts” – i.e., how users and technological artifacts reconstitute each other in the course of economic action. In developing this argument, I will draw on interviews with government officials, hawala brokers, and clients in Beirut and Istanbul, which I complement with existing literature and policy reports on informal money transfer systems elsewhere in the Middle East.

Drawing on evidence from the 2011 Egyptian uprising, this paper demonstrates the effect of two social media platforms – Facebook and Twitter – on a discrete facet of revolutionary mobilization: successful “first mover” mobilization. Specifically, it argues that these two platforms enabled the revolution’s first movers to organize and execute a large, nationwide, and seemingly leaderless first day of protest on January 25, 2011, which signaled to hesitant but sympathetic Egyptians that a revolution might be in the making and convinced them to join subsequent protests. Using qualitative and quantitative evidence, including surveys, interviews, and scraped Twitter meta-data, it first demonstrates that those who used social media during the revolution tended disproportionately to be among those who participated on the first day of protest. It then discusses three mechanisms that linked these platforms to successful first mover mobilization: 1) movement recruitment, 2) protest planning and coordination, and 3) live updating about protest logistics. The paper not only contributes to debates about the role of the Internet in the Arab Spring and other recent waves of mobilization, but also demonstrates how scholarship on the Internet in politics might move toward making more discrete, empirically grounded causal claims.

The diffusion of military technologies into civilian industries, sectors, and institutions has long formed a significant element of the forms of innovation required in thriving processes of capital accumulation (Ceruzzi 2008; Friedman 2013; Goldman and Eliason 2013; Starosielski 2015). Often, the military technologies most deeply scrutinised tend to be kinetic (i.e. violent or sanguinary) instruments, weapons and techniques. Oft forgotten (with the notable exception of railroads; see van Creveld 2004; Wolmar 2012) is the diffusion of military knowledge/technology/technique in the mostly invisible milieu of ports and logistics that constitute transnational networks of maritime connection (for an exceptional study of these maritime/military logistical connections see Cowen 2014). In this paper, I will discuss the role and centrality of diffusion of military technologies in the making of maritime transport and networks in the Arabian Peninsula in the post-Second-World-War era. I will be drawing on a) the recently declassified archives of the US Army Corps of Engineers in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Arabian Peninsula, as well as b) the open-source materials published over the course of decades by various branches of the US military, and c) memoirs written in Arabic and English by participants in the processes delineated here. The paper will argue that there has been a two-way traffic between military technologies and networks of trade and commerce in the Arabian Peninsula. The US Army Corps of Engineers, but also logistics firms serving various US wars in the region, have been crucial in the formation of ports and maritime transport in the region. The US Army Corps of Engineers has been involved in the construction of harbours and ports at Dhahran, Jeddah and Salalah. In some locations, it is the commercial value of the ports, in others their strategic significance, but in all neo-mercantilist ideologies and protection of capital accumulation, that have encouraged the US military’s involvement. This two-way traffic between military/strategic and commercial interests has been crucial in the transformation of the Arabian Peninsula into the most significant transport hub in the Middle East, with Jabal Ali (9th largest container port in the world) and Salalah (largest port on the western littoral of Indian Ocean) leading the way, and new construction in Qatar, Saudi, Kuwait and elsewhere comparing for transport capacity.

In the early post World War II era American airlines and government policies sought to define a new global order based on global trade and communications without requiring direct control of overseas territories. American efforts to build global air travel networks and a so-called ‘empire of the air’ provided the material infrastructure and the aerial optic geopolitical vision to sustain America’s non-territorial empire critical to Henry Luce’s notion of the American Century. By the 1970s and 1980s, however, US-dominated regimes of aeromobility were challenged by air piracy, oil price spikes, and eventually airline deregulation. This paper argues that we are now in the midst of a new revolution in the global geography of air travel that is forging a new, Arab Gulf centered ‘logic of the air.’ As deregulation, open skies policies, and ongoing technological advances--in engine technology and aircraft design-- have expanded air travel affordability and mobility across larger populations including the global south, it has been the Gulf airlines, rather than the American ones, that have been able to exploit the changing economies and geographies of scale in mass air travel. At the center of these efforts have been rival efforts to develop massive mega-hubs and airport cities to sustain globe spanning airline networks. The paper outlines how these growing hubs operate with a graphical advantage, able to exploit growing markets in Asia and the global south, but also rely on a different set of rules, including the banning of labor unions, the absence of community interest groups concerns with noise and pollution, limited legacy costs, and access to government land and capital. The paper will conclude by assesses the sustainability and limits of these new models of airport development.