World Bank Dictates, Public Sector Retrenchment, and Rising Unemployment among University Graduates in the Occupied Palestinian Territories Over the past decade the occupied Palestinian territories have witnessed an unprecedented increase of student enrollment at institutions of higher education and a corresponding growth in the number of university and college graduates. Tens of thousands of women and men from all social sectors and strata of society complete their academic studies each year, earning bachelor degrees in a wide range of specializations. However, in too many cases the impressive educational attainments are not realized in the realm of the labor market. A long array of statistical findings that were collected by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics indicate the prevalence of high levels of unemployment among graduates, with unemployment rates among female and among Gazan graduates greatly exceeding those found among their male and their West Banker counterparts, respectively. For several years now I have been engaged in a comprehensive socio-anthropological study of the expansion of higher education in the OPT and of the potential that this process bears in view of the persistence of extremely adverse conditions, namely, Israel's occupation and military rule and the critical Palestinian dependence on international assistance. I presented findings from my field research on institutions of higher education, students and graduates in two MESA meetings (2008, 2010). My proposed presentation centers on an analysis of principal causes that undermine large scale absorbance of graduates into the labor market. I will argue that ever since its inception in the wake of the Oslo accords, international assistance to the PNA was guided by the World Bank's flagship ideology, namely that economic growth can only be generated by the private sector, while the public sector is non-productive by definition and that therefore its expansion should be limited to the minimum level. This regardless of the fact that the OPT clearly lacked the structural pre-requisites for a private sector-led development. The continuation of this donor policy into the post-Oslo era, and its further escalation into a public-sector retrenchment dictate resulted in a socio-economic setback for Palestinian society as a whole and for the young and educated in particular. The arrested development of the public sector leaves the population deprived of a range of services that will not be provided by any private establishment and prevents tens of thousands of bachelor degree holders from materializing their skills and becoming gainfully employed citizens.

This project will examine the connection between attitudes toward economic reform, national identity, and government policy in the Palestinian Territories. Specifically, we will seek to understand how both the demand for nationally autonomous state institutions and the exigencies of prudent fiscal management shape bureaucratic reforms within the Palestinian Authority (PA). Current PA policies are influenced by two seemingly conflicting goals: first, increasing the presence of de facto sovereign state institutions in Palestinian political life and, second, reducing the economy’s reliance on state spending. Under such conditions, what factors shape the size of the bureaucracy? In the Palestinian case, does nationalism translate into bureaucratic contraction or expansion? Drawing on existing scholarship on nationalism and bureaucratic reform, the project will make an original contribution to our understanding of the role of the state in economic development in transitioning economies. The project will rely on fieldwork that will be conducted in the Palestinian Territories during the summer of 2011, including interviews with relevant ministry staff and local municipal councils across a selection of West Bank governorates, Palestinian citizens representing varied employment status and occupations, and refugee camp residents as access permits. We will also exploit data from four public opinion surveys conducted in the Palestinian Territories between 2003 and 2010 to test our propositions. Although the Palestinian political and economic context represents a special case, the project will contribute to our broader understanding of bureaucratic efficiency and public attitudes toward economic reform in contexts of instability and conflict. As recent events have shown, many governments in the Middle East are grappling with maintaining a strong role for the state in economic development while also promoting alternative sources of job creation amidst public discontent. Observing the development of the PA’s bureaucratic institutions at this early stage will provide insights applicable to other economies, in the region and elsewhere, which depend on high levels of government spending and public sector employment yet are undergoing institutional change to accommodate growing private sectors.

This paper describes an emerging technology entrepreneurship network centered in Beirut, Lebanon. Small tech ventures and their funders and facilitators are enacting new styles of business and finance in Lebanon, creating new relations between the nation and its diaspora. The network described draws on globally novel institutional forms and financial practices such as business incubation and venture capital, but also relies on long-standing reserves of Lebanese commercial and financial expertise, both in the country and in the diaspora. The paper is based on ethnographic research conducted in Beirut, Lebanon in 2009-2010. Lebanon’s economy has long been composed of sophisticated financial institutions and small commercial enterprises, but the emerging network of tech, finance, and knowledge economy actors centered in Beirut draw on new, globally dispersed techniques of business organization and financial expertise. These new techniques simultaneously formalize and abstract what were once socially embedded business practices while drawing strangers into close association. Equity financing terms between startups and venture capital firms, university-based entrepreneurship programs, and new online public spaces are creating novel social and economic groupings. The network emergent from these groupings extends outside the country, bringing expatriate Lebanese back into close association with new ventures, if not back into residence in their country of origin. Mediating institutions and events such as business incubators, business networking groups, and entrepreneurship conferences are propagators of a global shift in post-Fordist economic arrangements; Lebanon, having never been primarily dependent on heavy industry, has been well positioned to utilize these institutions and practices. That this network has only blossomed in the last few years is a function of the country’s ongoing political troubles. The entrepreneurship network, while certainly not ignorant of the political realities of the country, is decentralized enough to sidestep blatant sectarianism; a loosely attested Neoliberal values and individualist voluntarism inheres in the field, and the emergence of this network gives its participants a novel perspective on their identity as Lebanese citizens, and on their country’s financial and regulatory climate. As the political events of early 2011 have shown, information technologies are dramatically reshaping the social, political, and economic landscape of the Middle East, and the network I have studied is a crucial site for the regional production of the ventures and properties that sustain and expand these technologies, in addition to being a site of their consumption.

Much attention has been paid to the role of private security corporations in both the invasion and occupation of Iraq. In particular, the activities and legal ambiguity surrounding organizations such as Blackwater (now Xe Services), Aegis Defense and DynCorp have come under scrutiny for their extensive roles in both security and reconstruction efforts in Iraq. However, the external private sector has a broader presence in post-2003 Iraq, particularly in terms of the reconstruction of the energy sector, telecommunications, banking and infrastructure. This paper is an examination of the role of the external private sector in Iraq in developing a sustainable program of post-conflict reconstruction and good governance. It argues that whilst the external private sector has an important role to play, particularly in assisting in the re-establishment of a viable financial sector and development in industries such as telecommunications and infrastructure (particularly transport), the case of Iraq highlights other trends. In particular, the efforts at disestablishing any form of governmental regulation over the external investment in the immediate post-invasion period has left successive Iraqi governments, whose rule is fragile at best, without effective means of control over this activity. Drawing on World Bank modelling, this paper will highlight how the removal of regulatory mechanisms for external private investment in Iraq leaves the Iraqi government not only vulnerable to predatory practices, but also in danger of being unable to absorb future investment and reconstruction programs. As such, the sustainability of the medium to long-term future of reconstruction in Iraq is tenuous.

In recent years, welfare provision by the governing JDP (Justice and Development Party) has been criticized on the grounds that it relies upon inculcating a “sadaqa culture” among poor people in Turkey. In this paper, I analyze this public debate as a corollary of neoliberal social governance, but in contrast to analyses which conceive of this debate as being about “rights vs. gifts”, I argue that this public debate is instead about the proper form, medium, and objectives of gift in a market economy. The resilience of the gift ethos, therefore, suggests that contrary to expectations about capitalism, it seems that the contemporary neoliberal present is suffused and indeed constituted by institutions, discourses, practices and ethics of social welfare. Moreover, by historically and comparatively situating the case of Turkey between European and Middle Eastern welfare regimes, I show the ways in which the actual political effects of economic liberalization vary, thereby arguing against homogenizing and monolithic accounts of global capitalism, thereby contributing to the scholarly conversation about the relationship between free market principles, welfare ethics and new subjectivities. I advance such an argument through a multi-sited analysis of the uses, criticisms and refractions of the popular motto of “giving fish vs. teaching how to fish” in circuits of civil society in Turkey. More specifically, this paper is based upon a 14 month fieldwork with two prominent non-state organizations working in the area of social service provision: Cagdas Yasam and Deniz Feneri, the former with a secularist-nationalist outlook and the latter with an Islamic-conservative class base. By analyzing the contradictory political languages, ethical practices and cultures of giving endorsed and eschewed by these two organizations through interpretive and ethnographic methods, I show precisely the opposite of the claim that the Cagdas Yasam and Deniz Feneri represent two poles of the spectrum in their articulation of “charity”—or the complex relationship between the responsibility of the state vis-à-vis the political economy of welfare. Partial embracement and slight nuances—instead of clear cut differences—lie at the heart of the recent politicization of questions of charity in Turkey, revealing that neoliberal social governance; is a historically shared milieu shared by secularists and Islamists in Turkey, instead of being a point of contestation which divides them.