This paper analyzes the struggles over the fate of the import-export tariff system during the early decades of Lebanese independence (1943-1975). Conflict around this system represented one of the central arenas of elite and popular mobilizations as part of the broader set of struggles to define the political economy of Lebanon, which was ultimately organized around an open laissez-faire service-based economy. First, I explore the shifting patterns of alliances and conflicts that animated these struggles as part of a broader struggle to shape the nature of state-market relations and organize the post-colonial political economy of Lebanon. I highlight how these struggles were informed by the normative and institutional legacies of the Ottoman Empire and French mandate, but ultimately shaped by the strategies of elite and popular groups that were mobilized around said institutions. Neither sectarian (e.g., Maronite vs. Sunni) nor sectoral (e.g., commercial vs. industrial) interests alone sufficiently explain the patterns of alliance and conflict under consideration. The model of collective action that I utilize locates agency in networks that cut across classes, sectarian identities, and corporate interests, bringing together partners who might be united for particular short- or long-term goals. These networks were manifested through both formal (e.g., party affiliation) and informal (e.g., marriage) relationships. Second, I analyze how “the Lebanese state” was (re)produced through specific representational practices that were normalized through these struggles. Explicit discourses about the state and the economy saturated public cultural texts, including newspapers, government reports, and political leaflets. I thus argue that the making of specific state institutions (and thus Lebanon’s economy) was itself the making of “the Lebanese nation-state” as a form of political sociability. Both lines of inquiry, that of the struggle around the import-export tariff system and the attendant cultural constitution of “the Lebanese state” shed light on processes of state and market formation in early independence Lebanon. Thus, my paper poses a challenge to prevailing narratives of Lebanese politics in these years and highlights the contingency of state-led economic development in the Middle East and other late developing countries.

In the last decade, Mecca, Islam’s birthplace, has been the target of some of the world’s largest commercial development schemes. Over one hundred buildings are under construction around the Grand Mosque and will soon replace the historical, architectural, and socioeconomic landscape of this rapidly developing city. Centuries-old fortresses, markets, bookstores, schools, and cafes in this central area of Mecca have been destroyed, no longer there to tell stories of a past that diverges from the one in official memory in Saudi Arabia. Historical artifacts and sites that date back to the time of the prophet Mohammad and his successors have not been spared either, rendering today’s Mecca outside the walls of the Grand Mosque a holy city without an Islamic material heritage. This indiscriminate approach to redevelopment projects in the holiest of Muslim sites is especially peculiar given the micromanagement and close attention that similar development phenomena have received in Riyadh. Redevelopment plans in the political capital are largely premised on safeguarding the city’s historical, archeological and cultural sites. In the last decade alone, the government poured billions of petrodollars into the production and rehabilitation of cultural and archeological sites that circulate the state’s official historical discourse. Where the Saudi government is actively allowing the effacing of one form of historical memory in Mecca, it is strictly enforcing the conservation of its material heritage in Riyadh. While these plans reveal the (excessive) powers of petro-capital and the complex relationship between private contractors and Al Saud’s state apparatus, they also speak to the new importance that historical legitimating mechanisms play in reifying the rule of the Al Saud family. This, in turn, puts into question the ways in which the monarchy has and continues to draw on Islamic discourses for legitimating purposes. By comparing the urban development plans of Mecca and Riyadh, I hope to complicate understandings of Saudi state building that solely privilege ‘PetroIslam’ as the state’s founding, and ruling, ideology. In this paper, I focus on both cities’ cultural roadmaps to bring the role of ‘history making’ to bear on our analysis of Saudi state formation and nation building. By studying the new museums, the Ajyad Fortress in Mecca, and Al Dir’iyya in Riyadh, I draw out the importance of circulating this historical discourse to consolidating state power and reifying images of the Saudi nation.

On 11 January 2011, the Supreme Court of the Republic of Yemen rejected a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Taxation Law No. 19, thus legally establishing the General Sales Tax (GST) and overcoming the last apparent barrier to its implementation. In the shadow of popular struggles across the Middle East, including Yemen, this decision nonetheless represents the nadir of ten years of resistance to taxation reform – encompassing demonstrations, strikes, consumer petitions, denunciatory religious opinions, and numerous legal challenges – begun in 2001 under the aegis of World Bank and IMF-mandated structural adjustment program. Following predictions that the exploitation of Yemen’s oil reserves will cease to be economically viable by 2017, the acceleration of these reforms heralds a renewed effort to reconfigure not only the fiscal regulatory institutions, and hence the material foundations, of the state, but also the forms in which state authority and political identity are contingently manifest. This paper examines an experimental World Bank taxation reform program operating within the newly reconstituted Tax Authority of the Republic of Yemen. Applying an ethnographic perspective, it argues that these reforms are not merely concerned with revenue generation (or surplus appropriation) by the state. Through an exploration of the everyday interactions of state agents with World Bank advisors, on the one hand, and taxpayers, on the other, I contend that they also implicate the production of governable and self-governing citizen-subjects. This paper makes three further assertions in connection with recent academic literature. The first maintains that ‘globalized’ institutions, such as the World Bank and IMF, do not necessarily undermine the state and its sovereign power, but restructure them in ways congruent with neoliberal logics. This recognizes recent political economy scholarship that has examined the centrality of national institutions for regulating and facilitating the transnational flow of people, commodities, and capital. The second posits that rather than accepting sovereign power as self-evident, we should examine how claims to authoritative status and unqualified jurisdiction both become normative and are resisted. Hence, I reference anthropological work on value and moral economies to consider the incoherence between norms of legality and legitimacy. The third challenges a body of work which characterizes the neoliberal project as a shift away from disciplinary forms of power to governmental techniques of rule and argues that these two forms of power are co-constitutive, and that a focus on taxation reform in Yemen reveals the interdependence of repression and law with self-governance.

This paper will argue that a recent series of constitutional crises in Turkey have called into question core bargains struck during the state-building period of the 1920s and 30s. The transformative process now underway in Turkey, as reflected in these constitutional battles, may qualify as a second era of state (re)building in the Turkish context. The Turkish state formation period was marked by a key bargain between the vanguard state-building military elite and the social elites of Turkey’s Western cities. In exchange for urban elites’ commitment to key ideological preferences – premised on particular conceptions of modernization, secularization and national homogenization – they were granted privileged access to state resources. This bargain between social elites and the state withstood social challenges and pressure for liberalization from alternative constituencies at regular intervals. Initially, demands for liberalization were met with repression through direct military intervention in 1960, 1971 and 1980. Later, the response took the form of indirect intervention, in 1997 and again in 2007. But the underlying social context that enabled military interventionism to restabilize this bargain began to shift in the 1980s as a result of the initiation of neoliberal economic policies and Turkey’s bid for membership in the European Union. In this paper, I argue that following the changes initiated in the 1980s, the sustainability of the elite-state bargain came to depend on the exclusion of new socioeconomic elites from the Anatolian provinces, far less faithful to the core ideological commitments of the state. As the economic stature of these groups grew, attempts to deny their demands for political access became increasingly untenable. Having exhausted their ability to stave off social and political change through military intervention, the traditional elites turned to the judiciary as a final guardian of their privileges. This paper will examine the ensuing constitutional crises and their connection to a process of renegotiation that has transformed the founding-era state-society bargain. I argue that the 2010 constitutional referendum represents a definitive rupture with the original state-building strategy of the Turkish republic, initiating a new period of state-building, centered on renegotiation of core bargains concerning secularism, ethnicity and access to state resources. These changes have paved the way for a period of constitutional renovation premised on a more inclusive set of state-society bargains and a redefinition of citizenship to accommodate (rather than repress) ethnic pluralism and competing conceptions of secularism.