This paper investigates the production of neoliberal spatial enclaves in the Palestinian West Bank with a view to drawing out some emerging contradictions of social and political life under changing circumstances of occupation. I argue that Palestinian gated-entrepreneurialism must be understood within the wider strategic context of Israeli efforts to fragment and enclose territories within the Palestinian political-economic space. Donors have encouraged this gated entrepreneurialism as a developmental strategy. However, one consequence of this is that the fragmentation of Palestinian life is naturalized by a seemingly global economic logic. While the Palestinian example provides an extreme case, it is by no means exceptional. The analysis presented here serves to highlight similarities and convergences across neo-liberal projects in the MENA region.

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.

In the 1990s, the Moroccan Monarchy set out on the path of political and economic reform. This path, the so-called Moroccan alternance, accelerated with the accession to the throne of Mohammed VI. Nevertheless, most observers acknowledge that liberalization didn’t result in genuine democratization. Given that the Moroccan political system remains largely dominated by the Monarchy, the process of democratization has understandably been depicted as cosmetic, a façade and top-down. However, this doesn’t mean that we cannot distinguish some real changes concerning political opposition and politics on the ground. The so-called ‘authoritarian regime’ in Morocco underwent radical changes and a new hegemonic class dominates Moroccan state politics. Responding to the perceived contingencies and opportunities associated with globalization and world market integration, the dominant Moroccan class has established and defended the boundaries of “new state spaces”. Concurrently, other social forces are also active in articulating the rationality of the state within these spaces, provoking new forms of opposition in the process. This paper elaborates on some of these oppositional forms that have arisen since the 1990s. Social movements like the diplômés chômeurs (unemployed graduates) and the tansikyat (coordination against the expensiveness of life) will be discussed in detail. Evidence will be drawn from extensive fieldwork. Despite the fact that recent elections were a worrisome demonstration of absenteeism, the country witnessed an exponential growth of social protest. It is our intention, therefore, to step outside the regime focus and explore how social protest emerges in a neoliberal environment targeting not only the classical notion of ‘the state’ but also how they relate to the new regulatory arrangements that have emerged with Morocco’s increasing integration in the space of the global market.

During the last two years Egypt has been shaken by a series of powerful strikes and labor actions which have invigorated the workers’ movement. The “prime movers” and heart of this process are the workers at the Ghazl al-Mahalla spinning and weaving factory in the city of Mahalla al-Kubra. They have turned a defensive conflict for local, “economic” demands into a broad syndical struggle for a national minimum wage and an independent and autonomous union, challenging state power itself. The different factions of the multifaceted political opposition have tried to connect to the workers’ movement in symbolic and/or organizational ways, attempting to translate its prestige and momentum into political gains of their own. In this paper I will explore how the Muslim Brothers, as one of the largest and best organized groups, relate to the Ghazl al-Mahalla movement. Do they support the concrete demands of the movement, e.g. the petition for an independent and autonomous union? What is their current perspective on autonomous workers’ actions and social conflict, and does it differ from their historically corporatist outlook? Have the Muslim Brothers formally intervened in the movement, and if so, was this a conscious strategy of the whole organization, of specific branches, or a mere individual decision? How are their syndical interventions perceived by the Mahalla activists? Evidence is drawn from interviews with both Muslim Brothers and Mahalla militants, and from textual sources such as journals, pamphlets, blogs, and websites.

This paper explores the Red-Dead Canal as part of the Master Plan for the Jordan Rift Valley. This mega-project - also referred to as the Peace Conduit - is being advanced as a solution for both the development and political challenges facing Palestinian Authority, Israel and Jordan. The Red-Dead Canal project is a multi-purpose project that will convey 1.8 billion cubic meters of water per year through a water conduit some 180 kilometers from the Red Sea to the vicinity of the Dead Sea. Often referred to as “the Peace Conduit,” it has general formal purposes. The first one is to save the Dead Sea from environmental degradation. Secondly it would provide desalinated water for Amman, the Palestinian Authority and Jerusalem, and generate hydro-electric energy at affordable prices. Finally the project is also presented as a symbol of peace and cooperation in the Middle East. Relying on techniques associated with the emerging field of global ethnography, the paper documents the agencies involved in the proposed Canal project and explores how certain (neoliberal) assumptions are being inscribed into the technologies deployed by the project, and–indeed—into the nature/environment of the Jordan Rift Valley itself. In other words we view the canal as a materialization of both globalist assumptions and shifting power positions. As such the focus of the paper is not on the classical development impact of technical projects of infrastructural development. Instead we emphasize the values, interests and modalities of power and control inscribed within projects as the Red-Dead Canal, and the ways such projects shape the politics of the populations most affected by them. By the time the canal project has finished, it will have affected and will keep on affecting the life and the environment of many people in the region. For that reason this paper will also trace the subaltern strategies of resistance, subterfuge, and creative appropriation articulated in the wake of this multi-purpose project.

Recent developments in world affairs have led to increased pressures on Arab countries to pursue neoliberal modalities of development and government, challenging the integrity of seemingly given spatial scales of political organization. As a result political and economic life is redesigned to reflect ‘market’ discipline, and the ability to govern is ‘transferred’ from the state to new regulatory territorial arrangements within the global market space. This neoliberal developmentalism had a profound impact on the spatial fabric of Jordan, creating a range of “New State Spaces” that fit the dominant contours of supply-side economics. These socio-spatial reconfigurations remain understudied in the MENA-region. Since King Abdullah II took power in 1999, several entrepreneurial strategies are being pursued in Jordan. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has been reformed to a central hub for transnational capital. This article explores these new governance arrangements of regulation and accumulation in the Aqaba Special Economic Zone (ASEZ). An in-depth analysis of different state spatial projects in the regional territory of Aqaba, illustrates the specific dynamics of social relations and ‘political’ agencies implicated in the production of ASEZ. The arena of various alliances and social struggles between a range of state and non-state actors, embodies and constitutes the production of “actually existing neoliberal spaces” that connect the ‘local’ territory of Aqaba to the global market. We explore ‘The Aqaba Masterplan’ that functions as a roadmap towards neoliberal futures, inscribing large urban regeneration projects and market strategies into the city spatial fabric. In contrast new governmental arrangements are set up between state-actors, NGO’s and private agencies for poverty relief such as microcredit schemes. A massive relocation program in the informal neighbourhood of Shallalah is set up towards substitute low income housing for these poor in the borderlands of Aqaba. Based upon extensive fieldwork through in-depth interviews with key-actors, this paper treats the uneven spatial development and the socio-spatial effects of this neoliberal reform in Aqaba (Jordan).