Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria all saw significant changes to their political systems in the years following the end of World War II. In the years 1952-1963, nationalist coups d’etat in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria put an end to (semi-)competitive elected parliaments and initiated authoritarian populist regimes. Turkey, by contrast, began to allow sustained political competition for the first time beginning in the years 1946-1950. This paper seeks to explain this variation in outcomes through a look at the importance of land reform, an issue that played a key role in all four cases. This paper argues that parliaments dominated by landowners led nationalists in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria to see democratic governance as an obstacle to national emancipation, identify feudalism with colonialism, and pursue revolutionary land reform as the key to lifting the subjugation of both the peasant and the nation. In Turkey, by contrast, different patterns of agrarian land use transformed land reform into an issue that was used to promote democratization by anti-land reform dissidents within the ruling single party. Whereas the parliaments in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria were “captured” by landholding interests fiercely opposed to land reform, rendering land reform through the existing democratic institutions inconceivable, in Turkey democratic politics were actually championed by those promoting the security of rural land tenure to prevent radical land reform from being carried out. Why did land reform play such a different role in these four cases? I investigate three factors leading nationalist military and state elites to view land reform and democracy in different ways. The first is the pattern of landholding, with roots in the Ottoman Empire and local social and ecological factors, often subjected to radical transformations under the periods of British or French rule. The second is the structure of the parliamentary institutions that were created in all four cases, and the ways that patronage and imperial influence led the Egyptian, Iraqi, and Syrian parliaments to offer little prospect for land reform. The third is the spread of ideas and economic theories concerning the nature of land use, agrarian economies, imperialism, feudalism, and the efficacy of state power in restructuring markets. Drawing on primary and secondary source materials in Turkish, Arabic, English, and French, this project seeks to provide new insights into role of political economy and rural poverty in the origins of the contemporary regimes in the Middle East.

The Developmental State and the Rise of the Iranian Automobile Industry Since the 1980s, successful industrial development has been attributed to the concept of the developmental state where rapid economic growth is associated with “autonomous” development bureaucracies that coordinate development activities around a single set of objectives. A subset of the development state scholarship is the work on state capacity that claims successful development is attained when a state has autonomous bureaucracies that are embedded in society to coordinate effective policies. By all scholarly accounts since the revolution, Iran lacks the state capacity to conduct coherent industrial development. Scholars have argued that factionalism has led to a diminution of state autonomy resulting in incoherent economic planning that in turn has led to industrial decline. In addition, Islamic institutions and foundations that own large industrial organizations are implicated in transforming Iran into a rent-seeking, predatory state. The success of the Iranian automobile industry however strongly contradicts current scholarly accounts. Iran has developed a national industry with high local manufacturing content while becoming the world’s eleventh largest producer of passenger cars and the fifth largest in the global south. In this paper I will argue that even in a larger state apparatus that is politically fractious and has strong predatory tendencies, state-led development can succeed as long as key actors connected to an industry can construct a network of politically effective relationships to decouple a key set of organizations from other parts of the state apparatus to create a "developmental state" within the automotive sector. To explain this process, embedded autonomy theory will be “reconstructed” to explain how state elites in politically fractious states can achieve their industrial development goals. Two components of embedded autonomy at two historical time periods will be analyzed. The first is the early period when industrial nationalists established industry autonomy by defeating political factions opposed to automobile industrial development. The second is a period of deepening embeddedness when industrialists constructed an internal network of social ties to protect the industry from predatory behavior, and a network of global-local ties to multinational corporations to build an industry with high local manufacturing content. My analysis is based on fifty-one in-depth interviews with corporate and state managers of development organizations, archival data and an industry social network data set of ownership gathered during fieldwork conducted in Iran in 2011.

This article is on the impacts of neoliberalization of tobacco production and market on the rural households in tobacco producing villages in addition to the attempts of survival and patterns of restructuring of tobacco livelihoods in rural Turkey. Tobacco is prefered for this commodity research because tobacco is one of the basic crops for Turkish peasant households sustaining their livelihood which was cultivated widely under state regulation. Moreover, it is one of the representative crops of the global oligopolistic commodity markets. In search for answers, a field research was performed in ten villages of three different regions of Anatolia which included in-dept interviews with the producers, local officials and representatives of subcontracting firms. Moreover, the qualitative data are combined with macro statistics on demography, population, production and socio-economic indicators. The findings are placed within the broader historical and theoretical framework in order to present a grounded, coherent picture of the phenomenon under scrutiny. The research reveals two major patterns. Primarily, agricultural production does not yield sufficient income for the survival and recreation of the peasant household in arid and semi-arid tobacco villages which necessitates integration of off-farm income sources to the household budget. The result is either permanent migration- which is also troublesome for the peasants- or income diversification through pluriactivity, off-farm diversification, seasonal migration, and circular migration. Thus a constant movement of peasants between rural and urban areas takes place indicating a new type of rurality by undermining the conceptual relevance of dualistic terms such as “rural” and “urban”, “worker” and peasant” Secondly the research reveals that inequality and poverty increase in the rural areas due to diversified diversification sites of the peasants. In villages with job opportunities in the near surroundings preservation and recreation of rural life is more likely than in the villages with less income opportunities in the near surroundings. Moreover, worse-off farmers diversify mostly in unfavorable and informal markets whereas better-off farmers diversify in better markets with opportunities to move other sectors. This phenomenon leads to the disruption of relatively egalitarian social structure in rural Turkey. In addition, the article elaborates on indebtedness, dispossession and deprivation of the poor peasantry.

The rebellions sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa face new modalities of political control that are constituent parts of “Global Capitalism.” Characterized by the transnationalization of production and the social relations of production, Global Capitalism introduced three innovations of political control. The first is neo-liberal development strategies. These strategies achieved hegemony among development agencies worldwide, making neo-liberalism objective economic science rather than an ideology and thus beyond contestation or deliberation. The second is the mainly legal process by which economic decision-making is made autonomous from the “public” and put in the hands of a technocratic cadre. This takes economic decision-making away from popular accountability and opens up the economy to disciplining by market forces. The third innovation is “democracy promotion” or more precisely the promotion of polyarchy as the model for the state. Polyarchy, sold as “democracy,” is the curtailing of democracy to an institutional understanding and limiting it to the public act of choosing between different elites in ritualized electoral processes. The combined effect of these strategies is to undermine, co-opt, and otherwise neutralize counter hegemonic movements. I lay out the argument above using the case of Iraq after the 2003 invasion. Through a detailed study of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the laws they implemented and their relationship with Iraqi political elite, I show how these strategies of political control were able to bring together a neo-liberal historic bloc in Iraq and undermine possible counter hegemonic movements. I suggest that the Iraqi experience can serve as a model and a warning for counter-hegemonic and oppositional movements.