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Max Ajl

Max Ajl is a doctoral student in the Department of Development Sociology at Cornell University. His work focuses on and contributes to the study of historical sociology, environmental justice, agrarian change, planning, and heterodox Arab/North African social thought. His research is focused on the MENA region, particularly Tunisia. His work has been published in Review of African Political Economy, Middle East Report, Viewpoint, and popular publications like TeleSur. He is an editor at Jadaliyya’s Political Economy and Palestine pages.

ARTICLES BY Max Ajl

Max Ajl, “Auto-centered development and indigenous technics: Slaheddine el-Amami and Tunisian delinking,” Journal of Peasant Studies, 2018 (New Texts Out Now)

As I was doing initial research years ago for my doctoral dissertation on Tunisian planning, I read widely into the criticisms Tunisians made of government planning in the 1970s and 1980s. One name persistently popped up in footnotes as a prescient and incisive analy..
- By Max Ajl Jul 13
Critical Readings in Political Economy: 1967

Guy Laron, The Six-Day War (Yale University Press, 2017).

Amidst the forest-felling libraries of literature on the question of Palestine, Israel’s 1967 war of aggression is perhaps responsible f..
- By Max Ajl Aug 1
Critical Readings in Political Economy: Apartheid

Andy Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

In some of the earliest editions of Al-Hadaf, the journal of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Pal..
- By Max Ajl Mar 1
Critical Readings in Political Economy: Mechanisms of Imperialism

Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism (Columbia University Press: 2016).

Exactly 70 years ago, Hubert Humphrey
- By Max Ajl Jan 18
Critical Readings in Political Economy: De-development

Sara Roy, The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development (Expanded Third Edition), (IPS, 2016).

In this third and last edition o..
- By Max Ajl Sep 7
Introduction: Interviews with Students for Justice in Palestine Chapters

I conducted the following interviews with a number of chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine over email in the spring and summer of 2016. The aim was to use this space to allow student activists involved in the Palestine movement to speak to the non-student sectors of the movement about t..
- By Max Ajl Aug 3
Critical Readings in Political Economy: Resilience

Sean Yom, From Resilience to Revolution (Columbia, 2015); Suzanne Maloney,
- By Max Ajl Aug 1
Critical Readings in Political Economy: Deserts, Soils, and Colonialism

Fazal Sheikh and Eyal Weizman,
- By Max Ajl May 31
Critical Readings in Political Economy

Welcome to the first installment of Critical Readings in Political Economy. This column will appear on a monthly basis and will discuss work—mostly new—in the discipline. It will address the disciplinary residue of Cold War post-colonial containment, the Middle East, including North Afric..
- By Max Ajl Apr 25
A Different Kind of Future

The United States’ founders were taken with the idea that they were building a New Jerusalem. Rhetoric of a City on the Hill animated the state-building project, particularly during what some historians call the colonial era. Such symbolis..
- By Max Ajl Feb 27
Petrodollars and Profit: Rethinking Political Economy through the Middle East

Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler. The Scientist and the Church. World Economic Association, 2015.
Howard Page, a director at what was then Exxon,
- By Max Ajl Dec 22
Militarized Neoliberalism: Jeff Halper's "War Against the People"

Jeff Halper, War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification. London: Pluto Press, 2015.
Dew drops as dual use remote sensors; mechanized micro-drones the size of wasps wandering the skies; and cannons..
- By Max Ajl Dec 3
The Settling of the United States from the Perspective of its Victims

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2014.
The..
- By Max Ajl Aug 10
The Limits of Humanitarianism

The prose of collapse increasingly punctuates reports and communiques concerned with the well-being of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. As early as 2006, as the Israeli siege slowly settled into place, reports cautioned of the collapse of the health system...
- By Max Ajl Jul 7
From Containment to Counterinsurgency in the Gaza Strip

Israel’s recently terminated “Operation Protective Edge” against the Gaza Strip was beyond destructive. Little is left standing in Shuja’iya, Khoza’a, Beit Hanoun, and Rafah’s east, where photos reveal a tableau of grey ru..
- By Max Ajl Aug 30