Announcing the 2017 Middle East Political Economy Book Prize Winners

Announcing the 2017 Middle East Political Economy Book Prize Winners

Announcing the 2017 Middle East Political Economy Book Prize Winners

By : Political Economy Project

The Political Economy Project (PEP) is pleased to announce the winners of the 2017 Middle East Political Economy Book Prize. With this prize, PEP aims to recognize and disseminate exceptional critical work on the political economy of the Middle East. For its second annual award, the selection committ­ee welcomed nominations for books on political economy published in 2016 from a range of publishers and across academic disciplines. After reviewing over a dozen submissions, the selection committee recognizes two co-winners for their original contributions to critical political economy research:

Hanan Hammad’s Industrial Sexuality: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Transformation in Egypt (University of Texas Press)

Johan Mathew’s Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea (University of California Press)

As co-winners, each author will receive a 750 US dollar cash prize as well as invited to highlight their work through a variety of paltforms PEP is affilaited with.

A call for nominations for the 2018 Middle East Political Economy Book Prize will be issued shortly. Books published in 2017 will be eligible.

 

Join Us at MESA

ASI Reception

Sunday 19 November, 8:30pm-10:00pm
Wilson A (Mezzanine Level) 

 

Industrial Sexuality: Gender, Urbanizaton, and Social Transformation in Egypt
by Hanan Hammad  

From the Selection Committee: Hanan Hammad's Industrial Sexuality: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Transformation in Egypt is wondrous scholarship: imaginative in its use of historical sources, textured in its presentation of these sources, sensitive in its conjugating the empirical and theoretical materials, deeply grounded in theoretical debates about work, gender, and sexuality. At the same time, it is lucidly written and immensely readable. The discussion of the ways in which men and women lived, loved, worked, had sex, and struggled politically in Mahallat al-Kubra in Egypt is informed by thoughtful and imaginative scholarship that takes seriously questions of class, gender, and sexuality. But the work is also shaped by a deep knowledge of the context of these workers' daily practices and extraordinary contestations.
 


Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism Across the Arabian Sea
by Johan Mathew 

From the Selection Committee: Johan Mathew's Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism Across the Arabian Sea is a fascinating, immensely readable, and insightful historical account of trafficking across the Indian Ocean. The work looks at how arms, slaves, and coins were transported across the seas, and the ways in which state and imperial interception of these movements were crucial to the creation of the categories of licit and illicit as well as to the making of British imperial power overseas. In constructing his analytic narrative, Matthew makes use of a near-overwhelming number of sources, ranging in the type of documents, their languages, and their repositories. By emphasizing the entangled histories and practices that produce markets and spaces of exchange and circulation, he has contributed not just to the political economy of the Middle East, but to the historiography of capitalism more generally.
 

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Political Economy Summer Institute (2024): Call for Applications

      Political Economy Summer Institute (2024): Call for Applications
      The Political Economy Summer Institute is soliciting applications from doctoral students and other researchers for our eighth Political Economy Summer Institute to be held online on 6-9 June 2024. Th
    • Political Economy Summer Institute (2023): Call for Applications

      Political Economy Summer Institute (2023): Call for Applications

      We are writing to solicit applications from doctoral students and other researchers for our seventh Political Economy Summer Institute to be held 1-4 June 2023 hosted by George Mason University on the political economy of the Middle East. The aim of the Political Economy Summer Institute (PESI) is both to provide graduate level engagement and instruction as well as to connect doctoral students and independent researchers with mid-career and senior scholars working in the field of critical political economy. The Summer Institute will consist of three main parts: (1) doctoral students presenting their research and receiving written and verbal feedback from the participants, (2) methodological and theoretical workshop sessions led by faculty scholars, and (3) small break-out group discussions that build on the faculty-led sessions.

    • LIVE EVENT - Living the Nile River: Materiality, Embodiment, and Egypt's Colonial Economy (3 June)

      LIVE EVENT - Living the Nile River: Materiality, Embodiment, and Egypt's Colonial Economy (3 June)

      From the microscopic to the regional, the local to the imperial, Jennifer L. Derr’s book, The Lived Nile: Environment, disease, and material colonial economy in Egypt, places the environment at the center of questions about politics, knowledge, and the lived experience of human bodies. At the root of this investigation lies the notion that the Nile is not a singular entity but a realm of practice and a set of materially specific relations that structured experiences of colonial economy. The production of a new Nile River helped to mold the future of technocratic knowledge and shape the bodies of those who inhabited rural communities. In her talk, Derr will explore the material and epistemological histories of this profound transformation

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412