Roundtable on Potential IMF Involvement in Lebanon

Roundtable on Potential IMF Involvement in Lebanon

Roundtable on Potential IMF Involvement in Lebanon

By : Mohamad Faour, Alia Moubayed, and Nasser Saidi

Reflective of Lebanon’s shortage of foreign capital, the Lebanese government recently announced it will stop payment on all future maturing eurobonds. In parallel, government and financial circles have increasingly discussed the potential need for a package by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to supply the majority of the needed capital. In this roundtable, co-produced by the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS) and Jadaliyya, three analysts share their views of the amount of capital needed, the potential implications of IMF involvement, and what might need to be different this time around vis-à-vis international borrowing.

LCPS and Jadaliyya (LCPS&J): How much foreign capital does Lebanon need and for what purpose?  


Mohamad Faour:
 Lebanon would require at least thirty billion US dollars of capital over the next three years to weather the current economic storm. These funds would be used for five purposes. First, provide much-needed foreign currency liquidity for its balance of payments, especially in light of a dire currency crisis and dwindling reserves in an environment in which little, if any, regular capital inflows are to be expected for the foreseeable future. Second, help recapitalize and restructure the banking sector, which is effectively insolvent. To put things in perspective, on a consolidated basis, the banking sector’s capital base stands at circa twenty billion US dollars. However, this is based on very optimistic and grossly overvalued estimates that do not take into account that the market values of these assets have significantly deteriorated. If banks were to revalue their assets based on their current market values, this capital will be fully wiped out. Therefore, full recapitalization is required, which would take the form of capital injections and/or depositor bail-ins. While a combination of both capital injections and bail-ins of big depositors is likely, larger capital injections would help minimize the damage that is expected to be incurred by depositors as a result of a bail-in. The third purpose of foreign funding is to help ease the pain associated with the adjustment period. Signaling credibility to creditors during Lebanon’s anticipated debt restructuring negotiations is a fourth purpose. With an interest bill that currently stands at around twelve percent of Lebanon’s annual GDP and forty-seven percent of annual government expenditure, a deep debt restructuring program is of utmost importance. This may only be possible with an IMF-backed program that signals Lebanon’s seriousness to creditors. The fifth and final purpose is to restore investor confidence to re-attract capital into the country, by providing much-needed financing of gradual economic adjustment and stabilization.

Alia Moubayed: Lebanon may need around thirty billion US dollars of external capital in the next three years. This will depend on the credibility of the planned fiscal and exchange rate adjustments, the depth of the public debt restructuring, and the successful recapitalization of the banking sector. The thirty billion covers three types of needs:

  • First is the need to rebuild a positive net foreign exchange position at the central bank. Indeed, Lebanon has been running large current account (CA) deficits—averaging eighteen percent of annual GDP for 2002–2018 (or fourteen billion US dollars in 2018). These were financed by external borrowing, by attracting non-residents deposit inflows (including deposits of the Lebanese diaspora), and by depleting foreign currency reserves of the central bank. Although the current account deficit is narrowing as the economy contracts, it will likely remain large at thirteen percent of GDP (around five billion US dollars) annually in the coming few years (2020-2022). Given the sudden stop of capital flows, Lebanon will, thus, need to secure circa seven billion US dollars per year to finance this deficit, to replace the continued capital outflows (one to two billion US dollars during 2020-2022) as well as gradually rebuild the reserves buffer.

  • Second is the need to recapitalize a smaller banking system after the restructuring. The requirement for banking sector recapitalization under a deep debt reduction scenario (sixty to seventy percent haircut on public debt) could be around twenty-seven to thirty billion US dollars, a large part of which could be funded locally through a bail-in program using large depositors’ money. The remaining part, about four to six billion US dollars, requires fresh external capital to minimize the impact of the losses on small depositors (i.e., those with less than one hundred thousand US dollars).

  • Finally, there is the need to support growth and jobs. Given the contracting economy, two to three billion US dollars for investment are needed per year to support growth revival while attending to the acute shortage of infrastructure. 


Nasser Saidi:
 The amount of foreign financing needs to be viewed within a comprehensive, multi-year adjustment and reform program that tackles macroeconomic, fiscal, banking, financial, monetary, and currency sectors of the economy. There are four components to such a program: macroeconomic and structural reform; banking sector restructuring; public debt restructuring (including central bank debt); and social welfare. 

According to government estimates (revealed at a recent presentation to investors) public debt was 178 percent of GDP at end-2019. The cost of servicing the debt would be just over ten billion US dollars, which is equivalent to approximately twenty-two percent of GDP and more than sixty-five percent of government revenue. This was an unsustainable position even before the country fell prey to the COVID-19 outbreak. Separately, the central bank (BdL) owes 120 billion US dollars to the local banks. BdL foreign exchange holdings have come under high pressure, dropping to about twenty-nine billion US dollars in January 2020, of which twenty-two billion are liquid (eighteen billion of which is BdL-held mandatory banking sector reserves). It is evident that the banking system needs a comprehensive restructuring.

Given public debt and fiscal unsustainability, the prices of sovereign debt have plummeted by an average of about fifty percent since the end of 2019. With about seventy percent of total bank assets invested in sovereign and BdL debt, the write down of debt means that banks’ equity has been wiped out. Bank recapitalization and restructuring will require some twenty-five to thirty billion US dollars, of which I estimate some ten billion would be foreign financing. In addition, a foreign aid package of twenty-five to thirty billion US dollars will be needed for macroeconomic and fiscal reform, structural adjustment, central bank restructuring, and balance of payments support, along with the establishment of necessary social safety nets.

This will necessitate an IMF program and multilateral financing. For it, there should be a completely redesigned CEDRE II program. I call it a “Lebanon Stabilization and Liquidity” fund. It is important to note that the overall cost of adjustment and required financing is rising due to unwarranted delay in approaching the IMF for assistance and designing the financing. 

Furthermore, the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak is adding more fuel to the fire. We can expect a GDP contraction of twenty percent, following a seven percent dip last year. The government has promised financial aid of four hundred thousand Lebanese liras (approximately 140 US dollars, at the parallel market rate of 2,900 liras/dollar) to the most vulnerable families (roughly estimated at 185,000 families combining those registered with the National Poverty Targeting Program, those drivers forced off the job by the lockdown, and frontline healthcare workers). But that will not be sufficient. The sharp drop in economic activity has led to growing layoffs and unemployment, business closures and bankruptcies, and overall falling incomes—all pushing more people into poverty. Social and economic conditions are rapidly deteriorating: Almost half of the population now lives below the poverty line; non-performing loans are likely to increase and many banks could become insolvent; the value of the Lebanese lira is now some forty to fifty percent less on parallel markets fueling inflation; and Human Rights Watch finds evidence of discretionary measures against refugees. The recipe for political and social unrest is boiling.

LCPS&J: What are some of the political and economic implications of securing such capital from the IMF? Could you identify other possible streams of foreign capital that could substitute for an IMF bailout program? 


Alia Moubayed:
 Given the size of identified losses by the government (eighty-three billion US dollars), it is difficult to imagine a scenario without an IMF program. Other donors may in fact insist on one as a pre-requisite, before pledging any support on their part. Accordingly, Lebanon will need to nurture and consolidate its strategic relationship with key donors (i.e., the United States, the European Union, China, Japan, Arab states) to ensure their support at both the multilateral and bilateral levels. IMF financing will require the strict implementation of reforms necessary to regain fiscal and external sustainability. While those reforms will include fiscal consolidation, currency devaluation, a robust credible debt restructuring, and BdL/banking sector recapitalization plan, the sequencing matters. I do not believe that front-loaded austerity measures are socially and politically viable, especially that the economy will suffer a sharp contraction in GDP, along with higher inflation and unemployment, which will likely cause political and security tensions. In order to reduce those risks, the reform plan needs to be home grown, in other words led and prepared by the Lebanese government after public consultations, in a way to gather the buy-in and support from a wide range of stakeholders, including policymakers, parliamentarians, private sector organizations, civil society organizations, and more. An IMF program will require politicians to deliver on robust and credible policy frameworks, commitment to and timely implementation of reforms, as well as accountability toward domestic and external stakeholders. They have failed doing so in the past decades, will they do now?  

Mohamad Faour: Unfortunately, we are not spoiled for choice when it comes to alternative sources of foreign capital. Given the country’s far from stellar track record in implementing much-needed reforms, most if not all potential donor countries have lost confidence in the Lebanese state’s willingness to implement economic and structural reforms. Multiple rounds of international financial aid, starting from Paris I, II, III and finally CEDRE, are testament to this mortifying failure. Furthermore, Lebanon’s creditors are unlikely to buy into a deep restructuring of the country’s debt if it is not frontloaded by an IMF program that puts the country back on the path of debt sustainability. Given these circumstances, we are now left with none other than the IMF to provide the umbrella that helps regain donor confidence, attract much-needed foreign aid, and signal credibility to creditors.

The political implications of an IMF program are largely dependent on the details and conditionalities of the program, which should be tailored to the specificities of Lebanon and its circumstances. A regressive program will come with adverse social and political consequences that would have negative feedback effects on economic stability and recovery. It is therefore necessary for the Lebanese government to propose a credible and viable economic plan that works for the country and protects the poor and middle class from the inevitable adjustment costs associated with the expected recession. This program can then be used as a basis for negotiations between a strong Lebanese negotiating team and the IMF.

Nasser Saidi: The political and economic implications of an IMF program are all positive, as this would include the development and implementation of a social safety net to shield the more vulnerable segments of the population. IMF program conditionality will force an irresponsible and corrupt political class and its subservient policymakers—who are responsible for Lebanon’s catastrophic demise—to undertake needed reforms (e.g., electricity, fiscal, monetary, and exchange sectors) that should have been undertaken years ago. The policy conditionality would be based on the national program the government should prepare beforehand. An IMF program will add credibility to the reforms included in the proposed Lebanon Stabilization and Liquidity fund. 

It is bitter medicine, but the alternative would be lost decades, growing misery and poverty, and the destruction of Lebanon’s economic base. The IMF itself would only be providing part of the funding (some four to five billion US dollars) with the balance coming from other international financial institutions (IFIs), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the European Investment Bank, and CEDRE participants, including the European Union, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Japan, and China. It is important to note that non-IMF funding will only be available if there is an agreed IMF program. None of the countries and IFIs, including the GCC and European Union will provide aid and funding without it. The same is true for private sector investment and finance (e.g., for public-private partnerships), restoration of Lebanon’s access to capital market, or for a sustainable restructuring of Lebanon’s debt. There are no substitutes to an IMF bail-out program and conditionality. Lebanon desperately needs external funding. It cannot rely on purely domestic funding for the restructuring of its public debt and its banking sector (including BdL), investing in infrastructure, reforming public finances and rekindling and supporting the private sector, as well as provide balance of payments support.

LCPS&J: Given the Lebanese government's poor track record in effectively managing foreign aid, what measures should it take to ensure that such funds are put to meaningful financial recovery?


Nasser Saidi:
 The government must introduce an anti-corruption and stolen asset recovery program. Transparency International ranks Lebanon forty-third-most corrupt out of total of 180 countries. Protestors have, justifiably, focused on rampant high-level corruption, bribery, and rife nepotism.

The current government must prioritize combating corruption at all levels. This should include: (1) Appointing and empowering a special anti-corruption prosecutor and unit; (2) implementing an anti-corruption program with respect to taxation and revenue collection; (3) reforming government procurement law and procedures; (d) establishing strong and independent regulators in sectors such as banking, financial, telecoms, oil and gas, electricity, among others. And the posts should be filled making sure that the process is completely transparent and that appointees are shielded from political and sectarian influence.

Last, but not least, the state must recover assets that politicians, policymakers, and their associates illicitly and criminally appropriated. Recovering stolen assets can be a wealth-regenerating strategy if implemented properly with complete transparency. Lebanon should immediately participate in The Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative (StAR), a partnership between the World Bank Group and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). StAR works with “developing countries and financial centers to prevent the laundering of the proceeds of corruption and to facilitate more systematic and timely return of stolen assets.”

Mohamad Faour: The crisis is primarily one of poor governance and a sectarian political system that has outlived its usefulness (if any). Credible reform at the institutional level should therefore be part and parcel of any economic rescue plan, which would, by extension be incorporated into an IMF program’s conditionalities. Such measures include, among many others, an independent and empowered procurement and tendering agency to subject all state contracts to scrutiny, empowering the Audit Bureau, a fully-dedicated anti-trust authority with far-reaching powers, regulators for the electricity and telecom sector, abolishing banking secrecy in full, the implementation of a serious procedure to investigate and track questionable spending (popularly known as stolen funds), preventing the central bank from funding wasteful state deficit as was the case for decades, etc.. A full-fledged IMF program with such conditionalities can help anchoring the implementation of such measures. The absence of institutional reforms that help tackle the inherent corruption risks wasting any forthcoming foreign aid. 

Alia Moubayed: Weak fiscal institutions, fragmentation of the budget process between current and capital expenditure planning and execution, and the absence of a modern and competitive procurement framework have all contributed to a poor track record in managing foreign funding. Lebanon needs to address these weaknesses in order to regain the trust of international donors and deliver on a series of critical public financial management and public investment management reforms necessary to secure value for money, improve the efficiency of spending, and support fiscal consolidation efforts. Some key measures include: 

  1. Restoring the credibility of the budget and developing a medium-term expenditure framework, by ensuring the budget is realistic, comprehensive, transparent, consistent with government policy, and implemented as intended in an orderly and predictable manner. 

  2. Ensuring efficient investment planning, allocation, and implementation: Through a unified, medium-term planning, and the adoption of objective criteria for appraising and selecting projects. In this respect, the government should implement the recommendations of the IMF’s Public Investment Management Assessment.

  3. Strengthening the procurement system building on the extensive work done by the Ministry of Finance (Institute of Finance) to modernize the public procurement law and framework.

[This roundtable was coproduced by the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS) and Jadaliyya.]

Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula Roundtable: Perspectives from the Margins of Arabia

[This is one of seven contributions in Jadaliyya`s electronic roundtable on the symbolic and material practices of knowledge production on the Arabian Peninsula. Moderated by Rosie Bsheer and John Warner, it features Toby Jones, Madawi Al-Rasheed, Adam Hanieh, Neha Vora, Nathalie Peutz, John Willis, and Ahmed Kanna.]

(1) Historically, what have the dominant analytical approaches to the study of the Arabian Peninsula been? How have the difficulties of carrying out research in the Arabian Peninsula shaped the ways in which knowledge is produced for the particular country/ies in which you have worked, and in the field more generally?

When I first began studying Arabic and, subsequently, formulating a research project in Yemen in the early 2000s, I did not consider myself to be working in or on the "Arabian Peninsula," as such. Rather, what drew me to Yemen was its historical, geographical, and cultural distinctiveness, which remains even now quite remarkable, but which nevertheless often obscures the relations, connections, and shared histories and presents that do exist within the region and beyond. This oversight is born perhaps out of what Sheila Carapico identified nearly ten years ago as a pernicious "dualism" that shaped not only American research agendas, but also the stereotypical conceptions, popular and academic, of "the Gulf" (rather than the peninsula as a whole): "Yemen is kaleidoscopic; the Gulf is monochrome…The Gulf is good for business; Yemen is good for ethnography" (Carapico 2004).

This same oversight—what Adam Hanieh in his response discusses as a "methodological nationalism"—is also born out of what we may call a secondary Orientalism: a way of "knowing" that considers the majority of the Arabian Peninsula without "culture" and without "history" in comparison to the Arab states of North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. This fallacy has been exacerbated, of course, by the relative difficulty for short-term visitors and new scholars of actually engaging on a deeper level with the citizenry in countries like the United Arab Emirates, where it may be easier to befriend migrants from Egypt or Sri Lanka than its small minority of "nationals." As a result, although there have been notable exceptions—including recent scholarship on the political economy, political ecology, and youth and urban cultures in Saudi Arabia, in addition to an older, rich tradition of studies on kinship and its Bedouin—anthropological scholarship on Gulf-state citizens has seemed relatively flat in comparison to the "thicker" ethnographies of migrant populations in "the Gulf" and of "tribal" communities in Yemen. In both cases, these research foci emerge from the historically dominant approaches to these "two" areas: oil and security in the Gulf (and its resulting dependence on cheap, imported labor) and state-tribe relations in Yemen (and related studies on tribalism, sociality and gender). Nevertheless, they are also being productively complicated by theoretically informed analyses of space, political subjectivities, and belonging. A similar and amplified turn to non-labor migrant populations in the Gulf (as in the work of Mandana Limbert in Oman) and non-tribal populations in Yemen (such as Marina de Regt’s work on Ethiopian domestic workers or Susanne Dahlgren on the public sphere in Aden) remains welcome.

As for the difficulties in carrying out, rather than framing, research in the Arabian Peninsula, the challenges of conducting research in Yemen may be somewhat distinct. Adam Hanieh, Ahmed Kanna, Madawi Al-Rasheed and Neha Vora have touched on the lack of (Western) research institutes and networks in the Gulf, the dearth of statistical data, and the difficulty of gaining unmediated access. In Yemen, a robust network of foreign research institutes work in tandem with several Yemeni research and studies centers to house and fund scholars and to facilitate their research there. These include the American Institute for Yemeni Studies (AIYS), the French Center in Sana’a for Archaeology and Social Sciences (CEFAS), and the German Archaeological Institute (DAI). In the early 2000s, when I lived in Sanaa, these centers supported a vibrant research community of both foreign and Yemeni scholars who frequented their libraries and attended their talks. The deteriorating security situation in Yemen and the subsequent evaporation of US funding for in-country research has had an unfortunate impact on these centers, which, during my visits in recent years, have appeared particularly vacant. Still, even with this institutional support, it could be challenging to be an anthropologist in Yemen. For one, as Ahmed Kanna notes, anthropology is one of the less known and less understood of the social science disciplines. And when my Yemeni acquaintances did have an understanding of anthropology, they were also well aware and suspicious of its colonial and imperial legacy. This was made clear to me when a professor of anthropology at Sanaa University asked me in March 2003 in front of his class of students why the United States had not sent one hundred anthropologists to Iraq, instead of bombing it. Suspicion toward the discipline and a more general suspicion of foreign researchers as spies was not new. One only needs to read Steve Caton’s remarkable account of his arrest and imprisonment in 1980 to see what an effect such suspicions have had on the kind of knowledge that is produced. Indeed, in reflecting on his own encounter with the National Security in Raydah, Paul Dresch notes that it is often the most mundane of facts that are the most heavily guarded.

This was certainly true of my own experience of fieldwork in Socotra. Whereas I was made privy to various conspiracy theories, extra-marital affairs, secret religious conversions, etc.—all things I hesitated to take note of, much less write about—it was nearly impossible for me to ask my hosts quite straightforward questions about their genealogies, tribal structures, and political past. Of course, I was conducting research at a time when US presence in Iraq as well as in Yemen was acutely palpable. Moreover, it made little sense to my Socotran friends that a US student would receive funding to hang out in Socotra or anywhere else if she did not have significant ties to the political powers that be. As a result, I turned to and became more interested in Socotri poetry where people’s opinions, struggles, and contestations were more forcefully voiced. In so doing, I thus followed, or rather stumbled, in the footsteps of a group of scholars who work on poetry in Yemen, including Steve Caton, Flagg Miller, Lucine Taminian and Samuel Liebhaber, but without their expertise! Fortunately, such suspicions do ease over time. Although it has become even more difficult in the past five years for anthropologists to conduct fieldwork in Yemen, now that I live in Abu Dhabi where I am easily accessible by telephone and where my current position is more comprehensible to my Socotran interlocutors, Socotrans are more comfortable reaching out to me, calling upon me for help, and working with me. I know that if I were to have the chance to return again for a lengthy period of time, fieldwork—in terms of the questions I could ask and the answers I would receive—would be very different this time.

(2) What are some of the new and innovative ways of thinking and theorizing the Arabian Peninsula and how has your work drawn on these approaches? How do these new theoretical interventions address elisions or tensions within more traditional approaches?

In my view, one of the most useful attempts to reframe and theorize the Arabian Peninsula occurred with the 2004 publication of Counter-Narratives: History, Contemporary Society, and Politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen (edited by Madawi al-Rasheed and Robert Vitalis). It is here that Sheila Carapico issued her "Arabia Incognita: An Invitation to Arabian Peninsula Studies" cited above. Carapico’s is a research agenda that would bridge the conventional divide between Yemeni and Gulf Studies to focus on the interconnections between the inhabitants and nations of the peninsula as a whole. Whether in direct response to Carapico’s invitation or in reaction to the region’s most recent and emblematic transnational phenomena, such as the global “war on terror,” the emergence of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and the spread of the Arab uprisings, several scholars and even academic journals have now taken up this call. For example, in the past two years we have seen the 2011 launch of the Journal of Arabian Studies: Arabia, the Gulf, and the Red Sea followed by, in 2013, the conversion and expansion of the journal Chroniques yéménites into Arabian Humanities: International Journal of Archaeology and Social Sciences in the Arabian Peninsula, both focused on the Arabian Peninsula en bloc and from antiquity to present.

What is needed when it comes to theorizing the Arabian Peninsula, however, is not just an expansion of scope—a sort of micro "area studies"—but also scholarship that explicitly draws on and forwards this transnational and interdisciplinary peninsular perspective. This approach breaks with the traditional dualism described above in its recognition that one cannot adequately study migration, religious reformism, sectarian identities, state and popular (or cultural) sovereignty, youth cultures, urbanism, natural resource exploitation and conservation, gender transformations, heritage production, or class, etc., within one nation without at least recognizing the influences and entanglements of these phenomena throughout the peninsula and across its surrounding waters. New scholarship that exemplifies this approach includes, of course, Engseng Ho’s work on Hadhrami migration; Adam Hanieh’s work on transregional (Khaleeji) capital and class formation; Laurent Bonnefoy’s work on Salafism in Yemen (and yet highly contingent upon grassroots flows to and from Saudi Arabia); Steve Caton’s emerging research on water scarcity in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates; and Andrew Gardner’s comparative studies of the kafala system in Bahrain and Qatar, among others.

Even in a relatively "remote" and off-shore location such as Socotra, this "peninsular" perspective is imperative to an understanding of the "local" and of how Socotra has been produced recently as a World Heritage Site and a "natural" biodiverse research laboratory. Yet, in the early stages of my research on the development, conservation, and heritagization of Yemen’s Soqotra Archipelago, and perhaps due to the pervasiveness of the distinctions drawn between Yemen and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, I was surprised by the degree to which my Socotran friends and neighbors were oriented not toward Sanaa or Aden, but rather toward Salalah, Ras al-Khaimah, Ajman, Sharjah, Bani Yas, and Jeddah. It was the cities and representations of "the Gulf" and Saudi Arabia—not mainland Yemen—which captured their imaginations and fueled their aspirations. Indeed, I soon learned that I could not examine heritage production in Socotra—conventionally understood to be a "national" project—without first examining heritage projects and discourses in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. For example, the annual Festival of the Socotran Poet which, as I wrote about in MERIP last May, was transformed in 2012 into a platform for public debate on the viability of Socotra’s cultural and political sovereignty, was originally modeled after the United Arab Emirates’ reality television show, The Million’s Poet, created by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (now the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority) to promote and safeguard national Emirati culture. This small example demonstrates to me the importance of seeing and understanding the peninsula holistically instead of continuing to bifurcate it into Yemen and the rest.

This is not to say, however, that the space and study of the Arabian Peninsula is any more "natural" than are the constructed borders of its nation-states. I agree with Toby Jones and John Willis’ deep reservations about area studies and about the "Arabian Peninsula" as yet another imperially produced category. As well as they state it here, these reservations are, of course, not new. And yet, as all of the contributors to this roundtable point out or imply, the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf—Yemen, too (hence Lisa Wedeen’s book title, Peripheral Visions)—have long been treated as peripheral, geographically and conceptually, to the Middle East and to Middle East studies. One only needs to look through the bibliography of Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar’s excellent review article, "Anthropologies of Arab-Majority Societies," to note that ethnographies and anthropological articles situated in Egypt or in Palestine far outnumber the recent scholarship produced on all of the Arabian Peninsula states combined. There is thus obviously no a priori reason to theorize the "Arabian Peninsula"—but we may still learn a lot in doing so.

Here, at New York University in Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), Pascal Ménoret, Justin Stearns, and I were hired into a nascent program named "Arab Crossroads Studies." During our first year teaching at NYUAD, we spent many hours debating both the merits and productivity of the name and the rationale for turning this then-concentration into a full-fledged undergraduate major. The legacy of US area studies’ Cold War roots was something we took seriously. What does "Arab Crossroads" even mean? And was it productive or just as flawed to move from a geographic focus, that is, Middle East studies, to a linguistic, cultural, and ethnic one: the Arab world? Even as these are questions we continue to ask, the renaming and reframing does something. If nothing else, it reminds me as a scholar and a teacher to focus more explicitly on the historical, political, economic, and social connections between the "Arab world" and its immediate surroundings (Africa, South Asia, the Indian Ocean region, and Europe) as well as on the human, material, and conceptual "crossroads" within "it." In doing so, it draws our attention away from place and toward movement across space and within various spaces.

In treating the Arabian Peninsula as a "center" rather than a periphery, we are forced to widen our geographical focus and broaden our conceptual one. That is, we cannot design classes or research projects as if the "Arab world" or the "Middle East" begins in Morocco and ends in Muscat. Nor can we ignore the capital and labor flows that link South Asia to the Arabian Peninsula to the Levant (and also to the United States). Finally, as Tom Looser has convincingly argued, it is with the export of Western universities and branch campuses to the Gulf and East Asia, for example, that area studies gains new salience. With the fashionable emphasis today on all things "global," a critical area studies approach can ground and situate an otherwise imperialist (and predominantly Western) sense of "global" knowledge and "cosmopolitan" belonging. Through the newly established "Arab Crossroads Studies" major at NYUAD, we seek to emphasize to our "global" students that their being here, in Abu Dhabi—in the Arabian Peninsula—does matter and that Abu Dhabi is not merely the "global" city it aspires to be, but that it, too, has been historically and politically produced. Included, however, among the required courses for all undergraduate majors is a "Problems and Methods in Arab Crossroads Studies" course: a course that examines area, area studies, and areas like the "Arabian Peninsula" critically, while asking what new theoretical interventions such a focus may uncover. We welcome further discussion on this!

(3) "Sectarianism" seems to have reemerged in popular and academic work on the Arabian Peninsula as both the label for and analytic of a socio-political phenomenon. What is the utility of both past and more recent formulations of "sectarianism" as an analytical tool for the study of the Arabian Peninsula? What challenges or problems have these formulations created?

This is an important question.  As I have not worked on sectarianism directly, however, I will defer here to the other roundtable participants.

(4) What is the relationship between local scholarship produced in the Arabian Peninsula and the work done by academics in the United States, Western Europe, Russia, etc.? What kind of attention has been given to local and regional knowledge production, if any?

I think it fair to say that the relationship between local scholarship produced in the Arabian Peninsula and the work done by academics from the outside is growing stronger, while still remaining contingent upon or even hampered by the hegemonic status of English as the scholarly lingua franca. We see this even in the shift from French- and German-language publications to English-language ones. Serious scholarship produced by "Western" academics does rely on local scholarship and knowledge production, but more can and should be done to translate these works to make them more widely accessible. For example, I recently assigned Ahmed Kanna’s Dubai: The City as Corporation to my students at NYUAD. Kanna draws heavily and productively on the writings of Emirati scholar Abdul-Khaleq Abdullah, thereby introducing his important work to Kanna’s English-language readership. As the majority of Abdullah’s articles have been published in Arabic, however, I am less able to assign them directly, meaning that "local" scholarship, like his, may be in danger of being presented or perceived as secondary to the English-language publications that build upon it.

Similarly, in my work on Socotra, I draw considerably on the texts written and published by the Socotran historian Ahmed al-Anbali (who resides in the United Arab Emirates), as well as on knowledge production by non-academics. The latter include Socotran guides, heritage brokers, and activists who, in response to and as a rejection of the international regime of "experts," are now fashioning themselves as what one may call "para-experts," engaged in an explicit and self-aware counter-form of knowledge production. Although I am mostly interested in the development and deployment of this parallel expertise (as opposed to the content itself), it remains a challenge to adequately present this knowledge production as scholarship and not just as ethnographic artifact. This is due in great part to what John Willis identifies as the incommensurable position of Yemeni academics in terms of their institutional and financial support and the different intellectual and political project in which they are engaged. Until recently, Socotran scholars were eager to promote a narrative of Socotran unity, stability, and exceptionalism. This has started to change, however, in the wake of the Arab uprisings, which have opened a space for more critical histories to be told.

Finally, as someone teaching at a US institution of higher education in the Gulf, I should say something about intellectual exchange and the proliferation of Western branch campuses mentioned by Al-Rasheed, Hanieh, and Vora. Madawi Al-Rasheed expresses concern that Western academic institutions (not just in the Gulf, but also in the West) may be forced through their funding sources to engage in self-censorship, if not the kind of outright censorship that occurred when Dr. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen was denied entry into the United Arab Emirates for a conference sponsored by the London School of Economics this past March. Adam Hanieh questions whether these institutions will reproduce dominant narratives about the Middle East and both Hanieh and Neha Vora raise the specter of their financial motives. It is undeniable that there are restrictions on academic freedom in these places—as there are in the United States and in Western Europe, especially when it comes to untenured faculty. Here at NYUAD we are guaranteed academic freedom in the classroom and within the institution more broadly, as long as we do not criticize the ruling families or Islam. Critics of these institutions perceive this as a profound infringement upon academic freedom and knowledge production. On the other hand, my students—Emirati, Filipino, American, and Palestinian—are reading and discussing Yasser Elsheshtawy, Andrew Gardner, Ahmed Kanna, and Neha Vora on structural violence, labor regimes, citizen-foreigner relations, and the politics of race, class, and space in the Gulf. In history classes, such as the ones taught by Pascal Ménoret, students are reading Madawi Al-Rasheed, Mamoun Fandy, Stephen Hertog, Toby Jones, Amelie Le Renard, Timothy Mitchell, and Robert Vitalis on resource extraction, corporate capitalism, imperialism, authoritarianism, political protest, and gender in the Arabian Peninsula. If our collective efforts to "theorize the Arabian Peninsula" take root, it will be in universities like NYUAD where students are eager to engage these analyses. This is only one way, but an important one, of creating a new generation of critical scholars and also of developing spaces of inquiry in which "local" scholarship is given serious attention within "Western" universities.

(5) Some argue that the Arab Uprisings changed the ways in which the Middle East can and will be studied. What has been the immediate impact of the Arab uprisings on scholarship on the Arabian Peninsula and what are likely to be the long-term effects?

The immediate impact of the uprisings on scholarship on the Arabian Peninsula has been an increased attention to both the transnational reverberations of these events and their antecedents—the politics of sectarianism in and across Arabian Peninsula states, the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the peninsula, the impact of social media transnationally, etc. Another result seems to be a renewed attention to various modes of sovereignty—state, popular, cultural—and its contestations. What may and hopefully will emerge with this, then, is the more thorough replacement of the Orientalist notion of "Gulf" states and societies as monolitihic and monochrome sites with a "thicker" understanding of the richness and complexities that underpins each Arabian Peninsula state individually and in relation to one another. To paraphrase Sheila Carapico, it should now become increasingly obvious that the entire Arabian Peninsula "is good for ethnography"—or, more importantly, that it deserves and requires a broader group of scholars’ critical attention.

 


Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula
electronic roundtable contributions:

Thinking Globally About Arabia by Toby C. Jones.

Knowledge in the Time of Oil by Madawi Al-Rasheed.

Capital and Labor in Gulf States: Bringing the Region Back In by Adam Hanieh.

Unpacking Knowledge Production and Consumption by Neha Vora.

Perspectives from the Margins of Arabia by Nathalie Peutz. 

Writing Histories of the Arabian Peninsula or How to Narrate the Past of a (Non)Place by John Willis.

Towards a Critical Cartography of the Political in the Arabian Peninsula by Ahmed Kanna.