On a Political Economy of the Middle East

This ought to be the introductory text for anyone interested in the politics, economics, and society of the Middle East and North Africa at the macro level. It’s expansive — chapters on political typology, social movements, resource allocation, and demography, then food and water, trade, war, Islamism, and a good deal more. I’d go so far as to call it comprehensive.

It took me much longer than expected, if only for the density of each page, and I found it illuminating: this kind of political economy is one of my blind spots, and the book filled in a lot of gaps. The authors open with a glance back at the 2011 uprisings and the question of how they happened, then arrange the chapters thematically, with an eye to comparison — among Middle Eastern states (Turkey, Iran, and Israel included) and between them and other middle-income countries around the world. Each chapter runs through its sub-themes and then closes on individual country case studies, an arrangement that made the whole far more readable than it might have been.