Middle East Research and Information Project

Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971

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Roger Owen

Roger Owen, a contributing editor of this magazine, is director of the Center for Middle East Studies at Harvard University.

MER Article

Sassoon, Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party

Joseph Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Since the days of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the difficulties of writing about the exercise of power inside authoritarian Arab regimes have been well known. The regimes’ inner workin

Roger Owen • 3 min read

MER Article

Kuran, The Long Divergence

Timur Kuran, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton, 2011). Readers looking at the title of Timur Kuran’s new book might be forgiven for thinking it had come from some pre-Orientalism time warp where it was still possible to make essentialist generalizations about

Roger Owen • 4 min read

MER Article

Yusif Sayigh

Yusif Sayigh (1916-2004) was a Palestinian nationalist, an Arab nationalist and one of the most influential exponents of Palestinian and Arab planning and development. He entered the national scene just after World War II as the primary organizer of a fund to raise money through taxes and tolls to b

Roger Owen • 1 min read

MER Article

A New Post-Cold War System?

There was a short period, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the shape of the emerging post-Cold war system seemed quite clear. The disintegration of the Eastern Bloc would be complemented by further economic and political integration of Western Europe according to the Maastricht Trea

Roger Owen • 11 min read

MER Article

Al-Naqeeb, State and Society in the Gulf

Khaldoun Hasan Al-Naqeeb, State and Society in the Gulf and Arab Peninsula: A Different Perspective (trans. L. M. Kenny and amended Ibrahim Hayani) (Routledge, 1990).

Roger Owen • 5 min read

MER Article

Egyptian Political Economy

Robert Bianchi, Unruly Corporatism: Associational Life in Twentieth-Century Egypt (Oxford, 1989.) Joel Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton, 1988). These two important new books address some of the central questions

Roger Owen • 8 min read

MER Article

Sadat's Legacy, Mubarak's Dilemma

For most countries in the Arab oil economy, the years 1982 and 1983 have marked an important moment of truth. The most obvious reason for this has been the decline in oil revenues as a result of falling world demand, cuts in production and the failure to hold the OPEC base price at $34 a barrel. As

Roger Owen • 25 min read

MER Article

Egypt Gropes for Political Direction

No one in Cairo seems at all clear about the present direction of Egyptian politics. The signs are contradictory and difficult to read. On the one hand, the press is freer than at any time since 1952 (and perhaps before), there is a wide-ranging public discussion about major issues, and all recogniz

Roger Owen • 7 min read

MER Article

The Arab Economies in the 1970s

The 1970s were undoubtedly the most dramatic and important years in recent Middle Eastern history. The decade began politically with the death of Nasser, the formal withdrawal of the British from the Gulf and the first sharp increase in the price of oil. Oil -- its production and marketing, its reve

Roger Owen • 27 min read