MER Article Cairo's Poor The proliferation of more than 100 squatter communities with some 6 million inhabitants signifies only one, but perhaps the starkest, component of the growing socioeconomic disparity [1] in Cairo since Sadat’s infitah (“opening up” or economic liberalization) in 1974 and the more recent implementation of the IMF’s structural Asef Bayat • 12 min read
MER Article Worlds Apart Ayman wanted a job in tourism. But he did badly on his high-school language exams and spent two years at a school in Luxor, across the river from his village, struggling to master enough rudimentary English and German to get into the hotel school at Qina. His most vivid memory from his two years in Timothy Mitchell • 13 min read
MER Article Algeria's Battle of Two Languages As the cancellation of Algeria’s electoral process reaches its third anniversary this January, the conditions for a political settlement between the Islamist groups and the army-backed government are becoming exceedingly complicated. Even if the “moderate” voices within both the established order an Abdeslam Maghraoui • 12 min read
MER Article "Tilt but Don't Spill" “Kaj dar-o mariz” (the jar is tilted but not spilled) describes how the Islamic Republic came stumbling through its first decade. Unlike Iraq, Iran fought the war between them entirely on its own resources, which enabled the state to maintain a sense of achievement and independence. [1] However, with the Kaveh Ehsani • 16 min read
MER Article Squatters and the State The early 1990s saw a period of renewed urban popular uprisings in Iran, unprecedented since the 1979 revolution. From August 1991 to August 1994, six major upheavals took place in Tehran, Shiraz, Arak, Mashhad, Ghazvin and Tabriz, and there were frequent minor clashes in many other urban centers. M Asef Bayat • 14 min read
MER Article From Demographic Explosion to Social Rupture Experts and politicians seem to agree that the demographic structures of the Arab countries have reached a critical point. They acknowledge that rapid population growth seriously constrains a country’s economy and, consequently, its social and political possibilities. In the relationship between consumption, savings and investment, demographic imbalance imposes an Philippe Fargues • 14 min read
MER Article Development Revisited Berch Berberoğlu, The Political Economy of Development: Theory and the Prospects for Change in the Third World (SUNY, 1992). Timothy Morris, The Despairing Developer: Diary of an Aid Worker in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 1991). “Development” is a quintessentially American concept, smacking of t Karen Pfeifer • 5 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 America's Egypt Open almost any study of Egypt produced by an American or an international development agency and you are likely to find it starting with the same simple image. The question of Egypt’s economic development is almost invariably introduced as a problem of geography versus demography, pictured by descr Timothy Mitchell • 45 min read
MER Article Health as a Social Construction Three basic theoretical formulations frame the state of the health debate among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The biomedical/clinical framework is generally espoused by the majority of the medical and allied health care establishment, most of whom have been trained in the Western medical t Rita Giacaman • 12 min read
MER Article Political Aspects of Health Health, along with food and shelter, is a fundamental element of every person's life. If we are in good health we may take it for granted, but when our health is bad -- when we are ill or injured -- it becomes central to our lives. Joe Stork • 14 min read
MER Article Chilcote and Johnson, Theories of Development Ronald H. Chilcote and Dale L. Johnson, eds., Theories of Development, Mode of Production or Dependency? (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1983). This is volume two of Sage’s series in “Class, State and Development,” and the answer to the question posed in the title of the book is “both.” That Karen Pfeifer • 1 min read
