MER Article Alternative Information Center Staffers On January 24, 1999, five members of the Alternative Information Center (AIC) and the son of a staff member went hiking in a wadi in the region of Ain Gedi near the Dead Sea. Flash floods overtook the group without warning, killing Inbal Perelson, Yohanan Lorwin and Elias Jeraiseh. The deaths of the Geoff Hartman • 2 min read
MER Article The Social History of Labor in the Middle East Ellis Jay Goldberg, ed., The Social History of Labor in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996). The advent of structural adjustment programs since the 1980s has rekindled interest in workers and labor organizations, perhaps the greatest “losers” in recent reform processes. This edited volume Christopher Alexander • 2 min read
MER Article Women and the Political Process in Twentieth Century Iran Parvenu Paidar, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth Century Iran (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). This book argues that in neither the Pahlavi nor the Islamic eras have Iranian women enjoyed direct and independent control over the establishment of gender policies. “By destroyi Shiva Balaghi • 1 min read
MER Article The Palestinian Economy: Between Imposed Integration and Voluntary Separation Arie Arnon, Israel Luski, Avia Spivak and Jimmy Weinblatt, The Palestinian Economy: Between Imposed Integration and Voluntary Separation (Leiden: Brill, 1997). Emma Murphy • 5 min read
MER Article Structural Adjustment and Rural Poverty in Tunisia World Bank and IMF sponsored neoliberal reforms can have different effects on the political and social structure of receiving nations. Reforms may fortify a status quo unfavorable to the poor, or may even make a bad situation considerably worse, or they may undermine the existing economic system, em Stephen King • 7 min read
MER Article Egyptian Privatization After decades of delay, privatization in Egypt is now taking off. [1] Since 1993, 119 of 314 state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have been fully or partially sold. [2] These have been mainly manufacturing ventures, but the government has also pledged to offer utilities, public sector banks and insurance Marsha Pripstein Posusney • 8 min read
MER Article Labor and the Challenge of Economic Restructuring in Iran During the last 20 years, the Iranian economy has had to adjust to a revolution, an eight-year war with Iraq, economic isolation and the collapse of its oil revenues. As a result, Iran witnessed the complete undoing of its gains in per capita income from the boom years of the 1970s. The generation o Djavad Salehi-Isfahani • 12 min read
MER Article Dreamland: The Neoliberalism of Your Desires Neoliberalism is a triumph of the political imagination. Its achievement is double: While narrowing the window of political debate, it promises from this window a prospect without limits. On the one hand, it frames public discussion in the elliptic language of neoclassical economics. The collective Timothy Mitchell • 15 min read
MER Article How Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan and Even Egypt Became IMF "Success Stories" in the 1990s Just as European missionaries were the spiritual handmaidens of nineteenth-century colonialism, so has the International Monetary Fund (IMF) assumed a modern-day mission in support of world trade, finance and investment. The mission aims to convert the benighted heathen in developing countries to th Karen Pfeifer • 12 min read
MER Article The Working Class and Peasantry in the Middle East Since the early 1970s the working class and peasantry of the Middle East have been socially reorganized while their political salience has been reconfigured. These processes are associated with a transition from economic nationalism, industrially biased statist development and populist politics towa Joel Beinin • 15 min read
MER Article Economic Restructuring in the Middle East The effect of economic restructuring on women was the focus of a two-day workshop at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies in 1998, entitled “Women and Economic Restructuring in the Middle East: Gender, Jobs and Activist Organizations.” Participants [1] agreed that restructur Eleanor Abdella Doumato • 2 min read
MER Article Alternatives to Neoliberalism A growing network of labor and human rights activists, women’s and indigenous people’s groups and grassroots movements is shaping a transnational consensus on global economic reform that challenges the ideological and programmatic triumph of neoliberalism over the last two decades. These activists r Steve Niva • 3 min read
