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 From the Editors (September/October 1993) In this issue we consider “new orders” in several senses -- orders of hierarchy, orders of magnitude and marching orders. Ray Hinnebusch succinctly notes the underlying theme: the struggle of capital to dominate labor, internationally via the IMF’s “liberalization” leverage and locally (in this case The Editors • 2 min read
MER Article Rethinking Palestinian Politics During the Gulf war the entire population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip lived under total curfew for 36 days, with brief and erratic periods of relaxation toward the end of the ordeal. Most inhabitants had no secure supply of food and fuel, no gas masks and no Joel Beinin • 5 min read
MER Article Contested Space Dispossession, displacement, migration and precarious living conditions are intimately connected phenomena. Lines of causality run in every direction. Those enduring such conditions, in their determination to establish some roots and some sense of community, somewhere, often find themselves in viola Omar Razzaz • 11 min read
MER Article Migrants, Workers and Refugees The outset of the Gulf crisis in August 1990 saw a dramatic exodus of more than a million Asian and Arab workers as well as some 460,000 Kuwaitis from Iraq and Kuwait. Perhaps a million Yemenis felt compelled to leave Saudi Arabia. During the civil war in Iraq that followed the ground war, a million Michael Humphrey • 13 min read
MER Article Halliday, Revolution and Foreign Policy Fred Halliday, Revolution and Foreign Policy: The Case of South Yemen, 1967-1987 (Cambridge, 1990). Sheila Carapico • 2 min read
MER Article How Israel Gets Its Credit Rating A “C” rating from the US government credit evaluators, coming after Washington has held up the $10 billion loan guarantee for more than four months, must come as something of a shock for Israel. Only last September Jacob Frenkel, governor of the Bank of Israel, told the Financial Times that a “good Fareed Mohamedi • 4 min read
MER Article Amin, Eurocentrism Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (trans. Russell Moore) (Monthly Review Press, 1989). The awakening of the Third World and the formation of nation states in the former colonies has brought about a liberalizing philosophy of cultural affirmation of local traditions. One could conveniently characterize this Georg Stauth • 3 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 The Fall of BCCI Aga Hassan Abedi, the founder of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), talked a lot about starting an “ordinary” bank with an extraordinary mission. He never tired, and still does not, of expounding on his vision and ambitions, which became the bank’s credo and one that many (Author not identified) • 5 min read
MER Article Women, Islam and the State Most commentary on gender and politics in the Middle East assigns a central place to Islam, but there is little agreement about the analytic weight it carries in accounting for the subordination of women or the role it plays in relation to women’s rights. [1] Using the Qur’an, Deniz Kandiyoti • 14 min read
MER Article Funding Fundamentalism While Islamic fundamentalism has become a major political force in the Arab world in recent years, particularly in the countries of the Maghrib, it is in Sudan where the Islamist movement has realized its greatest ambition: controlling the levers of state power and setting itself up as a model for s Abbashar Jamal • 12 min read
