Political Science 291N - S-PoliEcon/ModMidEast&N.Africa

This course will examine the social, political, and economic bases of power in North Africa and West Asia ("Middle East") in comparative perspective. We will emphasize the elements and processes of contested sovereignty, such as class conflict, citizenship, protest movements, institutional centralization, material resources, and global encroachment. A core hypothesis of "political economy," seminally traced to Marxist analysis, is that material struggles and physical demands condition political outcomes, e.g., regime-type, rights-regimes, welfare provisions, ideological schema, institutional design, and gender arrangements. One "crude" version of this idea is that its unique oil-abundance and -dependence condemns the MENA region to authoritarian rule and weak civil society -- a "materialist" perspective that oddly bolsters "idealist" Orientalist depictions of Muslim culture as exceptionally bound by religious conformity. As political economists we will ask what specific outcomes, if any, cannot be explained by "universal" approaches to social analysis, particularly by developing a more inclusive notion of materialist political explanation. Thus while introducing the MENA region, the course will cultivate a critical appreciation of social-analysis: concepts in political research; reconstruction and critique of arguments; inferential logic in political-economy; and philosophical problems of causality, conditionality, evidence, and comparison, viz. qualitative methods.