Steffen Hertog, Associate Professor of Comparative Politics, Department of Government, LSE
Chair: Dr Neil Ketchley (St Antony's College)

Steffen Hertog is an associate professor of comparative politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include Gulf politics, Middle East political economy, political violence and radicalization and he has published in journals such as World Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Socio-Economic Review, Review of International Political Economy, Comparative Studies in Society and History, European Journal of Sociology and International Journal of Middle East Studies. His book about Saudi state-building, “Princes, Brokers and Bureaucrats: Oil and State in Saudi Arabia” was published by Cornell University Press in 2011. He is the co-author, with Diego Gambetta, of “Engineers of Jihad: the Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education” (with Princeton University Press 2016).

Abstract

Dr Hertog will present the key arguments of his new short monograph “Locked Out of Development: Insiders and Outsiders in Arab Capitalism” published by Cambridge University Press. The book argues against the received wisdom that neo-liberal reforms are the main culprit explaining slow growth, corruption and inequality across low- to mid-income Arab countries. It instead proposes that it is the uneven presence of the state – over-protecting some while neglecting others – that accounts for the region’s lopsided development and creates deep insider-outsider divides in Arab economies. On the labour market these divides run between protected public sector workers on one hand and precarious workers in the informal private sector on the other; among firms, the divides run between crony insider companies and small, unconnected firms in the informal economy. Uneven state intervention and insider-outsider divisions reinforce each other and together contribute to an equilibrium of weak productivity and skill formation, which in turn deepens insider-outsider divides.

While some of these features are generic to developing countries, others are regionally specific, including the relative importance and historical ambition of the state in the economy and, closely related, the relative size and rigidity of the insider coalitions created through government intervention. Insiders and outsiders exist everywhere, but the divisions are particularly stark, immovable and consequential in the Arab world. They undermine the negotiation of a more equitable social contract between state, business and labour.

MEC Booktalk

Oxford MEC Booktalk16 Locked Out of Development: Insiders and Outsiders in Arab Capitalism

Speaker: Professor Robert Springborg (Italian Institute of International Affairs, Rome)
Recorded on: Friday, 3 November 2017
Edited by: Anne Kimunguyi
First published: 16 November 2017

About the speaker:
Robert Springborg is a non-resident Research Fellow of the Italian Institute of International Affairs, Rome. Until October 2013, he was Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, and Program Manager for the Middle East for the Center for Civil-Military Relations. From 2002 until 2008, he held the MBI Al Jaber Chair in Middle East Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he also served as Director of the London Middle East Institute. Before taking up that Chair, he was Director of the American Research Center in Egypt, University Professor of Middle East Politics at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia; and assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also taught at King’s College, London; University of California, Berkeley; the College of Europe; the Paris School of International Affairs of Sciences Po; and the University of Sydney. In 2016, he was Kuwait Foundation Visiting Scholar, Middle East Initiative, Kennedy School, and Harvard University. 

His publications include Mubarak’s Egypt: Fragmentation of the Political Order; Family Power and Politics in Egypt; Legislative Politics in the Arab World (co-authored with Abdo Baaklini and Guilain Denoeux); Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East first and second editions, (co-authored with Clement M. Henry); Oil and Democracy in Iraq; Development Models in Muslim Contexts: Chinese, ‘Islamic’ and Neo-Liberal Alternatives and several editions of Politics in the Middle East (co-authored with James A. Bill). He co-edited a volume on popular culture and political identity in the Gulf that appeared in 2008. He has published in the leading Middle East journals and was the founder and regular editorialist for The Middle East in London, a monthly journal that commenced publication in 2003. His new book -‘Egypt’ has just been published in October 2017 by Polity Press.

MEC Seminar: Governing Divided Egypt

Speaker:Yael Zerubavel (Professor Emerita of Jewish Studies and History, Rutgers University)
Chair: Professor Yaacov Yadgar (Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies, St Anne's)
Series: Middle East Centre Friday Seminar Series
Joint event with The Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA)

About the seminar:

At once an ecological phenomenon and a cultural construction, the desert has varied associations in Zionist and Israeli culture. Yael Zerubavel tells the story of the desert from the early twentieth century to the present, shedding light on romantic-mythical associations, settlement and security concerns, environmental sympathies, and the commodifying tourist gaze. Drawing on literary narratives, educational texts, newspaper articles, tourist materials, films, popular songs, posters, photographs, and cartoons, Zerubavel reveals the complexities and contradictions that mark Israeli society’s semiotics of space in relation to the Middle East, and the central role of the “besieged island” trope in Israeli culture and politics. The talk draws on the new book published by Stanford University Press (2019). 

About the speaker:

Dr. Zerubavel is Professor Emerita of Jewish Studies and History and served as the Founding Director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Study at Rutgers University. She is a scholar of memory studies with an expertise in modern Israeli society and culture. Utilising an interdisciplinary approach that informs both her teaching and writing, her work explores collective memory and identity, national myths, the transformation of traditions, war and trauma, and cultural perceptions of space, drawing on historical sources, Hebrew literature, educational materials, popular and folkloric forms, as well as in-depth interviews. Her work addresses the impact of nationalism, secularisation, immigration and dislocation, the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the reshaping of Jewish memory in Israel and developments within Israeli culture.

Yael Zerubavel is the author of the award-winning book, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1995), Desert in the Promised Land (Stanford University Press, 2019), and is currently working on another book manuscript entitled Biblical Reenactments: The Performance of Antiquity in Israeli Culture. She has served on the boards of the Association for Jewish Studies and the association for Israel Studies and on the editorial boards of key journals in the field of Israel Studies.

Recorded on: 10 May 2019
First Published: 3 June 2019
Edited by: Kaja Wawrzak(MEC)

Desert in the Promised Land: The Politics and Semiotics of Space in Israeli Culture

St Antony’s College, Oxford University, is a world-renowned centre for research and teaching in global and regional issues. The College provides an interdisciplinary environment to study a range of subjects from development to international relations. St Antony's houses seven research centres focused on Africa, Asia, Europe, Japan, Latin America, the Middle East, Russia and Eurasia as well as programmes on North America, Burma, Morocco, Sudan and Taiwan. In our regional centres and programmes we use insights and methods from both social sciences and the humanities to deepen our understanding of the key parts of the world. The work done here helps to inform public debate and public policy.

Our Fellows, students and visiting researchers include leading experts on the regions of the world and on issues of global and transnational importance. Each year we host visiting experts from the world’s leading universities and think tanks and from such fields as diplomacy, journalism, business, and politics. Our select group of more than 450 graduate students are among the best and the brightest, representing all the continents.

Oxford MEC Booktalk16 Locked Out of Development: Insiders and Outsiders in Arab Capitalism

St Antony's College, Oxford

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