Agrarian transformation in the Near East and North Africa: influences from the work of Lionel Cliffe

ABSTRACT

This article explores the influences of the work of Lionel Cliffe in developing a radical rural political economy. A number of key themes in Cliffe’s work are reviewed in order to explore how they have helped to shape a view of rural development that is based, amongst other things, on listening to farmers and exploring why both government policy and often radical interventions fail to deliver the promises of improvements to rural conditions of existence. Case studies from the Near East and North Africa (NENA) highlight absences in policy intervention particularly in the areas of conflict, environmental transformation and economic reform.

[La transformation agraire au Proche-Orient et en Afrique du Nord : influences du travail de Lionel Cliffe.] Cet article examine les influences du travail de Lionel Cliffe dans le développement d’une économie politique rurale radicale. Un certain nombre de thèmes clés du travail de Cliffe sont revus afin d’explorer comment ils ont participé à la formation d’une vision du développement rural qui est basé, parmi d’autres choses, sur l’écoute des paysans et l’analyse des raisons pour lesquelles les politiques gouvernementales et les interventions souvent radicales ont échoué à tenir les promesses d’amélioration des conditions rurales d’existence. Les études de cas au Proche-Orient et en Afrique du Nord mettent en lumière le manque d’intervention politique en particulier dans les zones de conflit, de transformation environnementale et de réforme économique.

KEYWORDS:

• Rural development
• peasants
• political economy

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Développement rural
• paysans
• économie politique

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Peter Lawrence for comments on a draft of this paper and to anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Ray Bush is Professor of African Studies and Development Politics at the University of Leeds. He was a graduate student, colleague and comrade with Lionel Cliffe from 1978.

Notes

1. This critique also applied to the view that ipso facto proletarianisation or growth of rural wage labour implied an automatically desirable path for rural development. Lionel was critical of the view that expansion of rural productive forces would necessarily follow growth in wage labour, especially where the desired outcome was the deterministic Marxism of authors promoting ‘rapid development of rural capitalism’ (see Cramer et al. 2014).

2. From discussions with a confidential and well-placed source.

3. This and the following two sections draw on more detailed analysis available in my paper ‘Family farming in the Near East and North Africa’, forthcoming, UN, Brazil 2016.