Does the Arab region have an agrarian question?

ABSTRACT

Discussion on food sovereignty and agro-ecology, and Anglophone rural sociology have blind spots when it comes to the Middle East/North African (Arab) region. This article explores them; outlines some initial concepts, discusses avenues for research, and notes some socio-political features of the region which make it distinct from others. It focuses on the necessity to include war and the national question to understand the regional agrarian question and advances and retreats in regional knowledge production. It proceeds by (1) establishing the relative absence of the region from the leading peasant studies journals; (2) synthesizing the region’s political economy and waves of knowledge production; (3) highlighting local traditions which speak to the questions of food sovereignty and agro-ecology; and (4) listing a series of theoretical, historical, and analytical avenues which remain to be addressed.

KEYWORDS:

• Arab region
• North Africa
• political ecology
• Middle East studies
• imperialism
• rural sociology

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Susanna Ferguson, Philip McMichael, Divya Sharma, Patrick Higgins, Carrie Freshour, Ziad Abu Rish, Ali Kadri, and two conscientious and diligent reviewers from JPS for discussion and suggestions for improvement, and to Jun Borras, for urging I write on Arab agrarian questions and knowledge production.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Terminology can draw intellectual and juridical borders around human lives, and such boundary-drawing ought not project itself as value-free. Instead of the familiar ‘Middle East – North Africa region,’ I use the phrase ‘Arab region,’ which I consider a coherent unit given intra-Arab economic development projects, the generally shared Arabic lingua franca, and inter-state institutions which weave the region together with intellectual, political, and economic threads of varying strength. Clearly, such institutions exclude other regional states which are situated in or on the borders of the region – Israel, Iran, and Turkey – which have linguistic differences and were not colonized. Furthermore, the Arab-North African region enfolds dual-language minorities such as Amazigh and Kurdish speakers, as well as many smaller linguistic minorities. The Ottoman Empire/Turkey’s conventional inclusion traces to long-standing political control over many of the regions now considered the Arab world. From an area studies perspective which analyzes longue durée processes, the inclusion makes sense. When analyzing contemporary knowledge production on the region, it does not. As Fergany writes, ‘In spite of persistent, recently strengthened and generously funded efforts to define alternatives, the terms Middle East, MENA, or “Arab countries, Iran and Turkey,” the definition of an “Arab region” is a coherent and meaningful historical entity. This is also true in the context of science, especially social sciences’ (Fergany 2000, 65). I furthermore only lightly deal with the Arabian Peninsula, whose agrarian history has been seriously understudied outside of Oman and Yemen.

2 The synthetic form of this piece requires me to sometimes write ex cathedra, otherwise references would be easily double the length of the piece.

3 Lenin analyzed imperialism and foregrounded the national question politically. Subsequent scholarship has separated his analytical work on the agrarian question from his contemporaneous political practice and his parallel writing on imperialism.

4 Historically, sanctions have most hurt the poorest in the Arab region.

5 At a 2018 meeting discussing ecologically unequal exchange in Beirut, one Lebanese activist remarked on the difficulty of organizing around the environment when there was a constant fear or reality of bombardment.

6 To take one example, in Alan Greenspan’s phrase, ‘the [2003] Iraq war [was] largely about oil’.

7 I conducted database searches using the terms Mauritania OR Somalia OR Saudi Arabia OR Bahrain OR Sudan OR Morocco OR Algeria OR Libya OR Tunisia OR Egypt OR Palestine OR Jordan OR Lebanon OR Syria OR Iraq OR Yemen OR Oman. Conventionally, the Ottoman Empire/Turkish region is included in US studies of the region; I excluded it on grounds discussed earlier.

8 An editor at the journal told me in conversation that they have received almost no submissions on the region.

9 But see (Ahmad 2008).

10 Mashreq refers to the Arab East: Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq. Maghreb refers to the Arab West: Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania. More expansive definitions for Mashreq would enfold the whole of the Arab World east of Libya.

11 Hassan Riad was Amin’s nom de plume under Nasserist populist authoritarianism.

12 Modernization theory took agrarian reform seriously, but non-aligned states which carried out confiscatory agrarian reforms were nevertheless immediately cast as enemies.

13 In Libya and Iraq, farther afield and not front-line states, it had the opposite effect: (First 1974; Wolfe-Hunnicutt 2011).

14 Worth mentioning here are Sophie Ferchiou in Tunisia, Hana Abdallah in Syria, and Najib Akesbi in Morocco.

15 On rural Thermidor, see (Ajl 2019b).

16 For example, Reem Saad’s (1998) ethnography of a community which benefited from Nasser’s agrarian reform.

17 Interview with Joel Beinin, March 28, 2019.

18 Some barriers are just linguistic: Francophone Maghrebi and Arabophone Mashreqi knowledge production have flowed less easily to an Anglophone audience, whereas journals like Peuples Méditerranées are treasure troves of regional rural sociology.

19 Monthly Review was one continual exception, and Review of African Political Economy and Agrarian South gave prominent place to his work, and the political economy journal Middle East Report also engaged with Amin and with dependency theory.

20 Lila Abu-Lughod similarly points out that the Middle East c. (1989) had little economic anthropology.

21 Amongst many studies which confirm this, see Miller (2007). From that date, one can add Libya, Syria, Yemen, and ongoing war in Palestine.

22 For analyses of these processes in South Asian and Latin American intellectual production, see Ahmad (1997); Womack (2005).

23 This notwithstanding important exceptions, some cited above, and others including Mouldi Lahmar (1994), Martha Mundy (1996), Kamil Mahdi (2000), and Habib Ayeb (2010), all published by at least mid-career scholars, ideologically formed before the counter-revolution I discuss took place.

24 During this period institutions like the Council of Latin American Social Sciences and CEPAL continued in Latin America, for example, and while no region of the South escaped entirely the disillusionment, Latin America barely saw the peasant revolutions of the 1980s in Latin America end before the 1990s saw the Zapatista Rebellion and then the election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 1997. South Asia had its own trajectory, but India has a long-standing critical mass of dissident intelligentsia clustered around Economic and Political Weekly which is large enough to constitute its own center of intellectual gravity.

25 Interview with Habib Ayeb, April 8, 2019.

26 Interview, Eileen Kuttab, Beirut, April 14, 2019.

27 Interview, Omar Tesdell, April 3, 2019. Palestinian agro-ecologist Saad Dagher is a critical figure here as well.

28 Interview, Jana Nakhal, December 8, 2019.

29 Interview, Habib Ayeb, April 8, 2019. The work of Mohammed Atif Kishk is crucial.

30 There are far too many such scholars to list by name, working on issues from revisiting the incorporation of the region into global capitalism during the colonial period, to issues of post-colonial modernization and development, and on to contemporary developmental obstacles, especially related to resource extraction, industrialized farming, and food sovereignty.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by American Institute for Maghrib Studies and the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.

Notes on contributors

Max Ajl

Max Ajl is a researcher at the Humanities and Social Change International Foundation and the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment. He works on national liberation and post-colonial rural planning in Tunisia, and his book, A People’s Green New Deal, is forthcoming with Pluto Press.