Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Extractivism and resistance in North Africa A paper available in Arabic, French and English

The Middle East and North Africa

We should flatly refuse the situation to which the Western countries wish to condemn us. Colonialism and imperialism have not paid their score when they withdraw their flags and their police forces from our territories. For centuries the foreign capitalists have behaved in the under-developed world like nothing more than criminals.”  —Frantz Fanon “Imperialism after all is an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control. For the native, the history of colonial servitude is inaugurated by loss of the locality to the outsider; its geographical identity must thereafter be searched for and somehow restored. Because of the presence of the colonizing outsider, the land is recoverable at first only through imagination.”  —Edward Said War on Want

The Middle East and North Africa "Why do governments last? What kind of governments last? Increasingly, studies on the stability of regimes in the Middle East/North Africa region focus on how elites enfold the middle and working classes into socio-political orders. Such enfoldment happens through turning the state into not merely an instrument of violent class rule through extraction, but also part-and-parcel of everyday social reproduction." Critical Readings in Political Economies: Resilience