Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Essential Readings: Uprising, Resistance, and Popular Mobilization in the Middle East

"Visitors to ramallah these days are often struck by its boom-town appearance. There are large-scale construction projects underway, a proliferation of hotels and nightclubs, Mexican restaurants, luxury cars, cappuccino prices on par with London or Brooklyn—jarringly at odds with prevailing notions of Palestinian life under the shadow of Israeli occupation. Arafat’s hilltop compound, reduced to rubble by Israeli shelling and bulldozers in 2002, has been rebuilt at vast expense and now houses his pharaonic tomb. The city’s ‘diplomatic quarter’ of al-Masyoun boasts quasi-embassies from the  OECD  countries, as if it were the capital of a real nation-state, while international dance and theatre companies regularly perform at its state-of-the-art Culture Palace. For some, Ramallah is Palestine’s Green Zone, as isolated from the rest of the Occupied Territories as the notorious  US  headquarters in Baghdad. It represents an enclave cosmopolitanism, a ‘Bantustan sublime’....

How did the West usurp the rest? Abstract: Traditional explanations of the “ rise of the West ” have located the sources of Western supremacy in structural or long-term developmental factors internal to Europe. By contrast, revisionist accounts have emphasized the con- junctural and contingent aspects of Europe ’ s ascendancy, while highlighting intersocietal conditions that shaped this trajectory to global dominance. While sharing the revisionist focus on the non-Western sources of European develop- ment, we challenge their conjunctural explanation, which denies differences between “ West ” and “ East ” and within Europe. We do so by deploying the idea of uneven and combined development (UCD), which redresses the short- comings found on both sides of the debate: the traditional Eurocentric focus on the structural and immanent characteristics of European development and the revisionists ’ emphasis on contingency and the homogeneity of Eurasian societies. UCD resolves these proble...

In late nineteenth-century  " [i]n the Muslim world, the Islamic  burkah , the full body covering of Muslim women, was growing in popularity. Often wrongly regarded as a mark of medieval obscurantism, the burkah was actually a modern dress that allowed women to come out of the seclusion of their homes and participate to a limited degree in public and commercial affairs. Even in this insistence on tradition, therefore, one glimpses the mark of growing global convergence." Uneven and Combined Development (Part 1)

An interesting blog written a year ago. The Euro train: going off the rails?

" Using both the published and unpublished  London Notebooks , Pradella, a lecturer in political economy at King’s College London, reconstructs Marx’s critique of globalization to show the remarkably consistent development of his political and economic views. Pradella also problematizes a widespread view, shared most notably by David Harvey and Samir Amin, that Marx’s  Capital  only deals with self-enclosed national economies, leaving it unable to analyze the uneven development of capitalism and prone to “Eurocentrism” (2–3). She claims that, on the contrary, the laws of capitalist development elaborated by Marx systematically include an analysis of imperialism and colonialism. Pradella not only helps contextualize Marx’s critique of political economy in the discursive constellations of his time, but also prepares her own theoretical basis for a critique of globalized capitalism today."