Commerce and Conflict: U.S. Effort to Counter Terrorism with Trade May Backfire

Moore, Pete W.; Schrank, Andrew

doi:10.1111/1475-4967.00120

Cited by 31 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…King Abdullah II has, since his succession to the throne in 1999, skilfully positioned his country as a supposed showcase partner in external interventions both elsewhere and at home. While the Jordanian military, for example, is a major contributor to United Nations (UN) peacekeeping forces and a close regional ally of the USA in military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria (for a discussion of contemporary US-Jordanian military collaboration, see Schuetze, 2017), external interventions in Jordanian politics range from humanitarian aid (primarily by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)), via externally supported structural adjustment and economic liberalisation (see Hanieh, 2013;Moore, 2005;Moore and Schrank, 2003), to an impressive portfolio of international democracy promotion interventions. With $47 million out of the total annual $1 billion in US assistance assigned to programmes related to democracy, human rights and governance, the Jordan democracy promotion portfolio of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) constitutes both in absolute terms and in relation to population figures one of the largest worldwide (US Government, 2016).…”

Section: Why Care About a Parliament That Is Not Happening?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Marketing parliament: The constitutive effects of external attempts at parliamentary strengthening in Jordan

Schuetze¹

2018

Cooperation and Conflict

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The Jordanian parliament is widely recognised as a patronage provider and means for authoritarian upgrading. Despite, or precisely because of this, it has over the past years become a linchpin of US and European attempts at parliamentary strengthening. The parliament's highly marginalised position notwithstanding, this article suggests that such efforts provide us with an insightful opportunity to better understand the reconfiguration of authoritarian power via external intervention in the name of democracy. Discussing the contradictory effects of parliamentary strengthening programmes in Jordan, the article tries to shift the discussion of democracy promotion away from a concern with policy, conceptual debates and intentions to one with democracy promotion's constitutive effects. As such, the article investigates the framing of Jordanian politics within a market rationale as central mechanism for the de-politicisation of uneven power relations. Further, it explores the ways in which democracy promotion serves to seemingly reconfirm interveners' desired self-understandings via the maintenance of assumptions of cultural 'difference'. Ultimately, it is suggested that decentring the study of democracy promotion by paying more attention to its constitutive effects provides us with a better understanding of why and how increasing democracy promotion portfolios have, in Jordan, had the effect of strengthening authoritarianism.

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Section: Why Care About a Parliament That Is Not Happening?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Marketing parliament: The constitutive effects of external attempts at parliamentary strengthening in Jordan

Schuetze¹

2018

Cooperation and Conflict

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“…Just as policies of the 1950s and 1960s were designed to cement political control, new reform policies were often geared toward bringing business into a tighter network with regime leaders. But the problem was that business as a social actor tends not to reform the institutions around it; rather it uses resident arrangements to pursue particular advantage (Moore and Schrank 2003). The private sector as harbinger of change failed.…”

Section: The Politics Of Economic Development and Reformmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Bread Revolutions of 2011: Teaching Political Economies of the Middle East

Moore

2013

APSC

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Whether it was bread-wielding Tunisians, marching Suez workers, or Yemeni protestors chanting against corruption, the 2011 Arab uprisings put political economy issues front and center. Indeed, a critical thread throughout the region's uprisings has been the simple question: “where has the money gone?” And though the field of political economy is multifaceted, the basic refrain “follow the money” unites most of it. Having students engage and debate political economy issues helps counteract much of the popular media's fixation on violence, terrorism, and sectarianism that too often exclusively frames how Americans understand the Middle East. Political economy gets at some of the most important (but certainly not all) factors and dynamics that define social and political life in the Middle East. A political economy approach also reinforces the critical disposition and tools of inquiry to instill in university undergraduates. In particular, the approach stresses to students that the realms of the economy and the political are hardly distinct, and therefore a more complete explanation for the events of 2011, and after, require grasping that interaction (Lindblom 1982; Polanyi 2001).

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“…In addition, the long‐standing US approach to free trade might even intensify the region's social problems as long as transnational investors can easily exploit existing social structures (Moore and Schrank, 2003). The associated increase of inequalities in income distribution further exacerbates what, as the modernisation approach admits, constitutes a serious obstacle to democracy (Issawi, 1956; Lipset, 1993) and explains Egypt's return to an era of political de‐liberalisation as the direct outcome of the regime's attempts to exclude the losers of economic liberalisation from the political process (Kienle, 2001).…”

Section: Taking the Long Term View: The Modernisation School As A Ratmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Missing Link? US Policy and the International Dimensions of Failed Democratic Transitions in the Arab World

Berger

2011

Political Studies

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In contrast to the hopes of some US observers, the so‐called ‘Baghdad Spring’ of early 2005 did not mark the beginning of an era of sustained political reform in the Middle East. In an attempt to explain the resilience of authoritarian governance in the region, this article aims to demonstrate the insufficiencies of external democratisation efforts that rely on a crude reading of the ‘modernisation’ school of thinking and ignore the insights of the ‘transition’ school with regard to the international dimensions of democratisation. Case studies of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, two countries sharing close strategic relationships with the United States yet differing in the socio‐economic foundations of authoritarianism and experiences with managing external and domestic calls for political reform, demonstrate that the unwillingness of the United States to condition its support for regional partners on human rights concerns constitutes one of the main reasons for the Arab world's ‘democratic exception’.

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Commerce and Conflict: U.S. Effort to Counter Terrorism with Trade May Backfire

Cited by 31 publications

References 0 publications

Marketing parliament: The constitutive effects of external attempts at parliamentary strengthening in Jordan

Marketing parliament: The constitutive effects of external attempts at parliamentary strengthening in Jordan

The Bread Revolutions of 2011: Teaching Political Economies of the Middle East

The Missing Link? US Policy and the International Dimensions of Failed Democratic Transitions in the Arab World

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