International political economy and the state in the Middle East

Abstract

International political economy has largely ignored the Middle East. This special issue not only expands the discipline’s scope geographically but also conceptually by addressing IPE’s ‘blind spots’ including gender and sexuality, race and colonialism, security-economy nexus, and the expertise intensity of our economy. Contributors do so by challenging exceptionalist conceptions of the Middle Eastern states as neo-patrimonial ‘rentier states’ unable to face challenges and seize opportunities of globalization. Contributors build on openings in IPE of the Middle East by deploying historical approaches, studying logistics that facilitate flows and circulation, regarding Middle Eastern states not just as passive recipients of globalization but active makers of regional and global capitalism, and through ethnography. The purpose is not to characterize a singular ‘the Middle Eastern state’ but to contribute to novel IPE debates on the state that go beyond Eurocentric institutionalism.