Adam Hanieh
Biographic Data
| ID | 1370176 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Adam Hanieh |
| GIVEN NAMES | Adam |
| FAMILY NAME | Hanieh |
| SIGNATURE | HANIEH A |
| AFFILIATIONS | SOAS University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7606-3417 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 137 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Multipolar illusions
In the years following the 2011 uprisings, the Middle East has experienced deepening social inequality, violent reassertion of authoritarian rule, and unprecedented mass displacement. Central to these trajectories are the Gulf monarchies, whose oil-derived surpluses have made them both regional powerbrokers and pivotal nodes in the global political economy. This article situates the Gulf’s post-2011 ascendancy within debates over multipolarity an…
Greening the Gulf? Renewables, Fossil Capitalism and the ‘East–East’ Axis of World Energy
This article examines the place of the Gulf Cooperation Council states in the global energy transition, with a focus on the recent and rapid expansion of renewable energy in the region. It argues that much like at the global scale, the energy transition in the Gulf is an additive process, one that superimposes renewable energy on growing fossil fuel production. Far from being in tension with hydrocarbons, renewables in the Gulf are explicitly con…
Misperceptions of the Border
This paper addresses the role of global migration and the nature of national borders within the co-constitution of class and race. We begin with Marx’s critique of the value-form – a critique that rests upon a distinction between the ‘essence’ of social reality and its immediate appearances. The paper elaborates how Marx’s understanding of the emergence of a society based upon generalised commodity production leads to a certain conception of the …
World Money and Oil
Over recent years, Marx's category of world money has proven to be a useful analytical tool for understanding the preeminent global role of the US dollar. However, accompanying the emergence of the US dollar, there was a second transformation receiving much less attention in the Marxist literature on world money: the shift towards an oil-centered global capitalism. Situating oil within the account of world money can provide numerous insights. Mos…
Pandemic Effects
This article explores the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on socio-economic development and political mobilization in the Middle East. It argues that beyond its direct public health implications, the pandemic is serving to intensify the extreme differences in wealth and power that have characterized the region for many years. The article gives an overview of the region's political economy prior to the pandemic, examining the legacies of the 2011…
The Political Economy of State Formation in Palestine
Class, nation, and socialism
The Commodities Fetish? Financialisation and Finance Capital in the US Oil Industry
This article explores the financialisation of the world’s most important commodity, oil. It argues that much of the literature on the financialisation of commodities tends to adopt a dualistic approach to financial markets and physical producers, where financial and non-financial activities are assumed to be externally-related and counterposed to one another. The article locates the roots of this analytical separation in a mistaken acceptance of …
Covid-19 and global oil markets
The COVID-19 pandemic that spread rapidly across the world in early 2020 delivered a profound shock to oil markets and the broader fossil fuel industry. With demand for energy in free-fall as a result of the pandemic, world oil markets were simultaneously hit by the March 2020 “Oil Price War” between Russia and Saudi Arabia, which promised to significantly increase global supplies. As a result, global oil prices fell to multi-decade lows, and pro…
Petrochemical Empire
A materialist history of capital and empire, through the lens of the German-American petrochemical industry. What does it mean to see oil, not just as an energy source or transport fuel, but as primary material for contemporary commodity culture—the chemical basis for a synthetic world of things
Incorporating Social Determinants of Health into Modelling of Covid-19 and other Infectious Diseases
Stone, Labor, and the Building of Israel
Andrew Ross's Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel is a significant contribution to an emerging literature on Palestinian labor. Through an examination of various facets of the stone industry in both Israel and the West Bank, Ross develops a series of insights into the nature of settler colonialism, patterns of urban development, the political economy of Palestinian class formation, borders and migration, and the ecological impacts of occ…
New geographies of financial power
A growing body of critical scholarship has examined the recent growth of Islamic finance (IF), unpacking its ethical assertions and highlighting its close affinities with conventional financial instruments. Receiving less attention, however, is the relationship between the global expansion of IF and the emergence of new financial actors and zones of accumulation. This article situates the evolution of global Islamic circuits alongside processes o…
Variegated Finance Capital and the Political Economy of Islamic Banking in the Gulf
The significant expansion of Islamic Finance (IF) over recent years provides a useful vantage point for examining the variegated nature of global finance. Nonetheless, within the substantial political economy literature on IF, there has been surprisingly little reflection on the concrete forms of class and capital accumulation underlying IF in particular national contexts. Against a methodological tendency to divorce Islamic financial markets fro…
Money, Markets, and Monarchies
Framed by a critical analysis of global capitalism, this book examines how the six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council are powerfully shaping the political economy of the wider Middle East. Through unprecedented and fine-grained empirical research - encompassing sectors such as agribusiness, real estate, finance, retail, telecommunications, and urban utilities - Adam Hanieh lays out the pivotal role of the Gulf in the affairs of other Arab sta…
Money, Markets, and Monarchies
Framed by a critical analysis of global capitalism, this book examines how the six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council are powerfully shaping the political economy of the wider Middle East. Through unprecedented and fine-grained empirical research - encompassing sectors such as agribusiness, real estate, finance, retail, telecommunications, and urban utilities - Adam Hanieh lays out the pivotal role of the Gulf in the affairs of other Arab sta…
Development as Struggle
The occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) are a major recipient of global aid flows, ostensibly aimed at improving development outcomes for the Palestinian population. This article presents a critical analysis of the ways that development is being conceived and practiced by major actors in the oPt. By analyzing different conceptions of power, the article examines how dominant approaches to development hide the ongoing reality of Israeli settler …
Absent Regions
This paper examines processes of financialisation in the Arab world, a region that has been almost completely absent from the wider financial literature. The paper shows that financialisation is much more than simply the expansion of financial markets within neatly bounded sets of social relations operating at the national scale. In the Arab world, financialisation has been marked by the growing weight of regional finance capital—most specificall…
Beyond Authoritarianism
Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States
Development through Unity. Assessing ESCWA's Arab Integration
Transit States
The states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar) form the largest destination for labour migration in the global South. In all of these states, however, the majority of the working population is composed of temporary, migrant workers with no citizenship rights. The cheap and transitory labour power these workers provide has created the prodigious and extraordinary development boom ac…
Shifting Priorities or Business as Usual? Continuity and Change in the post-2011 IMF and World Bank Engagement with Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt
Following the popular uprisings that erupted across North Africa in 2010 and 2011, international financial institutions have embarked on a significant re-engagement with governments in Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. New lending arrangements and project initiatives by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, in particular, have emphasised a supposed turn towards pro-poor policies, social inclusion and public engagement with economic decision-m…
Diversification by Urbanization
This article explores the role of liberalized real estate markets in shaping financial-sector development in the Arab Gulf region. Since 2001, record oil revenues and the inflow of repatriated wealth into the region have generated immense demand for new, productive destinations for surplus capital. Gulf Cooperation Council states have subsequently undergone rapid growth that is intimately tied to the regulatory transformation of urban real estate…
The dawn of the Arab uprisings
Shifting Priorities or Business as Usual? Continuity and Change in the post-2011 IMF and World Bank Engagement with Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt
Following the popular uprisings that erupted across North Africa in 2010 and 2011, international financial institutions have embarked on a significant re-engagement with governments in Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. New lending arrangements and project initiatives by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, in particular, have emphasised a supposed turn towards pro-poor policies, social inclusion and public engagement with economic decision-m…
Diversification by Urbanization
This article explores the role of liberalized real estate markets in shaping financial-sector development in the Arab Gulf region. Since 2001, record oil revenues and the inflow of repatriated wealth into the region have generated immense demand for new, productive destinations for surplus capital. Gulf Cooperation Council states have subsequently undergone rapid growth that is intimately tied to the regulatory transformation of urban real estate…
Development as Struggle
The occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) are a major recipient of global aid flows, ostensibly aimed at improving development outcomes for the Palestinian population. This article presents a critical analysis of the ways that development is being conceived and practiced by major actors in the oPt. By analyzing different conceptions of power, the article examines how dominant approaches to development hide the ongoing reality of Israeli settler …
The internationalisation of Gulf capital and Palestinian class formation
The internationalisation of Gulf capital throughout the economies of the Middle East has been a striking feature of regional capitalist development over the last two decades. This article traces the nature of Palestinian class formation in light of this trend (drawing empirically on 2006-2007 data), arguing that a full understanding of capitalism in the West Bank and Gaza Strip needs to integrate the internationalisation of Gulf capital with the …
Misperceptions of the Border
This paper addresses the role of global migration and the nature of national borders within the co-constitution of class and race. We begin with Marx’s critique of the value-form – a critique that rests upon a distinction between the ‘essence’ of social reality and its immediate appearances. The paper elaborates how Marx’s understanding of the emergence of a society based upon generalised commodity production leads to a certain conception of the …
From State-led Growth to Globalization
This article examines the development of the Israeli capitalist class and the role played by the state apparatus in that development. In contrast to analyses claiming that Israel was a "socialist-type" economy prior to the mid-1980s, it argues that the Labor Zionist movement fostered the emergence of an indigenous capitalist class by encouraging the growth of private capital through key conglomerates initially tied to the state. Following the 198…
Khaleeji-Capital
The countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) are most typically understood from the perspective of their position as the world’s key oil- and gas-producing states. This essay explores the largely-overlooked processes of class-formation in the GCC, and argues that very profound tendencies of capital-internationalisation are occurring alongside Gulf regional integration. The…
Incorporating Social Determinants of Health into Modelling of Covid-19 and other Infectious Diseases
Petrochemical Empire
A materialist history of capital and empire, through the lens of the German-American petrochemical industry. What does it mean to see oil, not just as an energy source or transport fuel, but as primary material for contemporary commodity culture—the chemical basis for a synthetic world of things
The Commodities Fetish? Financialisation and Finance Capital in the US Oil Industry
This article explores the financialisation of the world’s most important commodity, oil. It argues that much of the literature on the financialisation of commodities tends to adopt a dualistic approach to financial markets and physical producers, where financial and non-financial activities are assumed to be externally-related and counterposed to one another. The article locates the roots of this analytical separation in a mistaken acceptance of …
Variegated Finance Capital and the Political Economy of Islamic Banking in the Gulf
The significant expansion of Islamic Finance (IF) over recent years provides a useful vantage point for examining the variegated nature of global finance. Nonetheless, within the substantial political economy literature on IF, there has been surprisingly little reflection on the concrete forms of class and capital accumulation underlying IF in particular national contexts. Against a methodological tendency to divorce Islamic financial markets fro…
Absent Regions
This paper examines processes of financialisation in the Arab world, a region that has been almost completely absent from the wider financial literature. The paper shows that financialisation is much more than simply the expansion of financial markets within neatly bounded sets of social relations operating at the national scale. In the Arab world, financialisation has been marked by the growing weight of regional finance capital—most specificall…
New geographies of financial power
A growing body of critical scholarship has examined the recent growth of Islamic finance (IF), unpacking its ethical assertions and highlighting its close affinities with conventional financial instruments. Receiving less attention, however, is the relationship between the global expansion of IF and the emergence of new financial actors and zones of accumulation. This article situates the evolution of global Islamic circuits alongside processes o…
Class, Economy, and the Second Intifada
The current Palestinian Intifada and Israel's brutal response has been the subject of countless articles over the last two years. There is however a disappointing vacuum within left analysis, with much of this writing attempting to explain the character of Israeli policy through the right-wing views of Ariel Sharon. Within this framework, Israeli strategy is presented as a racist extension of colonialist designs on the Occupied Territories someti…
Beyond Authoritarianism
Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel
Additional informationNotes on contributorsAdam HaniehAdam Hanieh is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at York University, Canada, whose research interests include Middle East political economy
Greening the Gulf? Renewables, Fossil Capitalism and the ‘East–East’ Axis of World Energy
This article examines the place of the Gulf Cooperation Council states in the global energy transition, with a focus on the recent and rapid expansion of renewable energy in the region. It argues that much like at the global scale, the energy transition in the Gulf is an additive process, one that superimposes renewable energy on growing fossil fuel production. Far from being in tension with hydrocarbons, renewables in the Gulf are explicitly con…
World Money and Oil
Over recent years, Marx's category of world money has proven to be a useful analytical tool for understanding the preeminent global role of the US dollar. However, accompanying the emergence of the US dollar, there was a second transformation receiving much less attention in the Marxist literature on world money: the shift towards an oil-centered global capitalism. Situating oil within the account of world money can provide numerous insights. Mos…
Covid-19 and global oil markets
The COVID-19 pandemic that spread rapidly across the world in early 2020 delivered a profound shock to oil markets and the broader fossil fuel industry. With demand for energy in free-fall as a result of the pandemic, world oil markets were simultaneously hit by the March 2020 “Oil Price War” between Russia and Saudi Arabia, which promised to significantly increase global supplies. As a result, global oil prices fell to multi-decade lows, and pro…
Development through Unity. Assessing ESCWA's Arab Integration
Beyond Mubarak
Adam Hanieh's Beyond Mubarak: Reframing the ‘Politics' and ‘Economics' of Egypt's Uprising challenges the view that the uprisings were inspired simply by demands for democracy and political freedom. While these were important, he argues that they were inextricably linked to the widespread impoverishment and gross inequalities created by neoliberal capitalist development in Egypt, together with that country's role in sustaining US domination in th…
Forum hierarchies of a global market
The forum article by Adam Hanieh considers the impact of the crisis on the global South. Noting that most commentators have focused on the advanced capitalist core, Hanieh asks us to recall that, historically, crises in the core have been displaced to the periphery. Since the 1980s, the world market has evolved into a hierarchically layered global system into which countries of the Global South are linked through their role as low-wage manufactur…
The WWW in Palestine
Class, Economy, and the Second Intifada
The current Palestinian Intifada and Israel's brutal response has been the subject of countless articles over the last two years. There is however a disappointing vacuum within left analysis, with much of this writing attempting to explain the character of Israeli policy through the right-wing views of Ariel Sharon. Within this framework, Israeli strategy is presented as a racist extension of colonialist designs on the Occupied Territories someti…
Paying the Price of Injustice
From State-led Growth to Globalization
This article examines the development of the Israeli capitalist class and the role played by the state apparatus in that development. In contrast to analyses claiming that Israel was a "socialist-type" economy prior to the mid-1980s, it argues that the Labor Zionist movement fostered the emergence of an indigenous capitalist class by encouraging the growth of private capital through key conglomerates initially tied to the state. Following the 198…
Global Capitalism and Israel
The Global Political Economy of Israel by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon BichlerThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
Stolen Youth
Foreword Glossary 1. Introduction 2. The Political Context 3. Israel's System Of Control 4. International Law And Child Detention 5. Arrest And Transfer 6. Interrogation And Detention 7. Imprisonment 8. From Institutional Discrimination To State-Sanctioned Violence 9. Psychological And Social Impacts Of Prison And Torture 10. Myths And Politics- The Foundation Of Israel's Impunity 11. Conclusion Notes Index
Samara
Additional informationNotes on contributorsAdam HaniehAdam Hanieh is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at York University in Toronto, Canada and is the co-author of Stolen Youth: The Politics of Israel's Detention of Palestinian Children (Pluto Press, 2004)
Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel
Additional informationNotes on contributorsAdam HaniehAdam Hanieh is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at York University, Canada, whose research interests include Middle East political economy
Forum hierarchies of a global market
The forum article by Adam Hanieh considers the impact of the crisis on the global South. Noting that most commentators have focused on the advanced capitalist core, Hanieh asks us to recall that, historically, crises in the core have been displaced to the periphery. Since the 1980s, the world market has evolved into a hierarchically layered global system into which countries of the Global South are linked through their role as low-wage manufactur…
Collective Approaches to Activist Knowledge
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1947–1948 that led to the flight of more than three-quarters of the Palestinian population is not simply a painful historical memory. What Palestinians call al-Nakba (catastrophe) remains very much part of lived reality. It is felt in the longing of seven million Palestinians—the world's largest refugee population—to return to their homes and lands from which they were expelled over six decades ago. It is seen…
Khaleeji-Capital
The countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) are most typically understood from the perspective of their position as the world’s key oil- and gas-producing states. This essay explores the largely-overlooked processes of class-formation in the GCC, and argues that very profound tendencies of capital-internationalisation are occurring alongside Gulf regional integration. The…
The Political Economy of Postwar Capitalism and the Making of the Gulf
The global economy emerged transformed in the decades following the destruction of World War Two. A key underlying cause of the war—encouraging both the rise of fascism and the clash of European powers—had been the period of stagnation and crisis that preceded the conflagration. The years before the war had been marked by low profits caused by the overaccumulation of capital—few profitable outlets for capital investment leading to intensified str…
Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States
This book analyzes the recent development of Gulf capitalism through to the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis. Situating the Gulf within the evolution of capitalism at a global scale, it presents a novel theoretical interpretation of this important region of the Middle East political economy
Beyond Mubarak
Adam Hanieh's Beyond Mubarak: Reframing the ‘Politics' and ‘Economics' of Egypt's Uprising challenges the view that the uprisings were inspired simply by demands for democracy and political freedom. While these were important, he argues that they were inextricably linked to the widespread impoverishment and gross inequalities created by neoliberal capitalist development in Egypt, together with that country's role in sustaining US domination in th…
The internationalisation of Gulf capital and Palestinian class formation
The internationalisation of Gulf capital throughout the economies of the Middle East has been a striking feature of regional capitalist development over the last two decades. This article traces the nature of Palestinian class formation in light of this trend (drawing empirically on 2006-2007 data), arguing that a full understanding of capitalism in the West Bank and Gaza Strip needs to integrate the internationalisation of Gulf capital with the …
The dawn of the Arab uprisings
Transit States
The states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar) form the largest destination for labour migration in the global South. In all of these states, however, the majority of the working population is composed of temporary, migrant workers with no citizenship rights. The cheap and transitory labour power these workers provide has created the prodigious and extraordinary development boom ac…
Shifting Priorities or Business as Usual? Continuity and Change in the post-2011 IMF and World Bank Engagement with Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt
Following the popular uprisings that erupted across North Africa in 2010 and 2011, international financial institutions have embarked on a significant re-engagement with governments in Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. New lending arrangements and project initiatives by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, in particular, have emphasised a supposed turn towards pro-poor policies, social inclusion and public engagement with economic decision-m…
Diversification by Urbanization
This article explores the role of liberalized real estate markets in shaping financial-sector development in the Arab Gulf region. Since 2001, record oil revenues and the inflow of repatriated wealth into the region have generated immense demand for new, productive destinations for surplus capital. Gulf Cooperation Council states have subsequently undergone rapid growth that is intimately tied to the regulatory transformation of urban real estate…
Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States
Development through Unity. Assessing ESCWA's Arab Integration
Development as Struggle
The occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) are a major recipient of global aid flows, ostensibly aimed at improving development outcomes for the Palestinian population. This article presents a critical analysis of the ways that development is being conceived and practiced by major actors in the oPt. By analyzing different conceptions of power, the article examines how dominant approaches to development hide the ongoing reality of Israeli settler …
Absent Regions
This paper examines processes of financialisation in the Arab world, a region that has been almost completely absent from the wider financial literature. The paper shows that financialisation is much more than simply the expansion of financial markets within neatly bounded sets of social relations operating at the national scale. In the Arab world, financialisation has been marked by the growing weight of regional finance capital—most specificall…
Beyond Authoritarianism
Money, Markets, and Monarchies
Framed by a critical analysis of global capitalism, this book examines how the six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council are powerfully shaping the political economy of the wider Middle East. Through unprecedented and fine-grained empirical research - encompassing sectors such as agribusiness, real estate, finance, retail, telecommunications, and urban utilities - Adam Hanieh lays out the pivotal role of the Gulf in the affairs of other Arab sta…
Political science (32 works) · Economics (27 works) · Law (22 works) · Politics (22 works) · Economy (18 works) · Political economy (17 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Geography (14 works) · History (13 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (11 works)