Research Seminar Series: Economic Transformations, Social Tensions, and Coups in the Middle East: Revisiting the Postwar Period

Online via Zoom

The School of Arts and Sciences invites you to a talk by Dr. Carl Rihan, lecturer in the Department of Humanities, on the economic transformations, social tensions and coups in the Middle East: revisiting the postwar period. The event is part of the school’s Research Seminar Series.  

Click here to attend the lecture. 

Abstract: While colonial and imperial dynamics have contributed to the rise of the “Arab State” and its institutions, the process through which the rentier state was socio-politically consolidated remains poorly studied. This seminar examines the move towards the breakdown of large landowning estates and related political influence in the postwar Near East on one hand, and the rise of a rentier-merchant class, whose conflict with nationalist, often industrially-oriented, movements, was essential in cementing, often through violent overthrows, of the “rentier State”.