Papers by Adam Hanieh
Historical Materialism, 2021
This article explores the financialisation of the world’s most important commodity, oil. It argue... more 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 the fetish character of interest-bearing capital (IBC) – a view that the exchange of loanable sums of capital represents a relationship between money-capitalists rather than a relationship to the moment of production. Against such dichotomous readings, the article argues that the financialisation of oil needs to be understood as part of the reworking of ownership and control across the oil commodity circuit, expressed through the combined centralisation and concentration of capital over the money, productive and commercial moments. This argu...
Socialist Register 2023, 2022
T o many observers, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has brought into sharp relief a... more T o many observers, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has brought into sharp relief a central characteristic of world oil today: the rise of national oil companies (NOCs), on one hand, and the relative decline of privately-owned, international oil companies (IOCs) on the other. For most of the twentieth century, corporate power in oil had been defined by the almost complete dominance of the IOCs, a handful of verticallyintegrated firms located in North America and Europe, who collectively controlled each stage in the production, refining, and marketing of the world's most important commodity (including the ability to set its price). Over the last two decades, however, this dominance has sharply eroded, with NOCs run by governments in Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, and elsewhere now surpassing IOCs in their levels of oil production, refinery outputs, market capitalization, and export quantities. The significance of this shift is said to go far beyond simple questions of energy supply-in much of the contemporary writing on oil and politics, the rise of the NOCs has been linked to the consolidation of authoritarianism, the spread of corruption, and increased geopolitical instability. 1 The war in Ukraine has highlighted the importance of these debates, most directly through the heavy reliance of Europe on energy supplied by Russian NOCs. At a purely descriptive level, there can be little doubt that this IOC/ NOC rift captures much of what has changed in world oil over recent decades. Nonetheless, academic and industry discussion around this shift is often frustratingly superficial, tending to uncritically assume a fundamental distinction between private and state (capitalist) ownership, and implicitly linking 'Western democracies' with a 'free market' in oil. As one astute observer notes, an overemphasis on whether-and to what degree-NOCs pose a threat to private companies and the established market-order has
Historical Materialism, 2021
This article explores the financialisation of the world's most important commodity, oil. It argue... more 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 the fetish character of interest-bearing capital (IBC)-a view that the exchange of loanable sums of capital represents a relationship between money-capitalists rather than a relationship to the moment of production. Against such dichotomous readings, the article argues that the financialisation of oil needs to be understood as part of the reworking of ownership and control across the oil commodity circuit, expressed through the combined centralisation and concentration of capital over the money, productive and commercial moments. This argument is demonstrated through an original empirical investigation of the US oil industry, including 20 years of weekly trading data on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and a detailed study of more than 160 oil and energy-related firms in the US. By mapping the structural weight and connections between different capitalist actors involved in accumulation across the oil sector, we gain a better understanding of the ultimate dynamics (and beneficiaries) of the carbon economy.
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2015
The Middle East’s pivotal position in a hydrocarbon-based global capitalism carries enormous rami... more The Middle East’s pivotal position in a hydrocarbon-based global capitalism carries enormous ramifications for the region and the Gulf Arab states in particular. This chapter aims to present key debates associated with this transformation. It begins with an overview of the Rentier State Theory (RST). RST theorists foreground the impact of oil rents on Gulf states, drawing causal relationships between these rents and the characteristics of the Gulf’s political economy. The chapter turns to a critique of some of its core assumptions, notably its theorization of state and class. It argues that a more satisfactory understanding of the political economy of oil in the Gulf can be found through a return to the categories of class and capitalism, and a deeper appreciation of the ways in which the Gulf is located in the wider dynamics of accumulation in the world market.
Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS), Working Paper Series, 2021
A working paper developed for the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) 'New Regionalisms' ... more A working paper developed for the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) 'New Regionalisms' working group.
New Left Review, 2021
A materialist history of capital and empire, through the lens of the German-American petrochemica... more 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 and transport fuel, but as a primary material for contemporary commodity culture - the chemical basis for a synthetic world of things?
Social Science & Medicine, 2021
The role of socioeconomic conditions has been largely implicit in mathematical epidemiological mo... more The role of socioeconomic conditions has been largely implicit in mathematical epidemiological models. However, measures to address the current pandemic, specifically the relevant interventions proposing physical distancing, have highlighted how social determinants affect contagion and mortality dynamics of COVID-19. For the most part, these social determinants are not present in either policy discussions or in epidemiological models. We argue for the importance of incorporating social determinants of health into the modelling dynamics of COVID-19, and show how global variation of these conditions may be integrated into relevant models. In doing so, we also highlight a key political economy aspect of reproduction dynamics in epidemics.
International Politics Review, 2021
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2014
This article explores the role of liberalized real estate markets in shaping financial-sector dev... more 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 markets and the circulation of surplus capital from oil rents to the 'secondary circuit' of the built environment. With an emphasis on the city of Dubai, we employ the notion of diversification by urbanization to trace the re-regulation of real estate markets and highlight how these strategies have subsequently shaped Gulf financial markets. Through an examination of the impacts of real estate mega-project development on local banking credit, equities and Islamic financial markets, we reframe recent urbanization in the region as a process of financial re-engineering, and identify the emergence of capital groups whose accumulation activities are tightly connected to both the real estate and financial circuit.
British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2015
Following the popular uprisings that erupted across North Africa in 2010 and 2011, international ... more 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-making. This article analyses the content and logic of IMF and World Bank lending to these three countries, examining whether this re-engagement represents a substantive shift away from the neoliberal policies that characterised pre-2011 IFI relationships with the region.
Third World Quarterly, 2019
A growing body of critical scholarship has examined the recent growth of Islamic finance (IF), un... more 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 of capital accumulation in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), arguing that contemporary IF is deeply bound up with the internationalisation of capital groups headquartered in the GCC. This is evident in the internationalisation of GCC Islamic banks, which has given the Gulf a powerful foothold in new markets and a variety of sectors that are typically considered 'non-financial'. Simultaneously, the expansion and geographical diversification of Islamic debt (sukuk) issu-ance is refashioning the Gulf's relationships with other global spaces, a process that looks set to intensify given the widespread push to utilise IF in development financing. Seen from this perspective, the global growth of IF sits in a mutually constitutive relationship with patterns of capital accumulation in the Gulf, as well as the region's burgeoning weight within (and new linkages to) the global economy.
Middle East Report, 2019
Positioned at the center of eastwest trade routes traversing the Arabian Peninsula, East Africa, ... more Positioned at the center of eastwest trade routes traversing the Arabian Peninsula, East Africa, the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, Yemen is a key battleground for the towns, ports, military bases and shipping lanes that will underpin global power in the coming decades.
Antipode, 2016
This paper examines processes of financialisation in the Arab world, a region that has been almos... more 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 specifically, those capital groups based in the Gulf Cooperation Council-in circuits of capital operating at all scales. This has important implications for processes of class and state formation. Approaching financialisation in this manner-moving away from methodologically nationalist assumptions and the literature's largely singular focus on the advanced capitalist core-brings into focus the significance of cross-scalar accumulation patterns, their spatial hierarchies, and geographic unevenness. The paper thus reaffirms the need for a more spatially sensitive approach to financialisation.
New Political Economy, 2019
The significant expansion of Islamic Finance (IF) over recent years provides a useful vantage poi... more 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 from the wider circuit of capital, this article employs a Marxian conception of ‘finance capital’ to examine the class composition of Islamic banking in the six Arab states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The core argument is that the expansion of GCC Islamic financial markets reflects the growth of a distinct class-fraction of privately- controlled finance capital in the Gulf. The specificity of this process in the Gulf involves a set of privately-controlled conglomerates whose interests are uniquely interlocked with the ownership of Islamic banks but extend beyond these to a range of other moments of capital accumulation – most prominently those connected to the transformation of the built environment. These class relations differ from conventional banking in the Gulf, and highlight the importance of critical political economy in developing alternative interpretations to the dominant, industry-linked literature.
Book Reviews by Adam Hanieh
Journal of Palestine Studies, 2020
Andrew Ross's Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel is a significant contribution to an em... more 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 occupation. By highlighting the ways in which Palestinians actually built Israel, Ross's book carries important implications for how we think about Palestinian political strategy and the debates around one-or two-state solutions.
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Papers by Adam Hanieh
Book Reviews by Adam Hanieh