Compared to its share of the world’s population the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) accounts for percentages of global combat deaths, terrorist attacks, and refugees five to 11 times over.  The underlying conflicts have economic aspects, too. The region has seen a large array of international and intra-regional sanctions and blockades. State funds and geo economic strategies have been used to strengthen the resilience of authoritarian states. The MENA’s endowment with oil rents and strategic location along trade routes has engendered particular development models. The region’s states have seen their autonomy in economic decision-making challenged by compromised sovereignty in areas of limited statehood, where (violent) non-state actors command extractive capacities in a certain territory or economic sector. The respective states in turn integrate economic strategies in counterinsurgencies and efforts to re-assert control. Economic warfare is rampant in the MENA yet contextual knowledge of how it affects the political economies of its states, their international relations, and the socio-political coalitions that carry them is often missing, not based on local sources and perceptions, and insufficiently theorized. The 2-hour lecture uses the UN embargo against Iraq (1990-2003) as a case study and discusses how Comparative Area Studies (CAS) can provide necessary correctives to the narratives of large n-studies that focus on sending countries and their sanction instruments. Date

The course will take place online on 11 June 2020.

About the lecturer

Eckart Woertz is director of the GIGA Institute for Middle East Studies.