Absent Regions: Spaces of Financialisation in the Arab World

Hanieh, Adam

Abstract

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.

Citation

Hanieh, A. (2016). Absent Regions: Spaces of Financialisation in the Arab World. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 48(5), 1228-1248. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12257

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Apr 30, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Jul 27, 2016
• Publication Date: Jul 27, 2016
• Deposit Date: May 3, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: May 3, 2016
• Print ISSN: 0066-4812
• Electronic ISSN: 1467-8330
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 48
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 1228-1248
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12257
• Additional Information: Additional Information : Published online by Wiley on 27 July 2016.