Rachid Ouaissa – författare

Centered on Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, this book interrogates the complex entanglements between extractivism, state power, class formation, and geopolitical reorientation in North Africa. While the global energy transition promises economic diversification and sustainable development, the international contributors to this volume show how “green extractivism” often reproduces older structures of dependency and inequality, and therefore authoritarianism consolidates.Rather than fostering transformation, rent economies adapt, stabilize, and reconfigure themselves through new sources of rent and new modes of social control. The book makes three core contributions. First, it offers a historically grounded and theoretically informed understanding of rent economies in the Maghreb, tracing how colonial legacies of resource extraction evolved into postcolonial patterns of rentier governance. Second, it introduces a class-analytical perspective to debates on extractivism, arguing that rent not only finances authoritarian regimes, but also shapes dynamic social coalitions, “state classes,” and cycles of contention and co-optation. Third, the book develops a comparative approach to the political economy of green transformation, focusing on the interplay between domestic rent regimes and external pressures from global markets, international donors, and climate politics. By anchoring each case study in concrete struggles, everyday experiences, and contested claims to resources, the book reveals how global transformations are mediated, resisted, and reappropriated from below.The book will be vital reading for those interested in political economy, development studies, and Middle East and North Africa (MENA) studies. It will particularly appeal to scholars working on extractivism, rentier states, authoritarianism, postcolonial development, and the political sociology of class and class struggle.

Including contributions from leading scholars from Algeria, France, Germany, India and the United States this book traces the rise and turn to moderation of the New Cultural Identitarian Political Movements, often labelled in the West as fundamentalists. Arguing that culturally based ideologies are often the instruments, rather than the motivating force though which segments of a rising middle strata challenge entrenched elites the expert contributors trace the rise of these movements to changes in their respective countries’ political economy and class structures. This approach explains why, as a result of an ongoing contestation and recreation of bourgeois values, the more powerful of these movements then tend towards moderation. As Western countries realise the need to engage with the more moderate wings of fundamentalist political groups their rationale and aims become of increasing importance and so academics, decision-makers and business people interested in South Asia and the Muslim world will find this an invaluable account.

​Der Beitrag diskutiert die Rolle der Mittelschichten in den Transformationsprozessen der arabischen Welt in der jüngeren Geschichte. Rachid Ouaissa vertritt die These, dass die arabischen Mittelschichten zwar die Hauptträger von Protesten sind, jedoch keine strukturellen Druckmittel besitzen, um Demokratisierung durchzusetzen.Denn im Gegensatz zu den profitorientierten europäischen Mittelschichten sind die arabischen Mittelschichten klientelisiert und rentenorientiert.

This edited volume is an open access title and assembles both the historical consciousness and transformation of the MENA region in various disciplinary and topical facets.