Imperialism and Resistance in the Middle East: A Theoretical Catharsis in the Making?

Abstract

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes, “the world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point” (Garcia Marquez, 2014: p. 1). From the perspective of the Middle East, we are precisely at such conjuncture, ‘when the world is so recent.’ That is the least because we witness a unique articulation of three structural crises. First, the structural crisis of neoliberal imperialism has crystallized in a ‘world disorder’ characterized by financial and economic crises (Duménil and Lévy, 2013), intensification of intra-imperialist rivalries and the rise of new global powers, revolutionary openings and counter-revolutionary setbacks (Alnasseri, 2009). Second, the post-Cold War order in the Middle East, characterized by the unparalleled deepening of the United States’ strategic depth in the region, is in disarray. As Jacob Mundy puts it in his contribution to this issue, “the North Atlantic’s intellectual classes now appear to have reached a near-universal consensus that the United States’ preeminent global position is coming to an end. There is equally as much conviction among both supporters of American hegemony and its critics that US policies towards the Middle East since 2001 have played an important role in laying the groundwork for this profound shift in geopolitics” (Mundy, 2023). This is in part reflected in the unsettled nature of the Arab revolutions and counter-revolutions, the relative weakening of the United States’ geo-strategic depth in the Middle East and the increasing influence of new global and regional powers. Last but not the least, ‘domestic’ crises of hegemony have unfolded in various social formations in the Middle East. The ongoing national uprising in Iran since September 2022, the crisis of the ‘occupation regime’ in Iraq since Journal of Labor and Society 26 (2023) 1–13