February 10,2026
Roland Riachi
Roland Riachi is an Assistant Professor of Political
Economy and Political Ecology in the Department of Philosophy, Politics,
and Economics (PPE) at the American University of Beirut – Mediterraneo
in Cyprus. His research focuses on the political ecology of water,
agriculture, and food in the South West Asia and North Africa region,
exploring intersections between political economy, critical development,
and nature-society relations.
Arabic version
If you want to find your way to the American University of Beirut's (AUB) Agricultural Research and Education Center (AREC) in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, you would be better off asking for "Point Four" in Arabic, النقطة الرابعة ("al nokta al rabiaa"). The persistence of this name is a spectral reminder of the Cold War episode when United States President Truman's technical assistance program, named after his fourth inaugural speech point, became the new language of the global development paradigm, spanning from infrastructure and agricultural extension, to education and health, transitioning from the "civilizing mission" of the colonial era (Rist, 1997). Part of containment foreign policy, the Cold War’s technological intervention was framed by the overarching modernization theory of W.W. Rostow's (1960), which posits a linear path to modernity with the United States’ model of mass consumption as its ultimate endpoint. Rostow’s work, explicitly titled The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, became an ideological tool of Western intervention to pull nations out of their "traditional" state towards a “modern” one, steering them away from communism. This echoes Diana K. Davis’ (2007) work on French colonial authorities systematically constructing a native environmental degradation caused by "traditional" and archaic management, a narrative used to justify the need for an enlightened Western intervention. Contemporary mainstream political and economic discourse perpetuates this vision, presenting the region's challenges as inevitable consequences of natural limits and bad governance, necessitating financial disciplinary structural adjustment policies while systematically obscuring the historical role of power in actively producing scarcity, inequalities, and maladministration.
Critical development studies about the region are available, yet scattered, when a common corpus, explicitly recognizing the field and approach, is needed to counter the long-lasting and imposed hegemonic knowledge production and power relations disguised under the so-called “development.” Drawing from political economy, political ecology, and post-colonial studies reveals how mainstream explanations function as hegemonic narratives designed to “naturalize” inequality, reinforce global power asymmetries, and legitimize external intervention (Escobar, 1995; Said, 1978). This analysis argues that "development" in the South Western Asian and North African (SWANA) region has never been a neutral process of modernization, but a mechanism of control, adapting accumulation and regulation across historical episodes to serve capitalism.
Across the imperial-colonial (1830s–1960s), post-fordist developmentalist (1950s–1970s), and neoliberal (1970s–present) episodes, development has consistently functioned not as a benevolent process of modernization, but as a powerful mechanism for reinforcing control, dispossessing communities, and erasing local agency and epistemologies (Rist, 1997; Shiva, 1993; Riachi and Martiniello, 2023). By examining two key capitalist instruments, private property and technology, through critical development lenses, this piece tries to highlight the violence embedded in the very idea of "development" and expose how each historical phase has deepened ecological disasters and the dispossession of the means of living of local societies.
Private Property as a Legal Dispossession
The imposition of Western private property constituted a historical foundation for integrating the SWANA region into the capitalist world-system. While Karl Marx originally conceptualized this process as "primitive accumulation," and David Harvey (2003) later refined it as "accumulation by dispossession," for Rosa Luxemburg (1952), capitalism is inherently dependent on the violent appropriation of non-capitalist social formations through the establishment of private property institutions and laws. As Farshad Araghi (2012) argues, this process of land privatization is a necessary moment of the expanded reproduction of capital, involving a violent confiscation of communal rights and customs over lands and water. Mike Davis's (2001) analysis in Late Victorian Holocausts demonstrates that the late 19th-century famines were not "natural disasters" but "imperial disasters." Davis presents how the forcible integration of peasant economies into the global capitalist market systematically created social vulnerability, allowing climate crises like El Niño episodes to lead to mass starvation.
The colonial accumulation on a global scale represented a systemic assault on the region's diverse communal property relations, particularly targeting the communal mushaa land system in the Levant and arsh lands in North Africa. The socio-ecological consequences of this private property model were profound. It shifted production from diverse subsistence farming to export-oriented monocultures of industrial crops, mainly cotton, silk, and tobacco, destined for European industries. In French-colonized Algeria, the 1863 Sénatus-consulte and 1873 Warnier Law systematically dismantled communal arch lands, with colonial authorities transferring approximately 2.5 million hectares to European settlers by 1900 (Ruedy, 1992). The legal framework deliberately misrecognized communal tenure systems as either "vacant" or "inefficient" lands in ways that facilitated their expropriation. In Tunisia, Lewis (2013) discusses colonial decrees in the 1880s that created perpetual leases (inzal), transferring control to European settlers of the most fertile lands. This sophisticated legal manipulation of land enclosure allowed colonial powers to present dispossession as modernization rather than conquest.
In the Levant, Ottoman Land Code of 1858, emerging from imperial pressure like those under the Balta Liman Treaty, initiated a parallel transformation. The creation of a hybrid Hanafi-Napoleonic legal framework through the Mecelle of 1877 enabled the systematic registration of communal lands under privately-owned title deeds. This process, while framed as modernization, fundamentally served to concentrate land ownership among local notables (zuama) and foreign interests while dispossessing the peasantry. The consequences were particularly devastating in Palestine, where as Alkhalili (2017) demonstrates, the privatization of mushaa lands became instrumental to the Zionist project of territorial acquisition. Mushaa still represented 70% of Palestine in 1930s (Issawi 1988 p. 286). The installation of Zionist settlements primarily took place on dispossessed mushaa lands purchased from British authorities by the Joint Zionist Council, the Jewish Colonization Association, and later, the Jewish National Fund.
The developmentalist era's Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) model fundamentally reconfigured land tenure systems across the SWANA region, creating new forms of state-led capitalism. Post-independence land reform often served rural upper and middle classes while consolidating state control over agricultural surplus. In Egypt, Nasser's land reforms coexisted with policies that favored large commercial farmers who could efficiently produce cash crops for export earnings (Beinin 2001; Bush and Ayeb 2012). Similarly, in Syria, Batatu (1999) documents how Baathist land redistribution reinforced the power of rural notables through extensive bureaucratization of cash-crop, notably cotton, rather than empowering the peasantry. Thus, the developmentalist state, despite its rhetoric of equity, effectively became the primary manager of a state-capitalist agrarian project. Land distribution was presented as a tool for liberation, while in reality it was a mechanism for disciplining and co-opting the countryside, dismantling communal resistance, and deepening its integration into global market circuits.
The contemporary phenomenon of "land grabbing" represents a new frontier of accumulation by land dispossession. As Franco and Borras (2013) argue, these deals replicate colonial patterns of resource appropriation while employing the language of investment and development, under the denomination of Foreign Direct Investment. What McMichael (2013) terms "agro-security mercantilism" has seen Gulf Sovereign Wealth Funds and agribusiness corporations acquire millions of hectares in Sudan, Egypt, Ethiopia, and other food-insecure countries. This represents not simply land acquisition but the creation of integrated corporate food chains that reinforce Gulf capital's dominance over the regional food system (Hanieh, 2018). The consequences mirror historical patterns of dispossession: smallholders are displaced, ecological systems are transformed for export-oriented production, and traditional land rights are extinguished through state-mediated transactions.
Technology as a Tool of Dispossession
In the 19th century, European financial and technological power became primary instruments for exerting control over the politically and fiscally vulnerable Ottoman Empire. Facing mounting debt, the Sublime Porte initiated the Tanzimat reforms, but these often required foreign loans, creating a cycle of dependency and indebtedness (Quataert, 2005). This culminated in the establishment of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA) in 1881, a European-controlled institution that effectively colonized key sectors of the Ottoman state finances. This model of development through financial control was perfected in Egypt under Ottoman ruler Khedive Ismail, through an aggressive and debt-fueled modernization campaign. Following bankruptcy, Egypt fell under the authority of European-administered debt commissions, such as the Caisse de la Dette Publique, which exercised veto power over state revenues (Hunter, 1999). Infrastructures’ concession model ensured debt repayment. This was eased by the takeover of Egypt's fiscal and administrative systems, a process that severely undermined Ottoman suzerainty, which directly led to the British military occupation of Egypt in 1882 (Owen, 1981). This framework of financial and technological concessions first established projects like the 1856 Alexandria to Cairo railway and the Suez Canal in 1858. In parallel, the Nile's hydrology was engineered towards perennial irrigation centralized control, transforming land use for intensive cash crops like cotton, displacing locals, erasing traditional practices, binding local economies tightly to European industries and capital (Mitchell, 2002).
It was under this established concession system that the newly unified German Empire projected its ambitions for the Berlin-Baghdad railway. This massive concession was a proclamation of Germany’s status as a world power (Weltmacht), one that directly challenged the entrenched dominance of Britain and France, claiming Germany's "place in the sun” (Özyüksel, 2016). British and French statesmen perceived this as a profound geostrategic threat (McMurray, 2001), undermining British naval supremacy on the route to Asia and Persian Gulf, while simultaneously challenging French financial and political preeminence in the Levant. The railway served as a tool for the state to extend its control over autonomous tribes and regions (Rogan, 1999). In the early 20th century, the British replicated this by establishing their influence through political treaties, notably the McMahon-Hussein correspondence, countering the Ottoman call for jihad against Entente powers, supported by the German Reich. This precipitated Britain’s oil concessions with Gulf sheikhdoms. Following World War II, this mantle of external control passed to the United States, whose oil companies and close partnership with the Saudi monarchy cemented a new, enduring form of influence with the establishment of the Arabian American Oil Company, Aramco (Vitalis, 2007).
After WWII, the US-led developmentalist era introduced high-modernist infrastructure schemes, inspired by the Tennessee Valley Authority model (Ekbladh, 2002). This reached its zenith in mega-dam projects that became cathedrals of nationalist pride and techno-political power of Cold War politics. Egypt's Aswan High Dam and Syria's Tabqa Dam, funded by the Soviets, Lebanon's Litani project, and Jordan’s irrigation schemes funded by the Point Four, all were promoted as symbols of independence and modernity. The Aswan Dam triggered a cascade of ecological crises, from coastal erosion, soil salinization, to the spread of water-borne diseases (Mitchell, 2002). In Syria, the Tabqa Dam flooded vast tracts of fertile land while failing to deliver its promised irrigation targets (Hinnebusch and Zintl, 2012). These projects built upon the narrative that water is running wasted to the sea and needs to be tamed and modernized, while creating new forms of water inequality and ecological disasters, systematically marginalizing peasants and women, and reinforcing social hierarchies.
The neoliberal turn from the 1970s dismantled state subsidies and opened markets, shifting the technological focus from national development to a neoliberal regime of accumulation characterized by financialization, deregulation, and the globalization of production chains (Harvey, 2005). The corresponding mode of regulation, infamously known as the "Washington Consensus" prescriptions, was enforced through Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) imposed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. This framework systematically produced profound dependencies, locking states into a vicious debt-development cycle. The dollarization of economies became a symptom of this dependency, eroding monetary sovereignty and binding national economic stability. Official Development Assistance (ODA) and foreign loans reinforced the cycle. Aid and development loans conditioned on further liberalization created a development trap by increasing import dependency and vulnerability to shocks, leading to balance-of-payments crises that necessitated more debt and deeper austerity to maintain solvency. This dynamic culminated in Lebanon’s monetary collapse, where decades of a liberalized banking system, external borrowing, along with import‑dependent growth left the economy unable to sustain its currency regime. Similar pressures are now pushing Egypt and Tunisia to the brink of comparable crises, of rising import bills, currency devaluations, and mounting external debt.
Insulated by petrodollars, Gulf countries may have avoided IMF‑mandated austerity on one hand, but on the other, fossil capitalism internalized neoliberal developmentalism logics by channeling oil revenues into global financial markets, military-industrial complexes, food-import security and land grabbing in Africa under Foreign Direct Investments schemes, sovereign wealth funds, along futuristic urban megaprojects, and large Artificial Intelligence stock market investments. AI technology has become central to this model, as GCC governments deploy it as a political tool that legitimizes state power visions of hyper‑efficiency, and post‑oil futures. National AI strategies, smart‑city infrastructures, AI technology and datacenter deals, and projects such as Saudi Arabia’s Neom and the UAE’s Dubai innovation districts embed the region deeply in global Big Tech circuits, reinforcing dependencies on foreign expertise, proprietary platforms, and transnational data infrastructures.
Development as a Process of Dispossession
The uneven shores of the Mediterranean represent a historical product of global economic relations shaped by flows of capital, ideologies, and coercive institutions. For two centuries, property and technology have been systematically deployed to integrate, discipline, and extract resources and dispossess labor and peasants in the SWANA region, adapting since colonial conquest to neoliberal rule. Private property provided the legal and institutional means to privatize communal lands, reorganize social relations, and channel wealth to dominant classes, while technological infrastructures enabled ever‑deeper penetration of external capital, disciplining financial austerity measures, and expanding forms of neoliberal authoritarian state power. The story of development is not one of unrealized modernization and progress, but of dispossession and extraction successes, enforced by global hegemony and facilitated by the consolidating power of local elites, be it monarchs, sectarian leaders, or dictators.
________________________________________
References
Alkhalili, N. (2017). Enclosures from below: The Mushaa’in contemporary Palestine. Antipode, 49(5), 1103-1124.
Araghi, F. (2012). The invisible hand and the visible foot: peasants, dispossession and globalization. In Peasants and globalization (pp. 111-147). Routledge.
Batatu, H. (1999). Syria's Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics. Princeton University Press.
Beinin, J. (2001). Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East. Cambridge University Press.
Bush, R. (2007). Poverty and Neoliberalism: Persistence and Reproduction in the Global South. Pluto Press.
Bush, R., and Ayeb, H. (Eds.). (2012). Marginality and Exclusion in Egypt. Zed Books.
Davis, D.K. (2007). Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa. Ohio University Press.
Davis, M. (2001). Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. Verso.
Ekbladh, D. (2002). "Mr. TVA": Grass-Roots Development, David Lilienthal, and the Rise and Fall of the Tennessee Valley Authority as a Symbol for U.S. Overseas Development, 1933-1973. Diplomatic History, 26(3), 335–374.
Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton University Press.
Borras Jr, S. M., and Franco, J. C. (2013). Global land grabbing and political reactions ‘from below’. Third World Quarterly, 34(9), 1723-1747.
Hanieh, A. (2018). Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East. Cambridge University Press.
Harvey, D. (2003). The New Imperialism. Oxford University Press.
Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.
Hinnebusch, R., and Zintl, T. (2014). Syria from reform to revolt: political economy and international relations. Syracuse university press.
Hunter, F.R. (1999). Egypt Under the Khedives, 1805-1879. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Issawi, C. (1988). The Fertile Crescent, 1800-1914: A Documentary Economic History. Oxford University Press.
Lewis, M. D. (2013). Divided rule: Sovereignty and empire in French Tunisia, 1881-1938. Univ of California Press.
Luxemburg, R. (1952). The Accumulation of Capital. Routledge.
McMichael, P. (2013). Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions. Fernwood Publishing.
McMurray, J.S. (2001). Distant Ties: Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and the Construction of the Baghdad Railway. Praeger.
Mitchell, T. (2002). Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. University of California Press.
Owen, R. (1981). The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800-1914. Methuen
Özyüksel, M. (2016). The Berlin-Baghdad Railway and the Ottoman Empire: Industrialization, Imperial Germany and the Middle East. Bloomsbury Publishing..
Quataert, D. (2005). The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922. Cambridge University Press.
Riachi, R., and Martiniello, G. (2023). Manufactured regional crises: The Middle East and North Africa under global food regimes. Journal of Agrarian Change, 23(4), 792-810.
Rist, G. (1997). The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith. Zed Books.
Rogan, E.L. (1999). Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire: Transjordan, 1850-1921. Cambridge University Press.
Rostow, W.W. (1960). The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge University Press.
Ruedy, J. (1992). Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation. Indiana University Press.
Said, E.W. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books.
Shiva, V. (1993). Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology. Zed Books.
Vitalis, R. (2007). America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. Stanford University Press.