As part of the public lecture series held by the ACRPS, and alongside the launch of The Political Science of the Middle East with the volume’s editors and several contributors, Dr Lisa Anderson gave a lecture titled ‘The Financialization of Everything: Revisiting Capital and Coercion in the Middle East’. The session was moderated by Dr Amal Ghazal, Professor of History and Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.

Anderson, who holds the James T. Shotwell Professorship in International Relations at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, related the development of neoliberal capitalism to the financialization movement that dominates the world economy in our current times. Anderson’s proposal is based on American political sociologist Charles Tilly’s discussion of the impact of the relationship between capital and coercion in the formation of modern states.

Anderson highlighted the unprecedented power of financial capital to redraw boundaries for exploitation and impose new modes of hegemony upon society, illustrating developments since the 2008 global financial crisis, relating this discussion to state formation in the Global South, where she concentrated on several examples from the Middle East.

Anderson demonstrated that financialization now operates somewhat independently of the productive economy, while its activity increasingly impacts various other economic and social areas. States have been transformed into business enterprises operating by the logic of gains and losses rather than the public interest. She offered an illustration of the influence of this way of thinking on many sectors, including the university. She also addressed the World Bank’s inclination to promote financial inclusion policies as an effective tool for empowering the poor and limiting poverty, when in reality this only leads to more people being ‘banked’ and thus turned into clients of financial institutions. Anderson also gave the example of sovereign wealth funds, indicating that 12 funds in the region are among the 50 largest in the world, and expressed concerns about the operation of these funds in high-risk investments.

The state’s focus on the flow of global and transnational financial capital now surpasses its focus on developing its tax regimes. In this context, Anderson presented observations related to how coercive mechanisms perform a complementary role in the movement of financial capital. The speaker related the rise of the financialization movement to a simultaneous ascension in the role of corporations in the public sphere, and even their entry into the conventional strongholds of state action, such as foreign policy. In this context she added examples of the role of special economic zones and special urban systems, as clearly represented by the spread of walled residential complexes; private security systems; and tax exemption regimes, which reflect the decline of the role of taxes in strengthening public spending and even the recession of the legal role of the state, especially in dispute resolution via systems with autonomy from national courts.

At the end of the lecture, Anderson reflected on the consequences of this major transformation in the operation of capital on the state, at which point the discussion was opened to the audience in the Arab Center seminar hall and to viewers on social media.