ABSTRACT
The Arab Middle East is often characterized as being at the crossroads of globalization. Indeed, its very name in the English language, the Middle East, references its perceived middle position between Europe and the Eastern world. This chapter seeks to explore the ways in which this region’s academics reflect on globalization, as well as those reflections’ relationships to the socio-political and economic conditions in which they write. Such conditions include university standards in the Middle East, market effects on academic funding, and censorship and political repression. While Arab intellectuals describe how globalization is changing their region, they also resist the idea that these forces, in themselves, “embod[y] intrinsic value or inherent threat” (Ashrawi 2001:1). Hence, scholarly analyses often allude to it as a “mixed blessing” (Amin 2007: 95). We find that scholars tend to discuss these processes as dialogically complex between “external” and “internal” actors. In this way, we argue that the surveyed works view globalization as a phenomenon that is both imposed on and authored by domestic power structures (i.e., Arab actors). Moreover, it is perceived to both benefit the masses (primarily through the information communication technology revolution) and impoverish them (politically and economically). In other words, globalization is not seen as simply an external threat or as inherently harmful. Rather, it is understood as a complex process that realizes itself in sometimes contradictory ways.
