Anyone who has viewed images of the masses gathered at Tahrir Square in Egypt or the protests in Khartoum must have wondered: what drives the sudden popular mobilization against authoritarian regimes that had once seemed timeless? This dense and challenging book offers a unique and invaluable window into the forces that compel societies in the Arab and African worlds to either revolt or consent to the power of their rulers.
In his book Black Markets and Militants, Medani explores the vagaries of elites in Sudan, Egypt and Somalia as they struggle to retain control over economies that are beholden to economic booms and busts beyond their borders. Medani starts his story of militancy and black markets in the period when these countries began exporting labour to oil-producing states in the Gulf, which entailed flows of remittances that constituted an economic force that could easily elide political elites. People generally accepted the lack of domestic employment as long as remittances kept flowing. Medani’s analysis becomes particularly interesting where he offers an account of the recent present, after the drying up of these remittances as oil states went bust, redirecting political grievances towards questions of domestic employment. Here, the equation is one of relations between remittance brokers, Islamists and the state: did the state manage to co-opt remittance brokers? Did Islamists do so instead? Or, as in the case of Somalia, was the political landscape different altogether?
Medani explores how regional identities, clan links and religious ties varied with fluctuations not only of state policy but also of global business cycles. In doing so, he presents a truly international political economy that does not, for once, centre on the West, and that is able to bridge questions of ‘interest’ and ‘identity’. Medani does so by developing a unique and remarkably fruitful comparison between the Islamists of Egypt, Somalia and Sudan – countries that, he emphasizes, witnessed the rapid expansion of migrant labour to the Gulf and the parallel growth of remittances sent home by migrant workers in the 1970s. States were behind in governing the remittance economy, and informal mechanisms for transferring money were instead shaped by, and in turn reinforced, networks of clan, tribal and religious affiliation. New private banks and other financial institutions bolstered an Islamist middle class in Egypt and an Islamist military elite in Sudan, while reinforcing and accentuating clan networks in Somalia. In the 1990s, an economic downturn in the Gulf coincided with limited state capacity in Sudan and Egypt to manage the economy and restrain local militant mobilization. Somalia’s state succumbed completely; the regime in Egypt cracked down on dissent, pushing many moderate Islamists into the waiting arms of more militant groups; and Sudan staggered under the international sanctions imposed on its Islamist government.
Tracing the interactions between international economic factors and domestic state–society relations across three cases is an ambitious feat, and Medani resoundingly pulls it off. If the sections on Somalia are weaker because they seem to rely on more dated source material, Medani compensates by offering what is perhaps the most thorough application of Karl Polanyi’s thinking to the vagaries of elite formation and conflict. The underlying principle that Medani identifies is one of largely international economic forces that elude official financial controls, leading to an expansion of cross-border informal economies that leave domestic elites scrambling to retain their role as brokers of political and economic spoils. Contra Polanyi, he argues that such historical movements of ‘disembedding’ economies from formal state control do not necessarily beget neoliberal utopias but instead provoke new attempts to ‘re-embed’ them – which may revolve around, and bolster, ethnic and religious networks. Because Medani can delve into domestic struggles, he offers an alternative to the kind of pathologies proffered by many Africanists, who sometimes depict African elites as capable of responding to the shocks of international economic crisis and structural adjustment only by manipulating their dependency in ‘extraverted’ patterns of predation. The only thing I felt that Medani could have done differently was to engage with the theoretical implications of his work more explicitly – both in terms of Polanyi and in terms of the broader literature on African economies. What principles, for instance, does Medani think carry over to other settings, and under what conditions? But, ultimately, these are perhaps questions for others to resolve.
While not explicitly framed as such, Medani’s book serves as crucial background to the vagaries of protest, conflict and state failure in Egypt, Somalia and Sudan. As he put it in an interview about his book, ‘as the opportunities of securing prosperity by migrating to the Gulf have dwindled, young activists that I have interviewed in the region recently understand that their fate – their economic and life chances – are now predicated on employment at home’.Footnote 1 Medani’s key contribution, in other words, is to hammer down how protest and unrest are not only domestic political phenomena but should be explained through reference to the intersections between international and domestic dynamics. At a time when Sudan is suffering from a civil war begotten by competing elites, Medani’s volume should be obligatory reading for anyone trying to understand how and why deep underlying tensions often erupt in popular protest as well as more violent forms of political expression. As the volume is now available freely online, there is simply no excuse for scholars of African politics and the politics of the Islamic world, international political economists and students of conflict not to make themselves fully acquainted with this magnum opus.
