Max Ajl

Université de Tunis | ISGT

Until his early death in 1985, at age 51, the Tunisian agronomist Slaheddine el-Amami carried out a path-breaking research program at what was then the Centre de Recherche et de Génie Rural. He wrote technical studies ranging from the agricultural capacities of the unjustly-marked-as-barren Kerkennah Islands, to possibilities for drip irrigation, t...

In an extended critical response to Mike Davis's The City as Ark, this article dissects the urbanization and modernization teleologies which structure and inform the current interest in framing the city as humanity’s utopia. Instead, by showing how contemporary Global North urban rests rest on settler-colonialism and ecological imperialism, it show...

This paper treats the convergence of agrarian questions of ecology and labor in the context of the Green New Deal

Discussion on food sovereignty and agro-ecology, and Anglophone rural sociology have blind spots when it comes to the Middle East/North African (Arab) region. This article explores them; outlines some initial concepts, discusses avenues for research, and notes some socio-political features of the region which make it distinct from others. It focuse...

This is the second part of a two-part article on the Palestinian question. This part treats the development and trajectory of anticolonial nationalism, focusing on the post-1970s period in the Gaza Strip. It treats the growth and development of the main armed factions in the Strip, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, and then discusses Israeli policies towar...

This is the first part of a two-part article which considers the US-Israeli attack on Palestine in general and the Gaza Strip in particular in a world-historical and regional context. In contrast to a range of theories which resort to liberal international relations theory, economism, or methodological nationalism when theorizing accumulation in ge...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

This article considers the influence of Maoist China on Tunisian development theory in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The shadow—or brilliant light—of the Chinese experience was evident in Tunisia by the late 1950s, where wide-scale agrarian reform within the People's Republic and the use of cooperatives and labor-intensive agricultural technologi...

This article examines recent international financial institution and national government policy in North Africa intended to address the climate emergency. It focuses on the role of the World Bank and general policy trends since the 1970s. These policy trends fail to understand the continuing centrality of small-scale family farming to social reprod...

This commentary turns a critical lens on the perspectives of labour in the potential green transition. It shows what changes when we focus on worldwide social labour—the labour which most of humanity currently performs—and its worldwide impact, going beyond climate to damages from mining and to biodiversity and other elements of the ecology. Such a...

This article engages with Patrick Wolfe’s theoretical underpinnings and programmatic consequences of his settler-colonial theory. It contextualizes the renaissance of the settler-colonial paradigm, scrutinizing its theoretical innovations. In doing so, the article traces Wolfe’s work back to its origin in the work of Marcel Mauss and his notion of...

This article engages with and critiques dominant theories of political ecology. It takes the theory of ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) as the framework of critique. It assesses the claims of “fossil capitalism,” eco-modernism, extractivism, and degrowth, as well as the theories of “post-development.” It finds that with the exception of degrowth...

p>This article outlines the visions of Tunisian and Indian dissident political thinkers and agronomists, 1950s–1980s, for decentralised food and farming systems using just technologies. Amidst ascendent US imperialism, these marginalised proposals opposed the Green Revolution model of agrarian development, illustrating broader postcolonial politics...

*Available open access at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02633957221075323 In this article we draw attention to similarities and synergies between eco-fascist and liberal forms of populationism which encourage reproductive injustices against Indigenous women and women of colour globally, increasingly in the name of climate change m...

This review essay summarizes and synthesizes three books on Black and Indigenous agrarian struggles in the modern-day territories of the USA. It discusses how they recount the centrality of land, national liberation, self-reliant development, food sovereignty and sustainable forms of agriculture and land management to Black and Indigenous radical s...

Within the past years, the Green New Deal (GND) became the common language for Northern climate politics, offering a seeming exit path from Northern social and ecological crises while erasing an older Northern climate discourse tied to Southern demands for climate reparations and rights to development. This Eurocentric GND has become the environmen...

The idea of a Green New Deal was launched into popular consciousness by US Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018. Evocative of the far-reaching ambitions of its namesake, it has become a watchword in the current era of global climate crisis. But what - and for whom - is the Green New Deal? In this concise and urgent book, Max Ajl provide...

p>The argument for sidestepping state and nation is that nation-states and calcified core-periphery distinctions no longer help people understand development and maldevelopment. The history of radical Arab developmental thought is a lens through which people can reexamine the state, nationalism and internationalism, and the horizons and afterlives...

This paper considers the relationship between Samir Amin’s programme for delinking, smallholder agriculture, his theories of ecology, and the current of ecological dependency that developed out of North African dependency analysis. It argues that ecological forms of agriculture in fact underpinned the original case from which Amin derived delinking...

Recently a debate re-emerged between Adel Samara and Samir Amin on the state role in delinking – subjecting a social formation’s relationships to the world-system to a domestic, popular law of value. I suggest the arguments turns on the agent helming development. Amin’s agent is slightly more ambiguous than Samara’s, reflecting de-linking is modell...

It is widely understood that the social base for discontent with the Syrian government emerged amongst impoverished Sunni rural areas and slums surrounding mid-size cities. This chapter traces the disembedding through which the social policies upon which the Ba’ath initially emplaced were slowly rolled back. It situates the Ba’ath pact with the pea...

As scientists’ consensus shifts from sober scholarly dialogue into the wider plane of culture, there has been a need to find a framework upon which to hang popular understanding. An increasingly common move is to grasp for a (Global) Green New Deal. This move comes in many forms. I would like to start by dismissing the ones which deserve dismissal,...

This chapter proceeds as follows: it first describes Yemen’s pre-1970 agricultural system, before the oil age’s regional and global dynamics reworked the country’s political ecology. Next, it explains remittances’ role in restructuring Yemen, especially its agricultural sector. It then offers a quantitative and qualitative-historical account of Yem...

In our moment, questions and quandaries of land, revolutionary nationalism, the frictions and convergences of struggle in the core and the periphery, and finally what forms of struggle – in the most literal sense – can make a world big enough for everyone, find one of their most vivid and inspiring contemporary experiments in Jackson, Mississippi....

The article examines the weakness of discourses around food sovereignty in Southwest Asia and North Africa, and examines some older currents resembling the food sovereignty discourse. The author first historically situates the emergence of food sovereignty. He discusses agro-ecology – the ‘technics’ (or social embeddedness of technology) of food so...

Ali Kadri, Arab Development Denied (London: Anthem, 2014), 250 pages, $40, paperback.Perhaps nowhere does violence collapse the horizon as it does in the Arab world. Imperial wars have demolished the Libyan state and turned Syria into a charnel house. Yemen, the region's poorest country, was a U.S. drone shooting gallery before Saudi Arabia…attacke...

div class="bookreview">Rich Wiles, editor, Generation Palestine (London: Pluto Press, 2013), 256 pages, $24, paperback. When in March 2012, Barack Obama paused briefly from approving orders for drone killings of Pakistani and Yemeni villagers, in order to reassure the attendees at the annual gala of the AIPAC (American-Israel Public Affairs Committ...

Through an engagement with Derrida’s conceptualisation of Europe as that which is non-identical to itself and is always already constituted with and through its others, this chapter analyzes both Europe’s comportment to its Jewish community as in, yet not of Europe, and Zionism’s imaginings of Europe and its understanding of itself as of but not in...

Is Europe’s crisis merely a financial one? It has been widely understood as such, yet its scope and implications far exceed Europe’s financial markets. As the crisis deepens, and the possibility of Europe’s dissolution emerges on the horizon, the authors of this volume argue that the contemporary crisis points to a much older, more fundamental and...

Maximilian Forte, Slouching Towards Sirte (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2012), 341 pages, $27.95, paperback. Perhaps no war in recent memory has so thoroughly flummoxed the Euro-Atlantic left as the recent NATO war on Libya. Presaging what would occur as U.S. proxies carried out an assault on Syria, both a pro-war left and an anti-anti-war left [gave] e...