This book marks many years of collaboration and engagement with family farming and agrarian questions in Africa, the Middle East and in particular Egypt and Tunisia. We have benefitted greatly from conversations and discussions with colleagues and farmers in both countries. We are particularly grateful to François Ireton who has supported this work throughout and helped with data collection and organising statistical material to help analyse economic and social underdevelopment in Egypt and Tunisia. Nada Trigui and Sara Pozzi helped with translation from French into English. We have benefitted from membership of Thimar, a research collective on agriculture, environment and labour in the Arab World, based in Beirut and coordinated by Martha Mundy and Karim Eid-Sabbagh.

Thanks for comments on parts of the manuscript to Ali Kadri whose critical eye served us well. We are very thankful to Max Ajl who greatly enriched this work through many conversations and made invaluable comments on an early draft. His insight and perspectives have helped sharpen many of our arguments. Thanks also to Giuliano Martiniello who commented on an early draft and whose work on peasants and agrarian questions is so important.

Mark Duffield remains an inspiration.

Drafting this work would have been much more difficult without all the support and we feel honoured to have received it. Usual caveats that we may not have always done what we may have been encouraged to do. We also gratefully acknowledge support from the Open Society Foundation Middle East and the North Africa Programme office in Amman and Tunis.

It is with sadness we completed this book, as our dear comrade Hassanine Kishk passed away. The book is dedicated to his memory –an outstanding comrade.

The rise of private-sector liquidity as a dominant component in global liquidity markets has created a penetrating web of financial interdependence that links the fates of investors, financial institutions and national governments to one another. The booms and busts of the last thirty years provide vivid evidence that the behavior of each of these actors can generate uncertainties that affect capital flows, credit dynamics and price levels, all of which have potentially significant social, economic and political consequences. The dynamics are ongoing. The newly released International Monetary Fund (IMF) World Economic Outlook celebrates a broad-based global recovery, but it also warns that the postcrisis economic expansion has not been balanced and may have peaked in several major economies.

Europe’s journey toward the ideal of ever-denser integration, peace and prosperity has been buffeted by repeated trials of temptation, frustration and risk. Like Odysseus, who bound himself to the mast of his ship to avoid the seductive songs of the Sirens, political leaders of Europe bound themselves by treaty and fealty to the principle of fiscal discipline in order to protect themselves from the alluring yet fickle flows of global capital. As they discovered, such constraints are neither always effective nor always desirable. Consequently, also like Odysseus, economic policymakers and national politicians continue to employ a wide range of strategies to steer Europe past the twin challenges posed by a modern-day Scylla (i.e., a multiheaded monster of sluggish economic growth, resurgent nationalism and social unrest that threatens to yank politicians out of office and cast countries out of the European Union [EU]) and Charybdis (i.e., a whirlpool of financial capital energized by expansive monetary policy and conditional bailouts that threatens to pull individual countries and perhaps the EU itself underwater).

Like the bittersweet drama of tango dancers performing on Calle Florida for shoppers leaving Buenos Aires’ posh Galerías Pacífico shopping center, Argentina’s political and economic leaders stepped out of Latin America’s sorrowful “lost decade” of the 1980s with a series of dramatic policy changes that led the country through grand successes, devastating failures and postcrisis resurgences. Like the dancers shifting to changes in musical tempo, Argentine presidents and ministers of the economy responded to fluctuations in global markets and domestic politics with dips and twirls, driving forward and occasionally reversing direction with great fanfare. Their moves generated both praise and scorn, winning Argentina the diverse imprimaturs – at different moments in time – of “poster child” of the Washington Consensus, “defaulting pariah” of international bondholders, “vanguard” of Latin American populism and the “victim of vulture investors” that threatened to undermine debt restructuring agreements around the globe.

Speaking before the Senate Banking Committee on July 15, 2008, US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson petitioned Congress for the authority to use taxpayer funds to prevent America’s mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from collapsing. The hearing addressed widespread homeowner mortgage defaults that had sent stock prices plummeting and investors fleeing. Paulson argued that if investors came to understand that the government would not allow Fannie and Freddie to go under, stock prices would stabilize and a larger crisis could be averted. In a statement that would be repeated in news stories for years to come, Paulson speculated, “If you have a bazooka in your pocket and people know it, you probably won’t have to use it.” In this instance, the “bazooka theory” failed: Paulson not only had to fire his bazooka shortly after acquiring it, but its blast proved grossly inadequate to calm market uncertainty and forestall what became the worst financial crisis to hit the United States since the Great Depression. In spite of Paulson’s newly acquired money and authority, investors dumped Fannie and Freddie shares, both organizations fell into government conservatorship, political criticisms of bailouts grew louder and the whirlpool of uncertainty swirled ever faster.

With the creation of the Brady Plan – a program developed by US Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady in 1989 to convert national debt into bonds following the Latin American debt crisis – emerging market countries joined their wealthier cousins as important participants in global bond and equity markets. The subsequent profitability and popularity of emerging market bonds combined with the securitization of other debts (most notably the packaging of mortgages into tradable securities), the creation of a wide range of increasingly sophisticated finance instruments and the normalization of free capital mobility led to a dramatic surge in the growth of private-sector liquidity and sparked the development of the extraordinarily highly interconnected global financial marketplace that we live in today. The resulting globalization of finance has transformed the international financial system from one dominated by official, public sources of capital to one in which private-sector components of liquidity now permeate virtually all facets of the financial system.

In the wake of the recent financial crisis, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke argued repeatedly that fostering healthy growth and job creation required legislative action. He warned that continued political battles over fiscal and monetary policy, financial regulation and the debt ceiling were “deeply irresponsible” and would have “catastrophic consequences for the economy that could last for decades.” At the same time, like Alan Greenspan before him, Bernanke joined secretaries of the Treasury and other technocrats in guiding and enabling legislation, helping presidents outmaneuver critics and compensating for political uncertainty when political battles between the President and Congress stalled economic legislation. Far from being apolitical actors, these technocrats manipulated authority, exploited deference from politicians and business leaders, and alternately bolstered and challenged national politicians in order to shape US economic policy, manage market behavior and coordinate global activities before, during and after the recent financial crises.

In his seminal essay, Hamza Alavi (1972) characterised the state in post-colonial societies as an overdeveloped superstructure, a notion Zaidi (2014) contests for the case of Pakistan. Owing to the huge socio-political transmutations Pakistani society has undergone ever since Alavi penned his thesis, Zaidi argues for reconsidering, if not entirely dismissing, the notion of the ‘overdeveloped state’. Alavi (1972) conceptualises the ‘overdeveloped state’ as a top-down, centralised structure apexed by a triumvirate of feudal lords, the local bourgeoisie and metropolitan capital. According to Alavi, this triumvirate in turn is dominated by the civil–military oligarchy.

Alavi's thesis, although perhaps not surprisingly, ignores the role of the media even if the role of ideology and culture is hinted at in passing in his delineation of the overdeveloped state. Zaidi (2014), by contrast, places the media at the centre stage as a key player in understanding the transformed political economy of the Pakistani state. This view is justified in light of the changes to the landscape of the media since the 2000s, though Zaidi is not alone in making this point as demonstrated later. In partial agreement with Zaidi (2014), in this chapter, I will show that in light of the transformations of the state–society nexus in Pakistan since the 1970s, Alavi's thesis is not a cogent framework to explore, in particular, the role of the transformed Pakistani media. However, assigning primacy to the media – despite the rapid growth of the media in output and outreach – is an exaggeration. Therefore, this chapter argues the following. The Pakistani media is commanded and controlled by a mutually accommodating troika consisting of the military, commercial interests and the Urdu-Punjabi middle class.1 In this configuration, the nature of control is hegemonic and manipulative rather than authoritarian, as was the case until the 1990s. Consequently, while the overdeveloped character of state offers a useful framework to analyse the media until the 1990s, the political economy of the new-look media and state-media relations today can be best described through an understanding of Pakistan as a praetorian state. The role of the media can be best explained by what Althusser (2001) called the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). Therefore, this chapter will begin by placing the media at the interstices of state and society. A qualification is in place here.

It has been argued that Pakistan's class structure has been reconfigured over the past fifty years as the middle classes have become increasingly powerful and adept in their demands for political representation, government services and the redistribution of national wealth. Pakistan's class structure has indeed shifted significantly away ‘from a largely agricultural, rural economy, where ‘feudals’ dominate the economic, social, and particularly political space’ (Zaidi 2017), to one that has a large urban population and a small but highly visible upper-middle class. Zaidi (2014:51) has argued that Pakistan is ‘a long way from the classical structuralist or even Marxist formulation of the Pakistani state dominated by landlords, industrialists, and the metropolitan bourgeoisie’. Yet recent ethnography (Martin 2015; Armytage forthcoming) demonstrates that the configuration of power in Pakistan is not such a long way from these formulations as may initially be supposed. This chapter argues that though Pakistan's class structure has undoubtedly changed, its ruling classes – which I define specifically as the economic and political 1 per cent – have retained their hold on political and economic resources very successfully.

This chapter begins where much of the academic discourse on the location of power in Pakistan begins, by revisiting the foundational work of the influential sociologist Hamza Alavi on the relationship between the state and the ruling classes within the postcolonial nation. I then examine more recent scholarship that reconfigures Alavi's conception of this relationship. This oeuvre of scholarship poses an interesting challenge, but one that is usually peripheral to scholars of political economy: As Pakistan's class structure has evolved, how have the ruling classes, and their position of dominance in Pakistani society, changed? And further, what are the implications for Pakistan's political economy? Focusing first on the theoretical aspects of this challenge, the chapter then draws on ethnographic research conducted by the author between 2013 and 2015 to examine the shifting composition of the ruling classes and the implications for economic inequality and social mobility in Pakistan today.

Alavi concentrated his analysis of power within the postcolonial state on the state ‘oligarchy’ and the ‘ruling classes’, describing a structure of interlinking institutional power blocs, dominated by powerful members.