Governing the Future: Fictions of Security in the Neoliberal Middle East, 1990-2020
The implementation of neoliberal economic and political reforms in the Middle East, beginning in the late 1980s, involved radical transformations in logics and technologies of security and defense, the tools used by governing institutions to administer and manage the future. From an ethos of liberalization and development, states shifted to a new emphasis on austerity and security: networks of surveillance and preemptive policing replaced social safety nets; risk was privatized, monetized, and supplanted by zero-risk logics of precaution; national identifications were reconfigured as bases for transnational military and financial alliances. Cultural production from this period reflects these newly outlined relations between the state, the individual, and their projected futures. This research explores how Middle Eastern literature, film, and media installations from the 1990s to the early 2000s, hailing from distinct yet connected sites including Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates, are shaped by the adoption of neoliberal practices for governing time and population.