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Caught in the Middle? On the Middle Class and its Relevance in the Contemporary Middle East
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Sengebusch, Karolin Sonay, Ali Yasin |
| Copyright Year | 2014 |
| Abstract | Are we once again “embarrassed” (Wright 3) by the middle class?1 Recent academic and public debates about the middle class have been reignited by the global financial crisis of 2008 and the Arab Spring, as well as by the global Occupy movement and further popular upheavals in Greece, Spain, Turkey, or Brazil, with their discursive convergence to the global logic of precarity (Glasius and Pleyers 554). This is reflected for instance by the importance of social justice in these protests (558). Moreover, several recent works have discussed middle classes of the Global South (Banerjee and Duflo; Darbon; Heiman, Freeman, and Liechty; López and Weinstein; Watenpaugh). Thereby, the term is used both “as a concept and as a practice” (López and Weinstein 1): that is, as an analytic category, and as a descriptive term without analytic substance. Most of traditional theorization on middle class is based on empirical data from the “West.” Therefore, it is a matter of debate if the concept can also be meaningful for analysis of Middle Eastern societies. A new strand of scholarship has developed the concept of a “global middle class,” which has a strong basis in the Global South. These scholars have highlighted how processes of political and economic globalization have created common labor conditions, lifestyles, and identities, thus constituting a global form of the new middle class (López and Weinstein), particularly in “global cities” (Heiman, Freeman, and Liechty; Castells; Sassen). Having created new opportunities around the globe, the logic of neoliberalism2 promotes the middle class as an aspirational and normative notion that includes democracy, freedom, individualism, and consumption. Thus, the middle class constitutes an “ideological and social construct upon which the neoliberal state rests its political legitimacy” (Heiman, Freeman, and Liechty 18-19; Kandil 201). Some literature also points to ambivalent facets within these processes. Being aspirational on a global scale, middle classes also suffer from negative side effects of globalization processes. Several authors have stressed the “alienation and disconnection of the global middle class from [...] political and economic elites” (S. Cohen, Searching 108), along with a “constant anxiety” and “feelings of insecurity that infuse middleclass subjectivities around the globe” (Heiman, Freeman, and Liechty 20). Regarding the MENA region, Asef Bayat’s concept of the “middle class poor” and Farhad Khosrokhavar’s notion of the “would-be middle class” very aptly reflect editorial 04 |
| Starting Page | 4 |
| Ending Page | 10 |
| Page Count | 7 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.17192/meta.2014.2.2154 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://meta-journal.net/article/download/2154/2096 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.17192/meta.2014.2.2154 |
| Volume Number | 2 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
