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Middle East & North Africa
Deindustrialization in the Middle East and North Africa
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Africas
Seminar – Session n°6 – R. Tiquet
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Africas
Seminar – Session n°1 – B. Molo
Processes of deindustrialization have set the course for postmodernity. Though its impact varies with geography, it is deindustrialization which defines the conditions of social, political, and economic life across most the world today. This is certainly so in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). There, premature deindustrialization bequeaths legacies of grave and enduring salience. In the economic domain, effects are observable in the region’s struggles with job creation, productivity, growth, and macrostability. Socially, they are present in MENA’s extreme levels of inequality. Politically, deindustrialization contributes to democracy’s recurring failures to launch.
This report takes identifying the drivers behind deindustrialization in the MENA as its primary task. Based on months of desk research and an extensive exploration of the historical archive, we trace causality across time and beyond the borders of the region. Findings are many, prominently including the following:
(i) The early onsetting of deindustrialization in the MENA was provoked by the global economy’s drift into stagnation beginning in the late 1960s.
(ii) Due to global issues of overcapacity and falling profit rates, securing the investment needed to nurture competitive manufacturing sectors has been exceedingly difficult.
(iii) Though global dynamics did make opportunities for healthy industrializing scarce, they did not condemn MENA countries to the fates ultimately suffered. Political choices and policy errors also played a role in shaping the course of events. Critical in these regards were modalities of state-capital relations, inadequate policy design, and a series of contingencies derived from the management of natural resource endowments.
(iv) Neoliberalism’s resolution of capitalism’s profitability crisis harmed MENA’s industrial prospects significantly. The deepening of global value chains over the past forty years has been detrimental to capital accumulation. The enforcement of intellectual property claims has obstructed traditional pathways to industrial progress. Furthermore, competitive pressures have forced firms to adopt capital intensive forms of production, limiting industry’s capacity to absorb greater shares of MENA’s workforce.
(v) The corporate welfarism that many MENA governments have institutionalized in hopes of attracting foreign investment in recent decades is fundamentally misguided: The extension of non-conditional benefits to corporate actors serves only to minimize the social and developmental utility of a prospective investment.
Looking ahead, it is plain that deindustrialization will continue weighing heavily on the region’s outlook. For a better future to be realized, local policy officials and members of the international community alike will need reckon with the factors compelling deindustrialization. Materially, this requires rethinking the terms and incentives governing matters of production, trade, and investment.
This publication has been supported by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. The positions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
About Romain Tiquet
Romain Tiquet is a historian and researcher at the CNRS. Currently based at the Centre Marc Bloch, his research focuses on the history of forced labour, incarceration, and mental illness in West Africa.
Discussant
Georges Macaire Eyenga holds a PhD in Sociology from Paris Nanterre University (formerly Paris X). He recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at WISER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research), University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. He is currently a lecturer at the University of Dschang in Cameroon, where his research examines surveillance policies, individual identification systems, and agile governance in Africa.
About Brice Molo
Brice MOLO holds a PhD in History from the University of Yaoundé and a PhD in Sociology from EHESS. His research focuses on the governance of risks, disasters, and mass fatalities in Cameroon. He is also the co-founder of the Africas Program.
Discussant
Eric Essono Tsimi is a writer, an anthropologist and Assistant Professor (Baruch College, CUNY). He published several books, including: Les inadmirables. Essai sur l’art (forcément) peu subtil de la bêtise, Paris, Hermann, 2024.
This presentation examines how the 1998 disaster in Nsam, Yaoundé (Cameroon’s political capital), and the 2016 Eséka disaster in the Nyong and Kellé department reveal tensions surrounding the public utility of infrastructure in Cameroon. It explores the “moral economies” of local communities that, when faced with infrastructure projects such as railways or factories, only recognise them as truly public if they provide direct benefits—an expectation that often places them at odds with the notion of public interest as defined by the state.
In this context, disasters transcend their status as mere events and become moments and spaces for renegotiating relationships to infrastructure and power. They prompt critical reflections on the ownership, maintenance, and responsiveness of public assets to community needs, as well as their instrumentalisation in shaping demands directed at the state.
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