About the Program

Our AUC-based program is part of a larger project involving universities in India, South Africa, Colombia, and Mexico. The AUC program focuses on the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA).

The core mission of our program is to contribute to changing the narrative of the economy in academia and policy circles, and subsequently to how the economy is related to politics, going beyond the predominant neoliberal paradigm. Conversely, we aim at depicting the theoretical contours of an alternative accumulation model that is more equitable and sustainable. The notion of an "accumulation model" we adopt, considers the production of economic value as a social process. This challenges the economistic approach to the market as an autonomous area of formally rational economic agents, which is inherent in neoclassicism and neoliberalism.

The accumulation model captures the power dynamics and governance mechanisms through which public and private, socioeconomic and political, local, national, regional, and global interaction occur.. Emphasizing the processual dimension, the program aims to transcend the agency-structure dichotomy. It intends to trace the patterns of interaction through which value, embodied in goods, services, ideas and information, technology, techniques and skills, and material and social capital, is produced, exchanged, and distributed on multiple scales involving many actors.

Our ultimate goal is to formulate and communicate coherent, well-thought out, empirically informed, and theoretically based arguments that can become subject to broader public debate within MENA specifically and, in the Global South, more generally. We seek to accomplish this through rigorous academic knowledge production and dissemination, that is, cutting-edge, critical, and innovative. Such an outcome is channeled through well-established robust linkages with epistemic communities throughout the  MENA and the Global South and within the public sphere.

We believe that the advancement of the project depends on drawing together academics, experts and practitioners, social activists, and public intellectuals in search of a political-economic paradigm that can replace neoliberalism. It is an extended and extensive deliberative process that should happen simultaneously among the MENA region’s civil societies and in dialogue with members of global civil society, especially from the Global South.