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Religion has been important in a number of localities such as Peru, Iran and Mexico. There was a view that religion would become less imprtant as societies modernized, but this has not proved to be the case. Relations between state and church can be viewed from a perspective that is interest-based and institutional. This is a more fruitful approach than simply focusing on ideas. Religious authorities may have more power in the inital phases of developing a state, and their power may be eroded as secular rivals are eliminated by state officials.

In recent years, Persian Gulf cities have become symbols of the most spectacular forms of the 'globalization of urbanization'. Current scholarship has sought to situate these cities in transnational processes and linkages with conceptualizations of 'the global city' and the mechanisms of 'worlding'. This article builds on but moves beyond this line of analysis by turning to the histories of this region and its built environment to explore the longue‐durée influence of capital and empire operating across multiple scales. From this perspective, the glittering high‐rises and manmade islands are contemporary manifestations of a century of urban forms and logics of social control emanating from company towns, the struggles of state building, and the circulation and fixing of capital. To grasp how the Persian Gulf region has been remade as a frontier for accumulation, the analysis in this article blurs the boundaries between metropole and periphery, reconceptualizing the region not as an eclectic sideshow, but as a central site for global shifts in urbanism, capitalism and architecture in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how participation in smuggling restructures existing commercial regulatory systems and subjectivities. It does so through an analysis of the illicit commercial practices that mushroomed in postrevolutionary Iran and the ambivalent participation of established merchants (bazaaris) in the import and export of commodities through these circuits during the 1979–2005 era. Following two independent research projects on the Tehran and Qum bazaars, we adopt a multidisciplinary and relational approach to bazaars and smuggling to decipher the multiple logics. This process is assembled through networks of establishedbazaaris, new commercial actors, far-flung transnational buyers and diverse state officials, who both regulate trade and facilitate exchanges that are at times interpreted as smuggling by the participants themselves. Building on the growing literature on smuggling in cultural anthropology and political economy, our account demonstrates how commodities travel through channels that ultimately transgress categories such as licit and illicit, state and society, and ‘honorablebazaari’ and ‘smuggler’. The postrevolutionary Iranian regime is a case that challenges us to examine this quasi-formal economy in the context of an institutionalized and centralized state that has adopted both state-led and neoliberal economic policies. It also forces us to situate the phenomenon of smuggling within the context of existing commercial networks and moral orders. We further reveal howbazaaris have been subjects of and subjected to the hybrid commercial order, which has both displaced the social networks that underpinbazaaris' communal obligations and norms and cast doubt on the merchants' claim to ethical standing in the eyes of one another, and left them vulnerable to criticism by leaders of the Islamic Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

there is no abstract [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Free trade zones have been championed by policy makers as important mechanisms for the “economic liberalisation” and “globalisation” of the Middle East. While a growing number of political economists have begun to investigate the performance of these projects, few have considered why states voluntarily limit their sovereign powers by establishing these liberalised territories. To address this question, this paper studies the Jebel Ali free trade zone in Dubai (UAE) and the Kish free trade zone in Iran, two of the earliest such projects in the region. Rather than being products of neoliberal ideology or pressure from advanced industrial economies, the essay argues that paradoxically these zones were developed by the Iranian state and Dubai emirate to project territorial sovereignty in turbulent geostrategic settings and moments as well as nodes to circulate rent to domestic and international members of ruling coalitions. The geostrategic and state-building logics informed when, where, and how these projects were developed. More generally, this analysis illustrates that the Middle East is neither absent from the process of globalisation, nor does it simply respond passively and reactively to this complex process. Free trade zones are an example of local strategies working in consort with international processes to fashion new forms of economic and political interconnectedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]