Sandra Halperin is Professor of International Relations and co-director of the Centre for Global and Transnational Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research has focused primarily on the nature and shape of global development and its impact on different parts of the world. Its principal concern has been to understand how societies develop through essentially trans-national, cross-regional processes.

She is the author of three cross-regional and trans-historical comparative studies: In the Mirror of the Third World: Capitalist Development in Modern Europe (Cornell University Press, 1997), War and Social Change in Modern Europe: the great transformation revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Re-Envisioning Global Development: a ‘horizontal’ perspective (Routledge). She is also the author of articles on globalisation, ethnic conflict, Islam, and democracy in the Middle East. She is currently at work on a study entitled The Middle East in Global Development.

By this expert

Social Power and Development in the Middle East: a transnational perspective

Paper Conference paper | | Apr 2014

The chief obstacle to transformative change in the contemporary Middle East is the region-wide configuration of social power which was consolidated in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and which survived the transition from empire to post-Ottoman independent states largely intact.