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The Middle East plays a prominent role in global politics. The focus is often on the region’s security challenges. The Middle East is however a vast region that is home to over 400 million people. States, economies, and societies across the region make for complex patterns of political and economic development that are of importance to theoretical understandings of comparative political economy, but also provide insights into the region’s security situation, internal rivalries, and the region’s place in the global economy and relations with the world’s great powers. This course will provide a basis for understanding that dynamic by examining its patterns of economic and political developments, state formation, and relations between the economy, the state and society. The course will trace the historical foundations of modern states and look to theories of comparative political economy that discuss state formation and state-society relations in late-industrializing societies to analyze them. The course will discuss the impact of history and the colonial experience on Middle East politics, and the role of oil in its economic development. We will look at how economics and politics have entwined to shape states and their relations with societies, and the different trajectories of state formation pursued across the region—from secular modernizing states to tribal monarchies and an Islamic Republic in Iran. We will examine the reasons for and nature of authoritarianism, the characteristics of rentier states and patrimonial state-society relations, and the impact of security issues on state formation and behavior. We will also examine social structures in the region, and the way they have reacted to state formation. The course will provide explanations for emergence of strong states, weak and failed ones, as well as particularities of the region’s economies.