Leiden University Student Repository

Borumov, Dimitar (2024)

How Neoliberalism Ended the Arab Cold War: The International Monetary Fund and the Economic Entanglement between Egypt and Gulf Monarchies in the 1970s and 1980s

Bachelor thesis | International Studies (BA)

The years between the 1940s and late 1980s were seen as turbulent ones from economists and international relations theorists. The dichotomous economic division between the main blocks of the Cold War spread differently in different parts of the world. The Middle East is a region of no exception when it comes to global Cold War dynamics on a local level. In this thesis I argue that these local dynamics (Arab Cold War) were brought to an end because of the economic entanglement between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. This entanglement, in turn, facilitated by the presence of the IMF in Egypt in the form of neoliberalisation policies, created a positive environment for the development of an economic interdependency that thus ended the Arab Cold War.

Neoliberalism

IMF

Arab Cold War

Egypt

Saudi Arabia

Author

Borumov, Dimitar

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Middle East and Modern Hebrew

Supervisors

Yenen, Alp

ECTS Credits

15

Language

en