Issue Editors: Shana Marshall, Najib Hourani and Hesham Sallam with Guest Editor Kevan Harris

The summer 2022 issue of Middle East Report, “Currencies of Power,” examines the contemporary economy to highlight how global capital is suffocating the region’s working classes. The authors of issue 303 make a significant contribution to the understanding of how capitalism's modes of exploitation emerge in geographically specific ways. They do so by analyzing the geopolitics of Arab Gulf investments in the United States, the limitations of Chinese zone-based industrial cooperation in Egypt, the problems with promoting cryptocurrencies to liberate Palestinians and the politics of Turkey's expansion of consumer loans. Several articles focus in on the often precarious lives of informal workers like the indispensable local fixers for Egyptian media production companies who film on location in Cairo and the Sudanese who must cope with crisis and revolution as they migrate to Lebanon and back in their search for ways to support their families. Finally, a book review looks at the history of the Egyptian Labor Corps and the array of coercive forms of labor control that made the expansion of capitalism in the Middle East possible.