Sovereignty and international political economy: The Middle East’s role in the uneven geography of money

Sovereignty concerns not just security but also economy. One of the essential sovereign functions of a state is to mint its “national” currency. As Benjamin Cohen (Cohen, 1998) has noted, the supposed equality of currencies in the international arena is a myth: While the US dollar is widely accepted for payment across the world, there are other states where even their own citizens no longer trust their domestic currency enough to use it for day-to-day transactions. Meanwhile, most states’ currencies will be placed somewhere along this continuum.