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Noria Research
Photoreport: Halabja’s Youth
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Middle East & North Africa
Rivals in the Service of Empire: Abu Dhabi, Qatar and the United States
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Middle East & North Africa
Green (neo)colonialism in the Arab region
This photo essay is linked to an article written by Tom Préel in French. To find out more about the young people of Halabja, you can read his article here.
Living in a neighboring city to Halabja, I have always been deeply aware of the daily struggles and resilient spirit of its youth. As a photographer, my work often bridges cultural and social divides, bringing to light stories that might otherwise remain untold. The youth of Halabja, with their unique challenges and unwavering determination, have always held a special place in my heart. This project is a testament to their everyday lives, their spaces of solace, and their silent battles. Growing up in the Kurdish region, I was surrounded by rich stories and vibrant communities, yet I noticed a lack of visual representation of these narratives. My inspiration comes from a desire to document and share the raw, unfiltered experiences of people, especially those who live on the fringes of society. The ability to freeze a moment in time and convey emotions, struggles, and joys through a single frame motivates me to continue this journey.
The youth of Halabja face numerous challenges: high unemployment rates, limited social infrastructure, and a sense of geographic and social marginalization. Despite these hardships, they find ways to create spaces of belonging and community. Teahouses (chaikhanah), billiard halls, and biker groups serve as their sanctuaries, where they can gather, socialize, and momentarily escape their daily struggles. Having friends in Halabja and living just a short distance away, I have a personal connection to their stories. I understand their routines and the significance of these communal spaces. This proximity allows me to capture their lives authentically and respectfully, highlighting both their resilience and the harsh realities they endure.
In my photography, I aim to showcase the daily life of Halabja\’s youth and their communities. By focusing on their interactions within teahouses, billiard halls, and biker groups, I provide a glimpse into their world—a world often overlooked in broader narratives about the Middle East. My choice to use black and white photography is intentional. Stripping away color directs the viewer\’s attention to the subjects and their environments, emphasizing the raw emotions and dense atmosphere of their surroundings.
Black and white photography also adds a timeless quality to the images, allowing the stories of Halabja\’s youth to transcend the immediate moment and resonate on a deeper level. It highlights the contrasts and textures of their daily lives, from the chipped walls of the billiard halls to the expressive faces of the young men gathered in their social spaces.
Abu Dhabi and Qatar are the two brother enemies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Their consanguinity is evinced in several areas. The two emirates have comparable demographic features—3.8 and 2.8 million inhabitants, respectively, with nationals representing only a small minority (20% for Abu Dhabi, 12% for Qatar). They are each hugely rich. In 2023, Abu Dhabi had a GDP of $310 billion in current USD, which equates to a GDP per capita of $81,579.[1] That same year, Qatar reportedly had a GDP of $234 billion, or $83,571 per capita.[2] Institutionally, both states have sovereign wealth funds at their disposal for managing “surplus” receipts from hydrocarbon exports. Abu Dhabi, in fact, has three, the largest of which, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, retains total assets with an estimated value of $993 billion.[3] If smaller, the Qatar Investment Authority, with a balance sheet showing assets worth $526 billion, is a power within global financial markets all the same. More generally speaking, the economic behavior of the two emirates is quite similar as well. Dominated by rentier logic and a shared “devotion to the empire of capital”, both are key contributors to the insertion of the GCC in the circuits of global and regional capitalism.[4]
In certain fundamentals, Abu Dhabi and Qatar also pair when it comes to matters of security. Like many others in the GCC, they each allocate staggering amounts to military expenditure. Per capita spending on this line item was $3,562 in Qatar for 2023 and $2,080 for the UAE, Abu Dhabi contributing the lion’s share in the latter case. For the sake of comparison, Iran’s figure for 2023 is estimated at $85. Israel’s per capita military expenditure in that same year, boosted by its war on Gaza, reached $2,120 while Russia, also at war, topped out at $524. The United States, the one big state able to keep up with the GCC’s military prodigality on a per capita basis, clocked in at $2,666.[5] Both Abu Dhabi and Qatar are also tightly militarily linked to the Western geopolitical bloc. Most of their military imports come from the United States and Europe, France being the main supplier from Europe. In addition to making their ports available to the US Navy, both play host to the US Air Force (USAF) and cover much of its local operating costs to boot. 5,000 US personnel are currently in the UAE at Al Dhafra Air Base, where USAF Central Command stages its 380th Air Expeditionary Wing. Meanwhile,10,000 US personnel are based at Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base, the single largest US military installation in the Middle East, home to the Forward Headquarters of US CENTCOM and USAF Central Command’s 379th Air Expeditionary Wing. For their troubles, each of the emirates has also recently managed to institutionalize defense cooperation with the United States. In 2019, under the Trump administration, the UAE’s longstanding engagements with Washington were upgraded into a Defense Cooperation Agreement. Not to be outdone, Qatar got itself formally designated by the Biden administration in 2022 as a “major non-NATO Ally of the United States”.
The Gazan Crucible
Despite their many commonalities, Abu Dhabi and Qatar famously split course when it comes to foreign policy. The divergence traces back to the rule of Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani in Doha and the rise of Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan in Abu Dhabi. The former was Emir of Qatar from 1995 until 2013, after which he handed over the emirate to his son Tamim. The latter was named Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi in 2004, became de facto ruler of the emirate in 2014, and officially succeeded his long-ailing elder brother as Emir of Abu Dhabi and President of the United Arab Emirates in 2022.[6] And as Israel’s war on Gaza attests, the foreign policy contrast remains very stark. Qatar is playing a key role in organizing negotiations between Hamas, Israel, Egypt and the United States over a ceasefire and exchange of captives. Meanwhile, the UAE has been actively involved in preparing for the “day after” in coordination with Israel and the United States.[7] Reporting indicates that the day being envisioned is one where a new Palestinian administration—a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority (PA), in the words of US president Biden—will take over in the Strip under Israeli and US control, with forces from the UAE, Egypt and Morocco deployed as peacekeeping troops.[8]
In an immediate sense, the different roles adopted by the two emirates in Gaza are informed by the different relations each holds with Palestinian actors. Qatar has long since been a major funder of the Hamas administration in the Gaza Strip and, in the interest of maintaining close ties to the organization, hosts the movement’s political leadership in exile. Contrarily, Abu Dhabi has long since sought advice from another Palestinian forced abroad: Hamas’s one-time archenemy Mohammed Dahlan.[9]
At a deeper level, however, antithetical attitudes to the Islamic fundamentalist regional and international organization of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), of which Hamas was the original Palestinian branch, pertains. Matters of religion and culture do factor in here, at least to a degree. Sunni Qataris subscribe to a rigoristic Salafi version of Islam known as Wahhabism. While undoubtedly softer than the Saudi version (prior to Mohammed bin Salman’s ascent), Qatari Wahhabism would rank as more rigorist than the UAE’s mainstream brand of Sunni Islam. The ideological religious affinity between each of the Saudis and Qataris, on the one hand, and the MB, on the other, may contribute to explaining the fact that one state succeeded the other in the role of main sponsor to the organization. Hamad bin Khalifa stepped in to assume that role after Riyadh turned on the Brotherhood in retaliation for its opposition to the US intervention against Iraq in 1990.
Explanation by religious affinity is of limited value, however. It begs the question of why would little Qatar take the huge risk of provoking its much bigger and more powerful Saudi neighbour in rescuing those that the latter wanted to punish? Why would it almost recklessly engage in regional politics through its sponsorship of the MB’s regional network and enhance the latter’s regional influence through Al Jazeera, the satellite TV network that is basically a political joint venture between Qatar and the MB? The contrasting attitudes to religion of Abu Dhabi and the MB may likewise contribute to explaining the antipathy between them. But this again is an explanation of limited value, especially that the Saudi kingdom has enforced until 2017 an interpretation of Islam that was significantly more rigoristic than those of both Qatar and the MB – and yet, the UAE maintained fraternal relations with its Saudi neighbour.
A more significant variable than religion in explaining the break between Abu Dhabi and Qatar over the MB are political discrepancies. Upholder of a highly illiberal form of authoritarianism, Mohammed bin Zayed champion hierarchical, anti-democratic governance as being most suitable for the Middle East. He regards the Brotherhood—a political movement that fights for power at the regional level—as a source of instability and disruption.[10] Though hardly being more liberal at home, Hamad bin Khalifa, on the other hand, has seen in his sponsorship of the MB a means to greatly enhance Qatar’s political clout, seizing the opportunity created by the Saudi break with them.
Of course, Abu Dhabi and Doha bump heads in fields far beyond Gaza—and on issues well beyond the fate of the Muslim Brotherhood. Their scraps can be understood as a function of contrasting strategies. As a rule, Qatar actively hedges its political risks by nurturing relations with the widest possible range of political forces. These include state and non-state actors, as is evinced by Doha’s engagements with everyone from Israel and the United States to Iran, its regional allies, and fundamentalist extremists such as the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. As a second rule, Qatar tends to be militarily restrained when acting outside its borders. Mindful to keep a low profile, its forces have only ever participated in operations when part of wider GCC or US initiatives.[11] By contrast, the UAE has won the nickname of “Little Sparta” in Pentagon circles for its military effectiveness[12]—effectiveness which eventually translated to boldness and aggressiveness in intervening in the wider neighborhood. If slightly more cautious in recent years, the adoption of the maverick’s posture, which has frequently brought the UAE into alliance with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, is a direct product of Mohammed bin Zayed’s leadership. Today, its effects are most easily observed in the UAE’s support for Russia’s favored client in Libya, Khalifa Haftar, and in the multifaceted assistance being offered the Rapid Support Forces of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (aka Hemedti) in Sudan[13].
Underlying Causes of Rivalry
All of which leaves our initial question open: from whence do these differing options in foreign policymaking come?
When all is said and done, one needs to attribute a great deal to the personalities and ambitions of the two architects of contemporary foreign policy in Qatar and the UAE: Hamad bin Khalifa and Mohamed bin Zayed. The weight these individuals bring to bear derives, in the first instance, from the autocratic character of both states’ political regimes. It is also born of two factors specific to the regimes’ rentier nature. The first factor is patrimonialism.[14] In the UAE and Qatar, enlarged family rule supersedes any traditional “class” domination: the local capitalist class—more precisely, the fraction of it that does not belong to the ruling family—is entirely subservient to those ruling families. The second factor is the economic security provided by natural resources, hydrocarbons especially. This peculiarity grants individual rulers considerable discretion in that it (partially) frees them from the imperative of “economic rationality”, an imperative which constrains those governing ordinary capitalist states.
And yet, while relatively liberated from economic dictates, the rulers of Qatar and the UAE are subject to a powerful non-economic constraint in conducting their affairs. Standing at the helm of very rich but small states, they are vulnerable and prone to attract hostile designs. As such, both regimes need the protection of a major power – even to hedge against their own GCC big brother, the Saudi kingdom, whose territorial ambitions they fear. As a point of fact, both the UAE and Qatar owe their independent existence to British domination of the Gulf. Without it, there is little doubt that the Saudis would have annexed their territories to the kingdom they built a century ago by way of military expansion. The waning of British hegemony in the Gulf after the closure of the Suez Canal in 1967 naturally prompted a search for a new protector, the need for which was made undeniable after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Insofar as a US military intervention was what it took to restore the Kuwaiti Emir on his throne, it was a foregone conclusion that the United States would become the regional hegemon that both Abu Dhabi and Qatar deem indispensable to court. Indeed, courting Washington is the two emirates’ only significant common foreign policy denominator.
An Antagonism of Use to Empire
The next question needing answering concerns what the triangular relationship between the UAE, Qatar, and the United States means for regional and global affairs. What service, if any, does Washington derive from having these two rivals each call for protection? What do their engagements with the hegemon reveal about Washington’s own regional political choices and trajectory?
One must begin by considering how the UAE and Qatar’s are inserted into the regional hegemonic system run by Washington. The two emirates are imbricated, to different degrees, within the dissensus that animates the American foreign policy community and divides ruling circles. Contrarily to the old view that foreign policy tends to be bipartisan in the United States, there have always been important differences in the field, either between Democrats and Republicans, or transversally, between various opinion or pressure groups and lobbies from across the partisan divide. The heated debate about NATO’s future and engagement with post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s offers one emblematic instance of how differing foreign policy views clash within the US establishment.[15] Discord towards the upheaval that shook the Middle East and North Africa starting from 2011 offers a second. In the latter case, the differences between Abu Dhabi and Qatar would coincide with differences within the US establishment.
The UAE and Qatar represented and vouched for the two alternatives that Washington ultimately considered in confronting what came to be known as the Arab Spring. Qatar backed the option of containment through co-optation by means of the Muslim Brotherhood.[16] Abu Dhabi (and the Saudi kingdom), meanwhile, stumped for more classically-styled conservative counter-revolutions, except in Libya, where Gaddafi had long been a thorn in the side.[17]
The Obama administration clearly favored the Qatari option. It relied on Doha to mediate with local MB branches in the countries affected by the regional shockwave and delegated Qatar the task of convincing the movement to collaborate with Washington. Everywhere it could, the administration also encouraged compromises between old regime forces and the opposition in which the MB played a leading or hegemonic role. This policy achieved some success in Morocco and Yemen (and later in Tunisia). It failed most spectacularly in Egypt, where the military overthrow of the democratically elected MB president in 2013, one year only after his election, signaled the defeat of the Qatari option.[18] The Trump administration, contrarily, preferred and advanced the UAE-Saudi axis. Trump’s first presidential visit abroad was to Riyadh, where Washington’s Arab allies gathered to meet him in May 2017 along with rulers of other Muslim countries. Two weeks after that visit, the Saudi-UAE axis mobilized a regional boycott of Qatar, aggravated by a blockade of the peninsula, which ended only two weeks before Donald Trump relinquished power in January 2021 in favor of Obama’s former vice-president Joe Biden.
The coincidence between intra-GCC differences and differences among US ruling circles has translated into different alignments of GCC players in US domestic politics. Doha’s relation with the Obama administration was much warmer than Abu Dhabi’s and Riyadh’s, a difference compounded by differing attitudes towards Iran. Whereas Qatar welcomed the nuclear deal that the Obama administration concluded with Tehran in 2015, the Saudi and Emirati rulers resented it. Conversely, the Abu Dhabi-Riyadh axis rejoiced when Donald Trump entered the White House. The axis is even suspected of helping him get into office via illicit financial support.[19] The Biden administration has blurred the lines, rekindling the privileged relationship with Qatar. Overall, it is a safe guess that both Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, like the Israeli government of Benyamin Netanyahu, wish for Donald Trump to win the presidential election in November while Doha certainly favors Kamala Harris.
Regardless of how the camps align within Washington, the fact is that both Abu Dhabi and Qatar play useful roles for the United States. The two emirates’ sharp contrast in foreign policy strategy is, in fact, a boon for Washington’s policy in the extended Middle East. After all, their opposing stances widen the range of options that Washington can take advantage of in the region. Even while sidling up to the UAE, Trump could still lean on Qatar to mediate the negotiations with the Taliban which ultimately allowed the United States’ withdrawal from the Afghan quagmire. As discussed at the outset, the Biden administration is relying on both Qatar and Abu Dhabi in dealing with Israel’s onslaught on Gaza. On balance, then, the two emirates’ following of divergent paths affords an opportunity-enhancing complementarity to the United States. Their rivalry actually buttresses US hegemonic interests.
The author thanks Colin Powers for his skillful editing of this article.
[1] According to the UAE’s official government portal: https://u.ae/en/about-the-uae/the-seven-emirates/abu-dhabi
On the whole, the World Bank reported a GDP of $504 billion for the United Arab Emirates (UAE, the Abu Dhabi-led federation) in 2023.
[2] Bank Audi, “Qatar Economic Report: May 2024”, Report (2024).
[3] Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute, “Top 100 largest sovereign wealth fund rankings by total assets”, Report (2024).
[4] See: Colin Powers, “Capital’s emirates”, Sidecar: New Left Review (May 29, 2024).
Adam Hanieh, Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East (Cambridge University Press: August 2018).
[5] International Institude for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 124:1 (2024).
[6] The two positions have been paired since the establishment of the UAE constitution in 1971, which marked the termination of British administration of the so-called Trucial States.
[7] Barak Ravid, “Scoop: U.S., Israel and UAE held a secret meeting on Gaza war ‘day after’ plan”, Axios (July 23, 2024).
[8] Andrew England and Chloe Cornish, “UAE willing to join a multinational force for Gaza”, Financial Times (July 18, 2024).
[9] As head of the PA’s security forces, Dahlan, in collaboration with the George W. Bush White House, organised and directed the failed attempt to oust Hamas from power in Gaza by force in 2007. Upon later falling out with PA president Mahmoud Abbas over succession plans, Dahlan took refuge in Abu Dhabi, where he has since served as a key adviser to Mohamed bin Zayed.
See: David Rose, “The Gaza bombshell”, Vanity Fair (April 2008).
Adam Rasgon and Patrick Kingsley, “A Palestinian exile champions an Arab vision for Gaza”, New York Times (February 14, 2024).
[10] See: Staff writer, “UAE and the Muslim Brotherhood: a story of rivalry and hatred”, Middle East Monitor (June 15, 2017).
[11] Qatar participated in the NATO-led anti-Gaddafi campaign in 2011 and initially joined the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen in 2015. It withdrew from Yemen in 2017 after it got boycotted by a range of GCC as well as other Arab and Muslim states led by the UAE and the Saudi kingdom trying to force it to severe its relations with the MB.
[12] Kenneth Pollack, “Sizing up little Sparta: understanding UAE military effectiveness”, Report: American Enterprise Institute (2020).
[13] Abu Dhabi took part in the Saudi intervention in Yemen from the start. In 2018, it attempted to take control of the Yemeni island of Socotra, strategically located in the pathway to the Red Sea. This attempt was thwarted by Saudi counter-intervention on the island, forcing Abu Dhabi to backtrack. Two years later, the UAE completed its troops’ withdrawal from Yemen.
[14] Gilbert Achcar, “The crisis is permanent: Middle East and North Africa after 2011”, Against the Current (2024).
[15] Gilbert Achcar, The New Cold War: The United States, Russia and China from Kosovo to Ukraine (Saqi Books: 2023).
[16] The MB rapidly came to the fore in 2011, taking over the leadership of uprisings in most countries where they burst out, Bahrain excluded. Even though the Brotherhood did not initiate any of those uprisings, it managed to get to take the reins as the most powerful organised force in the opposition, benefitting from funding and media backing from Qatar.
[17] The UAE and Saudi states played a key role in helping the Bahraini monarchy quell the uprising that threatened its throne, whereas Qatar was suspected of sympathizing with the opposition. The UAE and the Saudi kingdom were later led to support Syria’s opposition when the civil war took a sharp sectarian character in that country. Riyadh—for which Sunni anti-Shia sectarianism had been the main ideological tool in countering the appeal of Iran’s Islamic Republic—could not avoid standing with the Sunni opposition against the Iran-backed Alawi-dominated regime of Bashar al-Assad. In both Libya and Syria however, the GCC political rivals ended up supporting rival factions of the opposition: Abu Dhabi vs. Qatar in Libya and the Saudi kingdom vs. Qatar in Syria. Riyadh chose to remain on the sidelines in Libya while Abu Dhabi kept mostly aloof in Syria.
[18] Gilbert Achcar, Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprisings (Saqi Books: 2016).
[19] The UAE’s ambassador in Washington played a key role in linking up with the Trump campaign, which is why Abu Dhabi had the most privileged relation of all Arab governments with the Trump administration. The foreign policy achievement which Donald Trump is the proudest of—which conveniently took place amid his 2020 presidential campaign, thus boosting itis the Abraham Accords that led to the establishment of official diplomatic relations between Israel and each of the UAE and Bahrain, soon followed by Morocco and the Sudanese military junta. Abu Dhabi was the architect of this achievement.
Staff writer, “Report: Saudis, UAE funneled millions to Trump 2016 campaign”, Al Jazeera (February 25, 2020).
‘, ‘post_title’ => ‘Rivals in the Service of Empire: Abu Dhabi, Qatar and the United States’, ‘post_excerpt’ => ”, ‘post_status’ => ‘publish’, ‘comment_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘ping_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘post_password’ => ”, ‘post_name’ => ‘rivals-in-the-service-of-empire-abu-dhabi-qatar-and-the-united-states’, ‘to_ping’ => ”, ‘pinged’ => ”, ‘post_modified’ => ‘2024-09-03 09:14:12’, ‘post_modified_gmt’ => ‘2024-09-03 07:14:12’, ‘post_content_filtered’ => ”, ‘post_parent’ => 0, ‘guid’ => ‘https://noria-research.com/mena/?p=532’, ‘menu_order’ => 0, ‘post_type’ => ‘post’, ‘post_mime_type’ => ”, ‘comment_count’ => ‘0’, ‘filter’ => ‘raw’, )Ouarzazate is a beautiful town in south-central Morocco. An important holiday destination nicknamed the “door of the desert,” it is where major films such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Mummy (1999), Gladiator (2000), and Kingdom of Heaven (2005) were shot—and where parts of Game of Thrones were set. But Ouarzazate is not only renowned for its splendour. Since 2016, it is where one of the grandest solar energy projects in the world has come to sit. Marketed as an initiative to end Morocco`s dependency on hydrocarbon imports, the project provides electricity to more than a million Moroccans and is constitutive of a wider effort meant to put the country on a “green path.” A closer look, however, invites serious doubts about the costs and benefits of the venture.
In the first instance, there is the dispossession at the origins of it all: The 3,000 hectare solar facility was built on land historically used by Amazigh pastoralists, who neither consented to nor subsequently accrued much benefit from its functioning. In the second, there is the project’s financing. Debts of USD9 billion were taken on from the World Bank, European Investment Bank (EIB) and others for the plant’s construction, all of which are backed by state guarantees. As such, it is the Moroccan taxpayer ultimately on the hook should anything go wrong. Thirdly, there is economic viability. The project, structured as a public–private partnership (PPPs), has recorded annual deficits of around €80 million since launch. As is so often the case with PPPs—legal arrangements which facilitate the privatization of profits and socialization of losses—these have been covered by the public purse. Fourthly, there are the social and ecological bills: The Ouarzazate plant relies upon concentrated solar power (CSP), which necessitates extensive water use for cooling down the system and cleaning the solar panels. In a semiarid region like Ouarzazate, this has implied diverting limited water resources away from households and farms.
Nor is the case of Ouarzazate’s mega solar project exceptional. In Midelt, 450km northeast of Ouarzazate, the same story of land grabbing and decarbonisation by dispossession is playing out. There, the construction of the largest hybrid solar plant in the world—a facility combining CSP with Photovoltaic (PV) technologies—again advances at the expense of local pastoralists. Per Hassan El Ghazi, a young shepherd:
“Our profession is pastoralism, and now this project has occupied our land where we graze our sheep. They do not employ us in the project, but they employ foreigners. The land in which we live has been occupied. They are destroying the houses that we build…In the end, we are invisible and we do not exist for them.”
Pundits and activists have dubbed projects like those in Ouarzazate and Midelt as ‘green grabbing’: Schemes where ecological objectives are used for orchestrating land theft and other forms of dispossession. Worryingly, the appropriation of land and resources a la “green grabbing” are becoming increasingly common. Not only observed in the installation of solar and wind farms, appropriations are also present in conservation and carbon credit projects that deprive indigenous communities of their land and territories and in the confiscation of communal lands for biofuel production.
The reality of climate breakdown is already visible across the Middle East and North Africa, undermining the ecological and socioeconomic basis of life. Mitigating breakdown’s consequence will of course require a drastic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and a rapid transition towards renewable energies. In view of the troubles evinced in Ouarzazate and Midelt however, questions on the risks and dangers presented by an energy transition beg asking. Might not the great green push maintain the same practices of dispossession and exploitation that currently prevail—might it merely reproduce injustices and exclusions which have plagued the Middle East and North Africa for decades?
The Bankruptcy of the International Climate Talks
Every year, the world\’s political leaders, advisers, media and corporate lobbyists gather for the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) on the issue of climate change. And yet, despite the threat facing the planet growing more proximate and existential with each passing year, governments are doing little to arrest the growth of carbon emissions. After three decades of what the Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg has called ‘blah blah blah’, it has become evident that international climate talks of these types are without substance or ambition. Hijacked by corporate power and private interests, they promote false profit-making solutions like carbon trading and so-called ‘net-zero’ and ‘nature-based solutions.’ Contrarily, they eschew the imperative of forcing industrialised nations and fossil fuel companies to reduce carbon emissions and leave fossil fuels in the ground.
With COP28 held in Dubai, UAE, in 2023, the Arab region has hosted the climate talks five times since the COP’s inception in 1995: COP7 (2001) and COP22 (2016) in Marrakech, Morocco; COP18 (2012) in Doha, Qatar; and COP27 (2022) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. The yield from these gatherings are minimal, as the most recent iterations can attest. Yes, COP27, held in Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022, achieved an agreement on Payment for Loss and Damage which has been lauded by some as an important step in making richer countries accountable for the damage caused by climate change in the global South. Alas, as the agreement lacks clear funding and enforcement mechanisms, it seems likely to meet the same fate as the broken promise (first made in COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009) of providing $100 billion in climate finance by 2020. The lack of seriousness at COP28, meanwhile, was signalled by the UAE’s appointment of Sultan al-Jaber, CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, as conference president. As Al-Jaber’s example makes plain, the same principals and interests which have driven climate change that are now shaping the response to it. The ultimate goals of these persons and corporate entities is to maintain existing power structures and to protect (if not grow) private profitability.
Despite calling for a climate transition (including in the Arab region), it is these goals—profit and power— which also underline the interventions of international financial institutions (IFIs) and northern governments. Like the World Bank and IMF, the development agencies of northern governments—including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the EU, and the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ)—are wedded to a capitalist (and often corporate-led) energy transition rather than one led by and for working people. Their analysis of climate change and the needed transition is therefore circumscribed if not dangerous, likely to reproduce the patterns of dispossession and resource plunder that characterise the prevailing fossil fuel regime
For the Middle East and North Africa, further privatisation of water, land, resources, energy and even the atmosphere itself is at the heart of the green transition being followed. And though private sector mediation of the energy transition is not unique to the region, it is comparatively advanced. The dominance of private interests within Morocco’s solar strategies have already been touched on. Similar developments are evinced in Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia. In Tunisia’s case, in fact, a major push is under way to expand the privatisation of the country’s renewable energy sector, principally by furnishing foreign investors with sizable incentives for producing green energy in the country, including for export. Tunisian law—modified in 2019—even allows for the use of agricultural land for renewable projects. Inasmuch as the country suffers from acute food dependency (as was starkly revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic and after the outbreak of war in Ukraine), the wisdom of such provisions is up for dispute.
Green colonialism
In the constructs of the world’s power brokers, the Arabian deserts (Sahara) are often described as vast and empty lands. Conceived within these frames, these territories are presented as Eldorados of renewable energy for a Europe in desperate need of cheap clean energy. Pervading prevailing discourses and policy plans when it comes to the energy transition in the region, then, is an unmissable ‘green colonial’ logic.
The emergence of green colonialism—or the extension of the colonial relations of plunder and dispossession to the green era of renewable energies, an extension which pushes costs onto peripheral countries and communities while prioritizing the energy and environmental needs (such as water) of one region of the world over another—should give us all pause. It threatens, after all, to reproduce the systems of production and consumption which have generated such profound inequality, impoverishment, and dispossession to date. Unsurprisingly, green colonial dynamics in the MENA are most discernible in the renewable projects being erected in occupied territories such as Palestine, the Golan Heights, and Western Sahara.
In Western Sahara, lands occupied illegally by the Moroccan Kingdom since 1975, there are currently three operational wind farms. A fourth is also under construction in Boujdour, while planning papers reveal a number of others in the works. Each of the operational wind farms in question is owned by Nareva, one of the many firms on the books of the Moroccan royal family’s holding company. Notably, also getting in on green colonial investment in occupied Western Sahara is Saudi Arabia. In the latter’s case, solar energy is the main play. Back in November 2016—at the time of the COP22 climate talks—Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power signed an agreement with Masen, the Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy, to develop and operate a complex of three solar PV power stations. Two of the power stations that ultimately came online, today generating 100 MW of energy, are located in Western Sahara (in El Aaiún and Boujdour). Plans have also been issued for ACWA to construct a third solar plant in Western Sahara in El Argoub, near Dakhla. The coloniality of these ventures is difficult to miss: they entrench the occupation of Western Sahara by deepening Morocco’s capital deployments and extractive capacity, with the complicity of foreign capital and companies.
In occupied Palestine, similar if not more brutal dynamics are evinced. These iterate from a Zionist project which has long since rendered Palestine an empty and parched desert—and which has justified itself on the claim of making the desert bloom. As pertains to green colonialism in particular, Israel’s efforts expanded upon the signing of the Abraham Accords with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan in 2020. Thereafter, agreements for jointly implementing environmental projects concerning renewable energy, agri-business and water were signed in rapid succession. Eco-normalization—or the use of ‘environmentalism’ to normalize Israeli oppression and the ecological injustices resulting from it in the Arab region and beyond—has provided essential cover for green colonialism.[1]
Evidence of Israeli green colonialism are now abundant. During the climate talks in Sharm El Sheikh (COP27) in November 2022, Jordan and Israel signed a UAE-brokered Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). The MoU bound the signatories to continue a feasibility study on two interlinked projects, Prosperity Blue and Prosperity Green, which together constitute Project Prosperity. In substance, the project stipulates that Jordan buy 200 million cubic metres of water annually from an Israeli water desalination station. Per the agreement, the latter is to be established on the Mediterranean coast, and to use power produced by a 600 megawatt (MW) solar photovoltaic plant constructed in Jordan by Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s leading state-owned renewable energy company. A virtuous cycle it would seem—except for the fact of the water looting that is at the core of it all. Indeed, Mekorot, the Israeli entity managing the water desalination part of the scheme, is perhaps the main cog in Israeli water apartheid. The firm not only drains the Jordan River at its discretion but controls the vast majority of Palestine’s water resources in the West Bank—using its authority to keep settlement swimming pools full while Palestinian industry and agriculture is left in a permanently precarious state.
In addition, in August 2022, Jordan joined Morocco, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and Oman in signing another MoU with two Israeli energy companies—Enlight Green Energy (ENLT) and NewMed Energy. This MoU concerned projects for wind and solar energy production and energy storage to be hosted within the countries of the Arab signatories. Like the Prosperity Blue and Green venture, these ones further boost Israel’s reputation as a hub for creative renewable energy technologies. Tacitly, they also enable Israel to continue its settler colonial project while entrenching its geopolitical power in the Middle East and North Africa.
The Gulf in Arab Green colonialism
The involvement of Gulf companies such as Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power and Abu Dhabi’s Masdar in the green energy projects referenced speaks to hierarchies and unevenness structuring the state and class relations in the MENA region today. For a number of decades running, the Gulf monarchies have ascended to the position of a sub-imperial force. The ruling regimes and leading capitalists of the Gulf are not only richer than their Arab neighbours. They mediate the syphoning of surplus value at the regional level, reproducing core–periphery-like relations within the MENA via processes of extraction, marginalisation and accumulation by dispossession. What is more, their sub-imperial reach is swiftly expanding beyond the MENA and into eastern Africa. And one of the mechanisms being leveraged toward this end is a nominally green one: carbon offsets projects. Blue Carbon, a Dubai-based company owned by a member of the emirate’s royal family, for instance, has recently signed agreements with Kenya, Liberia, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania to generate carbon credits (read pollution permits) from millions of hectares of forests. In Liberia, this amounts to 10% of the whole surface of the country while in Zimbabwe, it is equivalent to 20% of the country’s landmass. These carbon credits projects are central to the market-based solutions which have been promoted in international climate talks (and which were aggressively promoted at COP28 in Dubai) in 2023.
Hydrogen: the new energy frontier in North Africa
In recent years, states and firms of the global north have taken to promoting hydrogen as a ‘clean’ alternative fuel essential for the energy transition. Presently, most hydrogen production stems from the extraction of fossil fuels and is, as a result, tied up with significant carbon emissions. The process can be made cleaner by deploying carbon capture technologies. The best option when it comes to hydrogen, however, is to avoid fossil fuel extraction altogether and instead use electrolysers to split water molecules. As this can be done with electricity from renewable energy sources, the final yield is called green hydrogen.
The European Union, swayed by the lobbying of various interest groups, has shown itself especially keen on hydrogen. In 2020, it positioned the product at the center of the framework of the European Green Deal and named the scaling of green hydrogen production—through local extraction and the establishment of a steady supply from Africa—a priority. The Russian invasion of Ukraine only lifted hydrogen’s profile further. Thereafter, it became a key plank of REPowerEU, the European Commission’s plan to end dependence on Russian gas. Commission Vice President, Frans Timmermans, told the European Parliament in May 2022 “I strongly believe in green hydrogen as the driving force of our energy system of the future. […] and I also strongly believe that Europe is never going to be capable to produce its own hydrogen in sufficient quantities.”
In terms of numbers and figures, the European Commission has quadrupled its hydrogen production target for 2030 from 5 million tons to 20 million tons. Though recent studies have shown the EU’s objectives to be unrealistic, their designation has had the second order effect of promoting more fossil fuel exploration and exploitation. Apart from the green variety, after all, hydrogen production requires fossil fuel extraction. Indeed, it bears mentioning that major European oil and gas companies count amongst hydrogen’s biggest champions, recognizing it as a back door to the continuation of the fossil fuel operations.
Saliently, roughly half of the 20 million tons of hydrogen that Europe seeks is to be imported, with North Africa as the primary supplier. In 2020, the Moroccan government entered into a partnership with Germany to develop the first green hydrogen plant on the continent. According to certain estimates, the country can take up to 4 percent of the global Power-to-X market (production of ‘green molecules’) by 2030, given its ‘exceptional renewable resources and its successful track record in deploying large scale renewable plants’. French firms have moved into Morocco as well. France’s Total Eren launched a hybrid production project which is to combine solar energy, wind energy, hydrogen and green ammonia, with investments estimated at more than €9 billion. The project covers the entire green hydrogen value chain, from wind energy production and photovoltaic power to hydrogen export. Work on it is to commence in 2025, with hydrogen production expected to come online by 2027.
In the aggregate, Total Eren’s efforts will require a staggering 170,000 hectares of land, lands which just so happen to be in Guelmim-Oued Noun (some of the land is situated in occupied Western Sahara). The Moroccan state, claiming itself as sole proprietor of the lands in question, has ensured they will be available. Nor is Total Eren the only company angling for a hydrogen-powered land grab in Morocco and Western Sahara. Australian company CWP Global is also looking to sign an agreement with the Moroccan government to build a $20 billion mega green hydrogen and green ammonia project there.
Conclusion
The energy transition advancing in the Middle East and North Africa is premised on the assumption that any step towards renewable energy production is to be welcomed—that any shift away from fossil fuels production is worthwhile. It is organized, moreover, around export-oriented plans designed primarily to service the consumption needs of Europe. As such, this transition belies essential questions of ownership, winners and losers, costs and benefits, and power relations. In a macro sense, it is also inviting a new era of green colonialism.
The fight for climate justice and a just transition must take into account the differences in responsibilities and vulnerabilities between global North and South. Ecological and climate debt must be paid to countries in the global South, which happen to be the hardest hit by global warming, and which have been locked into a system of predatory extractivism by the workings of global capitalism. The green transition and talk about sustainability cannot become another façade for neocolonial schemes of plunder and domination.
In many ways, the climate crisis and the needed green transition offer a chance to reshape global politics. Coping with the dramatic transformation requires a break with existing militarist, colonial and neoliberal projects. Survival, never mind the flourishing of societies, demand the adoption of a truly democratized process of decision-making. Within this, communities poised to be most affected need to be granted their rightful weight. Universal rights must also be respected, and the needs of the collective have to be privileged.
Materially, the endpoint of the energy transition needs to be one in which everybody has enough energy as well as clean and safe environments to live in: To wit, a future with an ecosocialist horizon that is in harmony with the revolutionary demands of the African and Arab uprisings: popular sovereignty, bread, freedom and social justice.
[1] It is worth noting that normalisation between the Moroccan kingdom and Israel in December 2020 was secured by the imperial patron (the US under Trump) agreeing to recognise Morocco’s sovereignty over the disputed territory of Western Sahara.
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