Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region has received much critical acclaim since its publication with Pluto Press in October 2023. Here, while acknowledging the usefulness of such a volume in the current climate and highlighting several must-read chapters, Max Ajl sees a missed opportunity in how the book is framed by its co-editors, Hamza Hamouchene and Katie Sandwell. Missing a broader anti-imperialist politics, among other issues, Ajl argues that the edited collection loses its political edge and is unable to help address the problems it identifies.
The Israeli-US genocide in Palestine has re-focused global attention on colonialism and its centrality to capitalism. And it has shown peoples’ need to live free of violence in a state safe from external onslaught. These issues, under the umbrella of the national question, have long been part of liberation thought. Yet, while there are important traditions of Third World political ecology – indeed, thinkers like Amilcar Cabral and the academic field generally trace their taproots to colonial and neo-colonial under-development and ecological destruction[1] – the systematic oppression of entire nations has not necessarily been front-and-center amidst that paramount concern of contemporary environmentalism: climate change, and plans to allay, mitigate, or simply survive it.
In this context, it is useful to have the important collection of the political ecology of accelerating North-South plunder and dispossession in the Arab region assembled in Hamza Hamouchene and Katie Sandwell’s edited volume, Dismantling Green Colonialism, recently out from Pluto. The book’s scope spans Morocco to the Arab Gulf, stopping on the way in Egypt and Palestine. Within the region, or rather in an Arab region, where political manifestations of imperialism and anti-imperialism, including collapse of state sovereignty, sanctions, war, and resistance are front-and-center, the collection (which swiftly appeared in Arabic translation) brings useful nuance and information about the economic aspects of imperialism to its readership.
The editors use the overall approach of an integrated world system: “Rich local elites collaborate with multinational corporations and international financial institutions,” producing a region “integrated into the global capitalist economy in a subordinate position: colonial/imperial powers influenced or forced the countries of the region to structure their economies around the extraction and export of resources…coupled with the import of high-value industrial goods. The result was a large-scale transfer of wealth to the imperial centres at the expense of local development and ecosystems.” Such “unequal and asymmetric relations…preserve…the role of Arab countries as exporters of natural resources, such as oil and gas, and primary commodities that are heavily dependent on water and land, such as monoculture cash crops.”
The chapters cover a wide range, and some are must-reads for those wishing to better understand the political ecology of Arab region capitalism. The chapter on Egyptian electricity commodification by Mohamed Gad, for example, is excellent in showing the erratic advance of subsidy removal and marketization of energy that is a critical tool in dismantling the Arab socialist social compact. The 2014 energy crisis was used to replace public with private finance in the energy sector, turning public energy providers from institutions tasked with providing a service to ones tasked with selling a service in market competition with private firms. He also usefully challenges the dominant World Bank interpretation of that history. He also explains how pro working-class policies within the state were slowly excised under various stages of non-democratic rule.
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On Jordan, the work of Asmaa Mohammad Amin shows how the state, through phased restructuring, cleared the way for a withdrawal from overall electricity distribution networks, leading in the 2000s to mixed state-private compacts in the generation sector. She then narrates capitalist capture of the renewables transition, leading to its eventual stalling.
Karen Rignall’s wonderful chapter on Morocco is based on fine-grained empirical work on the class contradictions in the so-called “communities” affected by mega-renewable construction. She does not merely show the global commodity chains linking plant construction – chains whose links are often connected to fossil power – but furthermore asks, “how do we translate these complex relations for residents so that they can make the links between their local realities and global processes”? She furthermore explains how movements often seek to socially embed environmentally destructive projects, rather than merely to stop them. It is a model of discussing social agents of transformation through careful economic anthropology, careful empirical work, and integration of theory and research.
In a gem of a chapter, Chafik Ben Rouine and Flavie Roche discuss the prospects and possibilities of a neo-colonial versus sovereign green transition in Tunisia, which they define as “democracy and sovereignty over public goods and the environment.” They show how “focusing on communities’ interests in the design of an energy transition must involve taking steps away from the current financial, profit-based system and include consideration of other dimensions…the social and environmental sectors that may depend on those sources in various ways. The idea is to get away from narrow visions and goals and to consider the way in which renewable energies should be developed.” They link industrialization and wind turbine manufacturing to the possible renewable transition in the broader framework of the struggle over privatization or the maintenance of state ownership of STEG, the state energy company.
Indeed, Rouine and Roche tie industrialization and energy transition to making jobs, using a holistic analysis for how to conceive of just transition so as to avoid an over-focus on small-scale agriculture that sidesteps the need for a multi-sectoral development model to soak up the region’s labor reservoirs. Job creation has to include stimulating all branches of a given sector. As they write, “In this respect, the local production of the technologies required for renewable energy projects would offer strong potential for new job creation, since low dependency on imports means more employment.”
Overall, the book laudably brings to our attention important aspects of the concrete struggles local forces face against neo-colonialism, particularly within the energy sector. Indeed, they are not merely accounts of action but map out what could be done on the local, sub-national, and national scales to bring more justice to the much-ballyhooed “green transitions” that dominate development chatter. On their own, they are – with a few exceptions – informative and valuable studies.
It is unfortunate, then, that the book is far less than the sum of its parts, in no small part attributable to the confused, confusing, contradictory, and erratic theoretical and methodological armory deployed by Hamouchene and Sandwell, which recurs, furthermore, in Hamouchene’s single-authored chapter, and most of the public press around the book. The apparatus, meant to frame and direct the reader, is oriented around the broadest questions, indeed the putative purpose of the book itself: what is the nature of the colonialist or imperialist system to which the authors refer, and what is its relationship with capitalism?
Their answer, in essence, is primary commodity or energy export. They argue that this orientation, and attendant regional under-development, is produced and reproduced through economic processes, and this form of neo-colonialism (which they confusingly label green colonialism) is the region’s major struggle. However, this is neither an accurate sociology of the region’s social formations, nor of the challenges they face. Nor do these inaccurate diagnoses point to the kinds of large-scale planning efforts required to break from underdevelopment, or the political shifts needed to move to large-scale integration, and regional and pan-Maghrebi or pan-Arab plans.
This inaccurate and partial portrait is painted through a series of errant brush strokes. First is the use of extractivism rather than social formation – the types of classes which exist in a society – and value flows, or how imperialism hoovers up labor-hours from the periphery. Hamouchene and Sandwell, notably, collapse the concrete materials whose trade produces underdevelopment, with underdevelopment itself. Yet, extractivism confuses a technical system – extraction of minerals like oil or under-processed agricultural riches – with a mode of accumulation.[2]
In fact, it is simplistic to argue that commodity export produces underdevelopment or that it is the sole or primary means of damaging Third World environments, especially in the late neo-colonial period. The US, for example, has been a major wheat supplier to the Arab region through PL-480 counter-insurgency food aid, an element of its domination of the region, and export-oriented industrialization has been a major mechanism of underdevelopment since the 1970s.
Treating primary commodities as the source of underdevelopment has the effect of reducing political ecology to its agrarian or resource-extraction components. The result is to mischaracterize the Arab-Iranian regions’ social formations, on multiple levels, even taking the economistic and empiricist approach – that is, considering what the region produces, rather than what the region has been prevented from producing, and even being, by imperial violence.
Taken as a regional aggregate, because of oil, primary goods certainly dominate exports, but Tunisia’s major exports, for example, are, by quantity, first, insulated wire and coming in fourth, men’s clothing; motor vehicle parts aren’t far behind. Plastics and electrical machinery are Egypt’s second and third exports. Saudi Arabia’s non-oil GDP is ever-increasing, while as Hanieh notes in his chapter, “the petrochemicals sector serves as another important conduit for private wealth accumulation in the Gulf.”
The region’s market-based interaction with the world system is simply not, when taken on a country-by-country basis, particularly extractive. Foregoing analysis of the political ecology of Arab world industrialization in fact sidesteps engagement with a rich literature examining the problems of the new international division of labor based on export-oriented industrialization, incubated at institutions like the Algerian Centre de recherches en économie appliquée or Dakar’s African Institute for Economic Development and Planning.
Elsewhere the term becomes a Procrustean bed into which ill-fitting facts are jammed. In an otherwise excellent study on the neglected Sahrawi struggle, wherein Joanna Allan, Hamza Lakhal and Mahmoud Lemaadel carefully document underdevelopment indexed in exposure to energy shortages, they refer to “tourism and cultural appropriation…as forms of neocolonial extraction.”
Defining everything in reference to extraction is not helpful. Tourism is a service sector. It does not rely on extraction, but rather cheap wages, and such wages are simply part-and-parcel of dependent capitalism. Yet, there is little attention, throughout the book, to the mechanisms that ensure peripheral labor remains undervalued (labor reservoirs are mentioned, barely, yet the mechanisms to keep them in place are absent).
This connects to the second chief criticism. Although some chapters, on Jordan and Egypt, for example, clearly show the political production of regional neoliberalism, some of its driving pistons are erased: namely, violence. Imperialism is a sociological and political phenomenon not purely reducible to the transfers of wealth which it exists, in large part, to reinforce, nor reducible to national-box-constrained policy choices. Yemen, Libya, Iraq, and Syria are not covered (the editors’ acknowledgement of the gap does not really help the reader understand the reasons for the omission).
Yet, in each, war was a major causal mechanism of turns away from planning – as in Egypt and Syria in 1970 or Libya in the mid-1980s, or the destruction of Iraqi capacity to move to a more advanced stage of industrialization through decades of war and sanctions starting from 1980.
Indeed, in not attending to war, an opportunity is lost for thinking about the region as a region, because war, alongside oil, is now the Arab-Iranian region’s primary articulation with the world system – indeed, it is through war that the region is divided and demolished, and it is against war, through pan-Arabism, that economic development planning and popular sovereignty took shape and sharpened their edge.
Even obvious themes like weapons sales and their ecological consequences do not appear, while the politics of arms sales and defensive armoring – showing that imperially-induced violence is a critical obstacle to just transition – are not present. Hanieh, for example, in an otherwise empirically careful chapter, does not mention US basing or US arms sales in his account of the Gulf oil industry. Gulf sub-imperialism (or intraregional imperialism) is instead presented as largely interlaced with a new flow orientation to China.
This question of sovereignty brings us to the third central problem. Although the book promises a discussion of “green colonialism,” the book refrains from clarifying the distinction between neo-colonialism, and colonialism: a foreign entity controlling political power through violence, causing income reduction, famine, and genocide. More attention to sovereignty’s meaning and what was achieved through decolonization would have led to greater care and distinguishing between the terms.
As the chapter on Algeria states, “public sector institutions must also be managed better, and must be more transparent and accountable.” Indeed, the conceptual difference between the two can point at different strategies. Colonialism implies a struggle for national political sovereignty. Neo-colonialism implies, generally, a struggle for domestic social change, whether involving democratic struggle or otherwise. Meanwhile, military occupation and foreclosed sovereignty – in Iraq, Yemen, Syria – are generally absent in the book, which likewise does not discuss sanctions. Indeed, war is so widespread in the region that even the possibility of green planning is not possible outside considering how to achieve national sovereignty in Syria or national liberation in Yemen.
This is particularly jarring in that many of their “green” challenges manifest through vulnerability to natural disaster driven by previous cycles of imperial violence, as with the 2023 Libyan floods, or the salting of the earth through depleted uranium and white phosphorus in Iraq and the Gaza Strip. Furthermore, how indeed could the region’s resources – in Libya, for example – be placed at the service of the region’s people when imperialist-sowed instability metastasizes, destabilizing not merely North Africa but also the Sahel?
Such blind spots are not helped by a form of fashionable theoretical eclecticism which lurches into incoherence. “Green colonialism” is combined with citations to Walter Rodney and Samir Amin, yet also Patrick Bond and Adam Hanieh, authors whose understandings of capitalism are in fundamental contradiction, and who would agree with one another almost nowhere considering political strategy – Rodney was often a defender of Black nationalism while Bond’s “disdain for black nationalism” has been “blinding.”[3] Where does that leave the national question, then?
Now, why does all this chatter, matter? Why does it matter if we say neo-colonialism versus green colonialism? Some will be tempted to say this is scholarly quibbling, having nothing to do with activism (which perhaps it does not, if activism is reduced to the approved zones of engagement of the international NGO sector). Yet, it matters if we understand that these words are maps of a socio-political battlefield whose contours suggest maneuvering strategies.
The issue is not academic – indeed, what can it mean to imply that theory, the North Star of revolutionary practice, is the province of isolated scholars? – but rather speaks to the very heart of what it means to advocate for just transition. Does it, for example, require political sovereignty? Is that sovereignty national or regional? If political sovereignty is a necessary but insufficient condition for popular development, it is important to delineate how its absence weaves the Arab region into the world system.
Very simply, the US and Israel, as well as the Gulf states, target states or sub-state movements which harbor or arm asymmetric militia hostile to Israel and the US through semi-colonial or settler-colonial occupation, sanctions regimes or proxy warfare. So-called “fossil capitalism,” a frankly misleading terminology introduced by Andreas Malm, rests on the dominance-through-destruction of population centers and states with projects contradictory to the demands of US empire and accumulation.[4] The US agenda is to dismantle “any social platform from which the working class might potentially challenge the hold of US-led imperialism,” and furthermore to engrain “a state of defeat,” in the words of the Arab economist Ali Kadri.[5]
De-development in Syria and Yemen (registered in declining per capita Co2 emissions, and certainly having nothing to do with extractivism) has been part-and-parcel of inducing the regional defeats necessary to stabilize neo-colonialism in Algeria and Morocco as well as Saudi Arabian and Qatari imperialist subcontracting, and these connectivities must be made explicit. Furthermore, development is only permitted in states which do not challenge Israel. Meanwhile, the latter two Gulf states helped persecute the wars on Yemen and Syria on behalf of the US, a fact only obliquely adverted to, and that only once, in Christian Henderson’s chapter.
If “just transition” lacks social agents or a realistic understanding of the region’s insertion into global capitalism, it also tends to lack programmatic substance. Accordingly, there is an acute risk that the book falls into a folklorist and romantic approach to undoing “green colonialism.” Samir Amin’s delinking – practically the sole southern theory in the book other than extractivism – is more slogan than substance, and a chance is seriously missed for the authors and editors to think through what would truly be necessary to de-link.
For example, Saker el-Nour’s otherwise useful chapter on food sovereignty and ecologically unequal exchange argues that “just transition must empower the local population and redefine development as development that is based on participation, and the preservation and renewal of resources” (123). It is symptomatic of the muddiness of “just transition” discourse that perhaps the central question, agrarian reform and then accumulation from below on the Zimbabwean model, is unposed. Rather, the agrarian question is reduced to participation and ecological transition, a model that cannot speak to the desire and need for land to set in motion any process of auto-centered regional development.
Furthermore, agriculture cannot be warrened off from the macro-model. Agriculture will be central to any green transition within the region, as will energy system upgrading through democratic control over production and use. Yet these, in turn, demand to be nested in a larger project of sovereign industrialization, part-and-parcel of sovereign and auto-centered development, all of which must unfurl on a regional and pan-Arab scale, if it is to happen at all. Ben Rouine and Roche’s chapter is almost alone in thinking about just transition as a holistic economy-wide process enfolding industrialization. Elsewhere, the excellent work on Jordan clearly articulates a proposal for a region-wide pan-Arab energy market within the context of energy sovereignty – yet without mention of Jordanian neo-colonialism, US military basing, or the normalization treaty with Israel.
A plan for “just transition” must deal with this geopolitical contradiction that acts as an absolute barrier to the success of “movements from below” and structural transformation. Indeed, it was not so long ago that the New International Economic Order sought to bring together states to fight against unfair terms of trade, a project which foundered, amongst other shoals, on the US alliance with the Gulf States. The “region” is not just Gulf investments but a US-Gulf Cooperation Council-Israeli military and political alliance. It is, for example, unimaginable that the US would allow sovereign development in Tunisia or Algeria, were it on the agenda, and indeed the US role in promoting neo-colonialism in a US-allied neo-colonial Tunisia in the 1960s and 1970s is well-known.
Neglecting this geopolitical obstacle also means the authors and editors overlook key social agents required for a just transition. Generally, their notion of transition is rooted in economic or ecological struggles but does not extend to any discussion of the expulsion of imperial and colonial forces from the region. While Israel is mentioned, the broader military alliance against it is largely absent. Manal Shaqir, for example, clearly outlines the role of Israel and the neo-colonial Arab states in “eco-normalization” and resistance from West Bank ba’li agriculture. But sources of asymmetric (and indeed armed) resistance which have taken center-stage in the current period are not present. Similarly, Hanieh’s chapter refers to “popular movements aimed at challenging these regimes” in the GCC, yet does not mention Yemen’s Ansar Allah, which has destroyed Gulf oil infrastructure and more recently targeted Red Sea cargo ships.
As the region rapidly polarizes, it becomes clearer than ever that just transition requires Palestinian national liberation and the expulsion of US forces and their sectarian proxies. The forces fighting against Israel and America are to be found in popular discourse, and in the fields, but not in the collection under review. The actual forces fighting the US and Israel remain, simply, unmentionable – indeed, nearly banned from discussion in the academy. Such a gap means that the activist audience of Hamouchene and Sandwell’s book will have no clarity about how to orient to those forces, namely, those actually practicing resistance against the US – a matter which, in fact, is more concrete for Western radicals or revolutionaries than a kind of over-hyped “grassroots” or “movement to movement” solidarity with peoples’ struggles in North Africa and the Arab region, the political agenda implied by the book’s case selection.
Indeed, such a strategy, shorn of broader anti-imperialist politics, is not a vision to challenge “green colonialism.” It becomes essentially purported solutions to problems treatable by country-by-country or city-by-city development programs. Such fragmentation, foreshortening, and denial of politics is more or less the agenda of the international NGO sector, or for that matter the United Nations Development Program, albeit perhaps their more radical segments. These chapters, then, while on their own of considerable merit, lose their political edge, becoming a strategy for a just transition that will remain nice words on paper, and little more.
Max Ajl is a fellow at the Merian Center for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb, and the University of Ghent, and a researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment. He writes on Arab development and climate change, and his last book is A People’s Green New Deal. His writings can be found here: Max AJL | Researcher | Doctor of Philosophy | Université de Tunis, Tunis | ISGT | Research profile (researchgate.net).
Featured Image: Cover image of Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region (17 September 2024).
Notes
[1] Alejandro Pedregal and Alberto García Molinero, “The Early Socio-Ecological Dimensions of Tricontinental (1967–1971): A Sovereign Social Metabolism for the Third World,” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, August 30, 2024, 22779760241265565, https://doi.org/10.1177/22779760241265565.
[2] Álvaro García Linera, “Once Again on So-Called ‘Extractivism,’” MR Online (blog), April 29, 2013, https://mronline.org/2013/04/29/gl290413-html/.
[3] Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, “Intervention The Zimbabwe Question and the Two Lefts,” Historical Materialism 15 (August 31, 2007): 171–204.
[4] I elaborate on the incoherence of “fossil capitalism” in my Max Ajl, “Theories of Political Ecology: Monopoly Capital Against People and the Planet,” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 12, no. 1 (March 1, 2023): 12–50.
[5] Ali Kadri, Arab Development Denied: Dynamics of Accumulation by Wars of Encroachment (New York: Anthem Press, 2014), 7, 212.
