In a robust defence of his co-edited collection, Dismantling Green Colonialism, activist and author, Hamza Hamouchene, criticizes what he terms as Western ‘anti-imperialists par excellence’, who he says “parade their apparent intellectual superiority and condemn everyone else for failing to be genuinely radical and socialist”. Hamouchene argues against what he terms as a left politics that sermonises on the only right path to ‘genuine anti-colonial and anti-imperialist’ politics with the arrogance which, according to the author, is reminiscent of the colonialists. Hamouchene contends that in these dark times, when the forces of resistance and change are fatally injured and weak, time should not be wasted on sterile and divisive polemics.
By Hamza Hamouchene
Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region, the book I co-edited with my sister, comrade and Transnational Institute (TNI) colleague Katie Sandwell had an overwhelmingly positive reception and was highly acclaimed by many in academic and activist circles alike (and also became one of Pluto Press bestsellers). When we started on this book project, we were not anticipating that it would make such an important contribution towards the global discussions on climate justice, just transition and green (neo)colonialism. We are truly humbled by this achievement, which is a collective effort and a labour of love of so many authors, editors, reviewers, translators and publishers.
The book was published in Arabic, English and French (a shorter version with a focus on North Africa) in October 2023. Since then, it has also been translated into Spanish and published by the Latin American Social Science Council (CLACSO) in October 2024. A Portuguese version of the book will be published by the progressive Brazilian publisher Elefante later this year just in time for the COP30, the climate summit that will be held in Brazil in November. And finally, an Urdu version is planned for publication in Pakistan (Folio books), hopefully before the end of the year.
It has been inspiring to see how much discussion and debate the book has generated across more than one hundred online and in-person events we conducted across the Arab region, Europe, North America, Southern Africa, Latin America and Asia. Moreover, in the harrowing times of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the book has been used as a tool to centre Palestine liberation in the discussions around global climate justice in universities, activist workshops, trade unions forums and international gatherings such as climate summits.
Moreover, the book (in its various versions) has been added to several academic syllabuses in various universities in the world and is being used as an educational tool by climate justice and pro-Palestine activists. We are delighted that the book is having such a significant impact. For many in and outside our academic and activist networks, the book has become a foundational text for reflection and debate on the political economy of the “energy transition” in the Arab region and beyond: specifically in the sense that it can be seen as a starting point for more discussions while inviting deeper analysis and reflection on various themes relevant to extractivism, green grabbing, green (neo)colonialism, green capitalism, dependency, privatisation and liberalisation of the renewable energy sector etc,.
This brief, seemingly self-gratifying introduction does not mean that the book is exceptional or perfect. Far from it, we were aware of the book’s limitations, shortcomings and even contradictions when we were finalising the text before publication, some of which we outlined in the introduction. Our purpose has been and still is to bring various scholars and activists (mainly from the region) into dialogue with each other, and collectively challenge and counteract the neoliberal, (neo)colonial and largely euro-centric narratives and practices around the climate/ecological crisis.
In the many book reviews and exchanges we had with our fellow scholar-activists as well as in the discussions we had when launching the book in different parts of the world, we received critical but constructive feedback highlighting some of the blind spots and limitations, encouraging us (and others) to deepen the analysis, conduct more research and sharpen our arguments for the sake of the movements we work with. Furthermore, bringing regions and people into conversations with each other has been a major highlight of this project. I feel this has been a fulfilling and constructive part of the project – deepening critical and comradely debate has been largely achieved.
Neither comradely nor constructive
We were modest enough to always seek criticism from our peers and comrades. However, one hostile review by Max Ajl and published on ROAPE’s (Review of African Political Economy’s) website last September is neither comradely nor constructive. In fact, I would argue that it is largely disingenuous, seeped in sectarianism, condescension and pontification; it is what we call in Arabic Muzayada farigha, meaning an exercise of empty out-bidding by someone who regards themselves as superior intellectually and more faithful to certain theoretical frameworks and concepts. Muzayada (plural Muzayadat) leads the reviewer to misrepresent, distort, over-emphasise what is missing, and engage in intellectual out-bidding that is neither useful nor helpful, except for satisfying a desire to appear more radical.
In several passages, the reviewer says that the editors and contributors and those who celebrated the book are simply wrong. While it is technically possible that all of us are misguided and need to be enlightened by Ajl, I hope to show below how the reviewer is misrepresenting our arguments while trying to undermine us politically.
What is Ajl’s purpose? I would argue it is not about advancing academic scholarship and rigour but self-aggrandisement and pontification.
What makes this attack unacceptable in my view is that the reviewer is not from the Arab region, does not have a mastery of its languages, and has not lived in the region sufficiently to warrant the self-appellation as a ‘regional expert’. Sadly, what is described as ‘white privilege’, especially with certain pretentious white male academics knows no bounds and has little consideration for modesty and humility.
Unfortunately, our digital age reinforces this narcissistic behaviour and amplifies the most vocal among us. I dislike polemics and, despite their popularity on the left, I do not believe that they advance our struggles and strengthen our movements. However, I strongly believe that Ajl’s disingenuous review requires a response.
When I first read the review, I thought it was better to ignore it. Many comrades told me that it was not worth engaging such a destructive review. However, since this review has been published in ROAPE, a publication I have long respected, I feel compelled to respond. ROAPE, I believe, should not be a platform of sectarian, self-righteous and condescending commentary.
I will focus on arguing why I think the review is disingenuous in what it attempts to say under the pretence of critical academic objectivity. I believe that the primary goal is character assassination.
To begin with, Ajl lumps everyone in the same basket, characterising the book editors and the Transnational Institute (TNI) they work for as part of the NGO-industrial complex that needs to be damned. We have our own critique of NGOs but the tendency to see things in such stark dichotomies (black or white) would lead us to make the same analysis about all academia, ignoring the fact that these are terrains of struggle and areas of resistance, even if they are dwindling and getting weaker.
Environmental imaginaries, positionality and making an argument
In our book introduction (and through other chapters), we argued that the colonial gaze and environmental orientalism still shape the discourse (as well as the materiality) around environmental questions in the region I come from. The American geographer Diana K. Davis argues that Anglo-European environmental imaginaries in the nineteenth century represented the environment in the Arab world most often as “alien, exotic, fantastic, or abnormal, and frequently as degraded in some way”. She aptly uses Edward Said’s concept of orientalism as a framework to interpret early Western representations of the Middle Eastern and North African environment as displaying a form of ‘environmental orientalism’. This environment was narrated by those who became the imperial powers, primarily Britain and France, as a ‘strange and defective’ one, as compared to Europe’s ‘normal and productive’ environment. This implied the need for some kind of intervention “to improve, restore, normalise and repair [it]”.
This deceptive representation of presumed environmental degradation and ecological disaster was used by colonial authorities to justify all sorts of dispossession, as well as policies designed to control the populations of the region and their environments. In North Africa (and later in the Mashriq), the French constructed an environmental narrative of degradation in order to implement dramatic economic, social, political and environmental changes. According to this perspective, the natives and their environments warranted the ‘blessings’ of the ‘mission civilisatrice’ and required the attention of the white man.
In our book, we showed how orientalist representations of our environments and landscapes – with their land and resources as well its peoples – still persist and support (neo)colonial plundering today. There are various iterations of that orientalist discourse. One of them is where deserts of the Arab region are deceptively represented (or rather mis-represented) as vast empty lands, sparsely populated (the never-worn out Terra Nullius narrative), representing a renewable energy eldorado so Europe can secure its cheap green electricity while it continues its energy-intensive production and consumption patterns.
The other is where Israel portrays Palestine pre-1948 as a parched desert that has become a “blooming oasis” with the establishment of the Zionist state of Israel. Israeli policies and practices need to be placed within a genealogy of European colonial racism that has manifested itself on the land in a settler-colonial manner – a land otherwise barren, and unproductive. We can even push the analysis, inspired by the work of Shourideh Molavi and Eyal Weizman at Forensic Architecture, and argue that colonialism (either in its settler or neocolonial form) can be seen as a process of slow desertification and ecological domination and violence.
Why am I writing about this here?
The answer is simple: in the book, we rightly criticise our orientalist capitalist and imperialist enemies but that critique also stands against those self-proclaimed leftist “experts” and “pundits” whom the Australian Lebanese scholar Ghassan Hage calls the Terra Nullius anti-colonialists/anti-imperialists. To quote Hage directly:
While from Australia to Israel, we are more than well acquainted with terra nullius colonialists who treat the people of the lands they colonise as invisible and/or non-existent; terra nullius anti-colonialists likewise are leftists who treat the geopolitical struggles against colonialism and imperialism as if happening in territories devoid of the humans that occupy them and with no consideration for the existence, aspirations and well-being of those humans.”
These Western ‘anti-imperialists par excellence’, as I call them, with their belief in their intellectual superiority and “ability to ‘analyse’, ‘dissect’ and ‘capture’ the political essence of a situation anywhere in the world” – as Hage writes – provide us with top-down lectures about the right path towards genuine anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics with the same arrogance as their colonialist ancestors provided top-down lectures about the path to western civilisation.
I do not want to be misunderstood here. I am not saying that those in the West should not speak about and analyse the region where I am from. No, on the contrary, as an internationalist I do not believe in these false binaries and exclusionary practices. My co-editor Katie, for example, is Canadian and some of the book contributors are also from the North (Christian Henderson, Karen Rignall and Joanna Allan). What matters to me is a rigorous and critical exchange, in a respectful and comradely tone. Nevertheless, our comrades or allies from other regions (especially from the North) need to seriously reflect on their positionality in the struggle and check their privileges when they engage with their peers. This is far from the bullying approach adopted by Ajl in the last decade.
Voicing disagreement and criticism is crucial for generating useful knowledge and deepening our analysis, especially for pursuing an agenda of justice and liberation. However, when this is done primarily to say one thing: “You are not radical enough…. you’re not anti-imperialist enough and you should follow my superior analysis and the people I reference, etc,”, it becomes a futile exercise in Muzayadat. In fact, I would argue, this is precisely the kind of destructive approach that ends up alienating and fragmenting rather than building movements together, converging and coalescing, in a context of serious defeat for our movements on a global scale.
Who needs imperialist enemies when there are people in our own ranks prepared to do the dirty work?
Extractivism, delinking and industrialisation
I would like to turn now to some of the points Ajl has made, specifically his critique of the extractivism framework, my “fashionably eclectic” reading of imperialism and sub-imperialism as well as my apparent failure to make a distinction between colonialism and neocolonialism.
Ajl finds extractivism a problematic and incorrect framework of analysis. He is not the only one in this regard, as I know several comrades who are critical of its interpretations and imprecisions and prefer to engage with other frameworks of analysis. But Ajl makes a sweeping misrepresentation and simplistic distortion of how we understand and use this term. According to him, we crudely reduce extractivism to the process of extraction. This is incorrect.
I wrote a whole study in 2019 on Extractivism and Resistance in North Africa and my definition is inspired by the work of certain Latin American scholar-activists such as Eduardo Gudynas, Alberto Acosta and Maristella Svampa and others such as Henry Veltmeyer and James Petras. As I wrote at the time:
Extractivism refers to activities that overexploit natural resources destined particularly for export to world markets. As such, it is not limited to minerals and oil: it extends to productive activities which overexploit land, water and biodiversity…As a mode of accumulation and appropriation in North Africa, it was structured through colonialism in the 19th century to respond to the demands of the metropolitan centres. This accumulation and appropriation pattern is based on commodification of nature and privatisation of natural resources, which resulted in serious environmental depredation… The neo-colonial character of North African extractivism reflects the international division of labour and the international division of nature.
Extractivism for me cannot be dissociated from the pivotal role of imperialism and colonialism in the process of capitalist development. I specifically wrote in my 2019 study that extractivism and the accompanying ‘accumulation by dispossession’, a term first coined by David Harvey, cannot obscure the centre-periphery structure of imperialism:
According to dependency theory, ongoing imperialist domination, super-exploitation, unequal trade relations block industrial development in the South, trapping these countries in a state of permanent under-development. For Amin, capitalism is intrinsically imperialist and the nations of the Global South, despite being formally independent, are neo-colonies as they remained politically and economically subjugated to the former colonial powers.
Therefore, in my writings and public events, I always place extractivism in the broader dynamics of ecological imperialism, unequal exchange and dependency, never reducing it to a simple process of extraction. Perhaps that may be the reading of other scholars and activists, but certainly not mine. If one simply prefers to use the frameworks of ecological imperialism or unequal exchange, that is perfectly fine but, in my experience working with environmental movements, grassroots communities and climate activists, ‘extractivism’ can be a cogent framework with a compelling explanatory power.
During my work and the work of others in the Arab region, Africa, Latin America and Asia, the analytical framework of extractivism has proved very useful to open discussions on capitalism, imperialism, unequal exchange, accumulation by dispossession, sacrifice zones, externalisation of socio-environmental costs, delinking, etc. So, whatever its limitations and imprecisions, I still strongly believe that it is an important mobilising framework for movements and progressive forces that fight predatory capitalist and imperialist dynamics.
In his attempt to further discredit our analysis of extractivism, Ajl writes that Tunisia also has some mechanical and electronic industries. In a baffling comparison, he adds that the United States (where he comes from) also extract and export fossil fuels. I am not sure why or how he compared in the same paragraph a dominated and dependent economy like Tunisia with one of the most advanced economies in the world, which controls the imperialist system and dominates the global order through dollar-supremacy, control of the international financial and trade architecture, monopoly of high technology, and in its global military hegemony, etc.
Yes, Tunisia – like several other countries in the region and the Global South – has some industries, mainly the outsourced assembly or semi-processing type, but overwhelmingly its economy is characterised by a heavy reliance on exports of products with low added value, such as textiles, agri-food and mining products, which form the bulk of its industrial fabric. The country is also dependent on imports of technology and manufactured goods from the imperial core of the world. Moreover, Tunisia has sought to position itself as an international hub for subcontracting, mainly attracting light industries with low technological content, often supplied with obsolete equipment and technologies that can be abandoned in the event of capital flight. This strategy reveals the limitations of the outsourcing model, which systematically prevents the development of a sustainable industrial base.
Although the Tunisian industrial base has expanded somewhat in recent decades, it remains characterised by specialisation in low value-added activities, heavy dependence on foreign investment and European markets. This specialisation, inherited from a development model based on low labour costs, has only allowed Tunisia to integrate peripherally into global value chains, but has also trapped it in a situation that limits its ability to move up the value chain and challenge its subordinated insertion in the global capitalist economy.
For me, this is how dependency and World Systems theory remains crucial for understanding the realities of uneven development, unequal globalization and capitalist imperialism. The attempt to develop within the global capitalist system (on unequal terms) with a view to ‘catching up’ with the countries at the centre is simply a fantasy and exposed as such by this theoretical framework, and empirical research.
Samir Amin emphasised the need for ‘delinking’ that does not consist in renouncing all relations with the outside world, but in subjecting external relations to the logic of an internal development that is independent of them (‘auto-centric development’, in Amin’s words). In summary, it involves creating a national economy with different rules from the global economy. Hence, the project of delinking would involve abolishing dominant forms of private ownership, making agriculture central to the economy (agrarian reform and food sovereignty), industrialisation, mastery of technology and refusing land grabs in the name of export-oriented development.
Delinking, like socialism, is not possible within the confines of one country only, it needs to be articulated and strengthened at the regional and global level. In this regard, political and economic regional integration in the South in an autonomous fashion, i.e., not subordinated to imperialism is fundamental. This year coincides with the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference in 1955, which marked an effort to consolidate a multi-polar world; today these lessons offer some hope for Southern nations to embark on attempts at delinking.
I have written about Algeria’s delinking experience in the 1960s and 1970s and its deindustrialisation in the 1980s and 1990s. I am one of the proponents of delinking as the path towards eco-socialism, and I strongly believe that democratic, just, sustainable and sovereign industrialisation projects are crucial to the wider project of delinking. For this reason, some of us at the Transnational Institute, have been working on industrial policy for a few years and have launched a multi-disciplinary and multi-geographical research-action project on green industrial policy/green developmentalism that includes the Arab region.
In short, we do not need Ajl to provide his usual top-down lectures on what ‘delinking’ really means and why industrialisation is crucial. Self-anointed as the only true inheritor of Amin’s legacy, Ajl has created another absurdity.
Proudly eclectic and unsectarian
Not everyone who participated in this book project is versed in the literature of Dependency Theory (for a powerful description of the contemporary uses of the theory read here) and Delinking and some of the authors may have different readings and interpretations of it, this after all is the nature of an edited collection and collaboration. I feel that this is enriching as different intellectual and theoretical traditions can create useful and important knowledge. I proudly refuse to be limited to Dependency Theory as I do not think it captures the whole of reality. In fact, some of its analyses, readings, interpretations are limited and have some blind spots, which led some of its main thinkers including Samir Amin – whose work remains a deep influence on me – to take certain deeply flawed political positions, including Amin’s support of the French intervention in Mali and his backing of the Algerian regime opening its aerial space for French military jets to bomb Islamist Djihadists in Northern Mali. This was a total disaster.
Moreover, Dependency Theory, with all its merits, tends to seriously underestimate internal factors at the national level. So, we can see how such theories have become very fashionable with the Western ‘anti-imperialists par excellence’ who never pay attention to the murderous and criminal regimes in the Global South, and in fact they end up unconditionally supporting them. Any reading beyond their dogmatic interpretation or any combination of diverse analytical frameworks is frowned upon and attacked by these ‘anti-imperialists par excellence.’
I am proud in being eclectic in my learning and benefiting from various scholars who may be seen or perceived as completely different from each other or may have some opposing and even contradictory views. I have spent a lifetime learning from Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney and Edward Said to Ruy Mauro Marin, Samir Amin and Sam Moyo as much as I have learnt from Rosa Luxemburg, David Harvey, Andreas Malm, Nancy Fraser and Patrick Bond. Even to state these names may seem ridiculous, but sectarian and dogmatic criticism requires me to state my case and approach explicitly.
No doubt, certain intellectual nuances may escape me, and I have my own disagreements with the scholars mentioned above but what matters most is how useful these analytical frameworks are to movements, activists and grassroots groups.
Colonialism and neocolonialism
As for the lack of distinction between colonialism and neocolonialism, I am not sure what Ajl means exactly but perhaps it is worth repeating here what I wrote on that matter in my chapter “The energy transition in North Africa: Neocolonialism again!”:
Colonialism – if it ever formally ended – is continuing in other forms and at various levels, including in the economic sphere. This is what some scholars and activists call neocolonialism or re-colonization. The economies of the peripheries/the Global South have been placed in a subordinate position within a profoundly unjust global division of labour: on one hand, as providers of cheap natural resources and a reservoir of cheap labour, and, on the other hand, as a market for industrialized/high-technology economies. This situation has been imposed and shaped by colonialism and attempts to break away from it have been defeated so far by the new tools of imperial subjugation: crippling debts, the religion of ‘free trade’, and Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) imposed by international financial institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, etc.
It goes without saying that some distinctions need to be made between outright colonial forms (including settler-colonies) and neocolonial dynamics that manifest themselves in different ways as explained in the quote above. For me, some examples of current and proposed renewable energy projects in Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania can more accurately be described as green neo-colonialism (or green grabbing or decarbonisation by dispossession), but what takes place in terms of ‘green‘ projects on occupied land in the region from Palestine to the Golan Heights to Western Sahara can be called outright green colonialism, denoting the misappropriation by colonial and occupying states (Israel and Morocco in these cases) of environmentalism to eliminate the Indigenous people of Palestine, Syria and Western Sahara and usurp their resources, while appearing as environmental stewards and green champions.
Militarism, securitisation and war-making
The distortions do not stop there. Ajl insinuates that some contributors of the book – including two Palestinian authors – do not seriously discuss the question of imperialist and settler-colonial war-making in the region; these criticisms are laughable at best, and devious at worst.
To state ourselves categorically, here is what we wrote in the book’s introduction on matters of militarism, securitisation and the climate response:
While governments all over the world are beginning to take climate change seriously, they often see it through a ‘climate security’ lens – bolstering defences against rising sea levels and extreme weather events, and too often also shoring up their defences against the ‘threat’ of climate refugees and activists, and against renegotiations of global power. The securitisation and militarisation of the climate response in the Middle East is itself a potential challenge and threat to the climate justice agenda, given that the region plays a pivotal role in the global development of coercive technologies, techniques and doctrines. This role extends beyond the region’s status as the world’s single largest export market for weapons and military hardware and includes its crucial involvement in the testing of new security technologies, including emerging forms of surveillance and population control. Several authors have drawn attention to the intricate international networks that support the region’s arms trade and surveillance industry, including the flow of War on Terror logics, military technologies, personnel, training manuals, cross-border operations, police forces, and private military and security companies. All of these factors combine to make the Middle East an important hub in the global spread of new norms of militarism and securitisation. Moreover, the dynamics of warfare in the region itself are also significantly shaped by these global ties, as are the various ways that militaries have been assimilated into political and economic systems on both a national and regional level.
However, we have been perfectly aware about what is missing in the book (after all, what single volume can contain everything?), so towards the end of the introduction, we wrote:
Obviously, this collective book has some lacunas – things that are not addressed, such as the impact of ongoing war and conflict (and the resulting devastating cross-border displacement of populations) on questions of just transitions in countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen. This is partly due to our own limitations. Nonetheless, although we would not pretend, or seek, to be fully comprehensive when discussing such a vast region, we hope we offer here an important glimpse and contribute to the emerging study of energy transitions through a political economy lens which investigates the relationships between fossil fuel industries, the renewable energy sector, regional elites and international capital. Ultimately, the goal is to articulate and explore concepts and political ideas that can help to guide and galvanise transformative grassroots-led change in the region. We hope that this collection will spark more and deeper conversations and explorations about the role of the Arab region in a global just transition.
While Ajl acknowledges what we said in the introduction in terms of that lacuna – i.e., the need to deal with the ravages of permanent wars and what that would mean for a revolutionary agenda of a just transition in our region – he seems to suggest that it was an intentional omission on our part, simply because we are not anti-imperialist enough! Though we might ask, who for Ajl is ever sufficiently anti-imperialist?
As someone who tries to find the smallest omission here and there, Ajl even criticises Adam Hanieh – who in my view, is one of the most important Marxists from the Arab region – for not mentioning the Houthis in his brilliant chapter on “The Gulf Arab states and the new ‘East-East’ axis of world oil.” He also criticises Manal Shqair for failing to mention the environmental impacts of war in Palestine in her illuminating chapter “Arab–Israeli eco-normalisation: Greenwashing settler colonialism in Palestine and the Jawlan”. This is not just petty but carries an implicit and dishonest accusation, implying that we are not pro-resistance against colonialism (armed or otherwise). I will not dignify this with an answer as my position – as stated in all my writings, public speaking and activism for years – is clear on this matter (for those who want to see our work, please consult our dossier on Palestine Liberation on TNI’s website).
Conclusion
Our aim with the book was to start a conversation with various organisations, grassroots groups, movements, activists, trade unionists about important matters of climate justice and the just energy transition away from green (neo)colonialism and capitalism. Our approach has not been to lecture and pontificate but meet people where they are, critically engage with them, raise important questions to do with justice, sovereignty and self-determination to co-produce knowledge from below – a knowledge in the service of resistance, decolonisation and liberation.
This inevitably involves disagreement, debating with some of our audiences who are not necessarily sympathetic to our arguments and grappling with reviewers, contributors and editors who come from various ideological backgrounds. We have never assumed that our point of view and our analysis is spotless or infallible. All of us – editors and contributors – have our own distinct ideological positions and political convictions but we chose to work together to create collective knowledge that needs to be furthered and deepened.
Some people fail to grasp that their academic posturing is fundamentally and deeply undermining to activists, movements and the alternative politics we are trying to construct. Ultimately, it is not just about posturing, arrogance and insolence but about what kind of politics one represents. Is it a politics of fragmentation, alienation, toxicity and hate or a politics of love, care, solidarity and convergence? The latter starts with modesty, humility and knowing your place in the struggle rather than arrogating oneself as a barometer of radicalism or anti-imperialism.
This is the first and last time I will engage with such a disingenuous reviewer. In these dark times where our forces of resistance and change are fatally injured and weak, let us waste no time in sterile Muzayadat and nauseating polemics. Our revolutionary task is far more important.
Hamza Hamouchene is the North Africa Programme Coordinator at the Transnational Institute, author and activist.
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