This paper considers the role of transnational flows of Iraqi oil in shaping the post-war petroleum order and postcolonial sovereignty in Lebanon and Syria. In the years following the Second World War the financial terms of the international oil industry came under strain. Scholars have focused on the challenge from oil-producing states which demanded 50-50 profit-sharing of oil revenues by making claims to natural resource sovereignty. This paper shifts our attention to the transportation of oil as a site of contention between companies and states. It examines negotiations that took place in the 1950s between the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) and Syria and Lebanon to establish a transit fee for the operation of the Iraq-Mediterranean oil pipelines. The IPC, an international oil consortium, had been exporting oil by pipeline from northern Iraq across Syria to the port of Tripoli on the Lebanese coast since the 1930s. The IPC’s transit operations rested on rights and privileges granted by French colonial administrations, including exemption from taxation. Drawing on materials in the IPC archives and the local Arabic press, this paper considers the Lebanese and Syrian governments’ attempt to subject the IPC and its transit operations to sovereign control following independence. Company managers, politicians, and government experts grappled with the problem of assessing the pipeline’s “value” and expressing it in a set of calculations to produce a figure that could be presented as a “transit fee.” I demonstrate how the company defended its exemption from taxation and put formulae to work in managing Lebanese and Syrian demands and maintaining control over the principles governing the operation of the oil industry. Rather than representing the pipeline’s value, I argue that the transit fee acted as a site for the articulation and contestation of visions of postcolonial territorial sovereignty and its relationship to international oil capital.

This paper examines a critical period in the history of Lebanon’s Litani river project to consider how competing public narratives affect development projects. Drawing on state, private, and institutional archives and the Lebanese press, it historicizes how narrative claims to success and failure do political work and generate consequential expectations. It explores the possibilities opened or foreclosed when rival bureaucrats, powerful financial institutions, and popular movements advance competing narratives of a development project’s “failure” or “success.” Fuad Chehab’s regime (1958-1964) promised state-led rural water and power development to diminish the tensions the 1958 civil war had exposed. The regime’s young technocrats, dubbed Chehabistes, inherited from the outgoing Chamoun government a troubled hydroelectricity scheme: the Litani project. In 1955, the World Bank funded a Litani project design that provided electricity to Beirut by diverting water from the disenfranchised rural peripheries. In 1959, a disastrous construction accident, corruption scandal, and rural labor strike rocked the project, providing the Chehabistes an opportunity to define their era against Chamoun’s failures. They put the project’s leaders on trial and promised to scrap the hydroelectric infrastructure and distribute the Litani to water-poor farming communities. But the World Bank and Électricité de France intervened to prevent any unprofitable alterations to the hydroelectric scheme. When construction completed, the energy infrastructure functioned and the responsible institutions claimed the project was a success. But opposition leaders and rural dissidents portrayed the power plants as a failed promise. They mounted a campaign to redistribute the Litani whose consequences are still felt today. Although scholars favorably portray the Chehabiste era as Lebanon’s brief experiment with technocracy, I demonstrate that, like their promised Litani reforms, much of the Chehabistes’ planned infrastructure never materialized. But their narrative project did enable them to expand the bureaucratic and security apparatus and curtail radical and rural critics while generating politically consequential expectations. The anthropologist James Ferguson famously argued against diagnosing development projects in simplistic success-failure terms, advocating instead that scholars historicize these projects’ material effects. This paper builds on this insight, but argues that we cannot subtract success and failure from our analysis because they are powerful actor’s categories that can provide meaningful grievances to popular movements or shore up a regime’s claims to legitimacy. The Litani disaster reveals the necessity to analyze success and failure as historically contingent claims with potent consequences.

In February 2018, a parliamentary representative from the southwestern Iranian province of Khuzestan warned that Khuzestan would not exist in the next 20 years--referring to the rapid environmental degradation of the province due to water shortage, soil erosion, and petrochemical pollution, and the ensuing depopulation and mass out-migration. Six decades earlier, however, Khuzestan had been hailed as a land of “limitless potential,” constituting the “cradle” of Iran’s energy futures. These energy futures were to be realized through resource development projects centering around oil, water, and mechanized agriculture. Through an analysis of historical archives, photographs, and literary sources, this paper looks at the “politics and poetics” of large-scale infrastructural projects that coalesced around land, water, and oil in Khuzestan in pre-revolutionary Iran. These large-scale infrastructures include the expansion of petrochemical industries and dam construction for agricultural irrigation and electrification in Khuzestan. While located in the geographical margins of Iran, this paper locates Khuzestan as a key site for the formation of the nation-state. I argue that large-scale energy infrastructures in Iran remade nature and nation, and evoked contradictory and disjunctive imaginaries, affects, and visions of past, present, and future. The technonatural remaking of Iran’s “geo-body” in Khuzestan was thus central to the production of Iranian national modernity and reveals the material and symbolic forms and processes through which state power shapes and is manifested in everyday life. This socionatural transformation of Iran in the twentieth century through hydroelectric and hydrocarbon power mediated the relationship between the state and its subjects, and in turn shaped the experiences and expectations of national modernity.

The modern state has grappled with questions on how to effectively manage and distribute the public commons. Within mainstream development discourses, techno-managerialism has emerged as the solution to rationalising the role of the state in governing the commons. In the West state-led infrastructural investment has diminished with the fall of Keynesian developmental models and the rise of neoliberal ideology. The hollowing of the state has led to the private sector embracing an increased role as the supplier of public goods. The change in managerial strategies has resulted in the promotion of profit-making and cost recovery over equitable access and basic rights. In the Global South, under the guise of “good governance” and technocratic rhetoric promoted by the development industry, privatisation efforts have been underway in the energy, transportation and water sectors. The latter, deemed the last public utility standing, has proven especially resilient with failed water projects across the hemisphere. The Middle East in particular remains the site of a spectrum of privatisation efforts as states persist in their monopolistic control over water. In the case of Egypt, from the early 1990s, donor pressures, an enterprising state and business interests colluded in the re-organisation of utility bureaucracies, culminating in the creation of seemingly independent local water companies in 2004. Abandoning direct privatisation efforts modelled after Thatcherite reforms, donors and bilateral organisations have advocated for institutional reforms based on corporatisation principles. These include the establishment of profit-making public water companies, removal of subsidies, and local formalisation strategies of informal areas such as billing practices and disciplined metering. This paper will trace the evolution of Cairo’s water sector from a monopolised public common, to a site of commodification and dispossession. I argue that local informal water governance emanates from a fragmented institutional framework developed by donor programs during the restructuring of the sector. Grassroots cases from Cairo will illustrate how national policy-making affects local implementation of equitable water access and the informal codes and norms that unmake apolitical governance paradigms This case study exemplifies a local variant of infrastructure liberalisation efforts and illustrates the negotiation of global neoliberal agendas by states, elites and donors. In this paper, water serves as a material reflection of the changing power dynamics and interests of the state-business-experts nexus governing Egyptian utilities and shaping local technocratic expertise.