Powering Resistance, Fueling Conflict: Energy and State-Society Relations in the Middle East
Panel 034, 2014 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 23 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
Featuring case studies from Turkey, Israel, Azerbaijan, and Iraq, this panel highlights the role of energy in (re)shaping state-society relations across the Middle East and Caucasus. The papers explore how renewable energy infrastructure is used as sites of resistance against top-down political and economic agendas – as well as how the political economy of conventional energy resources can fuel social conflict. While increasing global energy demand has brought staggering revenues to fossil-fuel endowed countries, climate change concerns are spurring investment in low-carbon energy alternatives. Renewable energy is often portrayed as a panacea for an energy-hungry, carbon-intensive world. Though the negative political and environmental externalities of conventional oil resources are well-documented, the positive externalities of renewable energy have overshadowed the contentious political and social processes surrounding their development. Furthermore, the political economy linkages between development of conventional energy resources and renewable energy has received little attention in political science literature.
In particular, hydroelectric dam projects often result in displacement of politically disenfranchised communities, tensions over rights for water use, and the creation of new environmental problems. Yet research in Turkey shows that major renewable energy infrastructure projects can also be sites which bring together disparate groups in opposition to opaque state-level decision-making processes and the prioritization of rents over natural resource preservation. Taking a historical perspective, the use of oil rents by Saddam Hussein’s 1980s Baath regime funded repressive institutions meant to safeguard the regime from any potential uprisings or coups. It likewise funded a propaganda machine that demonized Persians as part of the war against Iran, and as collateral damage, Iraqi Shi’a. In exploring how Saddam waged this war against his own citizens, this study finds that oil played a central and deleterious role, empowering the state beyond society’s ability to effectively resist.
To the extent that investment in large renewable energy projects diverts resources from climate change adaptation, renewable energy can also be a catalyst for social unrest. Paradoxically, it is the political economy of Azerbaijan’s fossil fuel industry that facilitates foreign investment in large renewable energy and energy efficiency projects, deflecting investment in adaptation projects which would increase resilience to climate change. Conversely, the use of small-scale distributed generation technologies - such as solar panels – is offering politically marginalized, off-the-grid communities in Israel the opportunity to meet electricity demand while resisting and circumventing traditional state monopolies over electricity generation and distribution.
Drawing upon a state-society approach, as well as insights from the international political economy literature, this paper is a case study of investment in large-scale renewable energy projects in Azerbaijan. It demonstrates how the country’s well-developed conventional energy industry and status as a Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)-eligible country under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has garnered investment in large-scale renewable and energy efficiency projects, but has perpetuated a top-down, technocratic approach to climate policy which excludes local involvement in climate change adaptation measures.
As the impacts of climate change become more prevalent throughout the Middle East and Caucasus, countries endowed with large reserves of fossil fuels are increasingly becoming the site of foreign direct investment in large-scale renewable energy and energy efficiency projects. Such investment is spurred by several factors: the fact that foreign firms are already invested in conventional energy projects within these countries, and the expansion into renewables is a way to diversify their portfolio; the opportunities for certain countries to receive carbon credits for renewable and energy-efficiency projects under the UNFCCC and CDM; and the financial support of international development institutions in the development of energy projects. Host countries to such projects also have an incentive to welcome foreign investment in large renewable projects, both for the rent opportunities as well as the chance to increase electricity generation capacity. Yet does the investment in large renewable energy projects crowd out the pursuit of less-lucrative, but arguably more immediately necessary, adaptation to climate change?
Particularly as water resources become increasingly scarce within the Middle East and Caucasus, my research shows that well-intentioned investments in climate protection measures can actually exacerbate societal tensions over resource use, in extreme cases leading to conflict. Responding to the more immediate and local effects of climate change through adapting to changed circumstances can help minimize conflict generated by changing access to resources. My study uses the example of the Kura-Araks river basin in Azerbaijan, which is both susceptible to drought and flooding, and has been an ongoing source of international tensions among the countries of the South Caucasus regarding rights to water use. While concerns for garnering FDI in renewables have crowded out opportunities for adaptation investment in Azerbaijan and have entrenched a top-down approach to climate change policy, I demonstrate that societal demands for protection against drought and flooding in the Kura-Araks region will prove costly if ignored.
This would be a revolution, but it may be fine in two generations. Without coercion but with governmental direction… this phenomenon of the Bedouins will disappear. (Moshe Dayan, 1963)
Even fifty years after the state leaders had voiced the state decision on Bedouins’ future, the “phenomenon of the Bedouins” has not disappeared. The state of Israel still struggles to relocate the Negev Bedouins. The recently cancelled Prawer Plan was another round of this long-lasting struggle between the state and Bedouin citizens. One of the main strategies that the state of Israel uses to implement the relocation policy is making life in the “unrecognized” Bedouin villages difficult by denying basic infrastructure and public services. However, more than half of the Negev Bedouin community still manages to live in these villages. How do Bedouins manage to resist the state’s repeated attempts at relocation?
This paper argues that one key factor in the Negev Bedouins’ successful resistance is that they have broken one of the basic strengths of the modern state, the monopoly on infrastructure projects. Without permits to connect their villages to the advanced water and electricity grids, Bedouins started to construct their own solar panels to produce electricity. By producing their own energy, Bedouins have broken the state’s monopoly on distribution of infrastructure projects, challenged the state’s authority over their lives and became more autonomous. The struggle conducted around the solar panels indicates the Achilles heel of the modern state.
In the last decade people in different parts of Turkey have been putting themselves in front of bulldozers quite frequently in order to stop various construction projects. A very common type of resistance is against the numerous hydroelectric power plants (HEPP) that are being planned and constructed without taking the ecological and social impacts of them. There are almost no limits where HEPPs can be constructed. In this paper I analyze the HEPP projects in Turkey and the resistance of the local people with a focus on the province of Rize in the Eastern Black Sea region from the perspective of how the local people react to changing involvement of state in their lives. Rize is selected as the research focus of this paper since the Turkish state played a significant role especially starting in the 1950s and 1960s in promoting the emerging tea industry, increasing the economic development and shaping the employment structure in the region through the state owned tea company Cay Kurumu. However, since the 80s, this traditional emphasis on agriculture and the state’s direct involvement with the people has gradually changed. The change has been especially stark in the last decade under the government of Justice and Development Party (AKP). The emphasis on state-led agriculture was replaced with an emphasis on privatization, urbanization and energy development. The valleys and the rivers in Rize have attracted the attention of national and multinational companies quickly because of the topography of the region which is mountainous and rich in water resources and therefore, energy potential. In response to these developments local people started to get together; inform each other about the destructing effects of the HEPPs. They founded platforms that in some cases include environmental NGOs and lawyers and started building a struggle both on a legal and resistance level. As a result of their long lasting struggle some villagers succeed in preventing the construction of HEPPs to their valley. This paper analyzes the relationship between the state and local people that is undergoing significant change in Turkey by focusing on the case of Rize and the emerging environmental movements.
After more than 12 years in power, in the 1980s the Baath Party of Iraq suddenly changed the nature of its principal domestic discourse. The change involved the centrality of two discursive elements, Qadisyya Saddam and to a lesser extent shu’ubiyya. Somewhat surprisingly, this study finds oil to be a key factor in answering this question. This study argues that this shift in discourse from the previously-dominant Arab Nationalism helps explain the war that Saddam Hussein waged on his own people, specifically the Iraqi Shi‘a which make up the majority of Iraq’s population. This work finds the state in a powerful position to conduct this war as well as disseminate large amounts of propaganda, both banal and intellectual, because of oil revenues which strengthened the state. At first, the revenues broadly went to fund social programs, but as Saddam tightened his grip on power, and the oil price shocks hit, the remaining money went almost solely to fund Saddam’s repressive institutions. The campaign had the effect of impacting Shi’a inside Iraq and demonizing them, painting them as traitors who could not be trusted. The result was a multifaceted war that was an extension of the systematic violence Saddam had already visited on other sectors of the Iraqi populace. These discourses must be understood in the context of the strengthened and now authoritarian Baath Party, the Iran-Iraq War, and a larger global economic context in of oil and postcolonial late development. I argue that Qadisyya Saddam was centrally tied to oil and played a key role in the Iraqi political economy; these discursive elements, I maintain, were used by the Baath regime to legitimize the policies of biopower it carried out against the Shi’a in Iraq. I conclude that the Baathist discourses of Qadisyya Saddam and shu’ubiyya constituted a form of state racism meant to support state biopower in a manner consistent with the ideas of Michel Foucault laid out in his series of lectures called Il Faut Defendre La Societe at the College De France in 1975 and 1976.
