Suchergebnisse

This text investigates how ecology and politics meet in the Middle East and how those interactions connect to the global political economy. Through region-wide analyses and case studies from the Arabian Peninsula, the Gulf of Aden, the Levant and North Africa, the volume highlights the intimate connections of environmental activism, energy infrastructure and illicit commodity trading with the political economies of Central Asia, the Horn of Africa and the Indian subcontinent.

Prologue: the inauguration of the Merowe Dam --. - State-building, the environment and the civilisation mission --. - Hydraulic civilisation and land of famine: the crafting of the Sudanese state and its sources of power --. - Mashru al-Hadhari: the rise of Sudan's Al-Ingaz regime and its civilisation project --. - The hydro-political economy of Al-Ingaz: economic salvation through "dams as development" --. - The geopolitics of the Nile: Khartoum's dam programme and agricultural revival in the global political economy --. - Military-Islamist state-building and its contradictions: mirages in the desert, South Sudan's secession and the new hydropolitics of the Nile --. - Conclusion: water, civilisation and power --. - Appendix: elite interviews and in-depth testimonies

The historical proximity between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa has in recent years been increasingly experienced as a relationship of growing insecurity. Gulf States have rapidly expanded their economic and political roles on the other side of the Red Sea and have established military bases. This article argues that this interventionist thrust is historically rooted and deeply structural: the politics of state survival that dominate both the Gulf and the Horn are leading aspiring regional hegemons with a self-proclaimed responsibility to provide order to securitise their near abroad. Originating from the self-identity of regional powers and efforts to protect their respective domestic political settlements, this is producing a profoundly destabilising pattern of regional polarisation.