Environmental Politics in the Middle East
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ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS IN THE MIDDLE EAST HARRY VERHOEVEN (Editor) Environmental Politics in the Middle East Local Struggles, Global Connections A A Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Copyright © Harry Verhoeven 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available Harry Verhoeven. BEnvironmental Politics in the Middle East: Local Struggles, Global Connections. ISBN: 9780190916688 Printed in India on acid-free paper CONTENTS About the Contributors vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction: The Middle East in Global Environmental Politics Harry Verhoeven 1 1. Environmental Activism in the Middle East and North Africa Jeannie Sowers 27 2. Tunisian Phosphates and the Politics of the Periphery Francis Ghilès and Eckart Woertz 53 3. The Securitization of Oil and its Ramifications in the Gulf Cooperation Council States Jill Crystal 75 4. Greening Gulf Landscapes: Economic Opportunities, Social Trade-offs, and Sustainability Challenges Ali El-Keblawy 99 5. Burning Somalia’s Future: The Illegal Charcoal Trade between the Horn of Africa and the Gulf Ilya Gridneff 121 6. Illegal Fishing and Piracy in the Horn of Africa: The Role of the MENA Region Afyare A. Elmi 149 7. Learning Geopolitical Pluralism: Toward a New International Oil Regime? Clement M. Henry 167 8. Scarcity Drives Economic Development: The Effect of Energy Subsidies on Export Diversification in the Middle East Wessel N. Vermeulen 193 9. The Politics of Natural Resources in the Caspian Sea: A New Great Game in an Ancient World Abbas Maleki 223 Notes 255 Bibliography for Introduction Only 321 Index 331 v ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Jill Crystal is the Curtis O. Liles III Professor of Political Science at Auburn University. She received her PhD from Harvard University. She specializes in comparative politics with an emphasis on Middle Eastern politics, and is the author of, among other books, Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar (Cambridge University Press) and Kuwait: The Transformation of an Oil State (Routledge). Ali El-Keblawy is a Professor of Environmental Science and Plant Ecology at the University of Sharjah. He established the Sharjah Seed Bank and Herbarium, where he was the director. In his more than twenty-five years of research, he covered the biology and management of invasive plants, range- land management, combating desertification, and domesticating native plants for landscaping and as cash crops. He has published numerous articles in top journals. Afyare A. Elmi is an Associate Professor of Security Studies in the Gulf Studies Program at Qatar University. His research interests include interna- tional and maritime security, state-building/peace-building, conflict, and identity. He is the author of many policy papers, and academic publications, including Understanding the Somalia Conflagration: Political Islam, Identity and Peacebuilding (Pluto Press). Francis Ghilès is a Senior Research Associate at CIDOB, the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs. He served as the North Africa correspondent of the Financial Times for many years, and has contributed to numerous reports and studies on contemporary affairs in the Maghreb. Ghilès is trilin- gual and has lectured at major universities in the United Kingdom, United States, and France. vii ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Ilya Gridneff is a Nairobi-based analyst at the Horn of Africa think tank Sahan Research. Primarily working on Somalia, his topics of research cover security-sector reform, natural resources, and debt relief. Previously, he was a foreign correspondent in Papua New Guinea, South Sudan, and the broader East Africa region with Bloomberg News, the Associated Press, and other international media outlets. Clement M. Henry is Emeritus Professor of Government and Middle East Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. After retiring from Texas, he served as chair of the Department of Political Science at the American University in Cairo, and as Visiting Research Professor, at the Middle East Institute, National Union of Singapore. He coauthored Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press); and The Arab Spring: Will It Lead to Democratic Transitions? (Palgrave Macmillan); and coedited The Politics of Islamic Finance (Edinburgh University Press). Abbas Maleki is Professor of Energy Policy in the Department of Energy Engineering at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, and Senior Associate, International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School. He served as Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister from 1988 to 1997. He coedited U.S.–Iran Misperceptions: A Dialogue (Bloomsbury); coauthored Iran Foreign Policy after September 11 (Book Surge); and authored Iranian Foreign Policy: Past, Present and Future Scenarios (Routledge). Jeannie L. Sowers is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Program Chair of the International Affairs Program at the University of New Hampshire. Her publications focus on political economy, ecology, and state– society relations in the Middle East and North Africa. She is author of Environmental Politics in Egypt: Experts, Activists, and the State (Routledge); coeditor of The Journey to Tahrir: Revolution, Protest, and Social Change in Egypt; and coauthor of What Everyone Needs to Know about Modern Egypt (Oxford, forthcoming). She serves on the editorial boards of Middle East Report and Global Environmental Politics. Harry Verhoeven teaches at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University in Qatar, and is the Convenor of the Oxford University China– Africa Network. He is an editor of the Cambridge University Press book series on Intelligence and National Security in Africa and the Middle East. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford, where he later served as viii ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, and as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge. Wessel N. Vermeulen is Assistant Professor in Economics at Newcastle University London. He studies issues in economics related to natural resources, trade, and migration in international contexts and has published in The Economic Journal, Journal of Commodity Markets, and Acta Politica. His publications also include Failure to Prevent Gross Human Rights Violations in Darfur: Warnings to and Responses by International Decision Makers (2003– 2005) (Brill). Eckart Woertz is Senior Research Fellow at CIDOB, the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs, Scientific Advisor to the Kuwait Chair at Sciences Po in Paris, and teaches at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies (IBEI). Formerly, he was a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University and Director of economic studies at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. He is author of Oil for Food: The Global Food Crisis and the Middle East (Oxford University Press). ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This edited volume is the product of research, reflection, conversation, and writing by eleven scholars that occurred over a three-year period in all conti- nents of the world, with Doha as its epicenter. That observation not only highlights the global nature of the contemporary academic enterprise, but is also a pivotal reflection of the kind of bookEnvironmental Politics in the Middle East: Local Struggles, Global Connections aspires to be. The volume underscores the ways in which environmental dynamics in the Gulf, North Africa, and the Levant cannot be understood in separation from political, economic, and social developments; but also not without understanding the multifaceted links of the Middle East with Eurasia, Africa, and territories across the Arabian Sea. I thank the contributors to this volume for their enthusiasm to think, investigate, and author across disciplinary, regional, and political boundaries. This volume developed out of two working groups held under the auspices of the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University in Qatar. Mehran Kamrava and Zahra Babar formulated the initial contours of this project, and generously invited me to assume its intellectual leadership. They have shown great interest throughout and provided an excel- lent support environment. At CIRS, the contributors