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According to Bloomberg, Saudi officials project the Line will cost around $100-$200 billion of the $500 billion planned to be spent on Neom and will have a population of 1 million with 380,000 jobs by the year 2030. It will have one of the biggest airports in the world for some reason, which seems like a strange addition to a supposedly climate-friendly city.

The site also makes numerous hand wavy and vaguely menacing claims, including that “all businesses and communities” will have “over 90%” of their data processed by AI and robots:

Don’t pay attention to Saudi war crimes in Yemen, the prince’s brutal crackdowns on dissent, the hit squad that tortured journalist Jamal Khashoggi to death, and the other habitual human rights abuses that allow the Saudi monarchy to remain in power. Also, ignore that obstacles facing Neom include budgetary constraints, the forced eviction of tens of thousands of existing residents such as the Huwaitat tribe, coronavirus and oil shock, investor flight over human rights concerns, and the lingering questions of whether the whole project is a distraction from pressing domestic issues and/or a mirage conjured up by consulting firms pandering to the crown prince’s ego and hungry for lucrative fees. Nevermind you that there are numerous ways we could ensure the cities people already live in are prepared for climate change rather than blowing billions of dollars on a vanity project.

It has also become increasingly difficult to maintain a stable agricultural output as the country faces droughts and floods due to climate change

1 percent of Tunisia’s energy supply is based on renewable energy sources, but the Tunisian government has pledged to increase that number to 30 percent by 2030

Anti-Black racism has only increased in Algeria with the arrival of tens of thousands of sub-Saharan Black, largely clandestine, migrants over the last two decades, who enter Algeria for educational or economic opportunities, or more often, to travel through the country en route to Europe.

20-25% of Algerians are native Amazigh speakers (Tamazight), and many more are Arabized Amazighs. The indigenous Amazighs have been struggling for equality since independence against a state determined to impose an Arab Muslim identity on the country’s entire population

When Algerians think of “racial” discrimination, it is likely that they first think of the treatment Algerian Arabs and Amazighs received at the hands of the French during the colonial period (1830-1962), and afterwards in France.27Kamel Daoud, “Black in Algeria? Then You’d Better be Muslim” The New York Times, May 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/opinion/kamel-daoud-black-in-algeria-then-youd-better-be-muslim.html . See also Seloua Luste Boulbina, “Si tu desires te Moquer du Noir: Habille-le en rouge”, Middle East Eye, 24 November 2018. https://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/opinion-fr/si-tu-desires-te-moquer-du-noir-habille-le-en-rouge-0 The debate over Algeria as a post-colonial society has been fully engaged. However, in another sign of the invisibility of Algeria’s black citizens, consideration of Algeria as a post-slave society – and what that means for black Algerians today – has not

Black people, who were present in southern Algeria even before the 13- century-long  trans-Saharan slave trade, can be considered to be as indigenous to Algeria as the Amazigh population.

following a regional trend to repress diversity issues, the Algerian government has never taken a census to ascertain the total number of Algerian black citizens in the country, most of whom remain concentrated in the Saharan south. Ninety-one percent of the Algerian population lives along the Mediterranean coast on 12% of the country's total land mass.

Because most black Algerians are scattered in the vast southern Sahara, an area of the country about which many Algerians are not familiar, white Algerians may be only dimly aware, if aware at all, that they have black compatriots.25Ouzani, op.cit. Certainly, many black Algerians have reported that they face incredulity when claiming their national identity in northern Algeria at police roadblocks, airports, and even in doing everyday ordinary things like responding to a request for the time, “When I walk in the street and someone wants to ask me the time, he does it in French, convinced that he is dealing with a Nigerien or a Chadian, a way of indicating that an Algerian cannot be black.”

Amazigh activists have challenged the state’s assertion of Arab-Muslim homogeneity. Amazigh activism, in the form of mass protests and the undertakings of Amazigh-dominated political parties and civil society organizations, has pressured the state to constitutionally accept Amazigh identity as one of the components of Algerian identity, integrate the Amazigh language in secondary education, and recognize the Amazigh language as a national and later an official language of the state, in addition to Arabic

Arab-Berber whites constructed an economy that relied on black slave labour from their Haratins (enslaved or recently freed Islamicized and Arabized Blacks, who are still susceptible to forced labour practices).31These ambiguously freed black slaves in Saharan areas of Algeria are also called Bella or Ikelan if they were enslaved by Amazighs, including Tuaregs. Today Haratins, mostly sharecroppers, work under harsh labour conditions that some have described as a modern form of slavery, they “dig and tend wells, excavate and maintain the underground channels of foggara, irrigate gardens, tend to flocks, and cultivate dates”.32Benjamine Claude Brower, “Rethinking Abolition in Algeria,” Cahier D’etudes Africaines 49, 2009 Some argue that without the labour of enslaved Black people, the Sahara would never have been habitable at all.33Ibid. The arduous and relentless work to irrigate in a desert includes digging channels tens of feet into the sand with the risk of being drowned under it.

in Saharan areas, the slave trade continued throughout the period of French settler colonialism (1830-1962)

elites were also leaders of Third Worldism, and officially believed in pan-Africanism. Ahmed Ben Bella, Algeria’s first post-independence president, declared in Accra, Ghana, in 1963: “It was the imperialists who tried to distinguish between the so-called white and black Africans.”

The French accommodated slavery in the Algerian Sahara more than anywhere else. Slave masters and merchants were given permission to trade in slaves and keep those they owned well into the twentieth century.35Ibid. In exchange, slavers and merchants provided intelligence on far-off regions to colonial authorities

there is reason to believe that enslaved black people continue to be exploited for agricultural work in the southern oases of Ouargla and Ghardaia provinces to this day (among wealthy families, owners of large palm trees, fields, and farms) and in some instances among semi-nomadic Tuareg

The Algerian state has never adopted any policies, including any affirmative action policies, to help their black community emerge from the impact of generations of servitude and brutalization.40Brower, op.cit. Instead, it has sought to legitimize the country’s white Arab-Muslim identity only

descendants of freed Black slaves (Haratins) in Saharan regions of Algeria often remain dependent upon former “masters.” Most work as sharecroppers in conditions similar to slavery

Black Algerians also face discrimination in urban areas of the country. They encounter the same racist attitudes and racial insults as any other person with dark skin within Algerian borders.

Either by their colour, k’hal, which is twisted into kahlouche (blackie), mer ouba (charcoal), guerba kahla (a black gourd to hold water made out of goatskin), nigro batata (big nose that resembles a potato), haba zeitouna (black olive), babay (nigger), akli (Black slave in some Berber areas), rougi  (redhead or Swedish to imply that the black person is culturally and socially white, as everyone must want to be), saligani (from Senegal) 46Khiat, op.cit., Calling black Algerians Saligani (from Senegal) has a different history. It refers back to the early decades of the 20th century when the French utilized black West-African soldiers in their colonial army to do the dirty work of colonialization, including brutalizing members of the population that resisted French rule, taking food from farmers, and rape. or by direct references to past servile status: hartani (dark black slave or ex-slave forced to work outside the master’s house), khadim (servant), ouacif (domestic slave), ‘abd (slave), ‘abd m’cana (stinky black slave).47Ibid. Using these terms against a black Algerian passerby establishes difference, contempt, strangeness, rejection, distance, and exclusion

In addition to racial insults, a black Algerian academic has noted, “Our community continues to symbolize bad luck. Worse: in the stories of grandmothers, we play the bad roles, kidnappers of children, looters, or vagrants. [While Arabs and Berbers can both point to a proclaimed noble history in Algeria] there is no place for a black hero in the collective memory of my people.”

In addition to rejection of interracial marriages, an Algerian intellectual has reported cases of “white” Algerians refusing to room with Blacks or study with them at university

A step forward in reducing Negrophobia, the selection of Khadija Benhamou, a black woman from the Algerian Sahara, as Miss Algeria in 2019 has been marred by the subsequent deluge of posts on social media virulently claiming that she did not represent the beauty of the country, with many direct attacks against the colour of her skin.

Partly due to pressure on Algeria to control its borders from the European Union, Black sub-Saharan African migrants have been vilified by the Algerian government and some of the press;59https://insidearabia.com/algeria-desert-deportations-eu-migration/ accused – usually falsely – of violence, selling drugs, promiscuity, spreading venereal diseases, perpetuating anarchy, and raping Algerian women.

Without irony, some graffiti and social media posts called on the migrants to “Go back to Africa.”

Three generations after independence, the Algerian state is still resisting the open public debate and civil society engagement needed to reflect the country’s pluralism and to begin to reckon with slave legacies and racial discrimination

the lack of archival sources compounded with self-censorship pushed many historians to focus on pre-colonial history

I define other-archives as texts, artifacts, alphabets, embodied experiences, toponymies, and inherited memories where stories of the excluded, the silenced, and the forgotten live in a ghostly state, ready to articulate historical loss even as they are situated outside the margins of what is considered canonical

I look at how other-archives are created through the work of the Moroccan Amazigh Cultural Movement (MACM). MACM has not only advocated for the recognition of Imazighen’s cultural rights, but it also unearthed a different history of Tamazgha by resorting to memory and invented traditions, which have now transformed the public sphere in Morocco. When we see Tifinagh in public signage in Moroccan cities, what we see is an other-archive that evokes other possible histories.

Up until 2011, when Les Archives du Maroc was put in place to implement the ERC’s recommendations, Moroccan authorities showed no interest in creating an official archive. For sixty years, colonial and post-colonial documents of archival significance were either destroyed or left to decay. In some cases, civil servants did not know the importance of the archive and just destroyed it out of ignorance. The nationalist streak of the post-independence period must have also led some to destroy archives left by France out of this independence spirit.

how Tazmamart moved from being a taboo topic to becoming a transnational other-archive

research on cultural production and history in Morocco and Tamazgha (the broader North Africa)

the need to engage in interdisciplinary and multilingual scholarship by conversing with the fields of anthropology, literary studies, memory studies, archive studies, and historiography, among others, and using sources in Arabic, Tamazight, French, and English

The second book, which is provisionally entitled Saharan Imaginations: Saharanism and its Discontent, is a monograph about the ways deserts have been (mis)represented in a variety of media, specifically in literature, film, and political discourse. I look at issues of emptiness, death, fear, and impunity associated with deserts across cultures and I develop the concept of Saharanism to conceptualize why deserts are viewed in the way they are.

Moroccan historians dedicated a significant amount of time to the concept of tarikh al-zaman al-rahin (history of the present) to both open up their discipline to new methodologies and engage in unprecedented discussions about Morocco’s post-colonial history

The Nile Delta—where agriculture employs one-fifth of the country’s workforce and is responsible for 12% of its GDP and much of its food supply—is being hammered by rising sea levels, rising temperatures, and a growing shortage of water.

rapid urbanization and population growth

Climate adaptation solutions that could keep environmental problems from turning existential—fixing the battered and wasteful irrigation network, expanding affordable access to improved seeds and climate-smart farming technologies, and more effective and equitable regulation of urban development on agricultural land—are being rolled out by the government and research groups, but often slower than the pace of climate impacts. That’s left Egypt’s economy and food security exposed to growing risk.

“We’re really squeezed and marginalized here, and the government isn’t helping,” said one farmer down the road from Abdullah, who requested anonymity to speak frankly (with tens of thousands of political prisoners, Egypt’s restrictions on free speech are also gaining prominence ahead of COP27).

his children see no future in agriculture

Around 1805, an Ottoman general named Muhammad Ali took control of the country, and founded the dynasty of kings that would rule—eventually under British colonial supervision—for 150 years. One of Ali’s most enduring marks on the country was the establishment of the first modern network of dams and irrigation canals in the Delta, which allowed tens of thousands of new acres to come under cultivation.

water and land played a crucial role in Nasser’s legacy. 12% of the country’s arable land was owned by the aristocracy; Nasser nationalized this land and distributed it to about 340,000 impoverished rural families. He also further extended Ali’s irrigation network and oversaw construction of the Aswan High Dam, which brought an end to the Nile’s ancient seasonal flooding and fixed the river in its present position, with just two remaining branches forking through the Delta.

Egypt’s population has since more than quadrupled, to 104 million. Yet the flow of the Nile, which supplies more than 95% of the country’s water, has remained more or less constant. In the 1990s water availability fell below the international “water poverty” benchmark of 1,000 cubic meters per person per year.

Egypt has managed that scarcity by meticulously recycling agricultural water and, in recent years, curtailing the production of water-intensive crops like cotton and rice and importing 40% of its wheat and other food staples.

The population is still growing quickly, and could reach 160 million by 2050. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam that is nearing completion upstream could cut the flow of Nile water into Egypt by a quarter during the as-yet-unknown number of years it will take to fill its reservoir. By 2100, climate change-related heat waves upstream could reduce the Nile’s flow by 75%, Abousabaa said.

current annual demand for water is about 35% higher than what the country receives from the Nile, groundwater, and a very small amount of rain—a deficit of about 20 billion cubic meters. To cover it, she said, Egypt will need to use every drop multiple times, aggressively minimize wastage, and boost the supply by investing $2.8 billion in dozens of new desalination plants with the aim to produce 5 billion cubic meters annually by 2050.

Egypt has made clear that COP27 will focus primarily on wringing climate finance out of the rich countries that are most responsible for climate change.

rising temperatures and falling rainfall mean crops—which consume 86% of Egypt’s water supply—will require more irrigation to survive.

The unpredictability makes it difficult to identify solutions, Salah says: “Climate change is like a big black box.”

“For the last two years, with heat wave after heat wave, we lost more than half the crop. It’s really sad.”

The farm relies on groundwater brought up from wells on the property, and Nasrallah says the suburbs are draining the aquifer. In the last four years he has had to dig an extra thirty meters to find water—and deeper wells mean higher electricity bills for pumping. Some wells have dried up altogether. Recently, government officials told him he had to stop watering the grass on a soccer field he built for his workers.

Urbanization is also spreading in the inner Delta, as many farmers decide that constructing housing is more profitable than growing crops. Since the 1970s, about 14% of the Delta’s arable land has been converted to urban development

Individual farms are also becoming smaller with each generation as, in keeping with longstanding Egyptian custom, land is divided among a father’s heirs (with sons traditionally taking a larger share than daughters). Urban development degrades the Delta’s soil and drives more farming into the desert, leaving the entire food system more vulnerable to climate impacts. Land fragmentation leads to the inefficient use of water and other resources and raises the costs of distribution for farmers.

in some cases, the government’s own plans are responsible, most recently in August when thousands of people living on a Nile island near Cairo that was primarily used for farming were evicted to make way for a state-sanctioned development project.

The network started by Muhammed Ali now includes about 33,000 miles of delivery and drainage canals across the country, enough to wrap around the globe, that range in size from small rivers to something a child could hop over. Delta residents say they used to bathe in these canals, drink from them, and raise fish in them. Now many of them, especially at the ends of the network, are polluted with farming chemicals and sewage, and choked with trash.

Between seepage, evaporation, and water wasted by farmers who flood their fields instead of using controlled irrigation hoses, nearly one-third of the country’s water is lost in the irrigation system between the Aswan High Dam and the sea

The soil is dark and appears rich, but is crusted with a visible layer of salt, a problem that affects up to 40% of Egypt’s arable soil.

Fixing the irrigation network is a priority for the government. Eman Sayed from the Irrigation Ministry said her agency has lined about 3,700 miles of canals with concrete in the last two years and is aiming to finish another 12,400 in the next few years. The ministry is also helping farmers cover the cost of installing drip irrigation systems, which researchers at AUC found can cut farmers’ water consumption 61% per year; today such systems cover only one-sixth of arable land in Egypt.

Authorities have also begun to restrict production of water-intensive crops like rice and bananas, although farmers say there is little enforcement of these rules, and both crops are still widely cultivated throughout the Delta.

On the western fringe of the Delta, farms and suburbs are gradually overtaking the desert as the central Delta grows more crowded. Here, water is even scarcer and the impacts of climate change are more pronounced. But in this and a few other desert areas around Egypt, the government is working to link more than 1.5 million acres to groundwater irrigation, and says it is about one-third of the way there. Land reclamation could take some pressure off the Delta, and sandy soils are well-suited for the production of citrus fruits that are one of Egypt’s most lucrative exports.

On the horizon, an offshore natural gas platform is visible. Egypt, which seized the disruption of Russian energy supplies to Europe because of the Ukraine war as an opening to boost its own exports of natural gas, is now contributing more to the problem than ever before; an independent review of its new climate strategy ranked it “highly insufficient” for averting disastrous levels of carbon emissions.

By 2100, Noureldeen says, sea level rise could inundate nearly 700 square miles of the coastal Delta and displace four million people.

human rights begin with the conditions under which we live. The revolution made life harder for us—us being the poor—so of course when they arrest these activists, I say it’s for the better, we can’t afford another revolution. We can hardly afford to eat each day

December, four months after the opening of the new canal, and, aside from those who had bought bonds and received the first payout, most people I heard began describing it as el-tira’a (a sewer). When I asked one woman, Sabah, a cook who juggles jobs in six homes each week, why her opinion of the canal had changed, she said: “They promised revenues and immediate returns, and now everyone says revenues are down. Where are the immediate returns? The project has failed.”

Sisi was no Nasser, but his nationalist credentials as a former army general lent him credibility. He also spoke the language of the street—his public speeches were matter-of-fact and colloquial

I kept tabs on the shrinking number of people who showed up to protest, and then on the decreasing number of protests. Only a handful of people still voiced their dissent, including Laila Soueif, the matriarch of a family of longtime activists, whose son Alaa Abdel Fattah is serving a five-year prison sentence on trumped-up charges; or the team behind the online paper Mada Masr, led by the journalist and editor Lina Attalah, who continued to publish despite scrutiny and censorship (the paper’s website was eventually blocked, along with 127 others). The risks of human rights work had become almost prohibitive, with arrests, disappearances, and travel bans all commonplace. I counted the number of activists, academics, and artists who had left the country, and friends who were emigrating. Regeni’s name often came up in conversations—his murder lingered in our minds

in April, the president declared that two Red Sea islands, Tiran and Sanafir, long perceived as Egypt’s, fell within the territorial waters of Saudi Arabia and would be transferred to the kingdom. Public attention shifted to this new declaration, which brought revolutionary and pro-government Egyptians together in opposition to it

muffled grumbles, but the answers to the others were invariably: “The government’s job is to keep us fed, and at least the country is safe again.”

More and more, on the streets of Cairo, in government offices, and in informal settlements on the outskirts of the city, I heard references to Syria: “We could have ended up like them.”

Passivity has been their particular mode of survival

Discontent surged in February over the shifting official accounts of what had happened to Giulio Regeni, an Italian graduate student who disappeared and was then found dead on a highway in Cairo, his body bearing marks of severe torture

A friend’s activist neighbor was dragged from his home in the night and disappeared for four days on allegations of being an “Islamist sympathizer” (he was not); a writer was imprisoned, on grounds of “offending public morals,” for sexually explicit scenes in a novel; gay men were being hunted by undercover police on the hookup app Grindr; a poet was jailed on charges of “blasphemy” and “contempt of religion” for calling the slaughter of sheep during a Muslim feast “the most horrible massacre committed by humans”; two women were threatened with jail for allegedly “kissing” in a car (they were not)

I, too, had slipped into some variation of the so-called inertia. A friend one evening described our often-dulled responses to news and events that once enraged us as a type of PTSD

As a result of severely dwindling currency reserves, the government was forced to implement a series of long-overdue austerity measures to secure a $12 billion loan from the IMF. The risks of implementing the loan program were described by the agency’s staff as “significant.” Morsi had considered these same measures but backed out after a public outcry. Sisi had little choice but to take the risk. First gas and fuel subsidies were suddenly lifted (causing price hikes of 50 percent), then the Egyptian pound was floated, plunging the currency from seven to twenty pounds against the dollar. Overnight, the price of milk, tomatoes, pasta, cigarettes, soap, water, sugar, oil, chicken, chocolate, bread, juice, toilet paper, matches, bananas, plumbing services, and household goods leapt

They want to make it impossible for us to be political

By August, I heard people everywhere talking about the price of school supplies. School bags seemed to be the measure of the state of things. What cost 90 pounds a year before cost 350 pounds now. Inflation was at its highest (33 percent) since 1986 (when it was 35.1 percent), and second-highest since 1958. When, over the months that followed, I asked my grocer or the man who delivered the bread or the garbage collectors how they were managing to keep afloat, the invariable answer was “baraka”—blessings from God.

“They say he is building a $10 million palace in the desert for himself when the rest of us can hardly eat, but what is the alternative? To be fair, he inherited a mess. At least he is a nationalist, one of us.”

“We would have descended into chaos had the Brotherhood stayed in power. The country would not have survived the remainder of Morsi’s term.”

There was a handful of people who knew what military rule would bring, who anticipated the crackdowns, the closing-in of the state. Some had forecast the outbursts of violence to come. But perhaps nobody quite anticipated that the deep state would be resurrected with such ferocity, and so unabashedly

When I asked a range of political figures about the surveillance, the answer I got was “paranoia”—to this day, no one fully understands the political and emotional causes that led to the revolution on January 25, 2011.

radicalism seems at once to undermine and to strengthen Sisi’s hold on power. The country feels more and more mired in such contradictions

“I admit,” a brass worker in Cairo’s old city told me one evening in November, “I’m not happy with how things have unfolded. This was never a revolution to begin with. It was all scripted from the start, by military intelligence, so what is one to do now except put your head down and try to make a living?”

In neighborhoods like this one, with winding roads and haphazard rows of buildings, the elevated highway provides a watchtower for the state.

Rather than connecting informal districts to utilities and providing funds to upgrade housing, the government prefers to relocate residents to satellite cities on the outskirts. As residents of these areas grow poorer and more desperate under crushing austerity measures, the government would rather see them housed in isolated contingents in the desert, thus eliminating the prospect that they could participate in a mass mobilization, as happened a decade ago.

Building or repairing roads offers a relatively quick and easy way for a government to demonstrate progress, something the young regime would have been eager to do to establish some semblance of legitimacy.

the megaprojects. Work began on a $4.2 billion expansion of the Suez Canal in August 2014. The crews responsible for the canal expansion had not yet set down their shovels when construction began on the world’s widest cable-stayed bridge, which now stretches across the Nile in central Cairo. Its six lanes in each direction are inaccessible to most commuters who cannot afford to pay the 20 Egyptian pound ($1.27) toll. But those who tuned in to public television on New Year’s Eve were treated to a spectacle of fireworks choreographed to nationalist music above its towering pylons and a floating portrait of the president.

Located some 45 kilometers (28 miles) east of Cairo, the New Administrative Capital is Al Sisi’s crown jewel. Contractors began work on the project in 2015. When finished, the luxe megacity will be almost as large as Singapore and boast a series of artificial lakes, an amusement park four times the size of Disneyland, and the tallest skyscraper on the continent. But the first phase alone, slated for completion in 2022 (although engineers working on the project say that construction is far behind schedule), will cost $45 billion — an unfathomable sum to anyone, perhaps, but more dissonant still for the more than 60 million Egyptians who depend on shrinking subsidies for their daily bread.

Television commercials starring Egyptian celebrities and billboards stationed along every road in the nation depict imagined lives in lush, gated communities backdropped by gleaming glass towers and bluer skies than dust-choked Cairo has ever seen. They are part of what architect Adham Selim describes as a practice of “ruling through drawing,” in which the government produces images of the future as a means of exerting greater control over the present and the past. “The continuous act of drawing the world-to-be is the way in which authority sustains a stable worldview, in which it places itself as an external to the world it intends to change, and rule,”

Al Sisi longs to be remembered as the ruler who snatched Egypt from the mouth of the Muslim Brotherhood and built a new Cairo in its wake. To this end, he is curating an archive that will be taught in the future.

Ismail borrowed so excessively from foreign lenders to realize his vision that when a collapse in the price of cotton left Egypt unable to repay its debts, European powers had him deposed. Then Britain invaded Egypt to protect its interests, starting a decadeslong occupation.

Successive Egyptian administrations have tried to decentralize Cairo, building generation after generation of satellite cities meant to entice upper- and middle-class Cairenes out of the urban core. The cities 10th of Ramadan and 6th of October, located east and west of Cairo, respectively, built under Sadat, and Madinaty and New Cairo (not to be confused with the New Administrative Capital), scattered to the east and started under Mubarak, sit half-empty, having never reached their target populations — or anything close.

Yahia Shawkat, author of “Egypt’s Housing Crisis: The Shaping of Urban Space,” estimates that 33,000 families were victims of forced eviction under Mubarak between 1997 and 2012. Under Al Sisi, the Ministry of Housing now boasts that it has relocated 60,000 families between 2018 and 2020 alone

When the government wanted to demolish informal housing on Warraq Island, located in the center of the Nile river in Cairo and home to 90,000 people, it sent security forces with bulldozers in the predawn hours of July 16, 2017, while most residents were still asleep. Heba Nagaa Otmorsi, a resident of the island, told The Guardian that her house had been demolished while she was at work. “It was our neighbors who rescued the children,” she said. Clashes on the island left one resident dead and dozens injured.

“People living in these semi-autonomous neighborhoods are always blamed for some sort of social urban ill,”

In January 2021, several high-level government officials laid the cornerstone of the Cairo Eye in Zamalek, one of Cairo’s wealthiest neighborhoods. One-third of Al Masallah Garden, a 15,000-square-meter (16,500-square-yard) historic park, will be destroyed to make way for the 120-meter-tall (132-yards) observation wheel, surrounded by shops, entertainment, restaurants, and a two-story parking garage.

Recent projects have disrupted Khedival Cairo and Mamluk-era tombs in the City of the Dead. A recent announcement that graves around Imam Al Shafi’i Mosque will be moved to make way for a bridge project has left Hussein Omar heartbroken at the prospect of losing his family mausoleum, where generations have been laid to rest since his great-great-grandfather bought the plot in 1924. It feels like a “concerted assault on the fundamental relationship that Egyptians have with their past,” he says. A plot that has belonged to his maternal grandmother’s family since the 19th century is even nearer to the site of the scheduled bridge project. There is no way of knowing if either plot will survive the new construction.

Zero Mass isn’t going to rival bulk water processors any time soon. It will initially only be able to produce up to 2.3 million litres annually - about the volume of a typical Olympic swimming pool. The technology is still much more expensive than desalination for the same output of water. So Zero Mass’s will be in the same bracket as imported, high-end brands such as Evian and Fiji

The rectangular boxes - measuring around 2.4 meters (8 feet) by 1.2 meters - absorb water vapour and extract it using solar energy. Although they can operate almost anywhere the sun shines, Dubai’s hot and humid climate makes the emirate a prime location, according to Cody Friesen, founder of Zero Mass

The panels have dust filters and use a chemical compound that only captures water molecules, ensuring the water is purified even when the air is polluted.

Gulf nations want to reduce their heavy dependence on food imports, especially with the coronavirus pandemic disrupting global supply chains. This month the UAE imported 4,500 dairy cows from Uruguay to boost milk production. It’s also trying to farm rice locally, the success of which will largely depend on using sustainable amounts of water.

Water-from-air is only suitable for farming in enclosed environments such as warehouses

“With hydroponics, it’s a huge advantage to be using very pure water to begin with,” said Wahlgren. “If you’re using desalinated water, there’s still quite a large salt component, which can be harmful to the plants.”

Leaks reveal insiders’ growing uneasiness, which points to the elephant-in-the-room question: Will MBS’ grandiose venture bankrupt the kingdom?

Saudi private investors will also be encouraged to pitch in during a potential public listing of Neom in 2024. That raises questions about how consensual this private investment will be. Indeed, Saudi Arabia reportedly “bullied” several of the kingdom’s wealthiest families to become cornerstone investors out of “patriotic duty” in the IPO of Saudi energy firm Aramco in 2019.

a large chunk of Saudi money carefully set aside for decades to fund the transition to a post-oil era will pay for Neom's astronomical price tag. A bet on an unproven vision

“Infrastructure spending is like doing lines of cocaine; you have to do bigger and bigger and bigger lines just to feel high,”

Neom’s initial burst of economic activity, if unsustainable at a similar pace, would simply be "stealing" future economic benefits to create an illusion of growth right now

perhaps the motive is not sustainable growth at all, but creating what Pettis calls a "pyramid effect." This would be an attempt to copy monarchs of ancient Egypt who redistributed wealth to the population through jobs – paid laborers built Egyptian pyramids, not slaves. Although Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth is already redistributed to ordinary Saudis through public-sector jobs and subsidies, a large tranche is retained and stored in its sovereign wealth funds and U.S. Treasuries. In theory, flushing Saudi citizens with cash would stimulate the local non-oil economy. But in practice, the pyramid effect is likely to first and foremost cause economic leakages, as the kingdom imports most of what it consumes locally, including labor, despite the “Saudification” of the labor market being one of Vision 2030’s key priorities. Migrant workers account for about 77 percent of private sector jobs. At Neom, highly paid Western consultants are toiling to match MBS’ demands, and Asian low-income workers are building it, remitting Saudi money home.

Riyadh sweetened the project’s launch party with a flurry of social reforms, such as lifting the ban on women driving. (Saudi Arabia was the last country in the world to lift this kind of ban, and it didn’t do so as a principled stand on behalf of women’s rights.) The idea was not only creating a buzz among investors and the global public, but whipping up aspirational momentum among Saudis.

60 skyscrapers that were built in Riyadh’s financial center are still standing largely empty.

MBS, high on his visionary self-branding and his concentration of power, may have to pay the costs of bankruptcy – whether by admitting full responsibility or via a renewed deployment of decidedly imperious and despotic tactics to crush dissent. The latter path is, of course, what the late Shah of Iran chose, with notorious results.

The massive fall in oil prices from over $100 per barrel in early 2014 to under $30 by January 2016 was caused primarily by then-Saudi Minister of Petroleum Ali al-Naimi’s strategy to gain market share for the kingdom and hurt the U.S. tight oil (or “shale”) industry by allowing the market, not OPEC interventions, to set prices.

While Riyadh has cranked up its production from mid-2014 to today by over a million barrels a day (to a peak of 10.7 mbpd in August this year), its fiscal position has taken a serious blow, with the budget deficit rising from 3 percent of GDP to 16 percent in 2015

The resilience of U.S. shale makes the argument that OPEC has experienced a resurrection a fragile claim. The cartel can probably raise prices in the short term through an output cut, but it will only be so long, perhaps already by mid-2017, before the U.S. shale industry revives and grabs any market share conceded by OPEC in a higher price environment. This will ultimately bring prices lower again, all else being equal.

Within OPEC, while other Gulf Co-Operation states, namely Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, may be prepared to make a small cut to their production, key producers like Iraq and Venezuela are in too difficult a fiscal position to agree to any major cut.

Outside OPEC, Russia reached a production record of 11.1 mbpd in August, eclipsing Soviet levels. Being so close to the maximum anyway, Russia has little to lose by supporting the OPEC output cut and agreeing not to raise production further. Yet the Kremlin is unlikely to impose actual cuts on the range of oil companies that operate in the country.

In the short term, it seems Riyadh’s fiscal position was under such pressure from low oil prices that something had to give. While the kingdom has eased the fiscal pressure by starting to issue sovereign debt, the burn rate through its foreign reserves has been relentless (from about $740 billion in mid-2014 to $550 billion today) as it has attempted to defend the currency in the face of substantial capital flight from the country since the oil price crash in 2014.

Climate change will plainly be a major problem of the 21st century, and the world is moving away from fossil fuels: game over for an unreformed Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia will face hard years ahead as the oil market increasingly looks to U.S. shale, not OPEC, as a handrail to oil prices on the supply side. However, this might well be the jolt that Salman needs to push through painful but necessary reforms

the EAF is able, through the use of land designations and other means, to control much of the public lands (desert, agricultural and urban) that comprise 94 percent of Egypt’s area, through the use of land designations, the ability to auction such lands and to receive compensation from the state treasury when military zones are rezoned to civilian purposes. The army also controls the coastline (officially classed as border territory) and is thus able to profit from tourist developments. As such, the EAF wields enormous influence over the real estate market and the country’s development structure

Estimates as to how much of the total economy is controlled by the EAF range from 40 percent, according to telecoms billionaire Naguib Sawiris (in comments to local media last March) to somewhere between 45 percent and 60 percent, according to Transparency International

the consensus among those asked by Middle East Eye as to the size of the military-economic complex is that the EAF’s reach extends into virtually every economic sector, from foodstuffs like tomato paste and olive oil, to consumer electronics to real estate, construction, transport and services

since the military’s budget - and by extension, its economic fiefdom – is kept secret, EAF-controlled businesses can benefit from subsidies that are kept off the books, as well as having more freedom of manoeuvre amid the lack of oversight.  One example was the decision under the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to slash fuel subsidies for industrialists. Since the military’s budget (and therefore, its energy costs) are off the books, the rising energy prices disproportionately affected EAF competitors, but not the forces themselves

military involvement in the political economy generally leads to worse performance. Within the region, the examples of Iran and Algeria point to this, while China has taken steps to reduce its armed forces’ commercial exposure over the past few years precisely for this reason

A further effect of the EAF’s economic dominance is a lack of growth opportunities for SMEs, since only favoured insiders can win lucrative contracts and deal with the permit system. In turn, this leads to a large informal economy of insiders, leaving many Egyptians outside, in poverty

While patronage is nothing new in Egyptian politics, since President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi came to power the top brass has expanded intra-military patronage to the extent that they are crowding out other economic actors and failing to bring in key constituencies such as opposition groups, the private sector bourgeoisie and the urban poor. The EAF has expanded its reach so fast that now it has to defend its empire against these groups, sowing seeds of further strife in future.

Oman is desperate to diversify away from its oil and gas dependency. Research by the US Energy Information Administration puts Oman’s known crude oil reserves at 5.6bn barrels. While this is only enough to rank the country 21st in the world, its economy is disproportionately dependent: oil and gas accounts for nearly half of the country’s GDP, 70% of exports and between 68% and 85% of government revenue.

“Several dozen new cities are being constructed in the Middle East, mainly to transition away from the petroleum industry to a variety of other industries, including tourism, manufacturing, education and hi-tech,” says Dr Sarah Moser, a McGill University geography professor and author of an upcoming atlas of new cities.

Duqm sits on the Arabian Sea near the Strait of Hormuz, the gateway to the Persian Gulf – and the world’s most glaring oil supply chokepoint. Nearly a fifth of the world’s oil currently flows through this passage, ever prone to disruption. If the Duqm project succeeds, the shipping industry would be able to dock at the gates of the Middle East without needing to go all the way inside.

attracted the attention of Beijing’s much heralded Maritime Silk Road. More than three-quarters of Oman’s crude oil exports go directly to China.

While Duqm was never very densely populated, around 3,000 Bedouin – mostly fishermen and semi-nomadic herders – called the area home before the bulldozers arrived. These villages have now been demolished and the Oman government has built a new, modern town for them to relocate to. The houses look as if they were copied and pasted from Muscat – bright, white buildings two storeys high with garages and ornate gateways. There is a mosque in the centre. The houses stand empty. The local Bedouin prefer their traditional way of life – and want space to keep camels.

New policies and programs are announced constantly, while the delivery capacity of the sluggish Saudi bureaucracy continues to lag. Below the upper echelons, the Saudi state remains the deeply fragmented, bloated, and slow-moving machine that I described in my 2010 book. The government seems to have no clear strategy for reforming this bureaucracy

While space for political opposition arguably has narrowed, women will soon be allowed to drive and the religious police force that once harassed them has been almost entirely neutered. By relaxing religious controls over the public sphere, the crown prince is seeking to attract more foreign investment and facilitate diversification into tourism and entertainment

Saudi Arabia has tackled fiscal reforms more vigorously than most local and international observers expected, introducing unprecedented tax and energy price measures, including the introduction of a 5 percent value added tax, new levies on foreign workers, and increases in electricity and transport fuel prices. The government is now experimenting with new non-oil sectors with an increased sense of urgency, including information technology and defense manufacturing.

Local economic advisors fear that the majority of private petrochemicals firms — the most developed part of Saudi industry — would lose money if prices of natural gas, their main input, increase to American levels.

public sector employment remains the key means of providing income to Saudi nationals. Cheap foreign labor dominates private sector employment, thereby keeping consumer inflation at bay and business owners happy. Citizens, however, are parked in the overstaffed public sector. Out of every three jobs held by Saudis, roughly two are in government. The average ratio around the world is one in five. Public sector wages account for almost half of total government spending, among the highest shares in the world

As limits on government employment kick in, young Saudis will increasingly have no choice but to seek private jobs. But they will face tough competition on the private labor market where employers have become accustomed to recruiting low-wage workers from poorer Arab and Asian countries

Saudi wage demands will have to drop further if private job creation is to substitute for the erstwhile government employment guarantee. For the time being, private job creation has stalled as the government has pursued moderate austerity since 2015 in response to deficits and falling oil prices

The government has also underestimated how dependent private businesses are on state spending. The share of state spending in the non-oil economy is extremely high compared to other economies. Historically, almost all private sector growth has resulted from increases in public spending

As long as oil prices remain below $70 per barrel, the goal of a balanced budget will cause pain for businesses and limit private job creation. This will pose a major political challenge at a time when an estimated 200,000 Saudis are entering the labor market every year. More than 60 percent of the population is under 30, which means that the citizen labor force will grow rapidly for at least the next two decades.

It would be far more prudent to gently prepare citizens and businesses for a difficult and protracted adjustment period and to focus on a smaller number of priorities

The key structural challenge to non-oil growth is the way the Saudi government currently shares its wealth, most notably through mass public employment — an extremely expensive policy that bloats the bureaucracy, distorts labor markets, and is increasingly inequitable in an era when government jobs can no longer be guaranteed to all citizens. A stagnating economic pie that might even shrink in the coming years must be shared more equitably.

A basic income would not only guarantee a basic livelihood for all citizens, but also serve as a grand political gesture that could justify difficult public sector reforms. A universal wealth-sharing scheme would make it easier to freeze government hiring and send a clear signal that, from now on, Saudis need to seek and acquire the skills for private employment and entrepreneurship. The government could supplement this scheme by charging fees to firms that employ foreigners while subsidizing wages for citizens to fully close the wage gap between the two.

Focusing on such fundamentals might be less exciting than building new cities in the desert or launching the world’s largest-ever IPO — but they are more important for the kingdom’s economic future. No country as dependent on petroleum as Saudi Arabia has ever effectively diversified away from oil

It said Saudi police had the sole responsibility for monitoring offences and imposing fines, a comment that appeared to marginalize the kingdom’s religious anti-vice squads whose authority to pursue suspects or make arrests was curbed in 2016.

Alcohol remains illegal, which could deter some tourists. It also remains unclear if unmarried foreign men and women would be permitted to share a hotel room.

there have been no moves towards opening up a system that has kept the ruling Al Saud family firmly in control of political power

The authorities have detained women’s rights activists for the past year amid a broader crackdown on dissent. The crown prince’s image abroad has also been tarnished by last year’s murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate, and a devastating war in Yemen

vast tracts of desert but also verdant mountains, pristine beaches and historical sites including five UNESCO World Heritage Sites