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Another element of this legacy is the paranoia that makes it difficult for regional governments to distinguish between academic researchers and spies

Imagine if Syria had imprisoned a British PhD student and kept them in solitary confinement for seven months with one consular visit—or if Iran covered up the brutal murder of an Italian PhD student by their police forces, as happened in Egypt in 2016. The double standards pertaining to academic freedom and the rule of law in countries formally allied with the United States and Europe and those characterized as rogue actors is so obvious it barely merits pointing out. The Emirati authorities certainly recognize this, and will continue to exploit this double standard so long as it remains intact.

Oil money, along with a new generation of rulers eager to use military intervention to demonstrate their power to domestic and foreign audiences, has made the Gulf not just a major weapons customer but an industry partner. The story of the UAE today is no longer Dubai’s position as a global finance hub, but Abu Dhabi’s position as an emerging player in high-tech weapons development.

Academic research is not espionage—but many parties (notably US and European governments) are implicated in the process that has allowed them to be conflated

Matt’s arrest and detention, therefore, is a clear message from UAE authorities that research into the country’s growing arms industry is off-limits, in much the same way that researchers and activists working on labor rights have found themselves surveilled, intimidated and imprisoned

The slow erosion of public funding for universities has bled dry the resources reserved to support PhD students, meanwhile trustees and consultants urge the adoption of for-profit business practices that generate return on investment, including partnering with defense technology firms for research grants.[3] The fact that educational institutions must go begging—hat in hand—to billionaire philanthropists and weapons conglomerates reflects both the growing share of defense industry involvement in industrial and research activities as well as the failure of our political system to levy sufficient taxes on the ultra-rich to directly fund basic investments in public education.

what does the weakening of US and European governments vis-à-vis their Gulf counterparts mean for the protection of students and scholars conducting overseas research?

Before my research on the Gulf, my focus was on the role of regional militaries (primarily Egypt and Jordan) in their domestic economies. The more I studied these cases the more I realized their military economies are not some peculiarity of third world political development, but a legacy of colonial militarization, the obstacles facing newly-independent states trying to industrialize their economies, and the extraordinary organizational and financial resources that weapons producers dedicate to proliferating their products all over the globe.

I do not know of any studies estimating the total number of academics and non-government researchers working on security and military-related issues across the globe, but I expect it is in the tens of thousands at the very least. At my home institution alone—The George Washington University—there are maybe a dozen faculty working on everything from the psychology of drone operators to the role gender plays in government defense contracting—and I’m pretty sure none of these people are spies. This kind of security studies—which examines topics like defense technology, the global arms industry and government contracting—is a growing field, not least due to the proliferation of information about these issues coming from the booming private sector. And as multinational defense firms and their complementary industry partners continue to chase investment shifting from the core capitalist countries to emerging regional powers like the Gulf States these latter sites will become increasingly important targets for such research.

Matt’s case should make us question not only the safety of Western researchers and our students but, more importantly, the continued harassment, intimidation and imprisonment of academics and democratic activists across the Middle East.

The third sector — the new rising stars of the defense industry — are led by the president's men. They and their companies are tied to Erdogan: Baykar Makina, owned by the family of Erdogan’s son-in-law, Selcuk Bayraktar; BMC, owned by the Ozturk family and Ethem Sancak, a member of Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its Executive Council; and the Tumosan unit of Albayrak Group.

BMC is the leading producer of buses, trucks, rail systems, Kirpi armored vehicles and Amazon mine-resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles. The ambitious joint venture aspires to become Turkey’s monopoly over diesel engine production for land vehicles and jet engines. Sancak holds 25% of the venture's shares, the Ozturks hold 25.1%, and the remaining 49.9% is owned by the Qatar Armed Forces Industry Committee.

In 2018, BMC became Turkey's first private defense industry company to reach the Defense News “Top 100 List,” ranking No. 85, with $554.18 million in defense revenues.

In early 2019, Erdogan offered generous incentives to BMC, such as the opportunity to lease Turkey’s largest tank maintenance factory to produce the indigenous Altay main battle tank under a 25-year contract for only $50 million. This transfer of a tank factory in Sakarya province to BMC is still highly controversial in Turkey, with the main opposition party criticizing it at nationwide rallies because of transparency and accountability issues. Also, factory workers organized several protests against the decision.

a big cooperative deal in the defense industry helps strengthen Qatar’s ties with Turkey, guarantees Turkey's continued military-political shield against the Saudi-led bloc and blockade, and helps Doha diversify its defense sources.

BMC wants to penetrate jet engine production as well. After securing Erdogan's political backing, BMC’s TRMotor went to a joint venture with TAI to develop the jet engine for Turkey’s indigenous TFX aircraft project with the help of the UK’s Rolls-Royce. In March, however, Rolls-Royce​ announced it was withdrawing from TRMotor because of an irreconcilable difference over intellectual property caused by Qatar’s involvement with BMC.

BMC is trying to establish a monopoly in military diesel and jet engines, and also seeks to monopolize the raw material production field of boron mining it recently entered. 

Joint ventures are having a rough time. TSKGV, now under the jurisdiction of the presidential palace, is struggling to evade Erdogan’s attempts to take full charge. Meanwhile, Erdogan's favorites are rising quickly to the top.

Although the destabilizing contradictions of this dependency have now undercut both American hegemony and the power of the North Atlantic hydrocarbon industries, the oil-for-insecurity entanglement has nonetheless created dangerously strong incentives for more conflict ahead.

In a series of studies that began in late 1980s, economists Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler charted the extent to which the world’s leading oil companies enjoyed comparatively handsome rates of returns on equity—well ahead of other dominant sectors within North Atlantic capitalism—when major wars or sustained unrest occurred in the Middle East.

When oil prices began to collapse in the mid-1980s, the major oil companies witnessed a 14-year downturn that was only briefly interrupted once, during the 1990-1991 Gulf War.

The events of September 11, 2001, the launching of the global war on terror and the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq reversed the fiscal misfortunes of the North Atlantic oil companies in the previous decade. Collectively, they achieved relative returns on equity several orders of magnitude greater than the heyday of 1979 to 1981. As oil prices soared, new methods of extraction reinvigorated oil production in Texas, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and elsewhere. In effect, war in Iraq made the shale oil revolution possible

fracking—not only benefitted from sky-high oil prices, generous US government subsidies and lax regulation, but also the massive amounts of cheap credit on offer to revive the economy after 2008

In response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran hostage crisis, the Carter Doctrine declared America’s intent to use military force to protect its interests in the Gulf. In so doing, Carter not only denounced “the overwhelming dependence of the Western democracies on oil supplies from the Middle East,” but he also proposed new efforts to restrict oil imports, to impose price controls and to incentivize more fossil fuel extraction in the United States, all in conjunction with solidifying key alliances (Egypt, Israel and Pakistan) and reinforcing the US military presence in the region.[5] In effect, America would now extract geopolitical power from the Middle East by seeking to secure it.

What helps make energy security discourse real and powerful is the amount of industry money that goes into it. In a normal year, the oil industry devotes some $125 million to lobbying, carried out by an army of over 700 registered lobbyists. This annual commitment is on par with the defense industry. And like US arms makers,[9] the revolving door between government, industry and lobbying is wide open and constantly turning. Over two-thirds of oil lobbyists have spent time in both government and the private sector.[10]

A 2015 report by the Public Accountability Initiative highlights the extent to which the leading liberal and conservative foreign policy think tanks in Washington—the American Enterprise Institute, Atlantic Council, Brookings, Cato, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Council on Foreign Relations and Heritage Foundation—have all received oil industry funding, wrote reports sympathetic to industry interests or usually both

For some 50 years, the United States has been able to extract geopolitical power from Middle Eastern oil by posing as the protector of global energy security. The invention of the concept of energy security in the 1970s helped to legitimate the efforts of the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations to forge new foundations for American hegemony amid the political, economic and social crises of that decade. In the wake of the disastrous US war efforts in Korea and Southeast Asia, Henry Kissinger infamously attempted to re-forge American hegemony by outsourcing US security to proxies like Iran under what is referred to as the Nixon Doctrine. At the same time, regional hegemons would be kept in check by “balancing” competing states against each other.

The realization of Middle Eastern insecurity was also made possible by the rapid and intensive arms build-up across the region in the 1970s. As oil prices skyrocketed into the 1980s, billions of so-called petrodollars went to purchase arms, primarily from North Atlantic and Soviet manufacturers. Today, the Middle East remains one of the most militarized regions in the world. Beyond the dominance of the security sector in most Middle Eastern governments, it also boasts the world’s highest rates of military spending. Since 2010, Middle Eastern arms imports have gone from almost a quarter of the world’s share to nearly half in 2016, mainly from North Atlantic armorers.

For half a century, American policy toward the Middle East has effectively reinforced these dynamics of insecurity by promoting conflict and authoritarianism, often in the name of energy security. High profile US military interventions—Lebanon in 1983, Libya in 1986 and 2011, the Tanker Wars in the late 1980s, the wars on Iraq in 1991 and 2003, Somalia in 1993, Afghanistan since 2001, the anti-Islamic State campaign since 2014 and the Saudi-Emirati war on Yemen since 2015—have received the most scrutiny in this respect, alongside the post-2001 “low intensity” counterterrorism efforts worldwide

cases abound where American policy had the effect of preventing conflicts from being resolved peacefully: Trump’s shredding of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement with Iran comes to mind; the case of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara have likewise become quintessential “peace processes” that have largely functioned to prevent peace.

the myth of authoritarian stability

A year after the unexpected 2011 uprisings, the IMF’s former director Christine Lagarde admitted that the Fund had basically ignored “how the fruits of economic growth were being shared” in the region

In denouncing certain governments as “pariahs” or “rogue states,” and in calling for regime change, American policy has allowed those leaders to institute permanent states of emergency that have reinforced their grip on power, in some cases aided by expanded oil rents due to heightened global prices

From 2012 to 2018, organized violence in the Middle East accounted for two-thirds of the world’s total conflict related fatalities. Today, three wars in the region—Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan—now rank among the five deadliest since the end of the Cold War. Excluding Pakistan, the Middle East’s share of the worldwide refugee burden as of 2017 was nearly 40 percent at over 27 million, almost double what it was two decades prior.

profound political and financial incentives are accumulating to address the existing glut of oil on the market and America’s declining supremacy. A major war in the Middle East would likely fit that bill. The Trump administration’s temptation to wage war with Iran, change Venezuela’s regime and to increase tensions with Russia and China should be interpreted with these incentives in mind.

While nationalizing the North Atlantic’s petroleum industries is not only an imperative in the fight against climate change, it would also remove much of the profit motive from making war in the Middle East. Nationalizing the oil industry would also help to defund those institutions most responsible for both disseminating the myths of energy security and promoting insecurity in the Middle East.

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.

Unique to today’s environment is the sheer number of sources and the time-limited nature of the discovery-and-review period: Given the transience of information on the internet compared to print media, thousands of sources produce reports of variable reliability on a daily basis. Researchers must archive and extract information such as where, when, and why a protest took place, as well as how many people attended, before that content is moved behind a paywall, deleted, or otherwise made unavailable.

Moving forward, best practices will require forming teams of scholars that are geographically dispersed in a way that corresponds with the distribution of the events under investigation. While previous studies have concentrated on conducting surveys in different regions and in major cities, the datasets would be more representative if data were collected in multiple locations simultaneously in a way that represents smaller cities, suburbs, and rural areas.

What this article does show, however, is how blind the public and the press are flying

Sirianne Dahlum, Carl Henrik Knutsen, and Tore Wig, “Who Revolts? Empirically Revisiting the Social Origins of Democracy” (The Journal of Politics, August 2019)

We expect that both the urban middle classes and, especially, industrial workers have the requisite motivation and capacity to engender democratization, at least in fairly urban and industrialized societies. Other social groups—even after mobilizing in opposition to the regime—often lack the capacity to sustain large-scale collective action or the motivation to pursue democracy. We collect data on the social composition of opposition movements to test these expectations, measuring degree of participation of six major social groups in about 200 antiregime campaigns globally from 1900 to 2006. Movements dominated by industrial workers or middle classes are more likely to yield democratization, particularly in fairly urbanized societies. Movements dominated by other groups, such as peasants or military personnel, are not conducive to democratization, even compared to situations without any opposition mobilization. When separating the groups, results are more robust for industrial worker campaigns

we expect opposition movements dominated by the middle classes or industrial workers to be related to subsequent democratization. Yet, we anticipate a clearer relationship for industrial worker campaigns, due to their multiple sources of leverage and especially strong organizational capacity allowing for effective and sustained challenges to the regime.

The government is expected to play a "crucial" role in tourism development by injecting $6 billion over 25 years to trigger $43 billion worth of investments from the private sector.

the promises to allocate 223,000 direct tourism jobs to Omani nationals by 2040 does not align with Oman's undersized tourism education sector, which graduates only a few hundred students per year, mainly from the Oman Tourism College

although the number of tourists visiting Oman has doubled since 2008, the industry employs less than 17,000 Omanis.

“Corruption was also an issue since local authorities requested me to pay imaginary taxes," he said. "I am an ordinary man so I had to shut up and comply.”

“The concept of SMEs [small and medium enterprises] does not exist in the field of tourism anyway, the whole system is designed for large corporations,” said Christopher Chellapermal, a French entrepreneur. Chellapermal ran a scuba diving business in Oman for 15 years before being forced out of business in 2017.

The country’s ratio of debt to gross domestic product is rated junk by all three major agencies, as it has multiplied by 12 since 2014. Moreover, the Omani economy is ranked the worst performing among Gulf countries

For Chellapermal, Oman "makes the crazy wager" of luxury tourism by prioritizing premium visitors when the backpacker segment would be a better fit.

“Chinese and Indian tourists are very much interested in culture and heritage destinations," Hollister said. "Oman could focus on this segment to make it their niche, a differentiator.”

wealth of cultural and natural assets. The Ministry of Tourism promotes Oman as a hidden jewel at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula. 

regional tensions had very little impact on tourism

As Sultan Haitham bin Tariq Al Said takes power, analysts worry that Oman’s foreign policy of neutrality could be at stake. Will “any of Oman’s more assertive neighbors seek to sway Haitham to align more closely with their own approach,” Kristian Coates Ulrichsen wrote for Al-Monitor.

The prospect of tensions between Muscat and neighboring states does not please tourism actors, as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are Oman’s key source regional markets for tourism. In 2018, Gulf citizens accounted for about half of international arrivals.

Saudi Arabia’s aggressive push to develop its leisure tourism industry and attract 100 million visits by 2030 collides with Oman’s ambitions

“We are very aware that communications technology can be used for good and ill,” NSN spokesman Roome says. The elevated risk of human rights abuses was a major reason for NSN’s exiting the monitoring-center business, and the company has since established a human rights policy and due diligence program, he says. “Ultimately people who use this technology to infringe human rights are responsible for their actions,” he says.

Besides Bahrain, several other Middle Eastern nations that cracked down on uprisings this year -- including Egypt, Syria and Yemen -- also purchased monitoring centers from the chain of businesses now known as Trovicor. Trovicor equipment plays a surveillance role in at least 12 Middle Eastern and North African nations, according to the two people familiar with the installations.

Uprisings from Tunisia to Bahrain have drawn strength from technologies such as social-networking sites and mobile-phone videos. Yet, the flip side of the technology that played a part in this year’s “Facebook revolutions” may be far more forceful. Rulers fought back, exploiting their citizens’ digital connections with increasingly intrusive tools. They’ve tapped a market that’s worth more than $3 billion a year, according to Jerry Lucas, president of McLean, Virginia- based TeleStrategies Inc., organizer of the ISS World trade shows for intelligence and lawful interception businesses. He derives that estimate by applying per-employee revenue figures from publicly traded Verint’s lawful intercept business across the mostly privately held industry.

The Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and other human rights activists have blamed Nokia Siemens for aiding government repression. In 2009, the company disclosed that it sold a monitoring center to Iran, prompting hearings in the European Parliament, proposals for tighter restrictions on U.S. trade with Iran, and an international “No to Nokia” boycott campaign. While there have been credible reports the gear may have been used to crack down on Iranian dissidents, those claims have never been substantiated, NSN spokesman Roome says. In Bahrain, officials routinely use surveillance in the arrest and torture of political opponents, according to Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. He says he has evidence of this from former detainees, including Al Khanjar, and their lawyers and family members.

During the Arab spring, it was easy to spot the company’s fingerprints, says Gyamlani. Tuning in to Germany’s N24 news channel at his home in Munich, he immediately suspected that governments were abusing systems he’d installed. Failed uprisings stood out to him because of the way the authorities quashed unrest before it spread

Schaake says surveillance systems involving information and communications technology should join military items such as missile parts on lists of restricted exports. Schaake helped to sponsor a parliamentary resolution in February 2010 that called for the EU’s executive body, the European Commission, to ban exports of such technology to regimes that could abuse it. The commission hasn’t implemented the nonbinding resolution. The U.S. Congress passed a law in 2010 barring federal contracts with any businesses that sold monitoring gear to Iran. An investigation ordered by Congress and completed in June by the Government Accountability Office was unable to identify any companies supplying the technology to Iran, partly because the business is so secretive, the agency reported.

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 way for Turkey to achieve a sustainable growth rate by financing its current deficit is to make the country attractive for direct foreign investment. That in turn requires Turkey to have a properly functioning legal system, properly and justly operating independent institutions, good governance, a stable democracy and a free market — in short, to be predictable. Authoritarian and arbitrarily governed countries first lose their predictability.

The same situation has emerged concerning the Koc Group, which has been subjected to one tax penalty after another. The Koc Group, the largest capital group of Turkey, attracted the ire of Erdogan during the June 2013 Gezi Park protests when the nearby Divan Hotel it owns opened its doors to those escaping the pepper gas and brutality of the police. Erdogan perceived that as a challenge and accused the Koc Group of being accomplices to the protesters. Alluding to the group June 17, he actually said, "We know those who cooperate with terrorists and accommodate them in their hotels. We will settle accounts on this. Now we have an interest lobby emerging.” We all discovered how that account was be settled when tax audit teams from the Ministry of Finance accompanied by police raided the Koc companies.

Mustafa Boydak, the president of the Chamber of Industry of the Anatolian industrial city of Kayseri and a well-known conservative industrialist, denounced the tax audit of the Koc Group and called on the government "not to become party to the business world and not to treat the companies that carry Turkey as an enemy.” The government clearly didn’t appreciate Boydak’s call and responded with a tax audit of the Boydak Holding group of companies.

Some public corporations led by Turkish Airlines and private companies with ties to the government withdrew 900 million lira ($391 million) of deposits from Bank Asya, recognized as the Gulen movement's bank, on the same day without waiting for the deposits to mature, and put the bank in a tough bind. Bank Asya was saved from going under when companies and businessmen affiliated with Gulen deposited the same amount of money.

The first allegations of the AKP government using tax penalties as a political weapon came out in 2008, when the Dogan Media Group was openly targeted by Erdogan and fined $1.6 billion

wealth here is not evenly shared. Mr. Bashir’s Sudan is a thoroughly militarized place, and the president’s troops are among the biggest beneficiaries of the boom, constantly getting new weapons, trucks, hospitals and other perks

“If you want to protect yourself and your family, you join a militia,” remarked a middle-aged man in the Jazmati neighborhood. “The area is infested with crime associated with the National Defense militias. Each group has control over a certain quarter, and they sometimes fight each other over the distribution of spoils. Shop owners must pay these militias protection. One owner refused, and they torched his store.”

Another resident of the same area explained that he and his family could scrape by thanks to his two sons’ positioning in the Iran-backed Baqir Brigade—which provides not only monthly salaries, but also opportunities to procure household items through looting.

This cannibalistic economy, which encompasses all those who have come to rely on extortion for their own livelihoods, extends to the cohort of lawyers, security officials and civil servants who have positioned themselves as “brokers” in the market for official documents such as birth, marriage and death certificates

An industrialist in Aleppo put it simply: “I talk with factory owners and they say they want to reopen their factories, but they can’t find male workers. When they do find them, security services or militiamen come and arrest those workers and extort money from the owners for having hired them in the first place.” With no large scale returns on the horizon for local industries, this economic impasse will take years to resolve.

Although virtually every problem that sparked Syria’s 2011 uprising has been exacerbated, society has been beaten down to the point of almost ensuring that no broad-based reformist movement will be able to coalesce for a generation to come

the unraveling of Syria’s productive economy, and its replacement by an economy of systematic cannibalization in which impoverished segments of Syrian society increasingly survive by preying upon one another

a new term—taafeesh—to describe a practice that goes far beyond stealing furniture to include extremes such as stripping houses, streets and factories of plumbing and electrical wiring

“I watched uniformed soldiers using a Syrian army tank to rip out electrical cables from six meters underground,” remarked a fighter with a loyalist Palestinian faction, who was scrambling to retrieve belongings from his apartment before it could be pillaged. “I saw soldiers from elite units looting private hospitals and government offices. This isn’t just looting—it’s sabotage of essential infrastructure.”

I returned to my apartment just to retrieve official documents and some hidden pieces of gold. I did so, and then destroyed my own furniture and appliances because I don’t want these people making money at my expense. I was ready to burn down my own apartment, but my wife stopped me—she didn’t want me to cause harm to other apartments in the building.

micro-economies in their own right—from the recycling of rubble to the proliferation of taafeesh markets, where people buy second-hand goods stolen from fellow Syrians. Many have no choice but to use these markets in order to replace their own stolen belongings

Syrians also dip into precious resources to pay officials for information, for instance on disappeared relatives or their own status on Syria’s sprawling lists of “wanted” individuals. For those wishing to confirm that they won’t be detained upon crossing the border to Lebanon, the going rate is about 10 dollars—most often paid to an employee in the Department of Migration and Passports.

Just as Syrians are forced to be more self-reliant, they have also come to depend evermore on vital social support structures. Indeed, extreme circumstances have created a paradox: Even as society has splintered in countless ways, the scale of deprivation arguably renders Syrians more closely interdependent than ever before.

Today, even the most senior lawyers in our practice are working as document brokers. A well-connected broker makes 30 to 40,000 pounds [60 to 80 dollars] per day; this roughly equals the monthly salary of a university-educated civil servant. As a result, many government employees resign and work as brokers to make more money.And this truly is a business, not a charity: Every broker takes money, even from his own brothers and sisters. Last week a colleague brought me his brother-in-law. I asked him why he needed me, when he could make all the papers himself. He explained that he can’t take money from his own brother-in-law, but I can do so and then give him half.

Most who can afford to leave the country do so; others benefit from an exemption afforded to university students, while another subset enjoys a reprieve due to their status as the sole male of their generation in their nuclear family. Others may pay exorbitant bribes to skirt the draft, or confine themselves within their homes to avoid being detected—making them invisible both to the army and to broader society. Some endure multiple such ordeals, only to remain in an indefinite state of limbo due to the contingent and precarious nature of these solutions

Syria’s predatory wartime economy is slowly but surely turning into a predatory economy of peace

As some Syrians put it, Damascus has been particularly effective in reconstructing one thing amidst the immeasurable destruction: the “wall of fear” which characterized the regime before 2011 and which momentarily broke down at the outset of the uprising

active surveillance, intimidation and repression are not the only contributors to this leaden atmosphere. A pervasive exhaustion has settled over Syrians ground down and immiserated by war, disillusioned with all those who purport to lead or protect them, and largely reduced to striving for day-to-day subsistence

At one level, the war has wrenched open social and economic fractures that existed long before the conflict. The city of Homs stands as perhaps the starkest microcosm of this trend. A Sunni majority city with sizable Christian and Alawi minorities, Homs was the first major urban center to rise up and the first to devolve into bitter sectarian bloodletting

While vast swathes of Syria’s Sunni population feel silenced and brutalized, Alawi communities often carry their own narrative of victimhood, which blends legitimate grievances with vindictive impulses vis-à-vis Sunnis whom they regard as having betrayed the country

crude divisions based on sect or class fail to describe a complex and fluid landscape. Some fault lines are less dramatic, all but imperceptible except to those who experience them first-hand. Neighbors, colleagues, friends and kin may have come down on opposing sides, despite having every social marker in common. Each part of the country has its own web of tragic events to untangle.

Many Islamic State fighters swapped clothes and joined the [Kurdish-led] Syrian Democratic Forces to protect themselves and their families. But they haven’t changed; those people are bad, and will always be bad. There will be vengeance. Not now, while everyone is busy putting their lives together. But eventually, everyone who suffered under ISIS, whose brother was killed by ISIS, will take revenge.

A native of a Damascus suburb remarked: “Charities typically want to help those who fled from elsewhere. So, when I go to a charity, I say I’m displaced.”

The divide between conservative and more secular Sunnis has calcified, manifesting itself even in differential treatment at checkpoints. “I have an easier time driving around because I don’t wear the hijab,” remarked a woman from the Damascus suburbs. “If you veil, security assumes you’re with the opposition.”

While dialogue is sorely needed, some Syrians warn against emphasising dialogue for its own sake—even at the cost of burying the most substantive issues at stake. A businessman from Damascus described his own abortive experience with talks proposing to link disparate elements of Syria’s private sector: “There’s this whole industry around ‘mediation,’ including between sides that don’t actually disagree on anything. Meanwhile, all the problems that caused the uprising have gotten worse.”

Multiplying forms of predation have accelerated the outflow of Syria’s financial and human capital, leaving behind a country largely populated by an underclass that can aspire to little more than subsistence

remittances from relatives who live abroad

The country’s middle and upper classes have long extended vital forms of solidarity to their needier compatriots, with Syria’s merchant and religious networks playing a leading role. What is unique, today, is the scale of hardship across the country, which is so vast as to have changed the way that Syrians conceptualize the act of receiving charity. A businessman from central Syria noted the extent to which dependency, which once demanded some degree of discretion, has become a straightforward fact of life. “People used to hide it when they were reliant on charity. Not anymore. Today you might hear workers in a factory wondering, ‘Where is the manager?’ And someone will say that he’s out waiting for his food basket. The whole country is living on handouts.”

People still do charity the Islamic way, based on the premise that you must assist those closest to you. If there’s someone you should help—say, a neighbor—but you’re unable, then it’s your responsibility to find someone else who can. These circles remain very much intact, and the entire society lives on this. Seven years of war didn’t destroy that aspect of Syrian culture, and that’s something Syrians are proud of.

There will be no nationwide recovery, no serious reform, no meaningful reconciliation for the foreseeable future.

new ways of building came, like so much else, from the West, first through colonial administration and then through foreign “advisors,” often taking advantage of the insecure land-law of the region, introduced by the Ottoman land code of 1858. By the time France had been granted the mandate to govern Syria in 1923, modernist building types, the mania for roads and motorized “circulation,” the idea that cities should be disaggregated into “zones”—residential, commercial, industrial, and so on—and the obsession with hygiene had all made their destructive mark on the urban fabric

As in Russia and Germany, the arrival of the totalitarian state was prefaced by the arrival of totalitarian architecture

a modern city, another piece of anywhere

Architectural modernism fed into the Arab inferiority complex: concrete high rises, plazas, geometrical patterns, energy-intensive fenestration, sometimes with a mihrab or a dome stuck on in deference to a history that is no longer really believed in—all these have become part of the new vernacular of a hasty urbanization. The basic idea has been to abandon the great tradition of the Ottoman city, with its many communities in their tents of stone, and to “catch up” with the West

architect Marwa al-Sabouni, whose book, The Battle for Home, tells the story of how the conflict in Syria has overwhelmed her own city of Homs. She shows that you cannot destroy the serene and unostentatious forms of the Levantine city without also jeopardizing the peace that they symbolized and which to a measure they also protected

The old rabbit-warren city of the Middle East was a conflict-defusing device, a continuous affirmation of neighborhood and settlement. The new city of jerry-built concrete towers is a conflict-enhancing device, a continuous “stand-off” between competing communities on the edge of a place that does not belong to them and to which they in turn cannot belong.

Rarely, in any of this, however, has provision been made for the migrants from the villages, who have been compelled to survive in unplanned and unregulated structures, heaped up around the cities with no thought for how they look or for the character of the public spaces beneath them

We should remember that the idea of replacing the organic city of customary styles with cleared spaces and blocks of concrete, while it originated among European intellectuals, was first tried out in the Arab world. Le Corbusier, who had attempted in vain to persuade the city council of Paris to adopt his plan to tear down the entire city north of the Seine and replace it with an assemblage of glass towers, turned his attention to the North African city of Algiers instead, which was at the time under French colonial administration. As architectural advisor to the French Vichy government during the war he was able to overrule the elected mayor of Algiers and impose his will upon the city—though the Allied victory abruptly put an end to his plans.

Le Corbusier’s scheme is still studied and even treated with reverence in modern schools of architecture. It involved erasing the old city from the map, replacing it with great square blocks that negate the Mediterranean coastline and the contours of the landscape, and surmounting the whole with streets along which automobiles fly above the population. No church or mosque has a part in the plan; there are no alleyways or secret corners. All is blank, expressionless, and cold. It is an act of vengeance by the new world against the old: not a project for settling a place, but a project for destroying it, so that nothing of the place remains

the glitzy restaurant style of Dubai, in which vast gadgets, belonging to no known architectural language but looking like kitchen tools discarded by some gigantic celebrity chef, lie scattered among ribbons of motorway

Care for one’s place is the first move towards accepting the others who reside there. The thoughts “this is our home,” and “we belong here” are peacemaking thoughts. If the “we” is underpinned only by religious faith, and faith defined so as to exclude its historical rivals, then we have a problem. If, however, a resident of Homs can identify himself by the place that he shares with his fellow residents, rather than the faith that distinguishes him, then we are already on the path away from civil war.

decisions are made by officials, and officials belong to the great system of Mafia-like corruption that is the true cause of the Syrian conflict, and which has encouraged the Syrian political elite in recent times to look to Russia as its natural ally

Capitalism’s “creative destruction” is the anti-conservative claim that nothing that exists could not be improved easily in a short time by fast, profitable and “efficient” total replacement.

in the 1990s there were many popular Syrian TV drama series about how people lived and interacted with each other in the neighborhoods of the old cities in Syria during the late 19th and early 20th century. They depicted the days when the Levant society as it existed in its centuries-old Ottoman era make-up, just prior to the transition into colonial and post-colonial modernity and showed how rich and poor lived together in the same neighborhood, it showed the old houses, the shops & the markets.

Roger Scruton is romanticizing. He therefore completely misunderstands the expressive functional reality of ordinary homes and security by focusing on public architecture, which everywhere expresses elite ideals instead of common ones. Take Florence and the Italian Republics. Frequent wars and not infrequently with Muslim empires meant homes had to be defensible and closed off from streets. Only later, briefly, and elsewhere later like in Britain and the US were isolated farm villages open to welcome trade, or US farm homes isolated away from the necessity of group protections because genuine threats had become to rare to proactively defend against them. Similarly, the divide in the Muslim world is between open plans in port cities secured through trade by larger powers that could ensure protection, versus homes way from ports, deliberately closed off against strangers so as to be defensible against frequent invaders. Most of the Islamic world remains like unstable and insecure early Florence. And homes throughout MENA reflect their isolation and insecurity through closed plans, just as much as Spanish ones from Moorish times do, even in the New World.

In 2016, the military and other security institutions were given exemptions in a new value-added tax (VAT) law enacted as part of IMF-inspired reforms. The law states that the military does not have to pay VAT on goods, equipment, machinery, services and raw materials needed for the purposes of armament, defense and national security.The Ministry of Defense has the right to decide which goods and services qualify. Civilian businessmen complain that this can leave the system open to abuse. Receipts for a cup of coffee at private sector hotels, for example, add 14 percent VAT. Receipts at military hotels do not. Employees at the military-owned Al-Masah Hotel in Cairo told Reuters that no VAT was charged when renting venues for weddings and conferences.

The Ministry of Military Production is projecting that operating revenues from its 20 firms will reach 15 billion Egyptian pounds in 2018/2019, five times higher than in 2013/2014, according to a ministry chart. The ministry does not disclose what happens to the revenues. The chairmen of two of the firms said profits go to the ministry or are reinvested in the business.

“I don’t want to be a local shop. I want to be a company that has the capacity to export and compete internationally.”

The chairmen of two military engineering companies, Abu Zaabal Engineering Industries Co and Helwan Engineering Industries Co, said in recent years it had become much easier to access financing through the Ministry of Military Production.

Military companies receive an exemption from import tariffs under a 1986 law and from income taxes under a 2005 law. Cargoes sent to military companies do not have to be inspected.

The Ministry of Military Production signed a memorandum of understanding with China’s GCL Group last week to build a solar panel factory worth up to $2 billion. The military has taken over much of the construction of intercity roads from the Ministry of Transport and now controls the toll stations along most major highways.

Economists and investors say reforms tied to a $12 billion three-year IMF program signed in Nov. 2016 should lay the ground for economic expansion. But foreign investors are still shying away from Egypt, apart from those focusing on the more resilient energy sector. Non-oil foreign direct investment fell to about $3 billion in 2017 from $4.7 billion in 2016, according to Reuters calculations based on central bank statistics.  

foreign investors were reluctant to invest in sectors where the military is expanding or in one they might enter, worried that competing against the military with its special privileges could expose their investment to risk. If an investor had a business dispute with the military, the commercial officer said, there was no point in taking it to arbitration. “You just leave the country,” he said.

Egypt’s military, the biggest in the Arab world, has advantages.It enjoys financial support from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, staunch supporters of Sisi since he toppled the group they see as a threat to the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood. Western powers see Cairo as a bulwark against Islamist militancy. Egypt receives $1.3 billion in military aid annually from the United States alone.

In 2015, the defense minister issued a decree exempting nearly 600 hotels, resorts and other properties owned by the military from real estate taxes

Among projects the Ministry of Military Production announced in 2017 was a plan to plant 20 million palm trees with an Emirati company and build a factory to make sugar from their dates. It agreed with a Saudi company to jointly manufacture elevators. The military inaugurated the Middle East’s biggest fish farm on the Nile Delta east of Alexandria.

At bustling Cairo squares, people line up to buy subsidized meat and other food handed out from trucks sponsored by the military. Sisi said he had instructed the military to enter the market “to supply more chicken to push down prices.”Some disagree with such measures on the grounds the military’s mission is to protect the country from external threats.“We have reached a point where they are competing even with street vendors,”

all the cases he represented are related to specific leakage incidents, and that so far there have been no lawsuits for the other types of pollution caused by the factory

A chronic lack of financial resources in the area means that there are still no scientific studies confirming any connection between poor health conditions in the area and emissions from the factory

Tunisian law stipulates that polluters must fix the damage they do to the environment. But a common problem, which also applies to the SNCPA, is that many industries are owned by the government. The post-revolutionary Tunisian government so far appears unwilling to allocate the funds needed to cleanse the environment of the toxic materials the factory has released over the past half century. The plant itself has been facing financial problems, which means that investing in safer disposal of toxic waste is low on its list of priorities.

Kasserine’s agricultural land and water table consistently show much higher levels of mercury than average, says Majed Hagui, an agricultural engineer serving as Kasserine’s regional environment representative.

The SNCPA also discharges liquid waste containing toxic and corrosive substances such as hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, and sodium hydroxide, which then flows into a nearby river that farmers use for irrigation. According to Mhamdi, the toxins are leaching into the soil in areas bordering the river. Because few farmers in the region are aware of the danger, they continue to use the contaminated water for irrigation. Exposure to liquid waste from the factory can cause kidney disease and gastrointestinal infections as well as interfering with human reproduction. “To sum up, the environmental situation in Kasserine is catastrophic,”

Even though he doesn’t use the river water to irrigate his trees, he said as many as 100 of his olive trees were damaged because of their proximity to the river. “My trees used to produce 300 kilograms of olives each,” Saheri says. “Now we harvest between 30 and 50 kilograms. They produce less every year. I even had to destroy some trees.”

estimates put the cost of a “demercurization” process at 60 million dinars ($27 million)

the highly centralized decision-making process in local government is at fault. While local activists are often eager to find solutions, officials see few incentives to take action. “The government usually chooses to turn a blind eye to ecological issues, usually citing the need to create jobs and revive the economy,”

need to maintain jobs is vital in Kasserine, where the unemployment rate, at 26.2 percent, is more than 10 points higher than the national average of 15.4 percent. The SNCPA employs more than 500 people — meaning that locals are inclined to think twice before demanding that the factory move or shut down. Mhamdi says there are many potential solutions to the environmental problems caused by the factory that don’t have to involve closing it. Installing special filters could reduce up to 90 percent of toxic emissions into the atmosphere, while a water treatment station could neutralize toxins being released into the water. But there is no political will to tackle the problems.

Since the beginning of the 2020s, several articles5Jean-Loup Samaan, “The Rise of the Emirati Defense Industry,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 14 May 2019 https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/79121;  Elenora Ardemagni, “The UAE’s Military Training-Focused Foreign Policy,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 22 October 2020, https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/83033; Melissa Dalton and Hijab Shah, “Evolving UAE Military and Foreign Security Cooperation: Path Toward Military Professionalism,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 12 January 2021,  https://carnegie-mec.org/2021/01/12/evolving-uae-military-and-foreign-security-cooperation-path-toward-military-professionalism-pub-83549; Elenora Ardemagni, “ Building New Gulf States Through Conscription,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 25 April 2018, https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/76178; Elenora Ardemagni, “Gulf Monarchies’ Militarized Nationalism,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 28 February 2019,https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/78472; Zoltan Barany, “Big News! Conscription in the Gulf,” Middle East Institute, 25 January 2017, https://www.mei.edu/publications/big-news-conscription-gulf; Dr. Eman Ahmed Abdel Halim, “Implementation of Military Conscription in the Gulf,” Future for Advanced Research Studies, 12 December 2016, https://futureuae.com/m/Mainpage/Item/2250/pressing-threats-implementation-of-military-conscription-in-the-gulf were written on the economic, social, and geopolitical reasons behind Gulf countries’ shift in military recruitment strategy. The security problems originating from Iran and Yemen, the willingness to exercise soft power in the region along with the volatile energy sector, and the ruptures within the rentier state model are put forward as the main justifications behind the Gulf countries’ developing defense industries and growing their armies. In this context, compulsory military service does play an important role, be it to increase the size of the army, cause deterrence in the region or create new job opportunities and a qualified workforce out of young citizens.

can also create intangible moral advantages, and thus have significant effects on these countries’ civil-military relations. The biggest reason for this is the symbiotic relationship that has formed over time between compulsory military service and national sentiment.  In this sense, introducing conscription shows an effort to turn these societies into nations where individuals would be bound to one another by national sentiment and not the rentier state model they have so far known.

To raise obedient and productive citizens who wore the same uniform, spoke the same language, and sang the same anthems, education became an important tool in the nation-building process.11Ayşe Gül Altınay and Tanıl Bora, “Ordu, Militarizm ve Milliyetçilik,” Iletişim Yayınları, (2002): 140. In Prussia, this “new form of nationalist socialization” was provided through military establishments with the hope that, after their discharge from military service, men would remain loyal to the state and transfer their sentiment and what they “learned” to the rest of the population.12

mandatory military service in these countries should not be seen as a way to efficiently raise strong and competent armies. First, like their Gulf neighbors, neither Qatar, Kuwait, nor the UAE is populated enough to sustain a competent standing army. Most of their populations are made of ex-pats who are not subject to conscription laws. Second, their current system of outsourcing military needs has proven to be efficient in the long run, with all three countries continuing to invest in contracting foreign soldiers to efficiently populate their armies. Therefore, the new conscription laws should be seen as a symbolic move to strengthen nationalistic bonds and ambitions.

paradoxically, the exact nationalistic sentiment and loyalty that the Gulf countries try to channel among their citizens can backfire if the people (including the conscripts) were to ever resent the rulers and their policies. This is rather contrary to the long-established coup-proofing strategies25After gaining their independence, most countries in the region (or rather individual leaders) have engaged in various coup-proofing measures to keep their militaries in check. There were different types of coup-measuring strategies. For example, until 2011, Hosni Mubarak, a military man himself, tried to keep the Egyptian military at bay by giving officers and the military institution economic benefits and providing an unfair competition. In Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali took a different approach and choose to ouster the military as an institution completely and empowered the police force. In Sudan and Libya, former presidents Bashar and Gaddafi took a more social approach and tried to counterbalance different groups of society, especially the tribal establishments, as a buffer against the military. In the Gulf, the ruling monarchs resorted to using foreign soldiers to keep the military away from social and political affairs as much as possible. that Arab countries followed over the years. However, given the low numbers of citizens that will be drafted each year, the risk of such revolts taking place remains low.

In Kuwait, UAE, and Qatar, there are legal sanctions in place against anyone who fails to enlist when they become eligible and conscientious objection is not recognized. This could cause or further the feeling of oppression and resentment and trigger protests and turmoil in these countries. However, at this stage, this risk is low but still a possibility as seen in Thailand, Israel, and Armenia

there are many stark differences between the conditions of 1977 and those of 2013

Morsi’s rush to secure political power has cost him a lot on the economic front. However, he doesn't have to save the economy to survive as president. He just has to manage its decline well enough to prevent an acute dip toward bankruptcy and default

Mubarak was arguably ousted not because thousands poured into Tahrir Square, but because most elements in society were united against him. If Morsi succeeds in managing a declining economy and securing loyalties, he can avoid the same fate. That is what autocrats in Iran and Sudan have been doing successfully for decades

The widespread protests following Belaid's assassination showed the depth of division between Islamists and secular movements fearful that freedoms of expression, cultural liberty and women's rights were under threat just two years after the popular uprising ended decades of Western-backed dictatorship.

The day before his death he was publicly lambasting a "climate of systematic violence". He had blamed tolerance shown by Ennahda and its two, smaller secularist allies in the coalition government toward hardline Salafists for allowing the spread of groups hostile to modern culture and liberal ideas.

Declining trade with the crisis-hit euro zone has left the 11 million Tunisians struggling to achieve the better living standards many had hoped for following Ben Ali's departure.Its compact size, relatively skilled workforce and close ties with former colonial power France and other European neighbors across the Mediterranean has raised hopes that Tunisia can set an example of economic progress for the region.Lacking the huge oil and gas resources of North African neighbors Libya and Algeria, Tunisia counts tourism as a major currency earner and further unrest could scare off visitors vital to an industry only just recovering from the revolution.

"There are political forces inside Tunisia that don't want this transition to succeed," Marzouki said in Strasbourg. "When one has a revolution, the counter revolution immediately sets in because those who lose power - it's not only Ben Ali and his family - are the hundreds of thousands of people with many interests who see themselves threatened by this revolution."

the acquisition of 3000 hectares of communally owned land to produce energy

"green grabbing"

the transfer of ownership, use rights and control over resources that were once publicly or privately owned –or not even the subject of ownership– from the poor (or everyone including the poor) into the hands of the powerful

This productivist creation of marginality and degradation has a long history that goes back to French colonial times. It was then that degradation narratives were constructed to justify both outright expropriation of land and the establishment of institutional arrangements based on the premise that extensive pastoralism was unproductive at best, and destructive at worst.

the discursive framework rendered it "marginal" and open to new "green" market uses: the production of solar power in this case at the expense of an alternative land use - pastoralism - that is deemed unproductive by the decision-makers. This is evident in the land sale that was carried out at a very low price.

various deceptive laws with colonial origins that have functioned to concentrate collective land ownership within the hands of an individual land representative, who tends to be under the influence of powerful regional nobles

meetings masquerading as a "consultation with the people" were only designed to inform the local communities about a fait accompli rather than seeking their approval

This analysis examines the project through the lens of the creation of a new commodity chain, revealing its effects as no different from the destructive mining activities taking place in southern Morocco.

privatizations in the renewable energy sector are not new as of 2005, when a royal holding company called Nareva was created specifically to monopolize markets in the energy and environment sectors and ended up taking the lion's share in wind energy production in the country

he government had effectively privatized and confiscated historical popular sovereignty over land and transformed the people into mere recipients of development; development they are literally paying for, provided it would one day materialize, of course

There is no surprise regarding the international financial institutions' (IFIs) strong support for this high-cost and capital-intensive project, as Morocco boasts one of the most neoliberal(ized) economies in the region. It is extremely open to foreign capital at the expense of labor rights, and very advanced in its ambition to be fully integrated into the global marketplace (in a subordinate position, that is).

The World Bank’s disbursement levels to Morocco reached record levels in 2011 and 2012, with a major emphasis of these loans placed on promoting the use of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) within key sectors

It seems that production of energy from the sun will not be different and will be controlled by multinationals only interested in making huge profits at the expense of sovereignty and a decent life for Moroccans.

The idea that Morocco is taking out billions of dollars in loans to produce energy, some of which will be exported to Europe when the economic viability of the initiative is hardly assured, raises questions about externalizing the risk of Europe's renewable energy strategy to Morocco and other struggling economies around the region. It ignores entirely what has come to be called "climate debt" or "ecological debt" that is owed by the industrialised North to countries of the Global South, given the historical responsibility of the West in causing climate change

The biggest issue with this technology is the extensive use of water that comes with the wet cooling stage. Unlike photovoltaic (PV) technology, CSP needs cooling. This is done either by air cooled condensers (dry cooling) or high water-consumption (wet cooling). Phase I of the project will be using the wet cooling option and is estimated to consume from two to three million cubed meters of water annually (Kouz 2011). Water consumption will be much less in the case of a dry cooling (planned for phase II): between 0.73 and 0.88 million cubed meters. PV technologies require water only for cleaning solar panels. They consume about 200 times less water than CSP technology with wet cooling and forty times less water than CSP with dry cooling.

Even if the solar plant is only using one percent of the average dam capacity, the water consumption is still significant and can become a thorny problem at times of extreme drought when the dam contains only fifty-four million cubed meter. At such times, the dam waters will not be sufficient to cover the needs of irrigation and drinking water,  making the water usage for the solar plant deeply problematic and contentious.

in an arid region like Ouarzazate, this appropriation of water for a supposedly green agenda constitutes another green grab, which will play into and intensify ongoing agrarian dynamics and livelihood struggles in the region.

If the Moroccan state was really serious about its green credentials, why is it then building a coal-fired power plant at the same time, which represents an ecocide in-waiting for the already-polluted town of Safi? Why is it also ignoring the devastating environmental and social effects of the mining industry in the country? One notable example is the long-standing community struggle in Imider (140 kilometres east of Ouarzazate) against the royal holding silver mine (Africa's most productive silver mine), which is polluting their environment, grabbing their water, and pillaging their wealth.