Schütze, Dr. Benjamin

This paper draws on the project for a Mediterranean electricity ring to study questions of structural violence and exclusion. It focuses on how forms of containment at different sites of the envisaged ring connect with energy connectivities enabled by transregional electricity flows. It illustrates how seemingly local manifestations of violence at different nodes of the ring are not a testimony to the incompleteness of ongoing (energy) infrastructure projects, but instead an interconnected and distinct part of the latter.

For resource-poor countries in the MENA, the expansion of renewables represents a unique chance to overcome established geopolitical dependencies, develop employment opportunities, and pursue a long-term strategy of domestic energy security.

Research on authoritarian connections beyond the state requires a transregional practices approach. This special issue is an invitation to combine critical approaches to the study of authoritarian power by paying attention to spaces of contestation, authoritarian practices, as well as non-state actors and agency below and beyond the scale of the state. We focus on authoritarian practices and their spatial and temporal articulations in (1) transregional infrastructures, (2) global processes of capital accumulation and (3) nature-society relations.

Countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa are pursuing ambitious targets for a transition from fossil fuels to renewables. While this shift marks an important point of transition, the region’s political economy is still predominantly analysed through the prism of fossil fuels and state-centric approaches. Authoritarian power is widely understood as directly linked to the diffusion of oil revenues and the ways in which states use these to reinforce authoritarian rule.

Countries throughout the MENA are pursuing ambitious targets for a transition from fossil fuels to renewables. While the latter’s distributed nature offers a possibility for more democratic, inclusive and independent (energy) politics, transregionally connected authoritarian elites attempt to transform it into concentrated forms of political and economic power.

How can triangular cooperation (TC) between the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and the European Union (EU) contribute to energy transitions and development in the wider Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region? This report analyses the opportunities and risks of this cooperation constellation in several key sectors and countries.

In order to support democratic ideals of socio-economic justice, public participation and representation, established efforts at "democracy promotion" in the MENA must be abandoned. The promotion of procedural democracy has proven to be reconcilable with socio-economic authoritarianisms and presents no challenge to authoritarian power structures.

From collaboration on infrastructural megaprojects to vaccine development and digital surveillance techniques: Arab Gulf–Chinese relations in times of COVID-19 are complex and multi-layered. Nonetheless, established regime-centric, analytical approaches often fail to see this complexity by almost exclusively focusing on questions of collaboration between authoritarian regimes.

While Jordan is one of the main targets of US and European attempts at ‘democracy promotion’, it also demonstrates a remarkably stable authoritarian system. Existing literature on ‘democracy promotion’ however mostly fails to see a connection between authoritarian reinforcement and external efforts at moral intervention. The dominant approaches to the study of ‘democracy promotion’ widely suffer from a narrow focus on developing policy recommendations and/or from a lack of empirical research.

Brief summary and presentation of 'Promoting Democracy, Reinforcing Authoritarianism: US and European Policy in Jordan' (CUP, 2019).

External attempts at “democracy promotion” are one of the defining features of global liberalism. A core principle guiding this Essential Reading is that the topic at hand needs to be unequivocally situated against the backdrop of a critical analysis of liberal thought. A main shortcoming of much of the mainstream literature on “democracy promotion” is the tendency to ignore related fundamental questions.

How to rethink authoritarian power in ways that better account for authoritarian connections beyond nation-state boundaries? By reconceptualizing the context in which to analyze authoritarian power, we bring to light transregional authoritarian connections between the secondary port cities Aqaba/Jordan and Buenaventura/Colombia.