[This piece is the second in a three-part roundtable series discussing energy justice in the Arab World at the Arab Council for the Social Sciences conference in Beirut on 15 May 2025. Click here Part I and Part III of the roundtable.]
Over the past decade, a new landscape of critical energy studies has seen the development of the concept of “energy justice” as a heuristic and analytical tool that can help us form a wider public narrative around energy linked to the climate justice movement. It is a way to speak to our right to energy and make energy visible in everyday life. As part of the (En)visioning justice project, Ala’a Shehabi (UCL), Muzna Al-Masri (UCL), and Dana Abi Ghanem convened a roundtable on 15th May 2025 at the 7th ACSS conference in Beirut. The idea of the roundtable was to think collectively about developing a research frontier for energy justice in solidarity with the issues and the people of the Arab region. As energy scholars, what kind of research agenda do we need that can contextualize and challenge universalized theories of energy justice? Such theories are often rooted in liberal paradigms that peripheralize, exceptionalize and ignore the extreme energy conditions in the Arab World. The roundtable brought together in person Benjamin Schuetze, (Arnold Bergstraesser Institute (ABI), Freiburg), Eric Verdeil (Sciences Po), Hamza Hamouchene (Transnational Institute (TNI)), Zeina Abla (Ebla Research Collective), and Trish Kahle (Georgetown University Qatar), in addition to Muzna Al-Masri (UCL), Ala’a Shehabi (UCL), and Dana Abi Ghanem, the organizers. Muna Dajani (London School of Economics) was prevented from entering Lebanon so could not attend in person, but was interviewed by Ala’a and Muzna after the roundtable and her contribution was added. Dr. Abaher El-Sakka, Birzeit University, provided a final reflection and summary. At the ACSS, we discussed foundational questions that we hope can challenge the epistemic hegemony of classic approaches in energy studies.
Question 2: Reflecting on your own and other existing scholarship, how do you see the evolution of the energy justice discipline in the region?
Ala'a Shehabi: When Muzna, Dana, and I were reviewing the energy justice literature, we came across a recent bibliometric review of 4,000 articles, in which fewer than 100 were on the Arab region—the global center of hydrocarbon production, where nowadays large-scale renewable and new energy transition projects are also situated. We wanted to understand why we are missing from this quantitative analysis of the literature. The key themes that emerged from this bibliometric analysis show how academia goes through trends. In the first 10 years, people talked about “energy poverty” and then that wentout of fashion and they started talking about energy access. We believe this reading of the energy justice literature does not reflect either the thinking or the reality of energy in the Middle East. Through this roundtable, we would like to understand how energy scholars imagine the evolution of the discipline itself through recent scholarship. How would we draw our own teleologies and patterns? Which differing periodizations, concepts, and themes emerge from the region that reflect our own conceptions of energy justice?
Muna Dajani: There is a lot happening and being written in scholarship from and around the region, which is promising. For a long time, the region was invisible or told with a simple, single story dominated by petro-nationalism or deprivation narratives. There is a promising energy justice scholarship, exemplified by colleagues in this roundtable. The need remains to produce principled research with political commitments and not just follow trends. My research fits more in the material and historical, focusing on environmental history, and the legacies and continuities of settler colonialism related to water and energy. I’m interested in telling infrastructure stories differently: what happens when infrastructures are built, contested, or resisted? What happens when people are deprived of infrastructure? I look at the presence and absence of infrastructure in scholarship and everyday life and how people contest and negotiate rights and claims through them. I'm also interested in comparative work. Our region requires research that breaks boundaries, recalibrates knowledge production and conceptualizes space differently. We should make visible connections between struggles in North Africa and the Levant and imagine energy justice beyond colonial boundaries. We see how colonizers easily scrap everything and start over, expanding settler colonial projects regardless of global norms or “international law.” We shouldn’t be confined epistemologically by colonial lines. It’s about breaking grounds, thinking differently, and mending ruptures both in scholarship and in grounded struggles. Even if we think we’re connected, many of us are unaware of each other’s energy struggles. We need to collaborate more with clearer political agendas, not just research production.
Eric Verdiel: I thought it could be useful to say a few words about the work I have been doing with a group of colleagues for the last few years on urban energy politics and specifically electricity. We have advanced the idea of electrical hybridization, which captures some trends in the transformation of urban energy systems. The departure point is to rethink the role of the conventional electricity grid as the main electricity source. Lebanon is of course a case in point about grid failure, but in many other areas, for instance, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the grid is not the dominant energy or electricity provider either. Rethinking energy justice needs to take stock of this fact and to account for what we call the heterogenization of electricity and energy supply sources. It also means that rethinking energy politics and energy justice must make sense of this diversity, and of the bricolage it involves, and the specific inequalities that result from this heterogeneity. Often, this diversity is thought of as resilience, but it amounts more accurately to more vulnerability. At least, we must take into consideration the notion of hybridization of electrification, in order to understand the grid, its failure, its effects, and the decentralized politics of energy that emerges in answer to this failure.
Hamza Hamouchene: It is important that we frame conversations about energy around concepts that connect with and are guided by the material interests of our peoples and the popular and marginalized classes. Most existing concepts and the assumptions behind them are Eurocentric or neoliberal, stripped of class content and lacking a political-economic analysis. There are numerous concepts we can use when we talk about energy matters, one of them is energy democracy; however, I prefer the concept of energy sovereignty, which encompasses not only national sovereignty but also popular sovereignty over resources and energy systems. What I find missing in mainstream analyses and debates are direct and concrete references to questions of justice, sovereignty (including food, resources, and land sovereignty), especially given the widespread phenomenon of green grabbing, whereby agricultural lands are being repurposed for renewable energy projects aimed at export rather than local self-sufficiency. For instance, in Tunisia, a legislative amendment was introduced in 2019, permitting the alteration of agricultural land use for renewable energy production, including for export. This is nonsensical amid the severe food crisis in Tunisia, a situation exacerbated during the Covid-19 pandemic and further intensified by the ongoing war in Ukraine. Additionally, this policy raises concerns regarding extractivist and narrow export-oriented projects and the emerging green extractivist model, which perpetuates dependency relationships and unequal exchange.
Benjamin Schuetze: I strongly share Hamza's point. Energy studies have tended to “technocratize” political issues. The sheer quantity of articles written on rural electrification or fuel poverty or energy justice doesn’t really tell us that much. You can do very interesting and exciting research on cooking fuel or rural electrification and extremely apolitical and technocratic research on energy justice. Taking a broader view, if we talk of “justice,” what does it mean? Justice for whom? What is presented as the cause of fuel poverty? What does it mean that electricity is at the same time a cause of climate catastrophe but also presented as a solution? How are the effects of climate catastrophe unevenly distributed? These kinds of questions would be much more interesting and they are not really captured by these quantitative analyses. Research on energy justice should in my opinion center much more on questions of power relations and imperialism. I'm drawing heavily on the work of Andreas Malm and Adam Hanieh here. Malm has shown that coal and steam power were brought to the Arab world by the British Empire, through its deployment in the battle of Acre in 1840. The discovery and commercial exploitation of oil in the 1930s marked the onset of US imperialism. So questions of energy policy are related to questions of imperialism. Today we’re seeing renewables promoted for instance in Trump's Gaza riviera plan, and we are also seeing how energy, both gas and solar power, is used to further the regional integration of Israel at a time of ongoing genocide. So my bottom line on this is that we must center imperialism when discussing energy politics and questions of justice in the region.
Zeina Abla: Energy systems are often analyzed as linear, “straight-forward,” and uncomplicated; and approached with technical exercises and a simplified process or model of adoption, whereas the lived realities surrounding energy in our context are non-linear; shaped by crisis, conflicts, adaptations, and again new crises and conflicts and new adaptations.Discussions tend to move sporadically from “clean cooking” in one place to “justice” elsewhere without understanding how this reflects on citizen wellbeing or lived hardships, and without addressing the interconnectedness and cyclicality of energy and conflicts. There is a pressing need for a body of literature that explicitly examines energy justice in conditions of conflict, war, and occupation.
Methodologically, and in addition to the political economy framework, the sociotechnical (or sociomaterial) approach offers insight into how technical and social dimensions of energy systems shape each another. Drawing on these disciplines could strengthen the conceptual foundations of energy justice in the region by situating it within the dynamics of protracted conflicts and resonating with the everyday experiences of people living under conditions of injustice.
Trish Kahle: Another outcome of an energy justice literature that has, as others here have pointed out, turned political issues into technical ones is that the role of energy systems in processes of meaning-making has been underappreciated. When people resist energy injustice, they are not just mechanistically responding to inaccessibility and unaffordability (two consistent ways that the energy justice literature understands how energy injustice is experienced). The way people understand what energy injustice is and what energy justice would look like are culturally situated and historically produced. Energy practices are central to how people make meaning of their lives and their struggles. At the core of any question of energy justice or injustice are questions of values and priorities: who should get access to how much energy, at what price, and for what purpose? How do people think legitimate claims on energy within a system should be balanced? The answers that people give to these questions are not drawn from some general or universal theory of energy justice. So in order to have a framework for understanding energy justice and injustice in the region, we need a better understanding of the energy cultures and histories of the region, building on some of the excellent scholarship that has started to emerge on this question.
Muzna Al-Masri: When examining the existing literature, it is imperative to consider the grey literature produced by think tanks, UN and multilateral agencies, and even investigative long-form media reporting, which has produced accumulated knowledge on electricity over the past decade and beyond. The Arab Reform Initiative for example, the TNI who Hamza cites, and other NGOs like Public Works Studio in Lebanon, several so called “observatories” in Tunisia, and think tanks in the region have produced fundamental, critical research, markedly different from academic literature, that does not feature in the above-mentioned bibliometric review. The precarity of funding for such organizations means we risk losing many of these resources. Therefore, it is necessary to look beyond academic literature and include the grey literature produced by international organizations and to consider how such work might be accumulated and preserved if it is to contribute meaningfully to a broader discourse. This situation also reflects the unfortunate dominance of World Bank publications in shaping the discourse on this topic. This dominance may also explain why much of the prevailing thought is closely tied to policy frameworks that do not address justice in the same manner as it is approached within development-related disciplines. In my view, this is part of the ongoing colonial logic embedded in the treatment of energy issues.