[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 to read Part I and Part II of this 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 3: Future Research Agenda: If you were given the resources and power to advance an energy justice research agenda in the Arab world, what specific research questions, thematic priorities, methodologies, or regions would you prioritize to yield the most significant, equitable, and sustainable impact?
Muna Dajani: A research agenda needs to be driven by the region’s most pressing issues, the reality of the world we live in, and the futures we want to make. What about real struggles being forged as we speak for rights to clean environments, electricity and water provision and the right to remain in place? Here the great work you [Muzna, Ala’a and Mariam] do in utilizing citizen assembly as a method is inspiring: It engages, speaks, and thinks with the community. I think what is really important is that we are not engaging with energy justice as a topic of theorization or merely as a scholarly endeavor but as something that speaks with and speaks back to the struggles for dignity across the region. This then also brings in the question of how do we do it meaningfully and with emancipatory methodologies and research agendas? How do we bring disciplines together to ask it means to think about energy justice and emancipation in a region such as ours? How can we think of energy as not a singular concept or field? I have to commend Trish’s great work alongside her team when they convened the Global Energy Cultures Forum in 2023, bringing people from all sorts of disciplines together to speak about energy.
This is also a pedagogical question: how do we produce knowledge, teaching materials, and bold curricula to educate ourselves and others about energy justice in our region? We often look outward to Indigenous and Global South scholarship, which is great, but we need to bring knowledge back, including Arabic open-access curricula. Interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary collaborations are vital to capture the complexity of energy justice. Research questions should interrogate how energy sovereignty can be reclaimed, how hegemonic conceptions of energy can be challenged, and how infrastructures can be understood as sites of political contestation and emancipation. Engaging with communities and grounding research in lived realities will ensure that scholarship contributes meaningfully to ongoing struggles for justice.
Hamza Hamouchene: First, in order to change and overthrow the capitalist system, we must study capital. We must study its dynamics, circuits, articulations and projects, including the supposedly “green.” In my opinion, it is crucial as scholar-activists to monitor, study, and document all current and future energy projects in the region through a class-based perspective and a political economy framework. We must pose questions such as: who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what? Who wins and who loses? Whose interests come first? Our analytical approach must consider the environmental and social impacts of these projects. For instance, I am particularly interested in green hydrogen projects and I strongly think that they deserve more critical attention. This does not mean that we only conduct purely economic or technical studies, but I believe that we should strive to shed more light on the actors in the field, the constellation of agents and forces of changewith particular focus on environmental movements, local communities (especially rural, agrarian and fishing ones), andthe labor movement. We have to continue documenting various forms of resistance as well as the alternatives sketched and proposed by these actors. It is extremely important that we develop and crystallize a research agenda oriented toward action and change—an insurrectionary agenda for liberation, especially around democratic, just, and sovereignalternatives in our region, including in the energy sector. I believe these alternatives must address several issues. First, the right to development, confronting dependency at all levels, especially the economic and technological, and delinking from the imperialist capitalist system (not autarky but an inward-looking economy that starts with people’s priorities first). That would mean a break with neocolonial logic by attempting to move up the value chain in order to capture more added value, creating more sustainable jobs and a more sovereign economy. This will not happen without sovereign industrial and developmental projects that should also be green. This is not only possible but necessary for our nations, especially the popular and precarious classes, because our region is very rich not only in resources and land but also in human capital. If we do not place questions of justice, sovereignty, and power (who owns what and who gets to decide how society’s resources get used and distributed) on our agenda, the latter will only maintain the status quo or entrench dispossession in the name of sustainability and progress.
Eric Verdiel: Building on what Hamza just said, it is important to work with a long-term perspective as the question of energy justice emerges as an important political issue. We should also think about the way that energy relationships between people, society and state have shaped the political economy and the politics in the Arab world for the last 80 years. I am glad that we have historians with us to help us think historically about the way energy has shaped political relations between people and states in this part of the world. It is important not to consider energy just as a geopolitical issue; it has been at the core of organizing societies at the village level and at the urban level. The energy crisis in Lebanon leads us to think about the transformation of the urban landscape through energy. But we can widen this perspective to think about how energy has transformed societies. For this part of the world, and for the last fifteen years, war has weaponized energy in an unprecedented way, and we really need to think about that. How has war transformed energy? How has it, in a way, destroyed society, or at least intended to destroy societies that rely on energy? What has been the reaction of people against this attempt at destroying them? What we see in Lebanon, what is called resilience or Sumud, is important to consider in this regard.
Zeina Abla: I would like a research agenda in the region to focus on solution-oriented inquiry. I know there is no blueprint, butI struggle to envision alternatives that are timely and can dismantle the current dominant energy and economic systems and respond to crises. Research should therefore not only critique the status quo but also actively cultivate spaces for collective imagination and practical experimentation. Similarly, an energy justice agenda should foster methodologies and formats that invite co-creation, enabling scholars, practitioners, and communities to jointly reimagine the energy futures they wish to inhabit. I believe this is what you tried to do with the citizen assemblies, where participants prepare on the subject matter, and through a deliberative process, their collective ideas and imaginations expand. The agenda should integrate both technical and social dimensions, recognizing that energy justice is shaped by political, financial, and economic structures as much as by technological choices. Research must bridge the material and infrastructural aspects of energy systems to the lived realities of inequality, dispossession, and resistance. In contexts marked by war, genocide, and occupation, the concept of justice becomes even more complex. What constitutes “just” energy policy or access in Gaza, Sudan, or Yemen cannot be equated with the understandings of justice in the Gulf states. Therefore, the research agenda must prioritize contextualization and specificity, situating energy justice within the historical, social, and political realities of each region. Comparative and cross-context analyses could illuminate how distinct forms of power, conflict, and governance shape the possibilities for equitable energy transitions.
Methodologically, I would stress the importance of tools like ethnography and discourse analysis that enable researchers to engage with the lived experiences and narratives of communities, capturing how people make sense of justice, survival, and hope amid crises. This could also generate alternative visions rooted in local knowledge, solidarities, and crisis-born innovations that challenge extractivist paradigms and open pathways toward more equitable and sustainable futures.
Benjamin Schuetze: I agree with everything that has been said so far, but for the sake of argument I would like to illustrate four points that I and the other members of my research group try to already push now. First, we insist on an approach that understands energy as social relations and that critiques any kind of energy determinism or the fetishization of renewables as a supposed generic solution to unemployment, climate catastrophe, and colonial continuities. Instead, we explore how different energy projects are promoted, produced and contested, to facilitate just and emancipatory or unjust, exploitative, and authoritarian practices. Importantly, this centers the power of the people, rather than panels and pipelines, none of which hold any political agency. Further, research on energy justice in the Arab World must, in our opinion, center imperialism and the international reconfiguration of authoritarian power. A very interesting question—and I here again take my cue from Adam Hanieh and Andreas Malm—is what coal, oil, and now solar and wind power have done to capitalism and imperialism. How have coal and oil, in particular, facilitated the ever-increasing production of goods based on racialized divisions of labor, and the destruction of our planet? In what ways do coal, oil, and renewables allow investors to make profit (or not)? How do capitalists use renewables to establish new markets, for instance when it comes to green hydrogen and carbon offsets, deepening climate catastrophe and forms of energy imperialism and coloniality? And how are different energy sources used to deepen imperialist control? In addition, we think that it is important to challenge the idea of an ongoing energy transition. Energy systems worldwide, and in particular in the Arab World, are heavily dominated by fossil fuels. Renewable energy projects have thus far not replaced any fossils, but have been added to the latter. Instead of speaking of energy transition, we should thus speak of energy expansion. We find the notion of fossil fuel +, as suggested by Alexander Dunlap, very helpful as it encourages us to explore how investments in renewables may actually deepen fossil fuel dependencies. Finally, we find the critical logistics literature, including the great work of Deborah Cowen, Laleh Khalili, and Rafeef Ziadah, very exciting, as it helps us better see new or different contexts such as maritime and surveillance infrastructures and transnational connections. This is important to overcome methodological nationalisms and do justice to the globalized nature of energy supply and production chains. It also allows us to see how the connectivities produced by energy infrastructures are always selective, premised on different forms of containment. Finally, I have the impression that there is a growing imbalance in terms of research focusing increasingly on what are widely seen as safer countries like Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf. This is to some extent understandable, and in my own research group we also do this. Still, I think it is important to try and counter this by better supporting scholars who explore the meanings and manifestations of energy (in)justice in Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Palestine, as it is here where energy injustices and imperial violence are perhaps the most obvious.
Ala'a Shehabi: In relation to regional imbalance, an obvious blind spot is the Gulf. Its absence from discussions like the one above serves to render the Gulf exceptional in considering questions of energy justice. Where it is mentioned it is always as a homogenous block or as a regional actor/financier. In fact, questions of inequality and justice arise within the Gulf countries especially as states have lifted, or begun lifting fuel subsidies. In Bahrain this is being done without low-income support and families seek donations frequently to avoid electricity being switched off. More recently, in another GCC state, a family of six died from carbon monoxide poisoning from the use of diesel generator in their home. The trickle-down effect of oil capitalism is a myth, and protests and oil strikes have erupted periodically, including as recently as 2011 in Bahrain. In addition, the origin stories and colonial histories of oil remain relatively untold, hidden and whitewashed in national state narratives.
Trish Kahle: I’ll add just a couple small things that haven’t been mentioned. As a historian, I would prioritize the work of recovery and archiving of some of these energy traditions, particularly traditions that are oral and maybe disappearing with urbanization, movement, or displacement. Archiving might seem like a luxury faced with our present moment, but it speaks directly to present questions about energy justice because it is essential to fully understanding the present. One way to link archiving and energy justice is through forms of community archiving, cultivating forms of co-produced knowledge, and forming counter-archives to state power, as the digital humanities scholar Roopika Risam calls them. Imagining new ways of living with energy, imagining energy futures from below, across borders, and against violence and displacement demands new ways of producing knowledge about energy, and of trying to understand the kinds of relationships—as scholars and as community members—that can be generative of such projects.
Muzna Al-Masri: I think we missed something in the question that is key. We asked, what issues, realities, methodologies, and regions, but we didn’t speak about the spaces of research and the researchers themselves. It is important to ask, where are the sites of research? What institutions carry them forward? Which researchers are doing the work? Most of us that have funding to do research are not based in the region. If we take this panel, those based within the region are Trish, but in an American institution, and Zeina. Hamza, Muna, and I are not resident in the region anymore. We also need to consider the element of precarity, which works against the kind of deep long-term research required. Who in the region can carry a research agenda, which institutions allow academic freedom for critical research? I can only think of Birzeit University.
Dana Abi Ghanem: I would just add that regional research questions often focus on security, engineering, economics, or geopolitics. I think for a true energy justice agenda, we need more social sciences and humanities researchers engaging with energy research and I think a lot of work needs to be done to support that by building up a pipeline of researchers. While the rest of the world has made progress with distinguished institutions and journals focusing on energy social science, more work is needed here in the region to promote this type of research. This requires material support for more conferences, symposiums and seminars, as well as research grants that help build networks and communities of practice to promote energy as a research question across more disciplines.
Hamza: An insurrectionary research agenda for liberation is not merely a dream but an urgent necessity. We ought to have commenced this work yesterday, even if it is at a small scale. As critical and progressive researchers and activists from the region, if we do not undertake this endeavor, others will do so on our behalf, imposing upon us their colonial, imperialist, and exploitative agendas. Personally, I do not identify as an academic but rather as a researcher-activist. I contend that research should not be confined solely to academic frameworks; rather, it must be oriented toward action and social transformation, engaging directly and actively with the ongoing struggles in the region. As we have seen, these struggles concern sovereignty over land, resources, food, the economy, and related domains. Another crucial point is knowledge sharing and exchange with other regions of the world such as in Latin America and Africa, where numerous experiences resonate with our own challenges. There exist important parallels between the problems and concerns faced in those countries and ours; hence, we must learn with and from one another. On a final note, if we fail to pursue a radical people-centered research agenda, we may drift toward the fate depicted in Abdulrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt, in which our environment is altered yet remains subservient to imperialist and colonial agendas at the expense of our people. Will we have an updated version of Cities of Salt in the Cities of Wind or do we rise to the challenge of creating emancipatory futures? That’s our historical mission, I feel.
Concluding Remarks: Abaher El-Sakka:
I am very happy with these interventions and appreciate the difficulty of the task in responding to everything I have heard. I have distilled my thoughts into a set of observations.
Firstly, there is a significant gap between the knowledge of experts and consultants and that of ordinary citizens, a divide evident in multiple responses during the discussion. This gap reflects a broader pattern affecting those working on energy issues as well as other fields. Another related issue is the chasm between dominant knowledge, upon which much of the interventions rely, and the knowledge held by the people themselves. A further problematic issue confronting all of us in post-independence states concerns the relationship between the citizen and the state, and between the citizen and the corporation. In many contexts, the state transforms into a corporation and the corporation into a state. This refers to the neoliberal policies prevalent in the Arab region, including Palestine, where, for example, prepaid systems are imposed to compel people to consume only the energy they need. Energy thus emerges clearly as a matter of policy, as a form of oppression and subjugation, but conversely also as a form of resistance, fortitude, endurance, and steadfastness (Sumud).
The second observation is the gap in research priorities. The over-use of dominant research topics and agendas, as well as trendy or “fashionable” research themes, is imposed upon local communities and critical researchers alike. These research agendas often serve the interests, albeit implicitly, of dominant centers of power concerned with these issues.
The third observation, laden with complexity, relates to the social sciences and humanities: the dismantling of colonial knowledge. The question arises as to what should be done with this knowledge and how to decolonize it. This applies to all our research concerns, including the present topic. Here, I pause to highlight two matters: first, the ongoing postcolonial preoccupation with the universality of theories—whether theories can be truly universal—and the epistemological question of the grounding of knowledge, i.e., whose knowledge is produced and for whose benefit. This critical inquiry into the universality of theories and the “globalization of knowledge” leads to reflections on colonial practices, as colleagues have noted, linked to dependency theory in the vein of Samir Amin’s analysis and the renewed forms of colonialism manifesting in various ways, most recently exemplified by the presence of imperialism’s modern-day architect, Donald Trump, in the Gulf.
The most important issue, in my view, is again the gap between the everyday practices of people and dominant conceptions of electricity. I personally contributed modestly on the topic of electricity, borrowing from the renowned Palestinian poet Muin Bseiso, a communist poet who passed away over forty years ago, who wrote that “electricity is the fruit of simple people.” This seemingly simple expression encapsulates the profound relationship people have with electricity as a metaphorical “fruit.” All these issues related to people’s experiences and their relationship with electricityas colleagues have pointed out in Lebanon, in Gaza, and elsewhere. The monopolistic companies in Morocco mirror the practices of the colonial state in Palestine, which steals and sells water and gas. Part of the current genocide involves control over gas, alongside all forms of topographical domination, land exploitation, green colonialism, and the prohibition of cultivating the akoub plant. All these practices are presented and marketed by the colonial state of Israel as a neoliberal model that brings expert knowledge, energy, and the capacity for cross-fertilization among systems linked to privatization and monopolization. The figure of the war criminal Ben-Gurion, who was fascinated by the desert and famously claimed that Israel made the desert bloom, often comes to mind. The Negev, for example, can be imagined as a site of this “green orientalism.” In truth, Ben-Gurion’s model is a microcosm of what Trump is enacting. Who has not heard Trump claim that Saudi Arabia is the future of renewable energy and artificial intelligence? All this draws a picture of colonial and hegemonic scenes being reproduced in the region, largely sharing technocratic approaches that focus narrowly on deterministic technical solutions. This applies both to policymakers and to researchers who adopt these approaches to secure research agendas.
What is striking in the dialogue heard in this important session are research suggestions emerging from grassroots work related to emancipatory energy, the revalorization of an old idea—the right to the city—not only in its urban sense but also the right to energy and to various spaces, and the rethinking of methodologies. Part of the significance of this discussion lies in reflecting on research spaces, the role of institutions, and the reconsideration of methodologies. All these elements remain trapped within a methodological problem of comparative analysis. Certainly, South-South comparisons are important, but often they lead us to think that solutions may come from experiences elsewhere. This applies, for example, to Palestinians who have considered solutions inspired by South African resistance, treating the colonial situation as apartheid, or engaging with Latin America as a comparable case to Palestine. I am one of those who defend Southern knowledge but acknowledge the narrow limits of comparative frameworks, which constrain expectations. Often, the particular context—without falling into the trap of exceptionalism—requires reconsidering the ease with which comparisons are made, given the differing contexts.
Afterword: Reflections on a research agenda on energy justice from the convenors, Ala’a, Dana and Muzna
This rich and expansive discussion synthesizes the collective insights of a diverse group of scholars. As we conclude our En(Visioning) Justice project, we offer reflections on further areas of interest that emerge from our collaborative project and chart pathways forward.
Though we agree with calls to decenter the state and recenter people, we also believe it is necessary to reconceptualize the state and its role in energy systems We must move beyond the assumption that the state is a technocratic provider of services or top-down policymaker, centralizing control over all aspects of energy, but instead recognize that the state is a complex actor with many roles and relationships, that create dependencies or clientelist networks often reduced by terms like “corruption” or “failed” state.
From our own citizen assemblies, several key themes have emerged that would be good areas for future research, including the potential of energy communities and cooperatives; the pivotal role of labor unions (particularly in Tunisia), public participation and resistance to bilateral energy agreements, and the management of infrastructure during and in the aftermath periods of conflict and war.
The methodological and pedagogical innovations required to center people, community, and lived experience requires us to disrupt the classical way of doing individual research and requires us to be more inclusive, generative and collaborative. Methodological pluralism, including the use of oral history, ethnographic research, visual and video documentation techniques, and participatory research methodologies, strengthens the empirical foundations of energy justice scholarship.
The question of energy is a transdisciplinary subject constrained by the university system of siloes and the peripheralization of social justice issues. We call therefore to strength the connections between energy justice scholarship and other pressing scholarly agendas, particularly climate studies, water and environmental justice, and infrastructure research.
How do we sustain and expand this conversation? What institutional and convening spaces can facilitate the development of transformative research agendas and the articulation of energy imaginaries? This is an invitation for all of us and others reading this to think about building together a collaborative and institutional space in the region through strategic institutional partnership that would enable continued collaboration among the network of researchers engaged in energy justice work within and beyond the region. As activist-scholars we are committed to co-developing critical thought, not for its on sake, but for the sake of any radical and material change to the way we think about energy, and how to produce and share it. Any agenda needs to produce concrete resources and strategies useful for community organizations and activist groups working toward energy justice.