School of Social and Political Science

Description

The Arab region is a focus of world politics, with authoritarian regimes, significant fossil fuel reserves and histories of colonialism and imperialism. It is also the site of potentially immense green energy resources.
The writers in this collection explore a region ripe for energy transition, but held back by resource-grabbing and (neo)colonial agendas. They show the importance of fighting for a just energy transition and climate justice - exposing policies and practices that protect global and local political elites, multinational corporations and military regimes.

Dr Hamza Hamouchene is a London-based Algerian researcher-activist, commentator and a founding member of Algeria Solidarity Campaign (ASC), Environmental Justice North Africa (EJNA) and the North African Food Sovereignty Network (Siyada). He is currently the Arab region Programme Coordinator at the Transnational Institute (TNI). His work is focused on issues of extractivism, resources, land and food sovereignty as well as climate, environmental, and energy justice in the Arab region.

Manal Shqair is a Palestinian climate justice activist and a PhD candidate in sociology at Queen Margaret University, where she also teaches undergraduate modules on feminist and decolonial sociology and the sociology of education. In her doctoral research, Manal examines the role of  Palestinian semi-nomadic women in Masafer Yatta, occupied West Bank in resisting Israeli colonial dispossession through the lens of resistance studies, settler colonial studies and anti-colonial and Black feminist scholarship. She has published research on Israeli colonial policies of dispossession and environmental colonialism and on Palestinian resistance to that, with a focus on women’s indigenous praxis of sumud (steadfastness) in rural Palestine.