A Desert Turned inside out - Extraction, Construction and Corporate Agriculture in the Desert of Egypt
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Lehmann, Vanessa. 2024. A Desert Turned inside out - Extraction, Construction and Corporate Agriculture in the Desert of Egypt. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]
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Text (A Desert Turned inside out - Extraction, Construction and Corporate Agriculture in the Desert of Egypt)
POL_thesis_Lehmann-ElShalakanyV_2024.pdf - Accepted Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (5MB) | Preview |
Abstract or Description
Deserts are not usually seen as sites of contentious politics, economics and as landscapes whose metabolic changes are important to track. More often than not arid terrains are viewed as wastelands, as resource reservoir or dumping ground, empty of significance and therefore an ideal blank canvas for states or other actors to re-invent themselves. The desert country of Egypt, although most known for its millennia-old history of life on the Nile, has witnessed decades of large-scale human interventions in its desert territories. Yet, many of those interventions have taken place beyond any major accounting for with regards to what happens in and what happens to those arid regions and in effect, to the Nile regions as well. Today, a wide array of desert projects perforates those dry terrains with programmes ranging from desert agriculture, mega-urban developments, energy schemes to mining. At the same time, the country’s arid lands are being highly securitized by an opaque and ephemeral apparatus that obstructs access and mobility of the general public as well as land uses and claims of Bedouin communities. The research sheds light onto how these programmes have been developed and how regions both arid and fertile have transformed along the way. It argues critically against a perception that treats arid lands as a mere backdrop of development and planning efforts, making the desert the main field of enquiry instead. The project asks: How are Egypt’s desert regions capitalized? Who benefits from that and what is the price of those endeavours? How do desert projects concretely operate and what kind of resources do they require? How are socio-ecological contexts being affected both in arid and fertile regions? Ultimately, the question is: What is specific about the desert as a space for extraction and production? To answer those questions, for the case of Egypt, the research mobilizes archival resources and empirical research to capture some of the legal-discursive and techno-infrastructural systems that sustain these vast capital-making processes shaping the country’s drylands.
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Item Type: |
Thesis (Doctoral) |
| Keywords: |
desert, Egypt, capitalization, extraction, mining, land reclamation, corporate agriculture, gold, speculative urbanism, urban metabolism, extractive capitalism, colonialism |
| Departments, Centres and Research Units: |
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| Date: |
30 November 2024 |
| Item ID: |
38043 |
| Date Deposited: |
02 Jan 2025 14:17 |
| Last Modified: |
08 Jan 2025 14:16 |
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URI: |
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