Logistical futures and the Arabian Peninsula

On 23 March 2021, the 400-meter long container ship, the Ever Given, blocked the Suez Canal for six days. The vessel was wedged across the canal with its bow and stern stuck on either side, blocking traffic. Within a few days hundreds of ships were trapped and billions worth of trade interrupted. The incident starkly illustrated the vulnerability of the global shipping system and Just-in-Time logistical networks. It also emphasised the ways that access and control over trade routes along the Arabian Peninsula remains vital to international supply chains. Securing and controlling this important route has been a main objective of successive powers in the region.

In her latest book, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula, Laleh Khalili offers a textured, nuanced and critical analysis of maritime infrastructures and route making in the Arabian Peninsula. Pushing against dominant ‘exceptionalism’ narratives prevalent in the academic literature, Khalili firmly places the region within the operations of global capitalism, tracing international shipping connections and the deep entanglements between war and trade. She succinctly argues, “maritime trade, logistics, and hydrocarbon transport are the clearest distillation of how global capitalism operates today.” (Khalili, 2021: 3).

Though it is tempting to see Sinews of War and Trade as a complete departure from Khalili's previous work in Time in the Shadows (Khalili, 2012), in their own ways, both books attend to and expose the violent worlds of circulation. Time in the Shadows traces the circulation of counter-insurgency tenets, tactics, personnel and manuals as they move across multiple geographies. Sinews of War and Trade is concerned with circulation in a boarder sense – the very material movement of commodities, and the production of trade routes, harbours and hinterlands that make commodity circulation possible. Inevitably, the latter story of circulation touches on the violent world of logistics and its intimate intersections with war making (Cowen, 2014).

Covering the history of route making, port operations and construction in the first section of the book, in the second part Khalili skilfully hones in on the racialised labour and legal regimes that underpin and facilitate global trade. In the third and final section, Khalili brings us back to the current moment, drawing on her knowledge of war and counterinsurgency in the region, to expose the ways military and civilian logistics have intersected, including in the case of the Saudi-led coalition's war on Yemen. This final section threads geopolitical and geoeconomic analysis in essential ways that all scholars of the region will be able to learn from and engage with.

Methodologically, Khalili brings in the richness of her ethnographic experience, having travelled on two containerships. While following similar routes through the Suez canal, both ships stopped at different regional ports allowing Khalili a glimpse of life inside ports that are often inaccessible, hidden behind large industrial complexes and requiring special security clearance. She describes the daily grind of labour on ships, to advance a central theme of the book around the racialised labour regimes that underline the global shipping industry. She weaves this ethnography with important archival materials, poetry and memoirs, providing a textured entry point and historisization of route making and life on ships and in ports. Covering the complex life of maritime ports and shipping the analysis draws on different genres, integrating multiple literatures including critical logistics studies, critical labour and race studies, political economy and geoeconomics more broadly.

As Gulf Cooperation Council states vie to construct new mega-ports, following neoliberal blueprints written out in ‘vision documents’, the story most often told is one of a modernising elites keen to diversify their economies from oil dependency. This very narrative is produced through historical erasure whereby Gulf cities seem to emerge ‘out of the dessert’ with no history. Sinews of War and Trade is an important corrective to this, linking an exciting literature on histories of Indian Ocean trading circuits with the modern political economy of Arabian Peninsula. The book thus also links the history of trade in the Arabian Peninsula to the ways colonial powers directly intervened to shape the region as we see it today.

Khalili takes great care to historicize and decipher the operations of maritime infrastructures, often neglected in land-centred analysis, by scrutinising the array of organisations and actors that make up logistical worlds – including dredging and shipping companies, freight insurance firms, ruling families and elite circles. Yet, she insists on the centrality of physical labour, the work of seafarers and dockworkers, which make circulation possible in the first place, despite constant management assertions of the coming full port automation. This aspect of the book feeds nicely into debates around labour regimes and automation, urging us to focus on the lived realities of labour, the daily physical routines, rather than simply taking at face value what automation enthusiasts project.

Overall, Sinews of War and Trade contributes to a stimulating wave of literature on the Arabian Peninsula, which complicates some of the simplistic assumptions of Rentier state Theory (RST), especially analysis around the docility of local populations due to oil rent distribution. For decades, transformations in the Arabian Peninsula seemed to only be read through the lens of RST. While the hydrocarbons trade certainly helped shape the region, more critical analysis has focused attention on the material effects of oil rents in producing new urban forms, including the proliferation of mega-malls and mega-urban development projects (Kanna, 2011; Al-Nakib, 2016; Menoret, 2014; AlShehabi and Suroor, 2016; Buckley and Hanieh, 2014). These studies have examined the role international ‘startchitects’ play in constructing ‘new’ cities. Political economy accounts have also carefully outlined the place of GCC economies in global capitalism, again pushing against the authoritarian exceptionalism narrative. Such accounts explain how GCC capital is intimately connected and developed along side international financial markets and global value chains (Hanieh, 2018; Henderson, 2019; Vitalis, 2007; Al-Rasheed, 2004). With few notable exceptions however (Ramos, 2010; Jones, 2010), infrastructure, especially transport infrastructure, which have underpinned urban transformations in the region, is often left out of the analysis. Sinew of War and Trade productively contributes a new dimension to the critical literature on the Arabian Peninsula. Astutely shifting the geographical lens to analyse capitalism from the vantage point of the oceans and chokepoints that surround the region. In this, Khalili expands our analysis beyond a hyper-fixation on oil and actually helps us to understand the infrastructures of transport responsible for oil distribution in the first place.

The hydrocarbons trade features centrally in the narrative of port construction, the book moves away however, from the typical sharp separation of Arabian Peninsula history into pre-and-post oil periods, to trace the continuities and divergences in route making and port city formation. Throughout the book we see the political geography of the Arabian Peninsula reconfigured through both the making of port cities and new trade infrastructures, but equally, the destruction of others. This includes the interplay between how the rise of some port cities (Dubai for example) is heavily dependent on the destruction of others, as a significant section on the destruction of Yemen's Aden port explains.

As with all good books, Sinews of War and Trade opens up multiple new avenues for research. One of those is certainly around labour organising, particularly on ports, in the Arabian Peninsula. While there is a rich history of labour organising on ports in the region, much of this history remains to be written. Just as important as the history of labour in the oil industry, retracing labour struggles tells a very different story around authoritarianism and coercion. It works against the idea that local populations have always been bought out and welcomed all change by ruling families with open arms. It also reveals how authoritarianism is buttressed by repressive tactics to undermine labour struggles, especially any serious attempts at unity between citizen and non-citizen labour. Reading the Arabian Peninsula through maritime labour action draws out a different geography of insurgent connections across multiple regions.

In a similar vein, the book also points to the need for more scholarly attention to emerging cross border logistical cartographies of militarism and trade. As states like the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar compete to expand into new maritime ports, using them for trade, but also military bases – Khalili's book provides us an excellent starting point to begin tracing contemporary logistics space and the ways it is being reshaped by emerging regional actors. Finally, a fascinating aspect of the book is the focus on financialisation and maritime shipping, including the ways financial speculations and indices impact route making. For scholars interested in financialistion, this is an interesting aspect of the book to build upon.

Sinews of War and Trade's ambitious focus on the complex life of maritime infrastructures and logistics complicates the simplistic “rags-to-riches” story often associated with development planning and neoliberal urbanisation in the Arabian Peninsula. It offers a very different perspective than official narratives, which present infrastructures as feats of modernist planning. In this, the book provides new directions for future research both on the Arabian Peninsula, its internal political economy and geoeconomics, but also its place and relationship to broader maritime networks, such as the One Belt One Road Initiative.