At the very beginning of the year, Prime Minister Sharon had a major stroke – this time ruling him out of the political equation completely. Ehud Olmert stepped in as acting prime minister and as head of the new party, Kadima.

The election victory of the Likud, which won thirty-eight seats to Labour’s nineteen, was a resounding vote of confidence in Ariel Sharon and his handling of the al-Aqsa Intifada. His opponent, Amram Mitzna, the former mayor of Haifa, put forward a dovish platform which featured a willingness to unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank and to engage in negotiations with Arafat. In the midst of an ongoing campaign of suicide bombing, such an approach did not resonate with the Israeli voter and marked the diminution of Labour’s centrality in the political arena – even though Mitzna criticised Sharon for not moving faster to construct a security barrier.

The complexities of the Syrian civil war brought both Iranian and Russian forces to Israel’s northern border. While both wished to assist Bashar Assad and ensure the survival of his regime, only Iran expressed hostile intentions towards Israel and supported its ally, Hezbollah, in Lebanon with arms supplies.

Mobile peoples in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world have faced enormous pressure throughout the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries to change their way of life, to settle down and remain in one place. The notion that a settled existence is more modern than a mobile one continues to dominate expert thinking as a continuation of late nineteenth-century social evolutionist theories of the progress of civilisation. Most of the modern nation-states of the Middle East have approached their mobile pastoral peoples with a determined view to making them stay put in one place and give up their pastoral subsistence livelihoods. Settlement schemes, it was assumed, would assure political and economic control over these difficult-to-emplace-and-control peoples. The development aid efforts, both bi-lateral and international, throughout the twentieth century followed these same biases and were designed to make mobile or nomadic peoples ‘modern’, using principles developed during the colonial era such as terra nullius, which declared all land not held privately as empty, and thus belonging to the state so that it could be disposed of or developed as the state wished. By the end of the twentieth century, most pastoral peoples’ grazing lands had been expropriated and sed-entarisation schemes of one sort or another were the mechanisms of choice. Pastoral peoples in Oman, however, had some success in challenging the notion of terra nullius in the deserts of the country. A younger generation of ‘citizen’ herders have been able to parlay further multinational oil industry intervention to support their continued mobility in the deserts of Oman and subsistence pastoral livelihoods.

I begin the chapter with a brief examination of the ways in which mobile pastoral communities in the Middle East have faced and then navigated around government land expropriation and sedentarisation efforts to create multi-resource livelihood successes without always being forced to settle. I then examine the situation in Oman, where a more ‘enlightened’ state policy regarding settlement was enacted and where oil concerns have been paramount. Determined to provide social benefits to its mobile pastoral communities without forcing them to settle, the government of Oman extended basic services to these communities late into the twentieth century.

During the first half of the twentieth century, the British government sought to maintain its dominance over oil production in Iran and the Arabic-speaking Gulf. Central to maintaining this position was curbing the influence of American, Russian and local political groups. The British attempted to realise this geostrategic goal through oil concessions and also through controlling the workforce at oil projects in the region. One avenue used to achieve a stable workforce was a policy that specified that British subjects, including persons from British India, should staff oil company projects, as British subjects were seen to be more sympathetic to the British government. The staffing of oil projects by Indians was possible given the already strong presence of Indians in the Gulf, and the skills Indian workers had developed at other British oil projects, such as Burmah Oil Company; and also because large numbers of Indian labourers could be efficiently mobilised through the refashioning of the system used to move Indian indentured labour throughout the British empire in the nineteenth century. As a result, Indians had worked in the Gulf's oil industry since oil was first discovered at Masjid-i-Sulaiman in South West Iran in 1908 and at the Awali oilfield in Bahrain in 1932.

While British companies and the British colonial government preferentially sought to hire Indians for oil projects, Indian workers were not always sympathetic to British imperial projects. For example, in 1920, 3,000 Indians went on strike at Abadan, Iran, and were soon joined by Iranian workers. In Bahrain, less than six years after oil was discovered at Awali, the Indian workers at Bahrain Petroleum Company (BAPCO) went on a series of disruptive strikes in co-ordination with Bahrainis and other Arab workers.4 At these strikes and other moments of collective action in the first half of the twentieth century, workers in the Gulf's oil industry often formed alliances across ethnic, national and linguistic divides. However, by the mid-twentieth century, worker solidarities increasingly segmented along national lines. The reasons for this shift from class- to nation-based solidarity include workers’ experiences, postcolonial nationalism and corporate management practices.

Labour is often invisible in examinations of the oil industry, except in moments of ‘spectacular collective action’.

The 1970s marked the end of cheap, abundant and guilt-free petroleum. In the USA, long queues at the pump materialised the threats of foreign oil dependency following the 1973 Arab oil embargo. Since then, the surging global demand for energy, projections of oil depletion, and the need to manage climate change have brought forth the necessity for long-term structural change in energy systems. Most energy transitions, however, inherently become a problem of carbon, the response to which is low-carbon energy sources and a series of techno-fixes: carbon sequestration, carbon credits, carbon markets. The euphoric tone of low-carbon or carbon-free narratives is uncanny; it purges, or at least masks, carboniferous matters while perpetuating a series of myths, notably that ‘any newly discovered source of energy is assumed to be without faults, infinitely abundant, and to have the potential to affect utopian changes in society. These myths persist until a new source of energy is used to the point that its drawbacks become apparent and the failure to establish a utopian society must be reluctantly admitted.’ The project After Oil by the architectural collaborative DESIGN EARTH presents a speculative future of the Arabian Gulf when the world has transitioned away from fossil fuels. In a series of three triptychs, After Oil renders visible the embeddedness of petroleum in a region of many oil-producing economies by charting matters of concern at three nodes in the system: an offshore oil extraction and processing facility (Das Island); a transit chokepoint (Strait of Hormuz); and the site one of the largest oil spills in history (Bubiyan Island). To imagine a society after oil foregrounds the past and present geographies of oil. Such an extrapolation of issues critical for today's oil landscape favours an approach to energy transitions that upholds the geographies of technological systems – their processes, sites, objects and externalities.

Das Island, Das Crude

Das Island is a major offshore Emirati oil and gas industrial facility. Oil production began following prospecting during the 1950s and has since financed the urbanisation of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, with many of the country's iconic buildings built from oil wealth. Although such territories of extraction are critical to urban development, they are out of sight and often external to urban representation.