This seminar will think about the challenges of environmental and ecological action in the Arabian Peninsula. It will present an overview of the many obstacles facing this environmentally precarious region by focussing on the lens of its economic reliance on oil. It will then turn to the example of the People’s Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG), a trans-regional guerrilla movement which waged a protracted people’s war against the Omani Sultanate and the British in the 1960s and 1970s. The experience of the PFLOAG will offer grounds to think through the overlap of ecological and political action.

Dr. Faisal Hamadah is Assistant Professor in Postcolonial Studies and Transna3onalism at Maastricht University. His research sits at the intersection of cultural studies and political economy, and he publishes on Arab cultural history, the poli3cal economy of the Persian Gulf, and the environmental huminites. He is currently a researcher affiliated with the project ‘Mapping Connections: China and Development in the Middle East’, a three-year research project based at Exeter University.