Panel Nr. 1:
Energy and the MENA: State power, international relations, development
This panel investigates the interconnections between energy and state power, international relations, and societal developments in the MENA. This can include past energy transitions, the emergence of rentier states and geopolitical conflict around energy in the region, including the logistics of energy trade and the role of maritime security. Contemporary development perspectives that entail energy diversification into nuclear energy and renewables and the growing role of natural gas and petrochemical value chains are also welcome.
Article:
“German Energy Security and Algerian Gas: Roads not Taken (1972–82), Foreign Policy Roles and Current Horizons”
Eckart Woertz/ German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg and University of Hamburg, eckart.woertz@giga-hamburg.de
Sven Holger Brünner, University of Hamburg and Bundeswehr Command and Staff College, Hamburg, svenholgerbruenner@
Abstract
The 1970s marked a decisive shift in (West) German energy policy. Oil’s domination of the European country’s energy mix saw it go from single-percentage figures in the early 1950s to making up more than half of said mix in the course of two decades. Perceived as a vulnerability, the development of natural gas and nuclear energy was accelerated to diversify energy sources accordingly, with knock-on effects for domestic manufacturing and foreign policy. This article analyses the role Algerian gas played in that diversification process and juxtaposes it with Germany’s growing dependence on Soviet gas, its policies towards Arab energy producers and its assertiveness in the face of counterproposals by the United States that favoured supplies from the North African country over Soviet ones. Based on German archival material and using foreign policy roles as our analytical lens, we argue that Germany acted not as a mere trading state with predominantly commercial interests. Realist strategic calculations and the instincts of a civilian power to pursue its interests via multilateral institutions all weighed in the balance. Ultimately, Germany voted in favour of Soviet supplies, but that growing dependence came back to haunt it in the 2020s and put natural-gas cooperation with Algeria back on the agenda, this time in a more Europeanised and multilateral framework.
Article:
The Limits of Control: Fragmentation, Centralization, and Contesting External and Internal Actors Within Jordan’s Energyscape
Eric Verdeil and Hisham Bustani
The development of solar energy has been imagined as a means of liberating the citizen-consumer from state authority—a pathway toward greater autonomy. Yet this vision has proven utopian. Solar infrastructures continue to depend on global supply chains, international markets, and regulated electricity systems in which most power flows through a grid under state control. In Jordan, solar expansion has been further constrained by the 2016 gas agreement with Israel, which discouraged fully exploiting the country’s solar potential. At the same time, the logics and infrastructures generated by the solar push have partially escaped state control, enabling new independent actors to carve out positions within a fragmented yet governed energyscape. Since 1989, Jordan’s neoliberal reforms—driven in large part by IMF and World Bank pressure—have privatized electricity generation and distribution, producing a fragmented and segmented sector. Yet the state has retained command over the system through the National Electric Power Company (NEPCO), which monopolizes fuel imports, absorbs price volatility, and guarantees stable revenues for privately owned distribution companies. This arrangement secures profits for private actors while socializing losses to the public: NEPCO now holds roughly JOD 7 billion in debt, about one-fifth of Jordan’s public debt. It also centralizes external intervention, exemplified by gas imports from Israel and the trilateral “Prosperity” water-for-electricity project. This presentation examines the limits of control and centralization along two axes—consumers versus the state, and the state versus external actors—and analyzes how forces of fragmentation and centralization shape the contours of Jordan’s energyscape.
Panel Nr. 2:
Archives as Resistance and Memory: Documenting Palestine, Lebanon, and the Broader Middle East
Organized by the DAVO working group on Palestine
In contexts of conflict, dispossession, and erasure, archives emerge not merely as repositories of the past but as active sites of political struggle and cultural survival. This panel examines the critical role of archives — physical, digital, and unexpected — in preserving and contesting memory across Palestine, Lebanon, and the wider Middle East.
Drawing on recent developments in the ongoing Gaza and extended regional war, the panel explores how digital and archiving practices in general have become a form of resistance, enabling communities, activists, and cultural workers to document destruction in real time and counter narratives of erasure and dememorization.
Alongside this, the panel interrogates the role of art as an archival medium, asking how artistic practice captures testimony and cultural heritage when institutional structures fail or are deliberately dismantled.
A particularly striking case study concerns the Geneva Freeport, which has emerged as an unlikely archive of Gaza’s deep history, housing archaeological artefacts that attest to over 5,000 years of continuous civilization.
Together, the papers ask: who controls the archive, and in whose name is memory kept?
Abstracts up to max. 250 words are due to at latest March 15th, 2026, and send to:
Sophie Haesen: sophiehaesen@gmail.com
Detlev Quintern: detlev.quintern@tau.edu.tr
Panel Nr. 3:
Constructing Religion in the Arab World: Concepts, Approaches, and Institutions
Organizer: Dr. Mohammad Magout, FU Berlin
Papers
- “Representations of religion in the Arab Nahda: A prelude to comparative religion?”, Dr. Mohammad Magout, FU Berlin, Kontakt: m.magout@fu-berlin.de
- “Tadayyun vs. dīn; contingent religiosity vs. absolute religion”, Prof. Florian Zemmin, FU Berlin, Kontakt: florian.zemmin@fu-berlin.de
Abstract
This panel seeks to explore the various ways in which religion has been conceptualized in the Arab world, both historically and in the modern period. Rather than examining religious practice directly, we turn our attention to the mediums, sites, institutions, and actors that have engaged in questions such as what religion is, what it ought to be, and how it is related to other societal and cultural spheres.
The panel goes beyond debates about the universality or applicability of the category religion (or any other category associated with the religious phenomenon such as faith, ritual, or piety). Instead, it seeks to discuss how actors and institutions in the Arab world have approached any aspect of the religious phenomenon. Which frameworks, methodologies, concepts, or sources be it local, regional, or European have they employed or drawn on?
We invite papers that examine the myriad spaces and mediums across both scholarly and popular spheres where any aspect of the religious phenomena has been conceptualized and debated. This may include institutional as well as intellectual histories of religious studies, sociology of religion, and Islamic studies; representations of religion in literary and intellectual contexts; debates about religion in social and traditional media. By bringing scholarly and popular knowledge production together, this panel seeks to shed light on the diverse and contested ways religion has been constructed in the Arab world.