What Took place to Renewable Power?
Juli 2, 2023
Township of Woolwich Council Assembly – June 27, 2023
Juli 2, 2023
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Dr. Allan is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for International Development, Northumbria
University, UK. Her research focuses on resistance to neocolonial natural resource
exploitation, histories of women’s anti-colonial resistance movements, Saharawi and
Equatoguinean (resistance) literatures, environmental justice, and the relationship
between energy and culture. In 2022, she won a Philip Leverhulme Prize, which will
allow her to embark on a new research project focused on phosphates imaginaries as
well as to pen a biography of four influential Saharawi cultural activists.
ABOUT THE TALK:
Western Sahara is the UN Special Committee on Decolonization’s last remaining
open file in Africa. Spain never decolonized what was once Spanish province number
53 but instead sold it to neighbouring Morocco in 1975. Today, a military wall splits
Indigenous Saharawis between the two-thirds of Western Sahara that are occupied
by Morocco, a heavily land-mined ‘free zone,’ and vast refugee camps that also
constitute a Saharawi state-in-exile in rural Algeria. Energy is at the centre of the
ongoing Western Sahara conflict. In this paper, I follow the cables of the growing
‘renewable’ energy infrastructure in occupied Western Sahara to make sense of how
sun and wind can become enmeshed in on-going processes of colonialism. Crossing
the military wall eastwards, I then explore how the colonial renewable energy
apparatus of the occupied territory is challenged by a very different energy culture in
the Saharawi state-in-exile. My hypothesis is that wind imaginaries are an integral part
of wind energy systems, and I argue that the (imagined) Saharawi aeolian culture,
that is, a nomadic lifestyle tied up with the desert winds, offers lessons for a fairer,
decolonial, global energy transition.
