This paper describes the energy sector in the Mediterranean and MENA (Middle East and North Africa) countries. It first analyses the production of energy by fossil and renewable sources and discusses the increasing demand in the area and its consequences. It describes the policy frameworks to promote renewable energy as well as fossil-fuel subsidies, which are still abundant in the MENA area. It presents some avenues for integration across the Mediterranean and finally it discusses the implications of the Arab springon energy production in the next future.
This paper argues that the so-called Arab spring is part of a tectonic shift which signals the frailty of the Arab state system as such. Countries benefitting from oil and gas rents have been more resilient, because of their potential to create systems of incentives and disincentives in order to prevent disruptive social change. Islamism, whose emergence is connected with rentier state dynamics is, at the same time, an opportunity and a threat for the survival of the Arab state and, in general, of the Arab states system. In this context, national oil companies can increasingly be conceptualized not merely as instruments of the state, but as bulwarks of nation-state legitimacy in a period of chaos.
This article uses the theoretical framework of securitization in order to analyse the concurrent developments of, on the one hand, the Arab Spring and the resulting ascendance of a New Middle East and North Africa and, on the other, the discovery of natural gas resources by a number of states in the region. Furthermore, we use these developments as tests of the theory, in the process highlighting a number of criticisms that have been levelled against securitization and that are exemplified by these recent empirical events. We examine the outcomes of the Arab Spring as a process of contestation and as an avenue for the promotion of alternative discourses through the emergence of new political actors, institutions and state relations in the region. At the same time, we identify the underexploration of energy securitization in the literature and the need for a cross-sectoral approach for the referent object of energy in the widened security agenda. Ultimately, the article presents the argument that each of the two sets of developments affects the other, thereby transforming the environment within which securitization and desecuritization may result.