Capitalism, conflict and the climate emergency: How fossil fuel politics have shaped inequality and violence

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IGDC Annual Lecture

At this year's IGDC Annual Lecture, Adam Hanieh examines the Middle East’s central role in today’s fossil-fuel-centered world and the accelerating climate emergency, drawing on his recent books Crude Capitalism (Verso, 2024) and Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine (Verso, 2025, co-authored with Rafeef Ziadah and Robert Knox).

Using the Middle East as a lens, the lecture considers how global dynamics of energy and capital have shaped the region’s development over recent decades. This has led to profound levels of inequality, mass displacement, and violence, including the war in Gaza and the continuing dispossession of the Palestinian people. In rethinking the Middle East’s place within the structures of global capitalism, the lecture asks what these entanglements reveal about the political and ecological crises of our time.

About the speaker

Adam Hanieh is Professor of Political Economy and Global Development at IAIS, University of Exeter, and Joint Chair in Middle East Studies at the Institute of International and Area Studies (IIAS) at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

His current research focuses on oil and capitalism, energy transitions, and the political economy of the Middle East. To date, he has published five books (four single authored and one co-edited) the most recent of which is Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market (Verso Books 2024). His third book, Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018, and was awarded the 2019 British International Studies Association International Political Economy Group Book Prize.