Abstract
Development plans across the Gulf Cooperation Council emphasise logistical infrastructure as a driver of economic diversification. Investments in maritime ports, roads, rail, airports and logistics cities are transforming the economic geography of the region. This study aims to make visible this neglected aspect of the physical transformation of the Gulf Cooperation Council with a focus on the understudied maritime container ports in Oman and Qatar. Shifting the analysis to emergent maritime logistical infrastructure at a regional level gives insight into the uneven developments within the Gulf Cooperation Council’s integration project. Three key features emerge: (a) a large degree of duplication in maritime port infrastructure across Gulf Cooperation Council states; (b) a regional hierarchy among Gulf Cooperation Council states that are resource rich and those dependent on public–private partnerships and (c) increasing competition among internationally dominant port operators looking to gain access to the Gulf Cooperation Council maritime port market. These features both reflect and reinforce competitive tensions within the regional integration project.
Highlights
The suspension of diplomatic ties and effective blockade of Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Egypt which came into effect in June 2017 brought to the fore the unevenness within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)’s logistical infrastructure.1 Most strikingly, the maritime and air blockade disrupted trade routes into Qatar with many commentators raising the spectre of possible food and other commodity shortages
Dubai’s Jebel Ali Port will feature heavily in the following analysis, my aim in this paper is to examine the emerging logistical hierarchies in the region and situate the development of Gulf maritime ports within the broader context of the GCC regional integration project, contributing a regional perspective to the logistics literature
In a region central to global trade and imperial interests, this emerging Gulf transport infrastructure reveals much about the nature of development in the Gulf, and the ways in which different Gulf states are positioned within the wider GCC project
Summary
The suspension of diplomatic ties and effective blockade of Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Egypt which came into effect in June 2017 brought to the fore the unevenness within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)’s logistical infrastructure. Most strikingly, the maritime and air blockade disrupted trade routes into Qatar with many commentators raising the spectre of possible food and other commodity shortages. The maritime and air blockade disrupted trade routes into Qatar with many commentators raising the spectre of possible food and other commodity shortages These prospective shortages were a direct result of Qatar’s underdeveloped maritime routes and its reliance on Dubai’s Jebel Ali Port for basic imports. Neoliberal policies, diffused through international institutions, helped to foster this trend and have come to dominate development planning at the state level. The rise of these logistics networks is closely connected to the globally structured character of commodity circulation in contemporary capitalism, which ‘can be assured only through the creation of an efficient, spatially integrated transport system’ (Harvey, 2006: 377). That the concrete form of these infrastructures of circulation needs to be understood in relation to existing patterns of capitalist accumulation, as ‘revolutions in productive forces within the transport industry always have location specific effects’ (Harvey, 2006: 378)
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