Green Hydrogen Economies in North Africa: Towards a Comprehensive Peace and Conflict Analysis

With the Green Deal and the energy crisis caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine, the EU has accelerated a massive transition towards renewable energy, including imports of green hydrogen from North Africa. EU decision-makers portray this as a win-win situation, while civil society actors and scholars severely criticize these developments as “green extractivism” and “green colonialism”. The project seeks to contribute to this debate by bringing in a peace and conflict studies perspective in a comprehensive manner. It proceeds in two consecutive steps: First, it investigates how conflicts – both potential and already observable – over the planned production and export of green hydrogen relate to ongoing conflicts in North African countries. It analyzes how new lines of conflict emerge and interact with established cleavages. A PRIF report was published that analyzes the case of Tunisia along three lines of intrastate conflict. In a second step, the project builds on the current research that focuses on intrastate and global (mainly North-South) relations by looking at cooperation and conflict on the transnational level (mainly relations between civil society activists) and the international level. Regional as well as global power competition – in this case mainly between European countries and China, can have implications for North African countries and beyond. The aim of the overall project is to systematically investigate intrastate conflicts over green hydrogen and their potential for escalation in North African exporting countries, to better understand how they interact with inter- and transnational conflict dynamics, and, finally, to identify ways in which the energy transition can be implemented in a conflict-sensitive and socially just way.

Photo: Tarfaya, Africa's largest wind power plant. TEDxTarfaya via flickr CC BY-SA 2.0. (edited)