Decolonizing Land Imaginaries: Colonial Legacies, Oil Extraction, and Authority in the Gulf

This paper explores the entanglement of colonial legacies, land authority, and resource extraction in shaping contemporary land politics in the Gulf, focusing on the Saudi-Yemen border. Drawing from decolonial frameworks and archival research, it examines the transformation of precolonial forms of authority and land-use practices into modern colonial territorialities, driven by the imperatives of oil production and global capitalism. The study highlights how the British Empire's push to demarcate fluid borders in the Arabian Peninsula disrupted indigenous practices of negotiated sovereignty. For instance, the Treaty of Taif (1934) and later efforts to formalize borders illustrate the contradiction between local and colonial understandings of authority. While precolonial rulers like Imam Yahya relied on diffuse, negotiated authority grounded in local legitimacy, figures like Ibn Saud leveraged colonial support to consolidate centralized power and align with global capitalist frameworks. This dynamic was particularly evident in the territorialization of oil concessions, where colonial and modern sovereignty frameworks prioritized resource extraction over indigenous land stewardship. The paper further interrogates how these historical processes have created contemporary political and ecological challenges, particularly in the militarization and securitization of borderlands like the Saudi-Yemen frontier. These zones, historically contested and fluid, have become sites of violence justified by modern conceptions of state sovereignty. Ultimately, the paper argues that decolonizing land governance in the Gulf requires revisiting and reintegrating indigenous approaches to authority and resource management, challenging the colonial and neoliberal paradigms that continue to shape land politics.