Protestors burn transit stations in Madagascar capital; is American frustration so different?

Protests over lack of water and electricity turned violent late last week in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, and the government responded with tear gas, rubber bullets, and a curfew.

(UPDATE, Oct. 14, 2025: Madagascar President Rajoelina has fled the country, and the military has assumed control of government, purporting alliance with protestors.)

I know about the crisis because of friends with family there. I have not seen the story on American TV, which I mention with anxiety over endangered media heterogeneity. You can read more about the protests at, e.g., Reuters (UK), TRT Afrika (Turkey), RFI (France), WION (India), Al Jazeera (Qatar), and if you dig for it, the AP (US).

I was in Antananarivo, known locally as "Tana," in July. The people there could not have been more gracious and welcoming.

At the same time, socioeconomic tension was plain. That's not unusual in African cities, but in Tana, by plain, I mean that there were troubling and unavoidably visible signs of increasingly worrisome economic inequality. 

Antananarivo, Madagascar, July 2025
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

A Tale of Two Cities

Tana from the Radisson gym.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

I used the nicely equipped gym on the eighth floor of the Radisson Blu Hotel in Tana. The room has floor-to-ceiling windows that afford a view of the city from the treadmills. But if one looks straight down from the windows, immediately adjacent to the hotel, there is a residential warren of ramshackle homes. Children play on clay paths between crumbling walls and an open sewer. The neighborhood is right behind a concentration of auto shops, noxious with exhaust and dribbling out the toxic effluents of their work.

Shanty town and auto district adjacent to Radisson. A cable-car line is visible on the horizon.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

In contrast, the Radisson itself is part of a small swanky village that boasts a grocery store, theater, cafes, and gift shops. The village is enclosed by high walls with only one road in from the auto-shop strip. At night, a massive steel door rolls shut to seal off the Radisson village. 

The scene is reminiscent of the fictional town of Woodbury in The Walking Dead, fortified against an incongruent dystopia. Though to reiterate, here, in real life, the souls outside the wall are good people trying to make ends meet. As the sun sets, all but a few local people evacuate the commercial village before the door closes, and then they flow back in with the light of dawn.

Kids play beside a drainage canal behind the Radisson.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Even the walled Radisson village, anyway, is not immune from Tana's socioeconomic troubles, because the utility infrastructure is the same, inside and out. The tap water is not recommended for drinking, and power outages are frequent, if usually short.

Malagasy people generally don't have freezers and shop daily for produce. The cost of appliances would be manageable for many. But the problem would remain the power grid, which is not sufficiently reliable, even in the city, to make home refrigeration cost effective. When the power goes out, most of Tana life hums on without interruption. But the outages paralyze places such as the Radisson village, where devices from refrigerators to televisions to elevators are essential to business.

In bizarre juxtaposition with the motley cityscape, wires are strung across Tana's skies, visible from anywhere. The wires reach from tower to tower and occasionally dip groundward into modern multistory buildings of metal and brick. This is Tana's brand new cable-car system.

I was not surprised to read that protestors last week set fire to "several" of the cable-car stations.

Madagascar and the Monorail 

A cable-car line fills the sky behind the Tana train station.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

 

The motivation for building the cable-car system was ostensibly sound. Tana is plagued by jammed traffic, which is impeding economic development. One of the reasons people crowd into the tight and unsanitary living quarters of the inner city is that they could not otherwise reach their jobs if they moved to better accommodation on the outskirts.

The cable-car lines promise to soar over the cars and trucks, moving people into and out of the city with quiet efficiency. The lines also are built to reach less developed surrounding areas, rather than tracking the congested main highway, thus inducing new suburbs to bloom and alleviating the crisis of housing, besides transportation.

One doesn't have to look hard at the plan, though, to doubt its cost-benefit analysis. To start with, the road congestion is a function of infrastructure failure as much as volume. Though there are some recently constructed traffic circles, most roads are unmarked by lanes, and most city intersections are chaotic tangles with no right of way indicated by signs or signal lights.

One wonders that infrastructure money might have been spent better to bring the existing potholed road system up to standard before stringing cables over head between shiny stations.

Cable cars hang motionless over Tana in July.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Then there are the cable cars themselves. The first time a friend and I had a look at them, I couldn't help but say aloud, "That wreaks of kickback." My friend agreed. We both thought immediately of "Marge vs. The Monorail."

The 198 gondola cars can hold only 12 passengers each and move only so fast. The system is designed to move daily 75,000 people and replace 2,000 cars on the road. That's not nothing, but also not a big chunk of potential commuters relative to the city's population of 3 million. And if one figures that growing suburbs will attract more people to Tana from impoverished parts of the country, the problem of induced demand is compounded.

Though cable cars are touted as a potential boon for urban development, they work best as a discrete-route solution for particular hurdles, such as topography, and as a complement, not a substitute, for proven mass transit systems such as busses and rail cars, both lacking in Tana. A "bus system" exists only insofar as terribly overcrowded minibuses barrel along customary routes. Limited inter-city locomotives rumble over dilapidated tracks.

Is There a Hyena in the Debt Trap? 

It's unclear from government reporting just how much the cable-car system cost Madagascar, but it's a lot. The price tag was supposed to be €152 million. The French government loaned the country €28 from the French treasury and arranged for the rest by private loan from Société Générale. Malagasy voters were not happy about the indebtedness. Moreover, Madagascar committed to fund any cost overruns. Some reports say that the French loans wound up covering only one of the two system lines.

The government's revenue basis to fund cost overruns and pay back the loans also is shaky. Malagasy people have balked at the cost of tickets on the cable-car system, which range from about €0.65 to €1.1. That might be low by western standards, but it's a lot locally. Daily round trips add up to at least €32 per month in a country where the monthly living wage is only €126, and €85 marks the low end of actual-wage estimates.

President Andry Rajoelina, 2019
(ILO via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The government has not been forthcoming with data about the project, and no wonder. Malagasy-French businessman Andry Rajoelina has been president since 2019 and held out a technological solution to Tana's legendary traffic woes as a showpiece project. 

Rajoelina's vision has been slow to come to fruition. Plans were sidetracked initially by the pandemic. The French money came only in 2021, and construction began in 2022, with delivery promised in two years. In 2024, the Rajoelina administration inaugurated the cable-car system amid much fanfare and worldwide press. But the system wasn't actually finished then, and operational opening was postponed to 2025. 

On my last day in Tana in July 2025, the cable cars moved, surprising everyone on the ground. The system was not yet open, but was being tested. Buckets of water were loaded into cars to simulate the weight of passengers. The system finally opened in August.

The worst public relations challenge the cable-car system has posed to the Rajoelina administration to date is not its ultimate efficacy, but simply the foreboding physical presence of the empty gondolas hanging motionless over the city. When people are stuck in traffic, or when the power goes out, or when they leave their homes in search of drinkable water, they look up at the network of towers and heavy wires and wonder whether any of that debt and spending will make their lives better.

Don't Look Up 

I'm sometimes guilty myself of a siloed focus on American affairs. And thinking about what's happening in Madagascar makes me wonder whether—when?—the day will come that Americans turn our frustrations into conflagration.

America feels every day less a "developed" country in terms of critical needs such as transportation, healthcare, housing, and jobs. And people struggle more every day to make ends meet, while politicians bellyache over the government supposedly doing too much.

An anecdotal survey: 

Transportation. To travel for work, I have to make the arduous, two-plus-hour trek to the airport via foot, bus, train, and bus again, across slow, unconnected, and overpriced transit systems that my region is lucky to have at all. When I land in Europe, I'll travel about the same distance with one ticket on a rapid, unified transit system in under an hour.

Amtrak is hard at work on "NextGen Acela." But it will only serve the northeast corridor and will top out at 160 mph. Europe hit that mark in the 1970s with trains today running in the 190s. China and Japan have high-speed trains on dedicated lines running at 220 mph. Anyway, "old gen" Acela was a corporate subsidy, as it practically priced out non-business travelers, even before Amtrak introduced predatory dynamic pricing. 

Healthcare. My wife and I saw Trevor Noah deliver his latest stand-up in Connecticut a couple of weeks ago, and he did a long bit on the nonsensical costs and bureaucracies that tyrannize patients in the U.S. healthcare system. Noah was treated for a wrist injury he sustained just before boarding a plane home to New York from his native South Africa. He could have been treated faster and for less out of pocket had he just flown back to a hospital in Cape Town, he only half-joked. 

A Connecticut stage awaits Trevor Noah on September 18.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Most memorable about Noah's monolog to me, besides his trademark storytelling brilliance, was the chorus of audible vocalizations of assent and empathy from the audience, including us, as Noah described the absurdities of hospital billing, from the mysteries of bloated pricing—weren't we promised "No Surprises"?—and picayune itemization of the mundane to the unashamed prioritization of profit over care.

Housing and jobs. My daughter bought a home in Los Angeles this year and has done yeoman, Instagram-hit renovation work herself. But she's looking for a new job to make the mortgage bearable. From her scores of applications, she recently rated an interview in her entertainment-industry wheelhouse. Yet she was one of 54 people interviewed for one low-level position. A form email later communicated regret that she was among the hundreds of unsuccessful applicants. Every American job-seeker knows such woes amid the full-time job of looking for a job, despite the touting of low unemployment by the administrations of both parties.

A measure of wealth inequality, the U.S. gini coefficient was 41.8 in 2025, on a scale from 0, perfect equality, to perfect inequality 100, according to World Population Review (WPR). That's bad for a well developed economy, comparing unfavorably with, for example, western European countries, which score in the low 30s, and Canada, at 29.9. Worse, inequality in the United States is rising over the long term, while it's falling elsewhere.

Our number is, however, on par with Madagascar. Malagasy data are difficult to come by, but WPR estimates a 2025 gini coefficient of 42.5, also on the rise over the long term.

The gini coefficient is a ratio, so it doesn't speak to comparable sums. People in a poorly developed economy might be quicker to disrupt the status quo when their very survival is on the line than people in a highly developed economy who become unable to afford cable TV. 

At the same time, Americans have a temperamental sensitivity to injustice and, even after 250 years, little patience for tyranny.

History is littered with great societies befelled by their own greedy elites.

Conflict ebbs in West Africa; entrepreneurs ready to welcome tourism, spark economic development

Conflict is ebbing in West Africa, and local businesses are hoping to spur tourism and economic development to restore ravaged communities.

Many parts of West Africa have been difficult to reach in recent years, owing to armed conflicts and social turmoil. That means cultural treasures such as UNESCO World Heritage Site Timbuktu have been off limits, and communities that would benefit from foreign spending suffer economic paralysis or worse.

The situation is improving, if at a two-steps-forward-one-step-back pace. To navigate the changing terrain and start restoring tourism and economic opportunity, local entrepreneurs such as Mali-based Satimbe Travel are stepping up.

Ouologuem dances at the Ouidah Voodoo Festival, Benin, 2020.

RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

I hope to travel with Satimbe because my friend Hamadou Ouologuem is one of its founders and a tour leader extraordinaire. I am happy to give him and his partners some positive press in the interest of regional development. This is in no way a compensated promotion.

Satimbe has been in the works for many years. The project has prevailed over potentially ruinous setbacks in the pandemic, in 2020 and 2021, and in the outbreak of violence in the Central Sahel (Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger), in 2023. The latter conflict devastated communities, as rival factions—one being the Russia-based Wagner mercenary force—deployed scorched-earth tactics against civilians, inflicting crises of hunger and housing. 

The conflicts have not wholly abated, but have been scaled back to hot spots that guides can plan around so travelers avoid. 

In August, the Mali government felt comfortable enough with security in Timbuktu to return there ancient documents that were removed to the capital Bamako before al-Qaeda militants occupied the city in 2012 (PBS NewsHour). Meanwhile, in a positive development for civilian security, Wagner forces in Mali have experienced what The Sentry, a D.C.-based nonprofit and war-crime investigative organization, described in an August report as a "meltdown."

Satimbe mask
(In Museum CC0)

My two cents: attacks on civilians and resulting humanitarian crises in the Sehel would headline the world news were it not for the West's peculiar blind spot for Africa. The region needs foreign investment, and as importantly to get started, needs foreign interest and understanding. The way to help is simply to go, responsibly, all the better relying on a homegrown service provider such as Ouologuem.

Ouologuem's experience in the region is renowned; he is the on-the-ground coordinator to whom professional producers turn, especially in Mali. He worked on public broadcasting's Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; BBC One's Sahara with Michael Palin; Into the Unknown with Josh Bernstein: Lost Gold of Timbuktu; and Digging for the Truth: Timbuktu.

A "satimbe" is a ceremonial funerary mask of the Dogon people in Mali and Burkina Faso. The mask is associated with a female figure, like in the Satimbe Travel logo, placed on top.

Satimbe Travel can arrange tours in Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Togo, and Ghana. The company can tailor flexible itineraries for two days to two weeks, or more. The company is prepared to make arrangements for tourists, NGOs, missionaries, and corporations.

Stornaiolo publishes book of memoir, travel tracts

Ugo S. Stornaiolo Silva has published a new book, Wandering Meanderings (Into the Idea of Love): The Libertarian Catholic Essays (2023-2025) (2025) (Amazon).

Polymath Stornaiolo writes on political theory, history, and law, and authors poetry, besides. His poetry is collected in Princely Rhymes (2023) (Amazon). This latest book is deeply personal, intermingling interests with memoir and travel log. Here is the publisher's description.

Wandering Meanderings is a memoir-in-essays by a man between homelands, Catholic by anchor, boundless by culture, who keeps a passport in one pocket and notebook in the other.

From Kraków trams, Viennese Mass, and Westminster corridors to nameless winter streets, these essays track how love, friendship, and meaning are made at human scale: slowly, locally, face to face.

For him, beauty wrestles with the sublime, proximity argues with digital distance, and mentors, muses, and peers form the living triad of a life, as Erasmus and Thomas More hover like friendly ghosts, Lords Acton and Byron quarrel on his shoulders, and Leo Tolstoy and Mark Fisher speak across the dark. Travel becomes a way of thinking, and thinking a way of keeping faith with places and people.

This is a conservative book of affections, a romantic book of cities, and a refusal of modern affectations. Attention is not love, algorithms aren’t providence, and abundance without presence is a desert. The remedy is old and demanding: fidelity to the near until meaning appears.

Part travel log, part philosophical meditation and part confession, Wandering Meanderings invites anyone who has felt out of place yet alive to truth, beauty, and goodness to step back onto the pilgrim’s road into the idea of love itself.

Stornaiolo works as a legal researcher for the Centre for Law and Religious Freedom at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. He serves as an associate editor for The Miskatonian and writes as well for The Libertarian Catholic and for the Mises Institute.

I have featured Stornaiolo's work here on The Savory Tort before, including two books that preceded Princely Rhymes: Jueces Como Soberanos: Una Exploración Jurídico-Política del Poder Supremo de la Corte Constitucional Ecuatoriana (2022) (Amazon), and Achaean Disputes: Eight Centuries of Succession Conflicts for the Title of Prince of Achaea (2024) (Amazon).

Stornaiolo is an Ecuadorean and European attorney, now living in Kraków, and a friend, colleague, and former LL.M. student of mine. He kindly has visited my U.S. classes via Zoom to speak on topics such as comparative constitutional law and the Ecuadorean case law on the rights of nature.

Nuclear arms, testing still imperil life on earth

The August Atlantic published a few select photos of nuclear tests by military photographers in Nevada amid a series of stories on nuclear arms.

Nuclear power plants aim to fire back up around the country and around the world. That's causing those of us who remember The China Syndrome and The Day After, not to mention real-life Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, to feel anxious. 

Our anxiety is fed by the additionally burgeoning risk of a new nuclear arms race. Like many people, I, and apparently the editors of The Atlantic, are thinking back on the Cold War, when a nuclear holocaust seemed about as likely as not.

I'll republish here in low resolution four photos The Atlantic featured from the era of above-ground nuclear testing. The photos are in public domain, as they are in the possession of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)—collaterally, a reminder of NARA's importance amid its recent, inimical politicization. The photos were published previously in a military-photo compilation edited by Michael Light, 100 Suns: 1945-1962 (2003) (cover inset above).

 

The Atlantic issue, captioned "Eighty Years on the Edge" (cover inset at left), is well worth examining in whole. Coverage ranged from the historical to the contemporary. Inter alia, Noah Hawley traced the origin of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (1963) to the advent of the atomic bomb. And Ross Andersen explained how American absence in world leadership is setting the stage for the new nuclear arms race. 

I spent two weeks in Nevada this summer and saw that its atomic history persists, for better and for worse. 

To my surprise, there is an active program monitoring ongoing radiological risk, and a federal program only recently ended to compensate people for radiation exposure that resulted in illness. 

The Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act of 1990 expired in 2024 and afforded modest compensation to persons made ill, mostly by cancers. Onsite participants in atmospheric tests were entitled to $75,000; "downwinders" of atmospheric tests, present in specified areas near the Nevada Test Site, now called the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS), were entitled to $50,000; and uranium miners working from 1942 to 1971 were entitled to $100,000. I picked up a pamphlet from an education program of the School of Medicine at the University of Nevada Las Vegas that encouraged claimants (pictured below).

The Desert Research Institute of the Nevada System of Higher Education, in collaboration with the National Nuclear Security Administration Nevada Field Office of the U.S. Department of Energy, maintains a network of air and groundwater monitoring stations surrounding the NNSS. The NNSS describes itself today as a government "enterprise of multi-mission, high-hazard experimentation facilities." The Community Environmental Monitoring Program watches for "manmade radioactivity that could result from NNSS activities" and publishes its data online with an interactive map. At right is a map of CEMP monitoring stations, and below (RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), is one of two CEMP monitoring stations at Tonopah, Nevada.

Though nuclear testing has abated above ground and below, government test sites of all kinds abound still in Nevada. The sites encompass vast swaths of desert, and active sites are well cordoned off with fences and warning signs—including but far from limited to the famous Area 51. (All below photos, RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.) 

A CEMP station in Tonopah, Nevada, monitors air quality and dispenses pamphlets for curious onlookers.

The U.S. Department of Energy shares and leases the Tonopah Test Range ("Area 52") with the Defense Department and contractors.

Signs warn of a U.S. Air Force test site between "Extraterrestrial Highway" Nevada Route 375 and Groom Lake "Area 51."

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management now preserves Lunar Crater, where astronauts once practiced moon landing.

Still operational, a small U.S. Defense Department installation near Lunar Crater affords a staging area.

Displays at the Nevada State Museum and even a bawdy show at the Venetian in Las Vegas highlight Nevada's nuclear history.

"Earth Station," on the Extraterrestrial Highway in Hiko, Nevada, near Area 51, stocks alien-themed souvenirs.

Are we at the end of 'Bretton Woods'?: White House reconsiders post-WWII world financial system

Omni Mount Washington, Bretton Woods
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

"Bretton Woods," I said.

"Are you sure it's still on?" he asked.

That was part of my conversation with a motel manager in Carroll, N.H., a couple of weeks ago when I was at Bretton Woods for the annual meeting of the New England Political Science Association (NEPSA).

We were talking about where I was headed in the north of New Hampshire, and I answered the man that I was bound for an event at Bretton Woods. I realized later that he thought I meant the ski resort. I could see the slopes from the Omni Mount Washington Resort opposite, where NEPSA was meeting, and the snow cover was waning, yielding to rain.

I did not think he meant, but thought it would be funny if he had, that "Bretton Woods" might be over: meaning not the ski season, but the global financial system built around the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

That system, and the twin institutions (one a predecessor of the World Bank), were conceived at the Mount Washington hotel at the Bretton Woods Conference in July 1944, before the end of World War II. It was widely understood by then that a lack of multilateral economic cooperation was a key failing of the interwar period that led to a second global catastrophe. 

Nevertheless, world leaders, including the Americans and British, were not all yet convinced in 1944 that economic cooperation, especially with a reconstituted Germany, much less Japan, would be in their national interests. Bretton Woods welcomed a who's who of the times at the intersection of economics and politics, such as the British economist John Maynard Keynes. So in the end, the conference proved persuasive to skeptics.

"The Room Where It Happened":
the Gold Room, where the Bretton Woods Agreement was signed
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

 

On a tour of the stunning, now-Omni hotel while I was there, I learned that Bretton Woods was chosen as a location for the high-level meeting in bello because its location between two notches in the New Hampshire mountains afforded it remarkable physical security. I found that that security is still a thing even in the information age, as my cell phone found signal only intermittently. I had to use the public library in Carroll to meet with my International Law class on Zoom.

The Bretton Woods Conference resulted in a system of consistent currency convertibility and installed the IMF as a kind of backstop, or currency reservoir, to help countries avert spiraling domestic destabilizations that might otherwise threaten global security—such as the collapse of the German economy that fueled the rise of Nazism. The Bretton Woods conversion system lasted as long as the gold standard, until the 1970s, and what followed, what still functions today, is a direct descendant.

And now all that might change. As a headline asked in The New Republic (TNR) on April 21, three days before I arrived at Bretton Woods, "Will Trump Finally Kill the Bretton Woods System?" 

As TNR explained, Project 2025 is not on board with the global financial system, despite its facilitation of American dominance of the world economy since World War II. The rightest wing rather sees the Bretton Woods system as part of the globalist agenda to subordinate U.S. interests to a new world order. In this telling of it, the IMF and the World Bank are just two more UN-adjacent intergovernmental organizations that suck resources from the American economy to subsidize the world's welfare-indulgent masses.

It is true that the IMF and World Bank invest in poorer parts of the world. But those poorer relations sometimes see these investments as more imperialism than charity. I studied World Bank projects as long as 30 years ago and witnessed the thorns of economic hegemony that came with the roses of infrastructure development in Latin America. There's been a lot of reform since, but nationalist critics see thoughtful multistakeholderism as an ebbing of commitment to quid-pro-quo foreign aid, rather than an all-boats-float scenario.

The IMF has long been at the middle of similarly conflicting perspectives. High-GDP contributors complain about the organization's generous loans and patient debt restructuring. Meanwhile, countries on the receiving end see IMF loans as a Hobson's choice, complemented by promises of private investment that never materializes and delivery into an addiction-like cycle of economic dependence that knows no off ramp.

Bretton Woods ski slopes
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Climate change has exacerbated these tensions. Small-island and economically weaker nations have experienced an uptick of costly, destabilizing events, increasing demand for aid from developed economies. Meanwhile, aid recipients point out, not without reason, that the loan sharks got where they are through the very resource exploitation that they seek to restrain in the developing world. And with global temperature set to rise for the near future no matter what we do, no amount of economic and governance reform can turn back the clock on the damage sustained.

So need rising and prospects dimming for a return on investment, the Trump Administration contemplates bailing on Bretton Woods. You see it in the President's infamous tariff chart, which, analysts worked out, was not calculated to impose reciprocal tariffs, but to use tariffs as a weapon against trade deficits.

I as much as the next guy want the overworked American laborer to get a fair shake in the world. For a post-industrial economy, we work too many hours, enjoy too few benefits, and suffer an outrageously high cost of living, all summing wretched prospects for socioeconomic mobility. Trump is right that the IMF could care more about trade imbalances. 

But foreign social democracies are a scapegoat. Most of Americans' economic misery is self-imposed at the beckoning of a fat corporatocracy feasting on the deepening wealth divide.

An America-first policy that requires exiting the Bretton Woods institutions gives off an eerily 1930s vibe. And that didn't work out so well the last time.

Kuwait ponders a future after fossil fuels

Kuwait City skyline

Kuwait is an oil country, and Kuwait City glows with prosperity. Kuwaitis know, though, that they can't ride the oil train forever.

Earlier this month, I took part in a program of the Kuwait Bar Association (KBA) and International Association of Lawyers (UIA) in Kuwait on the mediation of energy disputes. (All photos RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.)

Kuwait Bar Association (Society of Lawyers)

The program addressed both state and corporate actors, which often in the Middle East are functionally the same, as political royals are only formally differentiated from their investments. Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 largely in response to long-running disputes over access to oil reserves under the countries' desert border. So it's understandable that Kuwait, powered by a 70-year-old, $1tn sovereign wealth fund born almost entirely of oil revenue, is an eager evangelist for non-violent dispute resolution in extractive industries.

Kuwait Towers

I spent some additional time in Kuwait, besides the KBA-UIA program, to see the sights of Kuwait City. The first place I went was the iconic Kuwait Towers. Dating to 1979, the towers were designed to be monumental more than functional, architecturally distinct among Kuwait's historical water towers, a remaining few clusters of which dot the urban landscape. Repaired since they were trashed in the Iraq invasion, and refurbished in the 2010s, the Kuwait Towers are a patriotic reminder of a Kuwait that long imported fresh water for its survival, before oil wealth paid for expensive but effective desalinization. 

Dhow model at Marine Museum

On display at the Al Hashemi Marine Museum and the Maritime Museum are Kuwaiti dhows dating to the 19th century. Some were used for pearling, the dangerous prospect but potential big score of a once seafaring economy. Many of the dhows are specially fitted with large water tanks running along the keel.

Thus imported, water historically was famously expensive in Kuwait. There's still a popular maxim that water, the truly scarce resource of the desert, is more expensive than oil. Water still is expensive, or should be, because desalinization is expensive and largely fossil fueled. 

Other legacy water towers

Government subsidies, however, obscure the cost of water. A combined utility bill in Kuwait, including water, electricity, sewer, garbage, etc., might run US$40 or $50 a month, single family—a lot for some locals, especially ex-pat laborers. But even correcting to U.S. cost of living with a 250% multiplier, utilities including water are far cheaper than in the States. Environmentalists fret over the conceit that water is inexpensive. I thought that my hotels would caution about water consumption, as is common in desert countries, not to mention American desert states, but they did not.

In keeping with the maxim, petrol is cheap. I was worried when Europcar warned me that gas stations accept only cash—until I worked out the prices. I filled up my SUV rental's 13-gallon (about 50L) tank for less than US$10.

Evening recreation at Dasman Beach

There's much to see in Kuwait City, in terms of museums and historical sites. What struck me, though, is the prevalence of western influence and a near indifference to foreign tourism. Attractions are aimed at locals. Kuwait excels at affording its people diversions of all kinds, including the educational and recreational: museums, beaches, playing fields. But the focus is decidedly domestic, bringing the world to Kuwaitis, not the other way around.

Texas Roadhouse Beneid Al Gar, one of three Kuwait City locations

Limited opening hours and a ramshackle bus system make many attractions difficult to access for visitors. Ride-share app Careem works well, though drivers speak little English. Some places' websites are in Arabic only. Besides foods, souvenirs are sorely limited: the norm is an assortment of refrigerator magnets and ball caps with cheap, afterthought patches. Walking south from Kuwait Towers on the city's corniche, the extent of Kuwait's Americanization in particular is on full display. Behind the beaches, the chain restaurants line up: TGI Friday's, the Cheesecake Factory, Texas Roadhouse.

One tentacle of sprawling Souq Al-Mubarakiya

Besides the beach, a favorite evening destination for locals is one of the city's many shopping malls, from the central 1,250-square-foot Assima Mall, with its gourmet Monoprix grocery, to the sprawling 334-acre (1.35m-square-meter) Avenues, with more than 1,100 retailers. Notwithstanding the scale and upscale nature of these operations, they are loaded with the sort of western retailers found on main street anywhere. There's plenty to buy, eat, and drink—besides alcohol; Kuwait is a dry country—but very little that is specially Arabian. A more touristically gratifying destination is the city's Mubarakiya Souq, though its modernized storefronts also cater mostly to local needs. The people-watching is better than the shopping.

Camels, highwayside

To see more than just the city, and also to get a closer look at both rural life and Kuwaiti infrastructure, I drove out both to the Iraq border in the north and to the Saudi border in the south. The highway network is impressive, if a work in progress, strong on asphalt, weak on road marking. Polished bridges here and there are designed for the exclusive use of crossing camels.

In both the north and the south, the desert is dotted with green patches of farms, fed, remarkably, by well water. Visiting these farms for markets of fresh produce, petting zoos, and other children's amusements is a seasonal family pastime.

Starbucks Wafra

Near the Saudi border, the town of Wafra is the center of an equine economy. Riding centers, breeding operations, and a market for export speak to the enduring importance of horses in Arabia. On Wafra's dusty outskirts, I was surprised to find a cluster of modern buildings, including a multistory veterinary center and, no kidding, the farthest flung Starbucks I've ever seen. A sign at Starbucks cautioned that horses are not permitted in the drive-thru.

Electric towers in the desert

Strung across the desert landscape is a mind-boggling network of electric towers, stretching lines into the distance from any vantage point. Kuwait imports electricity from Gulf partners such as Qatar and Oman, and even then struggles to meet demand in sweltering summers (e.g., N.Y. Times). Meeting electrical needs is simultaneously an incentive and an obstacle to Kuwait energy transition away from fossil-fuel dependence.

Change through energy transition and emission reduction was a recurring theme at the mediation program, besides the benefits and skills of mediation itself. I did not expect to hear, and am not accustomed to hearing, harsh criticism of fossil-fuel dependence in the Middle East. Yet in a session titled "The Climate Crisis and the Transition Imperative," speakers were adamant opponents of the status quo.

Panelists: Yousef Al-Abdullah; Elena Athwal, Qatar,
founder and CEO of consulting firm Icelis Global; and Sara Akbar

Moderator Sara Akbar, a chemical petroleum engineer, current CEO of Oilserv Kuwait, and a renowned figure in the modern history of Kuwaiti oil development, condemned the "New World Disorder" of Trumpian climate-change denial and on-again-off-again Paris participation. She argued passionately that the global costs of unchecked climate change, including devastated coastal cities and lost lives, will vastly outpace the costs of energy transition to renewables. According to Akbar, even the Kuwait oil industry understands that the era of fossil-fuel dominance in the Kuwait economy must end.

Akbar cited an interesting and alarming local statistic: Kuwait has long monitored the maximum temperature of the Persian Gulf at the sea floor, which reliably marked 95 or 96 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, she said, it routinely exceeds 100 degrees, evidencing the evaporation that is fueling catastrophic rainstorms from Dubai to Bangladesh.

Yousef Al-Abdullah, research scientist at the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research, discussed the energy transition and emission reduction commitments of Gulf states. In contrast with the U.S. re-withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and Trump Administration promise to double-down on drilling, Gulf states have articulated ambitious aims.

A leader in goal-setting is the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The UAE aims for 47% reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2030. In energy transition, the UAE aims for 15% renewables in its energy mix; has adopted a net-zero target, green hydrogen strategy, independent energy regulator, and national climate law; plans a massive expansion of solar capacity; and is investing more than $14 billion in transition this fiscal year.

Persian Gulf coastline from Kuwait Towers

Kuwait looks weak on the same benchmarks. But that's not the whole story, Al-Abdullah said. Kuwait believes that some neighbors have announced goals they can't realistically meet, such as the Saudi aim to cut 278m tons of annual GHG emissions by 2030, and Kuwait wants to be realistic. Notwithstanding articulated commitments on the international stage, Kuwait has announced targets domestically, Al-Abdullah said, such as net-zero in the oil sector by 2050, and in other sectors by 2060.

Oil production is down over 10 years, Al-Abdullah said, and that's problematic for environmental strategy. The economy remains dependent on fossil fuels, to the tune of 90% of revenues, and a strong economy is needed to transition away from fossil fuels. Production is down for many reasons, including OPEC restrictions; increased competition from other sources, such as Uruguay, Paraguay, Guyana, Mauritania, and Uganda; and rising production costs.

Here my observation on Kuwait's underdeveloped tourism economy is salient, at least in small part. Because Al-Abdullah said that key to Kuwait's future is diversification of the economy, reducing the dominant position of fossil fuels, especially relative to a newly developed service sector. 

In domestic policy, a national plan called "Kuwait Vision 2035" contemplates an economy centered on logistics, leveraging Kuwait's world-crossroads location by, for example, expanding airport and seaport capacity. Vision 2035 imagines a Kuwait that is more livable for residents and hospitable to visitors, expanding highways and building a rail and metro system.

Besides infrastructure, transformation of Kuwait's workforce is required, too. Kuwait suffers an affliction known to other oil-rich states, which is a comfortable, but under-skilled national workforce. Kuwait's education system must rise to meet the challenge of preparing Kuwaitis to participate in the new economy, while the social and economic fabric must expand the job market and incentivize people to enter it.

Like other Middle Eastern states, Kuwait has a worrisome dependence on foreign workers. Ex-pats, whom I mentioned above, constitute some 70% of the resident population and have no pathway to citizenship. Blue-collar workers hale especially from the Asian subcontinent and Pacific rim. Qatar's plight in this regard was highlighted and made controversial by the location of the 2022 FIFA World Cup there; whether reforms were meaningful or sufficient is debatable.

The existing service economy, including legal, financial, and engineering services, depends heavily on ex-pat white-collar workers, too, who make up a fair chunk of that 70%. At the KBA-UIA program, I met lawyers from other Arabic-speaking countries who have worked for years, even decades, in Kuwait. They are generously permitted to practice, more than an out-of-jurisdiction lawyer may in the States, on matters related to their home jurisdictions. But there's no pathway to bar admission, such as might expose the domestic market to competition.

Legal and regulatory reforms will have to complement the development of a service sector and trade center, Al-Abdullah said. I don't think Kuwaitis alone will be able to make that change. Rather, Kuwait will have to open itself up with a more robust immigration framework, affording ex-pats the likes of property and other rights, if not naturalization, to foster a justified sense of ownership in the new economy.

KOC Oil and Gas Exhibition Hall

Apropos of energy transition, one of the most interesting tourist attractions in Kuwait is the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) Oil and Gas Exhibition. The exhibition—reservations required for guided tours only—offers an artfully constructed tour of the history of Kuwait, from its desert and seafaring cultural history, to British protectorate and the discovery of oil, rise to global energy power, and Iraq invasion, destruction, and recovery.

Exhibit dramatizing Kuwait oil extraction: every second, every day

The exhibition is decidedly a paean to oil. But it is not wholly environmentally tone-deaf. One dramatic exhibit shows, with a massive gush of black liquid, the astonishing amount of oil that Kuwait pumps from the earth every second of every day, averaged out. The exhibits don't say it plainly, but there is an undeniable implication that this business model is not indefinitely sustainable.

The next chapter of Kuwait energy policy is ready to be written.

Tchotchkes for sale at the KOC Oil and Gas Exhibition gift shop

Kuwait sign on the corniche

Geologist beats Section 31 to Guardian of Forever

Dr. Steven Mueller, the intrepid geologist and my personal friend, has located the Guardian of Forever.

 

On earth, at present, the Guardian is located in Oman, where locals know it as the "Rock of Wishes."

Dr. Mueller's timing is impeccable (as usual, for those who know him), given the recent wrap of Discovery and release of a trailer for Section 31, as Captain Philippa Georgiou has a unique history (1, 2) with the Guardian.

Photos © Steven Mueller, used with permission. Contact author for license.