The Red Sea region, spanning East Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, is one of the most unequal in the world. Marked by vast disparities in security and wealth, the region is home to fragile states, newly sovereign states, and oil-rich states with some of the highest GDP per capita in the world. Despite these differences, the region faces common environmental and socio-economic challenges exacerbated by drought and desertification, water scarcity, and low levels of food self-sufficiency. The region is also increasingly connected through the growing military, political, and economic presence of the Gulf States in the Horn of Africa and through these societies’ mutual dependency on transnational labor and remittances. 

Made possible by the generous support of the Social Science Research Council’s Transregional Collaboratory on the Indian Ocean region, this project—“Red Sea Net”—starts with the urgent question of how, in one ecological region, some of the richest and poorest societies in the world are weathering today’s profound climatic, economic, and political transformations.

By creating a network of specialists across disciplines—particularly across the traditional boundaries of African Studies and Middle Eastern Studies—and across institutions based in East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, “Red Sea Net” enables a deeper investigation of how environmental transformations and political economies connect and shape this geopolitically-critical space: 

• How are the societies of this severely unequal, but intensely connected system responding to and participating in region-wide climatic, economic, and political transformations? 

• How will stacked ecological, political, and economic crises impact coastal livelihoods, public health, natural resource use, food supplies, labor markets, trans-regional migration, capital flows, regional conflicts, humanitarian assistance, and international rivalries in this region? 

• Will the political economies of the Gulf States and East Africa become ever more interconnected due to the disparate effects of global warming and the massive migrations of capital, humans, and other species across the Red Sea?

Within this wider inquiry emerges a fractal network of related research questions. Rather than impose externally-driven research questions, this project has stewarded trans-regional, interdisciplinary collaboration of scholars from across the Red Sea Arena to produce a joint research initiative. .