Terreform co-director, Deen Sharp, in Public Books, “The World the Gulf has Built.”

Despite the fragility of the alliance, the term “GCC” is often utilized to discuss these six countries together, because of their shared historical geography; cultural and religious mores; governance structures (characterized by authoritarian monarchies and highly personalized rule); large migrant worker population; rapid urbanization; and vast revenues generated from oil and gas. It is all too easy to focus on everything that is exceptional about the GCC—the record-breaking towers and shopping malls, the three-hundred-island real estate archipelago trying to replicate the world. But this reasoning does much to cover up the GCC’s ordinariness, its multiple connections to everyday lives around the world.

How exceptional can a region that produces so much of the energy that powers contemporary capitalism be?

From Terreform’s archive: Deen Sharp: Beyond the Square to the Nexus of Urbanization: Violence and Conflict to Making Connections with Julie Mehretu.