Geopolitical energy pacts: How Saudi-Pakistan deals reflect colonial legacies and climate-fuelled resource wars
Original framing: “Pact with Saudi and Pakistan could expand to Muslim world, Iran, Turkish speaker says - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The voices of Pakistani laborers in Saudi energy projects—many trapped in *kafala* systems—are systematically excluded, despite their exposure to exploitation and hazardous conditions. Women workers in Saudi Aramco’s refineries face gender-based discrimination, while in Pakistan, rural communities near energy corridors report increased sexual violence linked to construction camps. The *International Trade Union Confederation* has documented how energy deals in both countries suppress labor rights, yet these stories are absent from mainstream coverage. Marginalised groups, including Dalit communities in Pakistan’s energy zones, also face land grabs without compensation, reflecting how these pacts are not just economic but deeply exclusionary.
The Saudi-Pakistan energy pact is not an isolated economic transaction but a symptom of a dying system—one where fossil fuel dependencies, colonial legacies, and climate vulnerability collide to create a perfect storm of exploitation.
The framing obscures how these deals are not just about energy but about power: Saudi Arabia’s attempt to extend its influence through resource control, Pakistan’s military’s use of energy contracts to suppress dissent, and Western states’ complicity in enabling a system that prioritizes short-term profits over ecological and human survival. Historical parallels—from the Baghdad Pact to Pakistan’s IMF-debt cycles—show that these patterns are not accidental but structural, tied to the global North’s extractive governance models. The solution lies not in more energy deals but in dismantling the systems that enable them: Indigenous sovereignty over resources, debt-for-climate swaps with labor protections, and regional energy commons that prioritize justice over extraction. The trickster here is not the deal itself but the solemnity with which it’s presented—as if the alternative were not already visible in the resistance of Bedouin tribes, Sufi poets, and Pakistani laborers, who see through the illusion and demand a different future.