WeSmellGas ([email protected])

Industrial energy production is social war. Racial capitalism’s global gas market relies on the violent disciplining of bodies and ecosystems, transforming geographies into “sacrifice zones” for capital accumulation (Gómez-Barris 2017). In the first instalment of this two-part Intervention, we mapped how—from Taranto in Southern Italy, to Ioannina in Northern Greece—whole regions had been subject to acute environmental violence, predicated on the racialisation of certain populations, devalued and rendered surplus against the value of a growing gas industry (Bhattacharyya 2018). And yet, “no community passively accepts forced removals and exclusions, the destruction of habitats, the contamination of rivers, groundwaters, and soils” (Selwyn 2024: 23). Gas assets are implemented and maintained through “carceral regimes of surveillance and bordering, and martial regimes of dispossession and warfare” (Selwyn 2022: 128), which respond to or anticipate resistance, forcing projects onto communities who might otherwise refuse them. Accordingly, this second essay focuses on the dialectical relationship between gas industrial expansion and the coercive tactics wielded by state or corporate bodies to enforce it.

The interdependence between gas expansion and social technologies of force can be best understood by identifying the primacy of energy production to racial capitalism. Modernity’s conception of a “civilisational order” is “founded on fossil fuels as the dominant energy base for a considerable portion of humanity” (Di Muzio 2015: 8). This “order” was consolidated by the global proliferation of US oil capitalism following the end of the Second World War (Hanieh 2024); sustained by the production of Western lifestyles “organised around the consumption of extraordinary quantities of energy” (Mitchell 2011: 41). The global ascendance of oil to energy, transport, and petrochemical industries, ensured constant demand (Hanieh 2024), meanwhile scarcity was manufactured by delays in production to keep markets competitive (Labban 2013; Mitchell 2011). Therefore, by making fossil fuel production inextricable from social reproduction under capitalism, securing supply became incredibly high stakes—bound up with the continuity of capitalist liberal democracy itself. Furthermore, the material linkages of the global energy system “connected the dispersed power of workers” (Labban 2013), increasing worker leverage to strike and sabotage. Subsequently, the use of force employed by capitalists to protect and maintain their sovereignty over energy markets, also intensified. Thus, energy production has been bound up with regimes of control and violence since industrialisation, ensuring supply to markets, no matter the cost.

The colonial lineages of institutionalised force as a handmaiden to industrial energy production, further expose the interdependence between extractivism and technologies of social control—including counterinsurgency, policing, and armed combat—and racialisation. Policing was instrumental in consolidating colonial state formations and their resource plundering economies (Graham 2013). During European industrialisation in internal colonial contexts, the tactics of the police and the “threat of force from the military”, enforced proletarianisation (Brock and Dunlap 2022: 14). Meanwhile, in occupied territories, extraction was enabled via circulating counterinsurgency practices between colonies and metropoles (Khalili 2010), which facilitated domination of land and resources, alongside direct military invasions, settler occupations, and genocides (Wolfe 2006).

Underpinning colonial doctrine were racial narratives which employed arbitrary hierarchies of human value, to justify the protection and expansion of imperialist class power (Camp and Greenburg 2020). These same dynamics persist in contemporary policing and military institutions, which remain concerned with securing elite interests and expanding capitalist activity. These practices are enduringly racial, reproducing and “moving through relations of severe inequality” (Melamed 2015: 77) in order to delineate lives into “worthy”—the beneficiaries of extractive industries—and “disposable”—those subject to the extraordinary violence of extractivism (Bhattacharyya 2018). Therefore, as this essay hopes to show, we cannot separate the gas industry from the racial technologies of control that enable it.

To explore this connection, we will focus on three struggles we spent time with, in Italy and Greece, during the summer of 2023.[1] Firstly, we will explore the NoTAP movement against the Trans Adriatic Pipeline in Lecce, Italy, who experienced a full spectrum of institutionalised coercion and criminalisation, since the movement began in 2011. Then, we will reflect on the use of discursive manipulation to justify gas development, militarisation, and hardening borders in Alexandroupoli, North-East Greece. Finally, we revisit the struggle in Ioannina, Greece, to explore how gas and military agendas mutually enable each other.

Melendugno

Company reps for TAP AG first approached the sleepy town of Melendugno in Lecce, South-East Italy, in 2011. Their aim? To lay out the final stretch of one of the biggest EU “Projects of Common Interest”[2] in the last decade: the 878km Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP). According to Luca, a member of the NoTAP resistance movement, TAP AG were full of promises: “we will create jobs, we will create profit for the community”. Corporate counterinsurgency often takes this “good cop—bad cop strategy” (Williams 2007), beginning with a non-violent “preparatory” phase (Brock and Dunlap 2018), defined by “soft” and “low intensity” tactics which aim to socially engineer consent by winning a local population’s “hearts and minds” (Egnell 2010). The promise of jobs is an incentive commonly deployed by extractive companies to harness aspirations of betterment in economically precarious areas (Dunlap 2020). For Luca, this was an attempt to “buy the local population”, dividing the community between those convinced by economic incentives and those who were not: “There were brothers and sisters who got divided because one worked for TAP and the other was basically in the building site opposing TAP”.

Such an approach, cultivating acquiescence from locals, or producing disunity to fragment resistance, is characteristic of corporate counterinsurgency strategy (Brock 2024). However, its roots are in imperial counterinsurgency doctrine. Analogous to tactics deployed against indigenous communities during the British empire, TAP aimed to “‘divide and rule’ the locals, to create general compliance” (Rigden 2010: 215), causing irreparable damage to some family relations in Melendugno. However, in spite of this, by the time the project reached its execution phase, NoTAP was a hundreds-strong movement. Whether moved to protect the olive trees, local industry, or the environment, “each person had a weak point that was triggered by TAP”.

In colonial counterinsurgency doctrine, when divide-and-rule fails, military force is used (Rigden 2010). During this secondary phase, TAP collaborated with the Italian state to double down, abandoning attempts to socially engineer consent through financial initiatives, in favour of a “bad cop” approach (Williams 2007). This engaged much harder tactics of coercion and reframed locals protecting their olive groves as “enemies of the state”. In March 2017, despite six years of pressure from communities and local governments across Apulia, “an executive of the Ministry of Environment gave the go ahead to build the infrastructure”, overruling all local authority mandates against the project with support of a top Italian court. Locals who blocked roads or erected stone blockades were met with hundreds of police, who charged the protests with batons (Al-Zoubi 2017):

The police, following state orders, created a red zone. They surrounded the landing point area with three-metre-high fences with barbed wire and they created a real state of siege. At any time you could see police vans coming and going. Suddenly Melendugno became a war zone to protect the gas pipeline.

How could a move to such extreme police repression be possible? Ultimately, the police exist to “preserve the existing social order and protect the interests of ruling elites” (Russell 2020: 4). However, force can only be used in policing if there is a lawful objective (Liberty n.d.). This objective came not from the regional authorities, but via the Italian government, from the EU. TAP were, and continue to be, a member of ENTSOG, an EU incorporated lobby group representing the biggest European gas transmission system operators. Throughout TAP’s negotiation process, company representatives had nearly 50 meetings with European Commission representatives (LobbyFacts 2024) eventually securing €3.9 billion in funding from the European Investment Bank (EIB 2019). The project became a cash cow for the Italian state, promising to make a “direct contribution to GDP” and “direct and indirect employment opportunities” (TAP AG n.d.). This incentivised the neoliberal legal manoeuvres to overrule local government decrees against TAP, acting out the interests of fossil fuel lobbyists in the EU via an emboldened, armed police force who brutalised locals defending their lands. The police violence used against NoTAP was then legitimised by an unprecedented wave of criminalisation. By the time we met Luca, over 200 people had gone to trial, with 67 issued sentences, including prison terms ranging from three months to over three years (Frontline Defenders 2021). This extreme legal repression acted to depoliticise the movement as “criminal” (El-Enany 2015), undermining their demands to protect their homes, care for local ecologies, and maintain ancient olive groves, a cornerstone of community life for hundreds of years.

The $45 billion TAP pipeline went “online” in 2020, bringing fossil gas, largely from Azerbaijan, through Greece, Albania, and the Adriatic Sea, into Europe (Counter Balance 2021). And yet, the fight goes on. After their trials, Luca and his comrades opened a criminal case against TAP: “our objective was to save a historical record of what was a great struggle … [for] TAP to be remembered for what it is”. Whilst TAP will be remembered as a project motivated by profits for an elite few, facilitated by incredible police violence, NoTAP will be remembered in their steadfast resistance and integrity to protect their town.

Alexandroupoli

We will have two terminals in Alexandroupoli. Alexandroupoli is turning into an energy port for the interests of Americans and the local rich people.

We met Dimitra in Alexandroupoli, a coastal city overlooking the Aegean Sea in Greece, during a time when two gas infrastructure projects were nearing completion: the Alexandroupolis INGS Terminal Pipeline and the Alexandroupolis FSRU, the latter of which[3] connects to the Trans Adriatic Pipeline. According to Elmina Copelouzou, the founding shareholder of Gastrade, the Greek company who developed the terminal:

The Alexandroupolis LNG [Liquefied Natural Gas] Terminal is much more than a business project. It is a tangible proof of the possibilities we have in Greece to create European infrastructures that address the problems of our times, offering opportunities and prospects for a better and sustainable energy future. (Gastrade 2024)

Dimitra was quick to highlight what she saw as “interest for the big fishes [referring to Gastrade] … not the locals”:

The problem with LNG is, they say that it will be green energy, it will be good for all of them, it will open places for people to work. The real thing is the gas is not natural, it’s fossil gas, and it’s really bad for the environment. We will have a lot of pollution in the sea.

By disingenuously reinforcing the ecological and social “good” of the project, Gastrade’s greenwashing of its LNG developments performs a counterinsurgency function, “stabilizing ecological anxiety” of locals (Dunlap 2023: 40) and pacifying their potential resistance at once. Objectively, fossil gas is not green, though it is lower carbon than other fossil fuels (MIT Climate 2023). This is significant because carbon is “the principal unit of measurement for evaluating global warming” (Dunlap 2023: 45), an inaccurate framework overlooking other key drivers of ecological collapse which has led to methane-intensive gas being classified as “sustainable” in the EU’s own “green” taxonomy (ClientEarth 2023). A testament to this: the so-called “green” LNG now being produced in Alexandroupolis is 33% more dangerous in terms of global warming emissions over a 20-year period than coal (Howarth 2024), even though it is significantly lower carbon. Through the discursive manipulation of Gastrade’s PR, the ecological impacts of its LNG projects were hidden in plain sight. Meanwhile, the struggle against it was weakened from the outset, through the outright lie of a “sustainable energy future”.

At the same time LNG expansion was underway in Alexandroupoli, so too were developments for a US military base, aiming to provide a station for NATO in the region and a site to export US weapons to Central Europe. Despite NATO’s contested reputation worldwide, communities in Alexandroupoli were supportive of their presence:

They still believe that NATO and the military are for good because we are close to the border. They think that NATO and the military will protect them from the enemy and the enemy in their minds is the Turkish people, the immigrants. So they want the military here … they have been told that NATO in the area is security.

Like greenwashing, the promise of “securitisation” by NATO had a counterinsurrectionary function, implying that there is territory to be protected (a particular ideal of the Greek nation) and a way of being under threat (a Greek national subjectivity) (Chandler and Chapato 2021). Beyond Alexandroupoli’s coasts, imagined subjects racialised as “threatening” to the flourishing of the “normative” national subject dwell (Ahmed 2014), posing a danger to the “security” of the nation. This fabricated security threat is then used to justify and garner support for imperialist militarisation and hardening borders.

The expansion of military infrastructures into Alexandroupoli also relied on another framing of “security”: energy security. According to JINSA, an influential US-based lobby on Israeli–US relations, US and NATO support of LNG expansion in Alexandroupoli was “highly strategic”, offering opportunities to “s unique opportunities for achieving shared transatlantic objectives to reduce Europe’s dangerous dependence on Russian energy … [and] bolster the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) force posture in the increasingly contested Eastern Mediterranean” (JINSA 2022: 1).

While racist subjectifications of migrants are used to justify securitisation, state discourse on energy security legitimise fossil gas and military proliferation, framing both as a panacea to war, regional tension, and energy demand. Yet, more fossil fuels, more military bases create a “positive feedback loop”, whereby they not only reproduce and worsen the “threats” they claim to manage (Dunlap 2023), but also profit from them (Klein 2007). The most brazen example of this: European LNG imports from Russia were at “record levels” by the start of 2025, meanwhile reducing dependence on Russian gas was used to justify expanding more gas projects (Niranjan 2025).

Those who were unpersuaded by the corporate counterinsurgency of Gastrade or racialising security logics of military expansion, are covertly subject to repressive policing practices: “they seem to watch our activities, bring you in, check who you are, rather than being loud”. Organisers in Alexandroupoli resisting the LNG terminal had also been organising around the militarisation of the town. Dimitra’s experience of police repression speaks to the interdependence between militaries, policing, and industrial gas extraction. As we learned with Luca’s experience resisting TAP, policing is concerned with constituting the agendas of companies and states, reshaping “bodies, social relationships, and habits … to indoctrinate and affirm the order of accumulation” (Dunlap and Brock 2022: 6). Ecological harmony and energy security might have been the PR spin on the LNG projects in Alexandroupoli, yet this sanitised image was premised on discursive manipulation to win “hearts and minds” of locals and the quiet—yet violent—disciplining of bodies, like Dimitras, who resist.

The pipeline connecting the terminal to the Greek gas network was completed during our trip, in August 2023 (Habibic 2023). The US base launched its first “heavy brigade movement” the following spring, meanwhile the LNG terminal began commercial operations a few months later. Gas production in Alexandroupoli was inextricably linked to its militarisation. While both gas and military interests were affirmed through discursive forms of counterinsurgency, transforming local political consciousness in their favour, both industries emerged as collaborating drivers of imperialist hegemony in the region.

Ioannina

To the west of Alexandroupoli, London-based Energean Oil & Gas were seeking to develop “the hydrocarbon potential” of the mountain village of Ioannina, claiming to be well positioned to do so because of their “experience and knowledge of the region’s geology” (Energean 2017).

As we discussed in the first instalment of this two-part Intervention, members of this community feared that the onshore gas developments would make a “sacrifice zone” of their lands, leading to them to be, as our comrade Christian put it, “internally displaced”. Yet ecologies are not simply “sacrificed”, as NoTAP and Alexandroupoli proves: where there is extractivism, there will be resistance. This possible resistance is a business opportunity for carceral and military industries:

If we have a gas project here, we will have extreme militarisation of the society and police, [especially given] all these agreements between the Israeli and the Greek government and, all the violence, the actual contract between Elbit Systems and Energean.

Christian was right to observe the connections between gas drilling in his village and “extreme militarisation of the society and police”. A year before our trip, in Kavala, west of Alexandroupoli, 450 armed police charged a worker-led occupation in an oil refinery owned by Energean, releasing stun grenades onto the crowds (Selin 2022). The week we visited Ioannina, Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, and self-professed “heart of the IDF’s operational solutions”,[4] announced an agreement with the Greek government, promising training for a new military base in Kalamata (Elbit Systems 2023). Energean’s Israel branch had already awarded a $15 million contract to Elbit to secure its Karish-Tanin gas fields FPSO platform (Elbit 2019), while Greek collusion with the Israeli occupation scaled up during the genocide, as both parties signed a deal to increase “energy stability” (Reuters 2024). Both Elbit and Energean saw a nearly 30% profit increase across the first year of genocide in Palestine (Energean 2024; Middle East Monitor 2024). What this reveals is the co-constituting character of gas- and military-industrial complexes: armed forces facilitate the interests of extractive industries, while—in symbiosis—extractivist expansion produces new markets for arms and surveillance institutions to proliferate, furthering the geopolitical agendas of connected states.

While Elbit and Energean get rich, communities like Christian’s are pitted against each other, and their villages transformed into sites of docility and dispossession: “We think that this project will completely cut our ties with our ancestors. We will completely lose our collective consciousness”.

Energy company representatives often defend extractive projects accused of weaponising economic inequalities by claiming that it’s not “colonialism”; it’s “development” (Chatzimarkakis 2022). Unlike European colonial empires, contemporary neoliberal racial capitalism does not emerge as an intentional plan (Bhattacharyya 2018). However, it relies on reproduced colonial logics which serve to “deactivate relations between human beings” (Melamed 2015: 78) as well as from nature, culture, and ancestral memory; devaluing some lives over others. Therefore, to understand Christian’s situation as colonial is to not to blame single actors or even single companies. It is to understand how networks of military, carceral, and energy institutions weaponise the “racial” to make disposable communities whose homes and cultures stand in the way of their geopolitical and financial agendas.

Concluding Thoughts

In our last essay, we argued that the gas industry operates analogous to the prison- and military-industrial complexes mapped out by abolitionist thinkers: corporate and political elites are its beneficiaries; racialised, working-class people bear the costs of its ecologically violent production. In this piece, we aimed to show that this gas-industrial complex does not emulate the logics of racial capitalism in a vacuum. Far from it. Gas production, as the struggles in Melendugno, Alexandroupoli, and Ioannina prove, is intimately intertwined with carceral and military regimes. These multi-dimensional technologies of biopolitical control perform the “dirty work” of the gas industry, profiting from its expansion whilst facilitating the pacification, repression, and, at its most extreme, annihilation of the communities who—by living on the land already—stand in the way. They also bring into focus the intersectional nature of our struggle to resist gas expansion. For movements organising in solidarity, we cannot abolish the police, prisons, or militaries without transforming the energy systems that power them. Likewise, a just transition cannot be brought about without a global movement to defund policing systems and demilitarise the global economy. Our call to decarbonise must be synonymous with an interconnected global movement to abolish racial capitalism in all its guises.

Endnotes

[1] This focus is not to overlook our colonial present, but to enrich our collective understanding of it. The global political economy remains characterised by an unequal transfer of wealth from South to North, and an inverse outsourcing of ecological violence, debt, and militarisation. Yet, such a big-picture view might overlook how these colonial patterns of ecocidal dispossession are reproduced across poorer regions of Europe too. Our engagement with struggles in Southern Europe aims to show that gas imperialism does not care for borders, only capital expansion—an analysis we hope supports a greater unification of an internationalist struggle against racial capitalist expansion. We follow NoTap , whose slogan, “nè qui nè altrove” / not here or anywhere” reminds us our struggle can only ever be a shared one.

[2] Projects of Common Interest are energy projects identified as a priority for EU interests which receive benefits such as accelerated permit approvals and funding opportunities.

[3] “[A]n operating floating storage and regasification unit (FSRU) liquefied natural gas (LNG) import terminal” (Global Energy Monitor 2024).

[4] See https://x.com/ronnie_barkan/status/1731713148430733784 (last accessed 10 April 2025).

Acknowledgements

This two-part intervention series owes itself to the generosity of NoTap Meludungo, “Squatted Old Morgue”/κατάληψη Παλιού Νεκροτομείου, Convocatoria-Ecologista, ReCommon, Don’t Dig Campaign, Avli Initiative, Epirus Against Oil and Gas, Save Epirus, Ανοιχτή Συνέλευση Ενάντια στην ενεργειακή λεηλασία, Propaganda, Gastivists Greece, Mahmoud Nawajaa, BDS National Committee, Aforas, FFF Sardenga and FFF Thessaloniki. We are grateful for your time, comradeship and revolutionary integrity.

Thank you to Laleh Khalili for her mentorship and to the Antipode Foundation, whose “Right to the Discipline” grants made this project possible.

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Featured image: Photo by WeSmellGas ([email protected])