Tactical Landscapes

Abstract

Desert landscapes serve as a site for the dynamic interplay of competing historical and geopolitical narratives. In Kuwait, tribal, colonial, and global conflicts across the hinterland have mobilized state planning efforts, articulating a geospatial division between urban and desert life. Concurrently, visioning tools such as hand-drawn maps and satellite imagery have not only shaped the understanding of this desert, but have been shaped by it. Through an examination of the forces that have driven its transformation, this landscape is shown as both product and producer of cultural, social, and political complexity. The contemporary desert exists as a patchwork, the result of a disparate collection of essential narratives projected onto the territory.

Keywords:

• aerial
• cartography
• desert
• geospatial
• Kuwait
• landscape
• patchwork
• perspectives
• politics
• power
• space
• technology
• war

As Kuwait transitioned from nomadic to sedentary settlement in the mid-seventeenth century, a complex socioeconomic tapestry emerged. In the eighteenth century, the state’s dualistic existence as a port to the east and a caravan route to the west was manifest in a series of concentric walls separating town and desert. Regional instability and British imperialism altered the spatial balance of the Gulf during the following century, imposing new borders that transformed the desert into an abstract tactical landscape. The discovery of oil during the twentieth century served as an accelerant, propelling the desert from a space of tribal interactions to a political chessboard for resource extraction. Once a flourishing realm of activity, the desert was relegated to the peripheries of collective consciousness, becoming siloed by trade sectors and industrial forces. The 1991 Gulf War furthered this dislocation, as a revolution in satellite technology and warfare strategy permanently altered the state’s narrative.

Etched into the desert, tangible manifestations of power dynamics highlight the reciprocal relationship between tools for understanding the landscape and their translation to the public. As a palimpsest of past actions and decisions, the landscape reveals shifting power practices, tactical maneuvers, and military conflict. Kuwait’s desert emerges as a microcosm of broader patterns of territorialization and spatial politics shaping the world in which we live.

In popular imagination, the desert landscape of Kuwait conjures images of a static and barren expanse. Yet, as is often the case, the collective imaginary barely scratches the surface of the rich and complex reality that lies beneath. Beyond the sand and stark rock formations, this landscape is teeming with life, history, and intrigue, embodying a multiplicity of compelling narratives, undervalued operations, and complex social systems.

Despite its significance in supporting the nation’s economy and securing its borders, the desert remains an undervalued and misunderstood space. Its story has been shaped by colonial impact, tribal battles, and global conflict. As we trace the history of this space, we begin to understand the gradual transformation of the desert from a place of abundance to a space of patchwork planning projects. Human intervention has left its mark on the desert and has driven the evolution of tools used to understand and manage this vast landscape.

The Geospatial Divide

In the desert environment, Arabian tribes historically lived a communal lifestyle based on cultural and social values shared through pastoral wanderings as their primary means of subsistence. Within this landscape, distinct socioeconomic activity patterns existed, intimately connected with the ebb and flow of the Bedouin tribes and settlements. The isolation of the desert rendered the tribes in Central Arabia largely independent and impervious to foreign interference. However, the caravan trade routes that began withering with the shift from the Mediterranean to Atlantic trade in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries enjoyed a renaissance due to the imperialistic competition between the expansive mercantile powers of Western Europe. With the resurgence of trade in the area, the Bedouin tribes were drawn out of their isolation and into the mainstream of history.

In Kuwait, the transition from a fluid and transient nomadic culture to a more permanent sedentary settlement was already underway in the mid-seventeenth century. The town became a thriving commercial port that sustained itself on pearl diving, trading, and fishing within fifty years of its foundation. In parallel, a nascent social class system based on a nomadic class structure emerged in the community.¹ In addition to maintaining the ancestral character of the desert, these combined forces also imbued the distribution of labor and politics within the region with remnants of tribal ideology.²

As a port settlement, Kuwait had two main definitions: a thriving maritime industry to the east and an overland caravan route to the west. During the eighteenth century, the port town was an archetypal Arabian dichotomy of town and desert overlooking the Arabian Gulf. In order to defend the port from tribal attacks, three consecutive walls surrounded the vernacular urban fabric. The first wall fortified the port town from the north to south shore and expanded outwards into two further concentric rings growing towards the desert. However, the walls also imbued a geospatial division through their physical presence, separating the town from its surrounding desert.³ By the nineteenth century, the internal state and consequent lack of centralized power in Persia, Ottoman Iraq, and Arabia rapidly altered the region’s equilibrium (Figure 1). Moreover, due to the growth of British imperialism in the Gulf, Kuwait became increasingly entangled in the region’s international politics.

Figure 1. The third wall that separates the port town of Kuwait from its surrounding landscape. Source: Kuwait Oil Company (KOC).

Although the British competed with the Dutch, French, Russians, and Germans, their colonization of India provided a geographical advantage that catalyzed their control of the Arabian Gulf. As the Wahhabi tribe gained more power on the coast, the UK proposed to protect the sheikhdom of Kuwait from desert attacks by extending a treaty of friendship. In 1899, Sheikh Mubarak Al Sabah signed a secret protection treaty with England against foreign aggression, marking Kuwait as a protectorate. In return, Sheikh Mubarak and his successors could only obtain foreign representatives and sell territory with Britain’s approval. These restrictions led to the first iteration of Kuwait’s territorial extents, but England struggled to determine Kuwait’s territorial limits beyond the town walls.⁴ For the most part, the hinterland boundaries were fluctuating and undefined, with British records describing little beyond Kuwait’s shoreline. Despite colonial attempts to understand the desert economy, only glimpses were seen, as if the desert were a black hole that might swallow colonial agents whole.

The English drafted the 1913 Anglo-Ottoman agreement to confine the hinterland into two territories to avoid and absolve themselves of any responsibility to defend Kuwait from within its desert abyss. In red and green pencils on a map to show the limits of Kuwait and adjacent countries, the state was divided into an area under the direct control of the sheikh and an area outside the influence of the sheikhdom by using the port city as a pivot point. The red line encompassed the port city and its surrounding desert, while the green line denoted an outer spheric condition beyond comprehension. This land, nevertheless, served as a shared space for complex exchanges between nomads, farmers, and sedentary people who created different interpretations of borders and boundaries. At the time, the areas between Iraq, Najd (present-day Saudi Arabia), and Kuwait were a desert and a geography of movement and exchange until the mid-twentieth century. Although Britain could not ratify this convention because of the First World War, meaning it no longer had any standing in international law, the drawn lines would remain vivid in the memories of the British in the years to come (Figure 2).⁵

Figure 2. Map of the inner and outer zones of diminishing Kuwaiti Authority (Red Line and Green Line) defined by the 1913 Anglo-Ottoman Convention. Source: Map to Show the Limits of Kuwait and Adjacent Country [39r] (1/2). 2021, Qatar Digital Library. Accessed March 27, 2023. https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100023550810.0x000050.

After the First World War, the colonized and developing states in the region asserted more control over the vast stretches of the desert that had been domains of powerful Bedouin tribes and confederations. Both France and Britain exerted political pressure and economic hardship on Northern Arabia’s rural populations. Newly drawn borders were sliced across tribal territories, which created complications and conflicts in matters such as sovereignty, citizenship, migration, and political refuge. In 1920, the Ikhwan, a zealot tribe loyal to King Ibn Saud of Najd, attacked the Red Fort of Kuwait in Jahra to expand their territory. Due to its distance from the port city, the fort served the Kuwaiti population by safeguarding the agricultural lands of Al-Jahra. If Sheikh Salem Al Sabah had not called in support from British troops—who arrived with airplanes and three warships to end the attacks⁶—the Ikhwan would have likely incorporated Kuwait into King Ibn Saud’s empire.

The Battle of Jahra prompted Britain to revise the map again to end future territorial disputes. With a red pencil in hand, Sir Percy Cox inscribed boundary lines and buffer areas between Iraq, Najd, and Kuwait on a map of Asia at a scale of 1:1,000,000.⁷ The 1922 Uqair Protocol conference, attended by King Ibn Saud, followed the unratified Anglo-Ottoman agreement without seeking the validity of local knowledge or adopting indigenous mapping traditions. In order to appease King Ibn Saud after giving Iraq a large territory previously claimed by Najd, Cox granted him nearly two-thirds of Kuwait’s territory in return.⁸ Cox traced the “red line” of an esoteric agreement to remodel the desert into separate political and economic entities. When translated on the ground, Cox’s sharp pencil strokes appear as broad zones, lacking a holistic survey. With a reductive analysis influenced by a global search for resources, the foreign cartographic transcription of territory on paper dehumanized the hinterland and politicized the landscape’s spatial conditions using treaties and lines (Figure 3).⁹

Figure 3. Map showing boundaries between Iraq, Kuwait, and Najd drawn to scale 1;1,000,000, 1925. Source: “Map Showing Boundaries Between Iraq, Kuwait, and Najd [15r] (1/2).” 2021. Qatar Digital Library. Accessed March 27, 2023. https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100023400715.0x000023.

The British doubted tribes would easily recognize the proposition of a fixed line in a featureless desert. Their reports on the Arabian Gulf had almost always defined Iraq, Najd, and Kuwait’s shared desert as a “wasteland” and “of the most barren and inhospitable description.”¹⁰ Neutral zones were therefore defined in the hinterlands to serve as temporary compromises for shared grazing grounds and nomadic movements among the three countries. This agreement transformed the desert into an arbitrary sociopolitical economic landscape as nomadic populations became increasingly sedentarized, reducing their previously fluid migration patterns.¹¹

Before the Second World War, British oil companies—backed by their government’s power—secured vast oil concessions in the region, subsequently activating new strategic importance in the competitive imperialist framework of that time. After oil was discovered in 1938, the neutral zone between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia no longer served tribes but functioned to benefit oil companies collaborating with the two states, transforming the desert into a shared asset with land managed in two relatively equal halves. In addition to the discovery of oil, Kuwait welcomed an influx of a sizeable non-Kuwaiti labor force that alleviated and subsidized the state’s growth.¹² As a result, Kuwait experienced an unparalleled wave of transformation that ultimately changed the physical makeup of its national landscape in the 1950s. This massive modernization project derived from the new-found oil wealth and Sheikh Abdullah Al Salem’s rise to power. It was up to William Hasted, the UK’s advisor in Kuwait, to secure British interests. He suggested that the Emir contract the English firm Minoprio, Spencer, and Macfarlane to design and implement the First Master Plan of Kuwait in 1951.¹³

New Perspectives

The widespread adoption of aviation for everyday purposes following the Second World War enabled planners to survey urban landscapes from above, opening the door to viewing Kuwait like never before.¹⁴ From warfare to master planning, the bird’s-eye vantage led to the development of new methodologies that reshaped the built environment. There is no doubt that the use of this panoptic view fully mobilized the state, as the majority of activities within the town were borne out of their capacity to be observed through an aerial view.¹⁵ Aerial photographs of Kuwait’s old town, taken by the Hunting Aero survey in the 1950s, established the basis for the master plan and an era of top-down planning. To this day, this centralized approach, informed by the state as the land provider and developer, continues to produce relevant policies and developments.¹⁶ As inhabitants moved towards the newly constructed city center and its suburbs, designed to showcase the nation’s coming of age, the desert became further removed from everyday existence. What was once a place of living, commerce, and trade became nothing more than a sentimental memory for most (Figure 4).

Figures 4. Two British survey helicopters fly over Kuwait Town, late 1950s. Source: Kuwait Oil Company Archives. Accessed August 16, 2017.

The idea of urban life continued to be reinforced as the nation’s primary geographic and built scope. Despite their importance in preserving Kuwait’s sovereignty, the old town walls were demolished to facilitate infrastructure development. As a result, the past’s symbolic, psychological, and sociological significance was gradually diluted. However, like a lingering ghost, the geospatial divide once signified by the demolished town walls continues to characterize the metropolitan area. The national geography beyond this boundary did not align with the new spatial narratives. Thus, despite increasing activity calling this landscape home, the desert remained relatively peripheral and nondescript, both in political discussion and in collective thought. Agricultural developments had begun to appear along the northern and southern borders of the state, previously lush patches of land became recreational spaces for overnight camping getaways, and more and more logistical operations began to utilize the vast expanse of open land for industrial storage and production processes.

As the search for and processing of oil proved to be a driving force in the hinterland’s many evolving operations, the vast majority of this national landscape was essentially delegated to the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC), and the neutral zone was partitioned horizontally in two, ending the border’s undefined legal nature in 1965. The desert was subdivided and segmented multiple times to make it more manageable for bureaucrats and to enable commercial merchants to benefit from its resources.

As maps and aerial views accumulated over time, they formed a diverse patchwork of archived material, each with varying origins, sources, motivations, and resolutions. The advent of new technologies revolutionized the field of cartography, moving it beyond the traditional pen-and-ink of past generations and introducing novel methods of understanding space. While the precedents of past tools have demonstrated their political impact and capacity to shape land over time, the ramifications of new technologies extend beyond the boundaries inscribed by their predecessors.

These conditions projected themselves to the front line during the 1990 Gulf War. Satellite-based technology allowed for the wide-scale introduction of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to the battlefield for the first time, while cameras attached to high-tech missiles produced images that transformed the perception of war. Once analyzed and designed from the air, Kuwait’s national landscape became a space now viewed and dominated from above, played out across the desert and on television screens worldwide (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Seen in an appliance store in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, President Bush announces allied air strikes against Iraq on January 17, 1991. Source: AP/Amy Sancetta, as shown in Rian Dundon, “Operation Desert Storm Was a Practice Run in Press Manipulation,” Timeline, March 1, 2018.

For the entirety of the Gulf War, media coverage primarily presented aerial perspectives of the conflict, transforming the desert of Kuwait into a centerpiece of global reporting. As the first war to be covered live from the frontlines, it captured the attention of millions worldwide.¹⁷ The imagery gathered from planes and satellites presented to the public what on-the-ground reporting could not—the vast expanses of presumably empty land now brimming with heavily armored tanks and thousands of soldiers. Those taking part in the war greatly relied on GPS to navigate and strategically maneuver an arid and hard-to-understand landscape. The rate of adoption of this technology was so rapid it became difficult to secure and distribute sufficient amounts of GPS equipment, with soldiers writing home and asking family members to send receivers.¹⁸ It proved so critical during its implementation that it empowered the US Army to implement a strategic operation known as the “Hail Mary” or “left hook.” While the Iraqi army was expecting an attack further east, allied forces were able to move west beyond their anticipated arrival point and engage in battle with the element of surprise on their side.¹⁹ These systems had allowed strangers to the desert to navigate a seemingly endless landscape with considerable accuracy, a defining factor in the outcome of the conflict (Figure 6).

Figure 6. The smoke from oil well fires forces Kuwait drivers to use their headlights during daylight hours on April 22, 1991. Source: Everett Collection/Shutterstock.

The tools enabling the aerial view had ruled the war so much that it earned it the title “The First Space War” due to the newfound approaches and methods for utilizing satellite technologies.²⁰ In the span of a few months, the Gulf War ultimately triggered GPS’s common and commercial use. However, the damages caused on a national scale would need a few more decades to remedy. Photographs and video footage archiving the conflict had seldom strayed beyond the desert landscape. As the world was bombarded with images of the earth clouded in black smoke from the fires, the visuals associated with the nation became ingrained in the minds of many. These still influence the global perception of Kuwait today, denaturing the national narrative Kuwait sought to convey through its initial master planning efforts.

The war also propelled the United Nations Iraq-Kuwait Observation Mission (UNIKOM) to define and build the demilitarized zone along the northern border in 1992. What once was an arbitrary line that existed only on a map with a few markers delineating Iraq and Kuwait was solidified into a 15-kilometer-wide impenetrable zone. Pillars were placed at a distance of two kilometers from one another from the tripoint of the Saudi-Kuwait-Iraq border towards the maritime boundary. An electrified fence with sensors was erected along its entire length, divided by trenches and sand berms. The once shared border condition was remodeled into a region contained by ridges on either side, spatially translating a line on a map onto the ground.²¹

A Contemporary Patchwork

Today, what exists across this landscape is an accumulation of programs necessary for the survival of the state—cultural sedimentation, agricultural cultivation, resource extraction, and military installations. Aside from oil, Kuwait’s exports are not large, and so the majority of these spaces exist to support and logistically provide for the city-state itself. They are critical to the nation’s economic, political, and social aspects.

With activities spanning over 75 percent of state land, their effects cross borders and often impact other functional spaces around them, not solely regarding adjacencies, but also land management, resource utilization, and environmental complications. These activities are not assigned a territory based on their relevance to one another or their programmatic synergies. Instead, they follow a distribution scheme that provides land immediately available to the next-in-line institution, or those that have been well positioned politically. Despite the abundance of tools available to facilitate a more profound and resilient comprehension of the landscape, the potential for such an understanding remains unrealized in the social and political contexts that dominate its present-day existence.

The resulting patchwork of archived material embedded within the hinterland reflects the different motivations and interests of the forces that produced it and the ambiguities that remain. Acting as a palimpsest of past decisions and actions, the physical manifestations of these events have become a fundamental aspect of the desert. The landscape bears the scars of changing social dynamics, political maneuverings, and military conflicts. These remnants serve as tangible reminders of the desert’s complex history, highlighting the impact of changing tools and techniques. From hand-drawn maps to the latest in aerial satellite imagery and GPS technology, these tools have not only aided our perception of the landscape but have also played a significant role in shaping our relationship with it. Ultimately, the transformation of Kuwait’s hinterland reflects the broader patterns of territorialization and spatial politics that have shaped the modern world.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yousef Awaad Hussein

Yousef Awaad Hussein is an architect and urban planner. He holds a M.Arch. from Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a B.S. in Architecture from McGill University. He is a Penny White Project Fund recipient and was awarded the Center for Geographic Analysis’ Howard T. Fisher Prize for his project titled “Territory, Survey, Cartography.” His work has been presented at the ISOCARP World Planning Congress, and published in Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review and Wallpaper Magazine.

Asaiel Al Saeed

Asaiel Al Saeed is an architect who obtained her professional B.Arch. from Kuwait University. Her research interests focus on the development and regression of traditional agricultural practices in relation to their resource heritage and modern history. Her work was selected for the Kuwait Youth Excellence Award in Architecture, Planning, and Housing by the Ministry of State for Youth Affairs.

Saphiya Abu Al-Maati

Saphiya Abu Al-Maati is an architect and researcher interested in the intersection of policy, conflict, and the built environment. She obtained her M.Arch. from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Peace and Conflict Studies from UC Berkeley. She was awarded the Science Po and KFAS grant for ‘On the Stakes of War and Peace: Diplomacy, Anthropology, Climate, and Conflict’, and her research has been included at the UNESCO World Heritage Conference (Bahrain) and the IASTE (Portugal).

Aseel AlYaqoub

Aseel AlYaqoub is an artist, researcher and writer based in Kuwait. She holds an MFA from Pratt Institute in New York and a BA from Chelsea College of Art in London. Her work is featured in publications such as Architecture of the Territory: Constructing National Narratives in an Arab World (2023) edited by Collective for Architecture, and Iridescent Kuwait: Petro-Modernity and Urban Visual Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century (2022) by Laura Hindelang. Her work can be found in permanent collections, including the Barjeel Art Foundation and the Art Jameel Collection.

Notes

Editor’s Note: This piece was invited and did not undergo blind peer review

As a collective, Yousef Awaad Hussein, Asaiel Al Saeed, Saphiya Abu Al-Maati, and Aseel AlYaqoub curated the National Pavilion of Kuwait, entitled Space Wars, at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021. They have lectured at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Kuwait University, and Cornell University as part of the Preston H. Thomas Memorial Lecture Series. Their work was most recently included in the book Deserts Are Not Empty (2022), edited by Samia Henni.

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5 British official, Lorimer’s article for internal use by Government of India (1908).

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20 Greenemeier, “GPS and the World’s First ‘Space War.’”

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