OCEANS OF INEQUALITY: CLIMATE MIGRATION, ENERGY COLONIALISM AND PRECARIOUS FUTURES IN OMAR EL AKKADS WHAT STRANGE PARADISE

Omar El Akkads What Strange Paradise is a powerful account of the global inequalities reshaping climate migration in the twenty-first century. This paper applies the framework of Energy Humanities to illustrate how the refugee crisis as depicted in the novel is highly situated in the historical framework of energy colonialism. The economic systems of resource extraction, reliance on fossil fuels, and geopolitical imbalance between the Global North and South are the roots of the precariousness and expulsion of the protagonist, Amir. Not only do these structures destroy internal ecologies, but they also create the political environment and lived realities that constrain populations to migrate and disappear. The Mediterranean Sea, the novels stage, is a space of energy reflection where the motifs of climate change, militarized borders, and global consumption converge. The ocean is no longer a site of freedom, liberty or connection, but of zealousness, surveillance and inequality. It reflects who is given migration and who is cast to precarity. In its depiction of submerged bodies, failed rescue attempts, and shattered expectations, the novel reveals the human cost of a world organized around disparate energy regimes. This research reads What Strange Paradise as a narrative structured by energy histories, demonstrating how climate devastation, economic dependence and fossil-capitalist systems co-create refugee flows, forced migration and unpredictable futures.