Toby Jones

Topics of Interest:
Environment, Energy

Countries/Regions of Interest:
Arabia, Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia

List of Publications

Books: 
Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Running Dry: Essays on Energy, Water and Environmental Crisis (Rutgers University Press, 2015).

America’s Oil Wars (under contract with Harvard University Press).

Articles:
“Introduction: Roundtable on Technopolitics and War,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Fall 2014.

“Toxic War and the Politics of Uncertainty in Iraq,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Fall 2014.

“The Dogma of Development: Technopolitics and Power in Saudi Arabia,” in Bernard Haykel, Thomas Hegghammer, Stephane Lacroix, eds., Saudi Arabia in Transition: Insights on Social, Political, Economic and Religious Change, (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

“Energy Security: Genealogy of a Term,” Middle East Report, 271, Summer 2014.

“Saudi Arabia,” in Dispatches from the Arab Spring, Paul Amar and Vijay Prashad, editors, (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 89-100.

“The Laureate of Empire,” Raritan: A Quarterly Review, Fall 2012, 75-89.

“State of Nature: The Politics of Water in the Making of Saudi Arabia,” in Alan Mikhail, ed. Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa, (Oxford University Press, 2012).

“Embracing Crisis in the Gulf,” Middle East Report, 264, Fall 2012.

“America, Oil, and War in the Middle East,” Journal of American History, 2012, 99: 208-218.

“Crude Ecology: Technology and the Politics of Dissent in Saudi Arabia," in Gabrielle Hecht, ed., Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War  (MIT Press, 2011), 209-230.

“Saudi Arabia Versus the Arab Spring,” Raritan: A Quarterly Review, Fall 2011, 43-59.

“Saudi Alchemy: Water into Oil, Oil into Water,” Middle East Report, 254, Spring 2010.

 “Religious Revivalism and its Challenge to the Saudi Regime,” in Mohammed Ayoob and Hasan Kosebalaban, eds. Religion and Politics in Saudi Arabia: Wahhabism and the State, (Boulder, Co: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2008), pp 109-122.

“Saudi Arabia’s Not so New Anti-Shi‘ism,” Middle East Report, 242, Spring 2007, 29-32.

“The Iraq Effect in Saudi Arabia.” Middle East Report. 237. Winter 2006.

“Rebellion on the Saudi Periphery: Modernity, Marginalization and the Shi’a Uprising of 1979,” International Journal of Middle East Studies. 38:2. May (2006), 213-233.  

“Seeking a ‘Social Contract’ for Saudi Arabia.” Middle East Report, 228, Fall 2003.

Other Publications:
“Our Friends in Riyadh,” Jacobin, October 2014.

“Bahraini Oil, American Water,” London Review of Books Blog, April 4, 2014.

“Thinking Globally About Arabia,” Jadaliyya, April 22, 2013.

“Bahrain: Human Rights and Political Wrongs,” Sada, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 25, 2012.

“The Price of Dissent in Saudi Arabia,” The Nation, February 16, 2012.

“Bahrain’s Revolutionaries,” with Ala’a Shehabi, Foreign Policy, January 2, 2012.

“Don’t Stop at Iraq: Why the U.S. Should Withdraw from the Entire Persian Gulf,” The Atlantic, December 22, 2011.

“We Know What Happened in Bahrain: Now What?” Sada, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, December 1, 2011.

“Saudi-Iraq Relations: Devolving Chaos or Acrimonious Stability,” Henri Barkey, Scott Lasensky, Phebe Marr, eds, Iraq and Its Neighbors, and the United States: Competition, Crisis, and the Reordering of Power (United States Institute of Peace, 2011), 99-118.

“Saudi Arabia’s Regional Reaction,” The Nation, September 12, 2011, 39-40.

“Time to Disband the Bahrain-Based U.S. Fifth Fleet,” The Atlantic, June 10, 2011.

“Bahrain, Kingdom of Silence,” Arab Reform Bulletin, May 4, 2011. (Reprinted in The Daily Star)

“Counterrevolution in the Gulf,” Peacebrief No 89, United Statues Institute of Peace, April 15, 2011.

“Saudi Arabia Moves to Maintain Regime Stability,” CTC Sentinel, Vol 4 No. 4, April 2011.

“Bahrain’s Dangerous Path,” al-Masry al-Youm, March 27, 2011.

“The Persian Gulf Tinderbox,” E-International Relations, March 23, 2011.

“High Anxiety,” Foreign Policy, March 23, 2011.

“Seeking Reform, Not Regime Change,” New York Times, March 14, 2011.

“A Revolution Paused in Bahrain,” Middle East Report online, February 23, 2011 with Cortni Kerr.

“The siege of Bahrain,” Foreign Policy, February 18, 2011.

“Is Bahrain Next?” Jadaliyya, February 17, 2011.

"Saudi Arabia," in Assaf Moghadam, ed., Militancy and Political Violence in Shiism: Trends and Patterns (London; New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2011).

“Abdullah’s No Reformer,” Foreign Policy, June 2010.

“Embattled in Arabia: Shi‘is and the Politics of Confrontation in Saudi Arabia,” Occasional Paper Series, Shi‘a Militancy Program, Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, June 3, 2009.

“Women’s Rights in the Middle East and North Africa: Gulf Edition,” co-author of Qatar report with Julia Breslin, Freedom House Special Report, February 11, 2009.

“Saudi Arabia’s Silent Spring,” Foreign Policy, February 2009.

“Saudi Arabia’s Sectarian Ambivalence,” CTC Sentinel, Volume 1, Issue 9, August 2008, 19-21.

“Driven by a Sense of Urgency,” Bitterlemons International, Edition 16, Volume 5, April 2007. (Reprinted in The Daily Star)

“Bahrain: A Year of Decision,” Arab Reform Bulletin, March 2006, Volume 4, Issue 2. (Reprinted in The Daily Star)

“Shifting Sands: The Future of U.S.-Saudi Relations,” Foreign Affairs, Volume 85, Number 2, March/April, 2006.

The Shiite Question in Saudi Arabia. International Crisis Group Middle East/North Africa Report N°45. September 19, 2005.

Bahrain’s Sectarian Challenge. International Crisis Group Middle East/North Africa Report N°40. May 6, 2005.

“The Clerics, the Sahwa and the Saudi State.” Strategic Insights. Volume IV, Issue 3, March 2005.  

“Saudi Arabia: Reform or Ruin?” The Daily Star. December 18, 2004.

“Violence and the Illusion of Reform in Saudi Arabia.” Middle East Report Online. November 13, 2003.  

Book Reviews:
Alan Mikhail. Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History. Environmental History. November 2012.

Steffen Hertog. Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats: Oil and the State in Saudi Arabia. International Journal of Middle East Studies. Vol. 43 (1). Winter 2011.

Anthony H. Cordesman and Nawaf Obaid. National Security in Saudi Arabia: Threats, Responses, and Challenges in International Journal of Middle East Studies. Vol 40 (1). February, 2008.

Madawi al-Rasheed, Contesting the Saudi State: Islamic Voices from a New Generation. Political Science Quarterly, Vol 122 (4). Winter 2007.

Zachary Karabell. Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal in Technology & Culture. Vol 45 (4). October, 2004.

Mike Davis. Late Victorian Holocausts: El-Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World in Technology & Culture. Vol 43 (2). April, 2002.

Toby C. Jones is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University. He has lived and worked extensively in the Middle East, including several years in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. During 2008-2009 he was a fellow at Princeton University's Oil, Energy, and the Middle East project. From 2004 to early 2006 Jones worked as the Persian Gulf political analyst for the International Crisis Group. His research interests focus on the environment, energy, and the history of science and technology. He is the author of Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia (Harvard University Press, 2010) and is currently working on two new books, "America's Oil Wars" (under contract at Harvard University Press) and "Running Dry: Essays on Environmental Crisis" (under contract with Rutgers University Press). He has written for the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of American History, Middle East Report, Raritan Quarterly Review, The Nation, The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, and elsewhere. Jones is a member of the Editorial Committee at Middle East Report and Director of Rutgers' Center for Middle Eastern Studies.