A Tale of Two Gulfs: Life, Death, and Dispossession along Two Oil Frontiers

ArticleinAmerican Quarterly 64(3):437-467 · September 2012with 412 Reads 
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Abstract
Two major oil-producing regions frame this article. The first is the onshore oil world in the global South (the Niger delta in Nigeria as part of the wider Gulf of Guinea), and the second is the offshore world of deepwater oil and gas exploration and production in the United States (specifically, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Deepwater Horizon blowout). Both arenas can be seen as oil frontiers—frontiers of accumulation and dispossession—rooted in the operations of specific oil assemblages. I trace the relations between the deep infrastructures of the oil world—pipelines, rigs, flowstations, tankers, financiers, engineering firms, security forces, and so on—and to the regimes of life and death in the postcolonial South and the advanced capitalist North. Political, economic, and social relations are, as Timothy Mitchell notes, engineered out of the flows of energy. Opening up these sorts of oil frontiers—whether in Angolan or Brazilian deepwater, Russian Siberia, or increasingly now the frozen frontiers of the Arctic—necessitates engagements with place-specific social and political forces, none of which necessarily or easily are compatible with some presumed set of desires of corporate oil capital—political stability, surplus management, price control—or indeed of imperialist oil-consuming states. In one case the terminal point is an insurgency and combustible politics threatening the very operations of the oil industry and the petrostate itself; in the other it is the violence of a blowout—the loss of human and environmental life and livelihoods—and of the deadly consequences of substituting technical and financial over political risks.

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  • ... In political ecology, the analytic of "frontier" is applied to peripheral spaces of capital incorporation, where processes of accumulation and dispossession are in play (Watts, 2012, p. 440). In this view, frontiers are cast as spaces that may be continually "reinvented" as new resources are discovered, gain value and are commodified (Rasmussen & Lund, 2018;Watts, 2012). This reflects an understanding of frontier landscapes as resource assemblages, waiting to be dismembered for resource extraction (Watts, 2012). ...
    ... In this view, frontiers are cast as spaces that may be continually "reinvented" as new resources are discovered, gain value and are commodified (Rasmussen & Lund, 2018;Watts, 2012). This reflects an understanding of frontier landscapes as resource assemblages, waiting to be dismembered for resource extraction (Watts, 2012). Yet, such landscapes also frame the available resources and opportunities and have the potential to be "lively actors" in market for- mation (Tsing, 2003, p. 5100). ...
    ... Land governance arrangements and the emergence of political elites in the post-conflict period further supported market development. This provided a set of conditions that converged in time and place -a frontier assemblage or conjuncture (Li, 2014) -that supported and sus- tained the incorporation of this frontier region into global markets (Watts, 2012). The combination of these factors pro- pelled the overall demand for cassava, and facilitated the political and economic conditions for its production. ...
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  • ... Frontiers operate in the grey zones between licit and illicit modes of power, in the shifting overlap of competing regimes of rule. State and extralegal violence often play a central role in the creation of frontier-like spaces, where violence is used to free up land, resources and labor for profit generation (Woods 2011; Grajales 2011; Peluso and Vandergeest 2011; Watts 2012; Leonardi 2013). As a conceptual tool, the notion of the frontier encompasses both the imaginative and material processes that come together to assemble land and resources as being there for the taking (Tsing 2005; Li 2014). ...
    ... Frontiers operate in the grey zones between licit and illicit modes of power, in the shifting overlap of competing regimes of rule. State and extralegal violence often play a central role in the creation of frontier-like spaces, where violence is used to free up land, resources and labor for profit generation ( Woods 2011;Grajales 2011;Peluso and Vandergeest 2011;Watts 2012;Leonardi 2013). As a conceptual tool, the notion of the frontier encompasses both the imaginative and material processes that come together to assemble land and resources as being there for the taking ( Tsing 2005;Li 2014). ...
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  • ... Recent scholarship has suggested that we might think of oil and the worlds it produces as assemblages of technological materials, economic accumulation strategies, and social and cultural formations (Haarstad and Wanvik 2017;Watts 2012). The concept of the oil assemblage helps break apart the mythic specter that oil seems to cast upon every aspect of contemporary social life and instead see the landscapes of oil as subject to leakage and transformation. ...
    ... Cumming (2018) shows how the valorization of oil access impacted racial segregation historically in Los Angeles, as the conceptualization of future value was mapped from the geographies of extractable oil to determining whose homes would be redlined, and which workers would be able to move out of newly devalued land. Watts (2012) employs the oil assemblage to go beyond common treatment of oil as abstract symbol, and to connect "the deep infrastructures of the oil world" to "regimes of life and death" (440). Its analysis of accumulation can be further developed by taking seriously the racialization of the oil frontier, and connecting to the deeper theorizations of the role of the frontier in imperialist expansion. ...
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  • ... The framework comprises topics relevant to an analysis of legitimation (Table 1). For example, it emphasizes the importance of natural re- source-related capital accumulation, uneven development, and dis- possession as sources of grievances, and hence potential catalysts of contention (Watts, 2012;Webber, 2012;Woods, 2011). ...
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  • ... Through a close-in look at the workings of small-scale gold extraction, I discuss a disciplined world of territorial practices that have bubbled and fermented almost entirely outside of state control. Nevertheless, if contemporary small-scale gold mining largely eschews the state and its specific forms of territorialization (see, e.g., Elden, 2009;Vandergeest & Peluso, 1995;Watts, 2012), then its practitioners, organizers, and beneficiaries often mimic state institutions and enroll state actors in making its territorial realization possible. ...
  • ... The contribution speaks to literature that teases out the violence of capitalist accumulation (S. Springer, 2015;Watts, 2012), its universalizing attempts and contingent outcomes (Tsing, 2005). ...
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  • ... As Lefebvre outlines in a 1979 essay on the emerging SMP in France, state control of energy -"It supervises its flow and its distribution" -enables "the control -indeed the repressive partitioning -of space" ( Lefebvre 2001, p. 775). Attention to the social, political, and economic power that emerges from control over energy has increased recently among geographers and related social scientists ( Watts 2012;Huber 2015;Mitchell 2009). Recent work from Boyer (2014, p. 310), for example, attempts to term the forms of power that emerges from the provision of energy -or not -as 'energopower': the form of power that comes from "harnessing … electricity and fuel." ...
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  • ... Governance involves institutional structures, legal frameworks, policies and regulations, social practices, and industry narratives that structure decisions about access, production, and control (Bridge and Perreault, 2009). Geographical scholarship on hydrocarbon governance predominantly focuses on the global market (Bradshaw, 2010; Bridge and Le Billon, 2013) and states (Perreault, 2013; Watts, 2012). Processes leading to legal and regulatory structures that enable or constrain hydrocarbon extraction receives less attention (Andrews and McCarthy, 2014) than renewables (Kedron and Bagchi-Sen, 2011; Mulvaney, 2014), although some scholars have begun to examine hydrocarbon governance practices within advanced neoliberal states (Hudgins and Poole, 2014). ...
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    Local-scale government ordinances that attempt to delay or displace oil and gas drilling in their territories are common in regions with hydrocarbon extraction activities. Drawing on literature from policy mobilities and resource and energy governance, this paper analyzes policymaking processes that resulted in a December 2013 ordinance in Dallas, Texas, which established a 1500 foot (457.2 meter) setback between gas wells and residences, making drilling (with hydraulic fracturing) nearly impossible. Dallas was not the first city in the region to adopt an oil and gas drilling ordinance; indeed, many regulatory provisions were copied from other regional cities. This paper explains policy mobility in the Dallas policymaking process in terms of anti-political practices and hydrocarbon institutions that, overall, determine neoliberal hydrocarbon governance. City governments cede some of the political process to gas drilling task forces that work to render setbacks technical. Legal classification of subsurface hydrocarbons as the mineral estate creates a legal gray area that confounds municipal regulatory authority and gives discursive power to mineral owners to threaten municipal officials with lawsuits. Both of these anti-political strategies encouraged selective copying and morphing of other policy provisions by the Dallas city government. Adopting longer municipal setback distance regulations represents a type of contestation of neoliberalism situated between complete deregulation and overt opposition.
  • ... This approach provides a substantially different and more nuanced perspective on the role of energy in GEG. It calls for an explanation of how allegedly material phenomena - such as future demand or supply -are produced in concrete networks (Watts, 2012). A conception of energy as a unified and external material structure to which society has to react becomes impossible. ...
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  • ... The matrix is especially useful for studying the effects of relational power in the context of neoliberalism or similar institutional settings, such as decentralization of various 6 Personal electronic communication, social activist, Ahmedabad, India, October 28, 2017. shades that include the use of 'assemblages' or 'orchestration' by powerful multilateral and national actors (Li 2010;Watts 2012;Porter and Watts 2016;Gordon and Johnson 2018); 'creative accommodations' on the part of those using neoliberalism for their own ends (Wilshusen 2010); reshaping of norms of social solidarity in response to economic reforms under varying levels of state engagement (MacLean 2010); implicit bargaining across interlinked action arenas (Kashwan 2016); 'governance in motion' (Wilshusen, this issue), and 'commoning' as an everyday practice that challenges dominant ideas (García López et al. 2017). ...
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  • ... Outside the Brazilian context, contemporary political-economic frontier theory demonstrates similar structuralist and post- structuralist tendencies, with a structuralist, world systems per- spective evident in discussion of 'commodity frontiers' in the litera- ture on capitalism as world ecology (Moore, 2010(Moore, , 2012, and a post- structuralist perspective prominent in the literature on land control and 'resource frontiers' (Blomley, 2003;Eilenberg, 2014;Peluso & Lund, 2011;Rasmussen & Lund, 2018;Tsing, 2003;Watts, 2012). 5 Summers (2008) provides a useful overview of frontier theory in the Brazilian context. ...
  • ... Critically, nonetheless, the notion that 'elite struggles' over rents lay the ground rules for institutions to take shape is arguably more persuasive (within the resource governance debate) in underlining the key factors behind elite commitments than suggested by the political settlement approach. Although Khan's concept of 'holding power' emphasises the role of actors in institutional change, his rational choice approach tends to underplay other important dimensions of politics, particularly the role of ideas in shaping elite commitment (see Watts, 2004Watts, , 2012). For Bebbington (2013), deeper insights into the underlining factors behind resource governance reforms must be embedded not only in elite incentives, but within a 'comparative social institutionalist' theory that accounts for the role of ideas in defining the standards by which elites operate in extractives settings. ...
  • ... 75 According to Watts, the vast network of wells, pipelines, oil tanker and so forth that make up the global 'petro- infrastructure' is responsible for almost 40% of global C02 emissions. 76 In its New Policy Scenario, 77 the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that "natural gas demand The Netherlands: wind energy, the public face of ongoing offshore drilling ...
  • ... Some frictions come from struggles over territorial enclosure and dispossession, such as when petro-states, oil-producing countries where oil rents contribute significantly to the national economy, claim sovereign rights or grant firms exclusive operation rights to control oil flow better (Kaup, 2010;Perreault and Valdivia, 2010). Frictions also emerge from oil's social circulation, as social movements, firms, and states enroll oil infrastructure and rents into struggles over standards of living, livelihoods, health, and war (Apter, 2005;Mitchell, 2011;Vitalis, 2007;Watts, 2012). Frictions also occur when the generalized consumption of oil products generates an uneven biopolitical distribution of wealth accumulation (Huber, 2013). ...
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  • ... But aside from a handful of educational scholarships and some funding provided to technical institutions at the national level, there does not seem to be much emphasis being placed by Tullow itself to develop indigenous skilled workforces in the 'affected communities' (yet another problem of operating in an 'enclave'). The lackadaisical attitude of the company towards community development is even more perplexing when the events that have unfolded in neighbouring Nigeria are taken into account (see Idemudia, 2012; Watts, 2012). A telling case of what could happen in an oil community if local-level concerns are not taken into account, the Niger Delta debacle seems to have had little effect on Ghana's policy-makers and Tullow officials, many of whom, during interviews, showed very little concern over the problems facing coastal fishing communities affected by drilling activity, nor how to address them. ...
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    The study of Africa’s new developments and satellite cities has been mostly led under the fundamentally aesthetic typology of ‘urban fantasies’. This provides important elements for a critique of how speculative idioms have been tainting contemporary forms of urban development across the continent, but it does not allow us to apprehend them as modes of city making with particular histories, practices and toolkits. This article leans on the Angolan example to contend with that typology. Drawing on an in-depth study of urban development in contemporary Luanda and its relationship with the Angolan oil complex, it does so in three moments. First, it presents a brief overview of what, in the recent years, has become one of the leading ways of critically assessing urban worlding projects in the African context. Second, it uses an introductory viewpoint into Luanda’s ‘new centralities’ project to contribute towards an improved and more nuanced understanding of what underpins and constitutes the envisioned futures of African cities. And third, it reconsiders and fine-tunes some of the main premises on which the study of Africa’s emerging forms of urban development has been carried out thus far.
  • Article
    This article explores the politics behind the promise of ‘blue growth’. Reframing it as a ‘blue fix’, we argue that the blue growth discourse facilitates new opportunities for capital accumulation, while claiming that this accumulation is compatible with social and ecological aims as well. The blue fix is made up of three underlying sub-fixes. First of all, the conservation fix quenches the social thirst for action in the face of climate change. Here we see how protecting marine areas can be an important part of mitigating climate change, but in practice, gains at the national level are overshadowed by the ongoing expansion of offshore drilling for oil and gas. Second, the protein fix satisfies the growing global demand for healthy food and nutrition through the expansion of capital-intensive large-scale aquaculture, while ignoring the negative socio-ecological impacts, which effectively squeeze small-scale capture fishing out, while industrial capture fishing remains well positioned to expand into as well as supply industrial aquaculture with fish feed from pelagic fish. And third, an energy fix offers a burst of wind energy and a splash of new deep-sea minerals without disturbing the familiar and persistent foundation of oil and gas. This dimension of the blue fix emphasizes the transition to wind and solar energy, but meanwhile the deep sea mining for minerals required by these new technologies launches us into unknown ecological territories with little understood consequences. The synergy of these three elements brought together in a reframing of ocean politics manifests as a balancing act to frame blue growth as ‘sustainable’ and in everyone’s interest, which we critically analyze and discuss in this article.
  • Article
    Full-text available
    Using the framework of differential vulnerability, this study investigates the Boulder, Colorado flood of 2013 through the lens of environmental justice. Researchers looked at the differential vulnerability exhibited in the Boulder floods to see how this was an example of environmental injustice and what types of solutions exist to decrease people’s vulnerability to floods like this one. A review of relevant literature on the topics of environmental hazards, vulnerability, racism, the role of the state and economy, climate change, and Boulder’s flood history was conducted and the events of September 2013 in the light of the existing literature was analyzed along with multiple interviews with survivors of the flood and agents of flood relief organizations, spatial data, news articles, and historic archives. Findings show that differential vulnerability was not a glaring issue in Boulder with regard to race or ethnicity, but was exhibited to some extent in the recovery process through other spatial, income, and related inequalities, including: trailer home residents, immigrants, residents of mountain towns, low-income residents, and the homeless. Relatedly, it shows how past mitigation efforts have been generally successful in protecting residents and facilitating recovery, especially within the Boulder Creek floodplain.
  • Article
    This article presents a comparative study of two significant novels of oil-encounter modernization, George Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe (1972) and Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984), in order to argue that such petrofiction both demands and enables consideration of the world-ecological regimes and environmental ramifications of dynamic oil frontiers. These hitherto unconnected novels are brought together via recent arguments for a refurbished notion of world literature, and thereby a new comparative method, and are read through critical debates and theories of petroculture emerging within the energy humanities. The comparative affinities of these texts make visible the ongoing forms of “energopower” determining both the past and future of oil-driven imperialism, but they also offer a means of aesthetic and environmental resistance to the carbonizing determinations of an unsustainable fuel-ecological world-system.
  • Chapter
    This chapter analyses the frontier as a social-spatial formation that is produced by and is productive of what Michael Watts calls 'economies of violence'. It first shows how the historical development of the region's economies of violence was wrapped up with and enabled by an insidious cultural politics emanating from the city of Medellin – an 'internal colonialism', in the language of Latin American dependency theory. Next, it illustrates how right-wing paramilitaries, which are themselves a product of this history, helped turn the region's economies of violence into a form of rule. The chapter further details that the social production of Uraba as a frontier hinged on racist ideologies and abstract planning as much as infrastructure, capital flows and political violence. Uraba also demonstrates how the lived experience of those living in frontier zones is typically over-determined by violent forms of accumulation.
  • Chapter
    Oil's capacity as a destroyer of worlds is as well-known as its reputation for generating fabulous profits and corruption. These qualities, as Michael Watts has argued for some time, are not discrete problems that can be solved in isolation through better governance, corporate accountability or weaning modern capitalism off its dependency on oil. Watts' concern is with how the pollution, violence and destruction inflicted by oil dispossesses communities while drastically limiting their access to the new one created by oil wealth. Watts' analysis of indigeneity foregrounds the geographical aspects of this problem, singling out the failure of Saro-Wiwa's Ogoni movement to conceive of its position outside of the oil assemblage. Mobilized in response to dispossession, indigeneity is much more than a reaction to the integrated forces of capitalism and colonialism. It provides a means of challenging the constructions of subjectivity and geography that underwrite analysis, refusing to dissolve differences into a linear, universalizing narrative.
  • Chapter
    Certification and accreditation provide one form of everywhere to privatization's everything, providing 'pipes and tubes' through which value – equated across space and stripped of risk – may be stabilized and realized. Inspired by Michael Watts' essay 'The Privatization of Everything?', this chapter locates academic assessment in the context of efforts to standardize aspects of post-secondary education in a manner that facilitates a privatization of student finances and university services. By applying Watts' tripartite analytical schema to education, it identifies various dimensions of governance-by-assessment. First, examining the political economy of credit transfers shows how it permits an education available in more expensive, 'destination' institutions to be subsidized by contingent faculty in non-branded institutions. Next, analysing standardization discourses reveals how the ideal of a standards-based 'common language' serves to mask the structural antinomies and inequalities underlying value transfer, just as the evocation of 'risk' serves to 'naturalize' the social exploitation on which value is written.
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    On June 28, 2010, Nigerian President Jonathan announced that he had set up a Facebook page. Within a few days, his first post garnered 1,344 likes and more than 2,139 comments. This article examines how Nigerians use social media to interact with the state. It asks: How does social media facilitate conversations on what constitutes a national resource? How is social media creating citizens who are simultaneously anonymous and visible? It suggests that Facebook and other sites on which Jonathan established online presences were constructed as political spaces to interact with the youth of Nigeria, molding that constituency into loyal social media citizens ready to align with his aspirations. It also describes social media as sites on which the politics of claim-making produce the social mediation of oil as a commonwealth in Nigeria. The use of the term “social media citizens” is anchored in the fluidity of citizenship. Jonathan's use of Facebook as both public and political spaces elevated the site to a national forum on a resource whose distribution must benefit all Nigerians: oil. The article suggests further that social media can serve as a site on which social media citizens can critique how the state manages and distributes oil.
  • Article
    My purpose in this paper is to deepen the literature on Chinese foreign investments (particularly in Brazilian agribusiness), and the formation of a transnational capitalist class, by utilizing practices of global ethnography and the conceptual apparatus of ‘assemblages’ emerging in human geography. I trace the genealogy of the Chinese-owned Brazilian company BBCA Brazil and its agroindustrial project in Mato Grosso do Sul state, since it is illustrative of the conditions of possibility for Chinese direct investments in agribusiness in Brazil and Brazil–China agroindustrial partnerships more generally. I argue the central characters of this story aptly illustrate the transnational class of boosters, brokers, bureaucrats and businessmen who rise by assembling Chinese capital with Brazilian (agri)business expertise, labour and land. It is the particular work of assemblage and set of skills of these characters, especially those operating at the ‘middle levels’ of state and corporate governance, that both enables the successful implementation of transnational investments, and also explains why such projects propel them while marginalizing others, increasing social inequality, and aggravating environmental degradation.
  • Article
    Energy boomtowns are a persistent feature of the modern era. Yet such cities have been neglected in energy geography research, despite a remarkable invigoration of the subfield in recent years. Drawing on examples from around the world as well as historical examples, this paper argues that energy boomtowns are a vital feature of the expansive geographies of energy uses. It further argues that energy boomtowns must be seen as the confluence of four areas or dimensions: regional transformation; conflicts in city politics, governance and planning; legitimation of carbon economies; and social disruption. Each of these reveals the social production of energy and the frequently contentious process of urban space production. While the recurring emergence of energy boomtowns is of empirical interest, the turbulent setting of the boomtown can also reveal much about the social stakes of energy uses through their intersections with place‐specific, urban‐focused development agendas.
  • Article
    This paper shows how the development of oil in Niger and Uganda was coupled with standardization and dis/entanglement practices. In Niger, actors contested the lack of standards in the Chinese oil industry but capitalized on the opportunities that linkages to the industry had produced. In Uganda, by contrast, local entrepreneurs objected to the insistence of Western multinational oil companies on international standards, characterizing it as a barrier to the creation of linkages to the oil industry. To conceptualize these radically different outcomes of capitalist expansion, we identify specific socio-political, legal and corporate configurations that shape the way the oil industry operates in particular contexts. Understanding capitalism as assemblages, we acknowledge its heterogeneity, inconsistency and indeterminacy without losing sight of its ‘bigness’.
  • Article
    In this paper, we examine how oil-related activities in the Albertine region have the potential to influence conflicts of different forms and intensity in Uganda, a new African oil producer in the making. We view this through the lens of the future, for which we propose the ‘in-the-making’ perspective. Through this approach we identify three geographies of conflict, framed around three local narratives on mobility, namely: the peripatetic tradition of a social group commonly known as ‘Balaalo’, speculative labour mobility and ensuing narratives about oil-induced pressure on fishing, and the link between elephant mobility and community grievances. With this paper we seek to contribute to the growing body of empirical research on Uganda’s oilscape, and add a case to the existing work on the interface between oil exploitation and social practices across various oil-producing world regions. We conclude that in Uganda’s pre-oil situation, the emergence of complex local narratives, resulting from a combination of lack-or inadequacy-of information, pre-existing but low-lying ethnic sentiments, and institutional challenges, are important indicators of how materialities of the future frame relationships within societies today.
  • Technical Report
    Full-text available
    This policy brief outlines a political-economic perspective for studying the impact of climate change in ways that inform pursuits of climate justice initiatives. It emphasises the plurality of interventions needed at the global, international, national, and sub-national levels to effectively address the social-discriminatory effects of climate change and societal responses intended to mitigate and adapt to climate change. While fully acknowledging the importance of sociocultural aspects, this policy brief is premised on the argument that the root causes of climate change and climate injustice have to do with the political and economic inequalities that protect the status quo while sabotaging transformative change.
  • Article
    Full-text available
    This policy brief outlines a political-economic perspective for studying the impact of climate change in ways that inform pursuits of climate justice initiatives. It emphasises the plurality of interventions needed at the global, international, national, and sub-national levels to effectively address the social-discriminatory effects of climate change and societal responses intended to mitigate and adapt to climate change. While fully acknowledging the importance of sociocultural aspects, this policy brief is premised on the argument that the root causes of climate change and climate injustice have to do with the political and economic inequalities that protect the status quo while sabotaging transformative change.
  • Article
    Drawing on ethnographic research in the Falkland Islands (Malvinas), this paper analyzes how disputed oil interests become embedded in data infrastructures for environmental governance. Nearly four decades after a war that cemented the South Atlantic archipelago’s British status, offshore oil discoveries have led Argentina's government to renew its sovereignty claim, arguing that the islands are within its waters. Nonetheless, the British Falkland Islands Government (FIG) has licensed unilateral drilling. Centering on a “data gap” project, financed by the FIG and its oil licensees, the article describes how marine ecologists tag penguins with tracking sensors, as part of a new geographic data infrastructure for the South Atlantic. Data representing penguin foraging are supposed to feed into environmental impact assessments for oil exploration. The article demonstrates how these data and confidence ratings in environmental impact statements reinforce access to and control over maritime territory and resources. Extending recent claims that data have become key actors within environmental governance networks, this research finds that particular data practices may actually enhance fossil fuel industry interests through measures of transparency, leaving ambiguous matters related to transboundary impacts and local pollution unresolved.
  • Article
    "Where We Stand" takes the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease's Cultures of United States Imperialism as an occasion to survey the last forty years in both the lived experience of and the growing scholarship on US Empire. Capping a generation of critique and inquiry sparked by the Vietnam War, Cultures of US Imperialism is a poignant benchmark in the interdisciplinary study of US Empire, and also in the recognition that empire must be central to the study of the United States even in its "domestic" dimensions. In the twenty years since its publication, however, even as this turn in the scholarship has matured, the US Empire itself has not sat still. New paradigms are called for to conjoin the state-centered history of empire that Kaplan and Pease represent, on the one hand, with the geoeconomic contours of the corporatecentered neoliberal empire that have become increasingly apparent in recent decades, on the other. The address concludes with reflections on the relationship between the current forms of empire and the challenges to higher education in a neoliberal age.
  • Article
    States that depend upon oil revenues appear to be less democratic than other states. Yet oil presents a much larger problem for democracy: faced with the threats of oil depletion and catastrophic climate change, the democratic machineries that emerged to govern the age of carbon energy seem to be unable to address the processes that may end it. This article explores these multiple dimensions of carbon democracy, by examining the intersecting histories of coal, oil and democracy in the twentieth century. Following closely the methods by which fossil fuels were produced, distributed and converted into other forms of socio-technical organization, financial circulation and political power, the article traces ways in which the concentration and control of energy flows could open up democratic possibilities or close them down; how connections were engineered in the post-war period between the flow of oil and the flows of international finance, on which democratic stability was thought to depend; how these same circulations made possible the emergence of the economy and its unlimited growth as the main object of democratic politics; and how the relations among forms of energy, finance, economic knowledge, democracy and violence were transformed in the 1967-74 oil-dollar Middle East crises.
  • Article
    The work linking natural resource wealth to authoritarianism and under-development suffers from several shortcomings. In this article, the authors outline those shortcomings and address them in a new empirical setting. Using a new data set for the U.S. states spanning 73 years and case studies of Texas and Louisiana, the authors are able to more carefully examine both the diachronic nature and comparative legs of the resource curse hypothesis than previous research has. They provide evidence that natural resource dependence contributes to slower economic growth, poorer developmental performance, and less competitive politics. Using this empirical setting, they also begin parsing the mechanisms that might explain the negative association between resource wealth and political and economic development. They draw implications from intranational findings for resource abundant countries across the world and suggest directions for future cross-national and cross-state work.
  • Article
    Oil has always been at the center of discussions of resource scarcity. Over the last decade of volatile and often rising oil prices, a vast "peak oil" literature has emerged citing the geological finitude of petroleum as a harbinger of an era of catastrophic energy scarcity. Many analysts focused on the geopolitics of oil also presume that natural oil scarcity is the primary driver of global conflict and "resource wars." In contrast, I follow geographical discussions of the social production of scarcity, to problematize oil scarcity as not a geological fact but as a social relationship mediated by capitalist commodity relations. Specifically, I focus on the role of violence in socially producing the scarcity necessary for the oil market to function. I first discuss the broader historical and legal problems of "overproduction" in the United States. I then examine the 1931 declaration of "martial law" in the oil fields of east Texas and Oklahoma in a moment of lax depression-era demand, glut, and collapsing oil prices. I argue that violently imposing oil scarcity was not merely sectoral but a broader project of stabilizing the chaotic oil market in accordance with the reorganization of capitalism during the 1930s. Such stabilization as critical for the emergence of an oil-powered Fordism in the postwar United States responsible for the intractable patterns of oil demand so vexing to energy policymakers today. I conclude by suggesting that contemporary debates on petro-imperialism might consider questioning the role of violence not as a product but as a generator of scarcity. © Association of American eographers Initial submission, February 2010.
  • Chapter
    Full-text available
    Technological Reason and Biopolitics as ‘Ethical’ ProblemsRegimes of Living in OperationNotes
  • Article
    This article explores the opportunities a GPN approach provides for understanding the network configurations and regional development impacts associated with extractive industries. The article elaborates two core claims: (i) that the application of the GPN analytical framework provides a way to make progress in a stalled policy debate regarding the linkages between resource extraction and socio-economic development (popularly known as the ‘resource curse thesis’); and (ii) that the encounter between GPN and a natural resource-based sector introduces distinctive issues—associated with the materiality and territoriality of extractive commodities—that, to date, GPN has not considered fully. The article examines the global production network for oil as an empirical case of how extractive industries can provide (limited) opportunities for socio-economic development.
  • Article
    In the wake of 9/11 the Bush administration has called upon established foreign policy discourses to cement the idea of a nation at war.1 Given the amorphous and often virtual nature of the “war on terror,” in which the adversary is by definition largely unseen, the association of other resistant elements with terrorism has become a mechanism for materializing the threat. Notorious in this regard was the Bush administration’s linking of internal and external threats by aligning individual drug use at home with support for terrorism abroad. In itself, this is not a new argument, with alleged links to terrorism having been featured in previous episodes of the U.S. “war on drugs.”2 However, the Bush administration went one step further by making a causal connection between individual behavior and international danger. The Office for National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) launched hard-hitting advertisements in which the social choices of hedonistic youngsters were said to directly enrich and enable terrorists threatening the United States.3