Author: Meredeth Turshen

Jun 02, 2009

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ACAS Blog Series: The Geopolitics of Petroleum

Some of us working on Africa are finding oil issues very much in the forefront of our interests at the moment, and in academic year 2008-2009 we decided to form a discussion group with faculty and students working on other regions to look at oil and interregional issues of development around petroleum.

Oil issues include a very wide range of problems: food security, scarcity of resources (sometimes referred to as the problem of peak oil), global climatic changes as a result of hydrocarbon consumption, human rights, and resource wars over oil (in Sudan, Chad, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Nigeria, and Western Sahara, inter alia). As the price of oil rose to over $100 a barrel last summer, oil issues came to dominate U.S. foreign policy (competition with China for oil, the Bush Administration’s position on Venezuela, and OPEC), as well as domestic policy (tax policy, energy conservation initiatives, preservation of wilderness, etc.). Some issues have been extensively debated (for example, peak oil), but others—such as the impact of the high price of oil on the oil-importing economies of Africa—have scarcely been mentioned in analyses.

We felt the need to understand more fully both the political dynamics of the contemporary struggles over oil and to provide a framework within which governments, local communities and the oil transnationals can all be held accountable for the consequences of their policies. Ultimately, we hoped that our group could lay out for future research some dimensions of a just and responsible political machinery for national and international governance of this central resource. But in the short term we settled for a better understanding of one dimension– how US foreign policy intersects with energy policy–of this multidimensional, multinational issue.

This collection of brief articles represents some of the work of our study group. Comments may be sent to Professor Meredeth Turshen (turshen@rci.rutgers.edu)

Contents

“Everything Must Change So That Everything Can Remain the Same”: Reflections on Obama’s Energy Plan
By Constantine Caffentzis, University of Southern Maine

AFRICOM and the Geopolitics of African Oil.
By Daniel Volman, African Security Research Project

‘Syriana’ as a Teaching Tool
By Angus Kress Gillespie, Rutgers University

Film Review: Michael T. Klare’s Blood and Oil
By Mark Major, Rutgers University

Reader’s Guide: Crude Democracy: Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes
By Roy Licklider, Rutgers University

Feb 01, 2009

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ACAS Puts Health on its Agenda

At the 1991 ASA meeting in St. Louis, ACAS members made a number of decisions designed to move the organization forward to a new level of activism in the decade of the 1990s. ACAS established thirteen issue working groups: US Aid and US Foreign Policy; Scholar Activists; Academic Freedom in Education; Regional and Pan-African Linkages; Why Africa has fallen off the Policy Map; US Support for Authoritarian Regimes; Democratization: a Guise for Destabilization; Environment; Africa’s Economic Crisis; South Africa’s transition; Post-apartheid Development in Southern Africa; and the Financial Intellectual Complex. Doe Mayer and I coordinated group number 8, “Health: Whose Agenda?” (see ACAS Bulletin 35). Issue Working Group papers (including ours) appeared in Bulletin 38/39, “Proposed agendas for scholars of Africa” in 1993.

In 1995 I edited a special double issue of the Bulletin on Health and Africa (number 44/45), with significant African input on issues ranging from female genital mutilation to World Bank and World Health Organization policies for African health care. In 1998, a second bulletin devoted to health appeared, “Health and Political Violence” (number 50/51); based in part on panels at ASA in 1997, this issue covered events in Mozambique, Rwanda, South Africa and Sudan.

Since then there has been a steady contribution of articles on health issues to the ACAS Bulletin and, in 2006, a special issue devoted to AIDS (number 74). I feel satisfied that this issue is now an established part of ACAS debates and permanently on the ACAS agenda. I want to extend my personal thanks to all editors, guest editors and contributors: ACAS Bulletins are great teaching tools, and in the era before the internet the Bulletin was able to get topical material into circulation much faster than academic journals.

As Bill Martin notes in the overview (this issue), the work on health helped ACAS reach beyond the southern Africa solidarity model and changed the makeup of the ACAS Executive, Board, etc., bringing in new people with different expertise and interests. The work on health led and reflected changes in ACAS and the scholar-activist world more generally. With the consolidation of ACOA and the Africa Fund into Africa Action, Salih Booker undertook a major push to reorient US government policy on aid to the AIDS epidemic, and Bill Minter has maintained our interest with regular bulletins from Africa Focus excerpting policy documents on AIDS in Africa.

An interesting byproduct of the health issues, or so it seems to me, is the introduction of women’s issues. In 1999, Ousseina Alidou and I edited a double issue on women and war (number 55/56). It remains the only ACAS Bulletin devoted to women’s issues, although occasional articles have appeared (viz. numbers 62/63, 68). It is ten years since ACAS published a double issue on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (number 53/54). Since 1998 over 5 million people have died in what some have described as Africa’s first international war. An epidemic of rape has been reported—but not in the pages of the Bulletin. The issue on Africa’s resources (number 75/76) does not link the plundering of Congo’s mineral wealth to the vicious assaults on women. (For anyone interested in the connection, see The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo (www.thegreatestsilence.org). It is my hope that in the coming decades ACAS will include an analysis of/by women in every special issue, whether the theme is Africa’s resources, new politics, race, debt reduction, or . . .

About the Author

Meredth Turshen is a professor in the the School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University