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