Petrostate

In the aftermath of the financial collapse of August 1998, it looked as if Russia's day as a superpower had come and gone. That it should recover and reassert itself after less than a decade is nothing short of an economic and political miracle. Based on extensive research, including several interviews with Vladimir Putin, this revealing book chronicles Russia's dramatic reemergence on the world stage, illuminating the key reason for its rebirth: the use of its ever-expanding energy wealth to reassert its traditional great power ambitions. In his deft, informative narrative, Marshall Goldman traces how this has come to be, and how Russia is using its oil-based power as a lever in world politics. The book provides an informative overview of oil in Russia, traces Vladimir Putin's determined effort to reign in the upstart oil oligarchs who had risen to power in the post-Soviet era, and describes Putin's efforts to renationalize and refashion Russia's industries into state companies and his vaunted "national champions" corporations like Gazprom, largely owned by the state, who do the bidding of the state. Goldman shows how Russia paid off its international debt and has gone on to accumulate the world's third largest holdings of foreign currency reserves--all by becoming the world's largest producer of petroleum and the world's second largest exporter. Today, Vladimir Putin and his cohort have stabilized the Russian economy and recentralized power in Moscow, and fossil fuels (oil and natural gas) have made it all possible. The story of oil and gas in Russia is a tale of discovery, intrigue, corruption, wealth, misguidance, greed, patronage, nepotism, and power. Marshall Goldman tells this story with panache, as only one of the world's leading authorities on Russia could.

Jeff D. Colgan explores why some oil-exporting countries are aggressive, while others are not. Using evidence from key countries such as Iraq, Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, Petro-Aggression proposes a new theoretical framework to explain the importance of oil to international security.

Introduction : A Petrostate Typology -- Applying the Typology : Petrostates at War --Resource Arms Racing : Oil Wealth and Military Power -- Proxies and Altriusm : The Light and Dark of Oil Wealth -- Institutions, Intelligence, and Personalization : The Resource Curse and Foreign Policy -- Crude Power : The Oil Weapon in Practice -- Under the Umbrella : Soft Oil Power and Hegemonic Protection C -- Conclusion : Peak Petrostate? -- Appendix A: Methods and Measurements -- Appendix B: Oil and Conflict -- Appendix C: Military Spending and Arms Sales -- Appendix D: Soft Power, Sanctions, and Oil.

This book examines the development of bilateral energy relations between China and the two oil-rich countries, Kazakhstan and Russia. Challenging conventional assumptions about energy politics and China’s global quest for oil, this book examines the interplay of politics and sociocultural contexts. It shows how energy resources become ideas and how these ideas are mobilized in the realm of international relations. China’s relations with Kazakhstan and Russia are simultaneously enabled and constrained by the discursive politics of oil. It is argued that to build collaborative and constructive energy relations with China, its partners in Kazakhstan, Russia, and elsewhere must consider not only the material realities of China’s energy industry and the institutional settings of China’s energy policy but also the multiple symbolic meanings that energy resources and, particularly, oil acquire in China. China’s Energy Security and Relations with Petrostates offers a nuanced understanding of China’s bilateral energy relations with Kazakhstan and Russia, raising essential questions about the social logic of international energy politics. It will appeal to students and scholars of international relations, energy security, Chinese and post-Soviet studies, along with researchers working in the fields of energy policy and environmental sustainability.

This edited book complements and follows up on the book, Thompson and Volgy et al, Regions, Power and Conflict: Constrained Capabilities, Hierarchy, and Rivalry. It is predicated in part on the paucity of published material available on comparing regional international politics. Monadic, dyadic, and systemic approaches all have their uses and have been exploited extensively. The same cannot be said about comparative regional analysis. The premise is that a great deal of international politics takes place within regional parameters. Most states simply lack the capability or interest in devoting many resources to extra-regional affairs. Yet each region is distinctive. In some, military coups remain common while they have died out as a form of political practice in others. A few have been highly conflictual and then become more pacific, while others persist in their conflict intensity. Some have powerful neighbors with intervention tendencies, while others are surrounded by relatively weak states. Some are rich; others are poor. The point is that regions, all with proper names, have attributes that can be harnessed through comparison to explain why regional behavior differs greatly across the planet. The aim is to replace the proper names with the leading variables that appear to drive behavior. For instance, to shrug and say “that’s the Middle East for you” does not take us very far. Replacing the Middle East label with conceptualization about how a set of small, weak, autocratic states behave subject to high penetration by major powers might take us farther than shrugging off regional identity. We have good reasons to think that comparative regional analysis can deliver an explanatory value-added product just as much as alternative “levels of analysis” can. Ultimately, we might desire to integrate separate levels of analysis, rather than segregating them. But in the short term, we need to encourage comparative regional analysis because it is the least developed perspective. Why that might be the case can be debated, but it stems in part from our disciplinary tendencies for some analysts to specialize in regional behavior largely in a descriptive vein while others prefer to focus on explaining universal behavior. Comparative regional behavior tends to be squeezed out by regional scholars who suspect generalization about behavior and universal scholars who suspect particular contexts such as regions. Comparative regional analysis requires analysts who are willing to explore generalization but acknowledge regional contexts more explicitly than is customary. At the same time, more general substitutes for those regional labels must be introduced if explanatory headway is to be achieved.

Oil is the world's single most important commodity and its political effects are pervasive. Jeff D. Colgan extends the idea of the resource curse into the realm of international relations, exploring how countries form their foreign policy preferences and intentions. Why are some but not all oil-exporting 'petrostates' aggressive? To answer this question, a theory of aggressive foreign policy preferences is developed and then tested, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Petro-Aggression shows that oil creates incentives that increase a petrostate's aggression, but also incentives for the opposite. The net effect depends critically on its domestic politics, especially the preferences of its leader. Revolutionary leaders are especially significant. Using case studies including Iraq, Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, this book offers new insight into why oil politics has a central role in global peace and conflict.

This book unpacks the links between oil energy, state power, urban space and culture, by looking at the Petro-Socialist Venezuelan oil state. It challenges the disciplinary compartmentalisation of the analysis of the material and cultural effects of oil to demonstrate that within the Petrostate, Territory, Bureaucratic Power and Culture become indivisible. To this end, it examines how oil is a cultural resource, in addition to a natural resource, implying therefore that struggles over culture implicate oil, and struggles over oil implicate culture. This book develops a story about Venezuela as an oil state and the way it deploys its policies to instrumentalise culture and urban space by examining the way Petro-Socialism manifests in space, how it is imagined in speeches and how it is discursively constructed in adverts. The discussion reveals how a particular culture is privileged by the Venezuela state-owned oil company and its social and cultural branch. The book explores to what effect the state-owned oil company constructs a parallel notion of culture that becomes inextricable from land, akin to a mineral deposit, and tightly controlled by the Petrostate. The book will appeal to researchers who are interested in Resource Management, Environmental Studies, Cultural Studies and Political Geography.

Since 2008, energy and food markets—those most fundamental to human existence—have remained in turmoil. Resource scarcity has had a much bigger global impact in recent years than has been predicted, with ongoing volatility a sign that the world is only part-way through navigating a treacherous transition in the way it uses resources. Scarcity, and perceptions of scarcity, increase political risks, while geopolitical turmoil exacerbates shortages and complicates the search for solutions. The New Politics of Strategic Resources examines the political dimensions of strategic resource challenges at the domestic and international levels. For better or worse, energy and food markets are shaped by perceptions of national interest and do not behave as traditional market goods. So while markets are an essential part of any response to tighter resource supplies, governments also will play a key role. David Steven, Emily O'Brien, Bruce Jones, and their colleagues discuss what those roles are and what they should be. The architecture for coordinating multilateral responses to these dynamics has fallen short, raising questions about the effective international management of these issues. Politics impede here too, as the major powers must negotiate political and security trade-offs to cooperate on the design of more robust international regimes and mechanisms for resource security and the provision of global public goods. This timely volume includes chapters on major powers (United States, India, China) and key suppliers (Russia, Saudi Arabia). The contributors also address thematic topics, such as the interaction between oil and state fragility; the changing political dynamics of climate change; and the politics of resource subsidies.