Transnational Oil

This book examines the role of Soviet energy during the Cold War. Based on hitherto little known documents from Western and Eastern European archives, it combines the story of Soviet oil and gas with general Cold War history. This volume breaks new ground by framing Soviet energy in a multi-national context, taking into account not only the view from Moscow, but also the perspectives of communist Eastern Europe, the US, NATO, as well as several Western European countries – namely Italy, France, and West Germany. This book challenges some of the long-standing assumptions of East-West bloc relations, as well as shedding new light on relations within the blocs regarding the issue of energy. By bringing together a range of junior and senior historians and specialists from Europe, Russia and the US, this book represents a pioneering endeavour to approach the role of Soviet energy during the Cold War in transnational perspective.

This book addresses energy research from four distinct International Political Economy perspectives: energy security, governance, legal and developmental areas. Energy is too important to be neglected by political scientists. Yet, within the mainstream of the discipline energy research still remains a peripheral area of academic enquiry seeking to plug into the discipline’s theoretical debates. The purpose of this book is to assess how existing perspectives fit with our understanding of social science energy research by focusing on the oil and gas dimension.

Ecuador is the third-largest foreign supplier of crude oil to the western United States. As the source of this oil, the Ecuadorian Amazon has borne the far-reaching social and environmental consequences of a growing U.S. demand for petroleum and the dynamics of economic globalization it necessitates. Crude Chronicles traces the emergence during the 1990s of a highly organized indigenous movement and its struggles against a U.S. oil company and Ecuadorian neoliberal policies. Against the backdrop of mounting government attempts to privatize and liberalize the national economy, Suzana Sawyer shows how neoliberal reforms in Ecuador led to a crisis of governance, accountability, and representation that spurred one of twentieth-century Latin America’s strongest indigenous movements. Through her rich ethnography of indigenous marches, demonstrations, occupations, and negotiations, Sawyer tracks the growing sophistication of indigenous politics as Indians subverted, re-deployed, and, at times, capitulated to the dictates and desires of a transnational neoliberal logic. At the same time, she follows the multiple maneuvers and discourses that the multinational corporation and the Ecuadorian state used to circumscribe and contain indigenous opposition. Ultimately, Sawyer reveals that indigenous struggles over land and oil operations in Ecuador were as much about reconfiguring national and transnational inequality—that is, rupturing the silence around racial injustice, exacting spaces of accountability, and rewriting narratives of national belonging—as they were about the material use and extraction of rain-forest resources.

"This book is a compilation of papers first presented at the workshop "The palm oil controversy in transnational perspective" that took place in Singapore, 2-4 March 2009. The workshop was jointly organized by the Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universit'at, Bonn and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), Singapore. It was funded by Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF)"--Preface.

In this book, the author draws upon his training in political science and experience as an energy consultant at Atlantis, Inc. It explores the conflicting interests of host and firm, and discusses the way firms use political risk analyses leads us to the issue of managing political risk.

Writing this book would have been impossible without the help of certain institutions and persons. For a gas-producing and oil-processing country like the Netherlands, there was surprisingly very little, publicly available, research material. Public libraries' collections contained, with a certain degree of inconsistency, little of the more specialised sources. I would therefore like to express my gratitude towards Royal Dutch Shell, and especially the library staff in The Hague, for allowing me to use the company's library, thanking them for their assistance in finding and supplying the required data. I am also grateful for the financial assistance of the 'Nederlandse organisatie voor wetenschappelijk onderzoek' (NWO) and the Faculty of Law of the University of Leiden. They provided the financial means to work a (crucial) month in the very well equipped library of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. I am indebted to the staff of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, and particularly to Robert Mabro and Jeremy Turk, for their comments, support, and friendship. After I spent a month in the Institute in July 1989, I was able to return for two five-month periods in 1990 and 1991. For both periods, the Oxford Institute and the Leiden Law Faculty provided me with the necessary means. I would also like to express special gratitude to some people who have been a great support and supplied me with valuable comments at various stages of the study.