From Petro-States to ‘new realities’: Perspectives on the Geographies of oil

From Petro-States to ‘ new realities ’ : Perspectives on the Geographies of oil

Emilia Kennedy*

Department of Geography, University of British Columbia Vancouver

Abstract

Recent“oil shocks”in the form of not only price volatility, but also catastrophic oil spills, growing acceptance of climate change, and public contestations over oil wars and major projects, have multiplied in recent years–indications that the spaces and practices of energy intensive social formations are becoming increasingly politicized objects of concern. The paper summarizes the petro-state thesis and reviews recent contributions on the geographies of oil. While the petro-state is useful for conceptualizing some aspects of the political dynamics of oil, it fails to capture some of the dynamics of concern in four major areas of work on geographies of oil: petro-capitalism and economies of oil violence, socially produced scarcity, petro-state(s) and expanded oil polities, and the“new realities of oil,”such as price volatility, changes in size and location of demand and supply, and the energy dilemmas associated with energy security and climate change. The conclusion discusses recent work that ties the political geogra- phies of oil to geographies everyday life, pointing to a research agenda for integrating the consideration hydrocarbons into wider geographical inquiries.

1. Introduction

Oil – the energy it provides and the mobility it affords – undergirds and intersects most geographies of contemporary life. It is the“lifeblood” (Huber 2013a) of social production and reproduction in high-energy societies, accounting for 36.3% of world’s energy primary supply.¹ Yet, its ubiquity and the way it is consumed (gas pumps and thermostats afford a distanciation from its materiality) tend to make oil a rather taken-for-granted feature of life (Mitchell 2011).

Mirroring its ubiquitous invisibility in everyday life, the role fossil fuels play in affording many of the phenomenon studied by geographers – urban life, mobility, militarization, democratic politics–is incommensurate with the amount of scholarly engagement they have received, despite the fact that many modern geographies are made possible by“the anthro- pogenic eruption of the underground”onto to the surface of the earth– iron, carbon, and precious metals mined into the skyscrapers, fuels, computer hardware, and fertilizers (as well as their ‘others’ – waste, effluents, and CO2) (Bridge 2013) Bebbington contends that the subsoil has been “essentially absent” from political ecological study, suggesting that

“[p]erhaps this very omnipresence [of mined materials] has made the centrality of the subsoil too big to get a handle on, or too mundane to recognize”(2012, 1159). Yet, Bebbington notes that the lastfive years has seen an upsurge of work on extractive geographies in recent years, and major geography journals have recently featured hydrocarbons in themed issues (Geopolitics2011,Geoforum2010,Annals of the Association of American Geographers2011).

Above ground, oil is the number one commodity in the world in trade value terms, as well as a strategic good for many states. The importance of oil to economic production and social reproduction makes it a “political resource,” since “decisions about finding, moving, and using oil bring together groups of people with different interests and agendas”(Bridge and

Le Billon 2012, 3). Even though the politics of oil is“a normal and continuous state of affairs and not an aberration or interrupting event”(Bridge and Le Billon 2012), for most oil con- sumers, sporadic eruptions of crises are the only times oil is experienced as political. For ex- ample, the 1973 OPEC ‘crisis’ sharply sprang the importance of the oil lifeblood in the workings of the social body into focus (Mitchell 2011).

However, the frequency of“oil shocks”seems to have multiplied in recent years, albeit of a changing nature: price volatility has been joined by climate change, decreasing public support for oil wars, oil spills, and public contestations of oil projects all indications that the spaces and practices of energy intensive social formations have“become a more intense object of political and social concern”(Huber 2010, 74). In North America in the last four years alone, the BP Deepwater Horizon blowout, Enbridge Kalamazoo pipeline spill, Lac Mégantic rail derailment, deeply divisive pipeline project proposals like Enbridge Northern Gateway and TransCanada Keystone XL, and the explosion in hydraulic fracturing (fracking) practices have increasingly shown the political dimensions of oil to be irreducible, ongoing, and deepening. Because so much of modern life is“locked-in”to hydrocarbon dependency (Unruh 2000), these ‘long emergencies’ of the contestation over energetic basis of modern life signal the end of the time when the lifeblood of oilflows quietly.

Pronounced in the discussions of these recent shocks has been not only the expected castigation of ‘Big Oil’s’ negligence and greed but also the role of the state in causing or exacerbating these events, through corruption, regulatory capture and laxity, or regulatory

‘roll-back’. In the case of the Deepwater Horizon blowout, for example, Zalik writes,“[o]

f note was the extraordinary coverage in the spill’s aftermath to crony corruption and regulatory gaps in the US Mineral Management Service”(2012, 268). Likewise, there is an increasing discussion of aggressively ‘roll-out’ petro-developmental state strategies, such as the decimation of environmental laws and expansions in executive branch power widely believed to facilitate expansion tar sands and exports to Asia, in the case of the current Canadian government. Growing political consensus on climate change and decreasing political acceptability of high-carbon fuels places shines still more light on the contradictory roles of states with respect to fossil fuel energy that arises under a global capitalist system: they are “caught between two pressures” (Bebbington 2012, 1155) of “providing the right incentives for private companies to secure profits from oil, and attempting to extract a‘social’

share in the oil revenues”(Cumbers 2012, 234).

The notion of the“petro-state”has recently been applied in popular geopolitical discourse to refer to the actions of states such as Russia (Goldman 2010) and Canada (Nikiforuk 2012), who are perceived as making collective decisions based on the advancement of oil and gas interests over other state goals.² The term has conceptual appeal in its ability to act as a shorthand for state policies and actions that triumph oil interests at the expense of public good, or for the benefit of certain segments of society. However, petro-state thesis first proposed by political scientist Terry Lynn Karl has a somewhat more specific meaning: a state’s fiscal reliance on petroleum revenues, which subsequently produces institutional settings that encourage the political distribution of rents, the substitution of public spending for statecraft, and weakened authority, in the cases of capital-deficient exporters.

While the petro-state thesis has been used in political science as the basis for hypothesis testing and comparative study, the term ‘petro-state’ has been used scantily in geography (and if used, deployed loosely, or without definition), even though many of the issues of concern to geographers studying oil–spatial inequalities, social injustices, capitalist political economy, and violence – are partially accounted for by this thesis. The aim of this review paper, therefore, is twofold. The first section provides a more detailed account of the petro-state thesis. The following section presents recent contributions from geographers on

oil, discerning four intersecting themes, which demonstrate ways of thinking through the political geography of oil beyond the petro-state perspective: petro-capitalism and economies of oil violence, constructionist critiques of scarcity, petro-state(s) and expanded oil polities, and the“new realities of oil,”a series of intersecting dynamics shaping contemporary geogra- phies of oil, including price volatility, changes in size and location of demand and supply, and to the relative power of oil actors, and the dilemmas associated with energy security-climate change nexus. The conclusion discusses recent work that ties the state-political geographies of oil to geographies everyday life, pointing to a promising research agenda for integrating the consideration hydrocarbons into wider geographical inquiries.

2. The Petro-State

The petro-state thesis wasfirst elaborated by Terry Lynn Karl inParadox of plenty: Oil booms and petro-states (1997), which sought to answer why capital-deficient oil-exporting states appeared unable to translate their oil boom windfalls into “self-sustaining, equitable and stable development paths” (4–5), regardless of regime (democratic and authoritarian), geographical location, and history. Many of the oil-exporting nation-states suffer from particularly dramatic forms of what some scholars call the ‘resource curse’: economic and political problems associated with resource dependence, including poor economic growth, vulnerability to price shocks, poverty, and high inequality, as well as high levels of corrup- tion, authoritarianism, and poor governance.

Resources associated with the curse– notably oil, diamonds, and copper–are also often considered ‘conflict commodities’, as problems associated with the resource curse – poor economic conditions, corrupt, or authoritarian politics–combined with the lucrative wealth generated by these resources, have been linked to a greater incidence of violence and civil conflict (Ross 2012; Collier et al., 2003; Watts 2004a; Le Billon 2005a, b). Extractive resource-dependent states tend towards common features such as high dependence on a few, or even a single resource, and capital-intensive extraction methods, which often lead to foreign-dominated industry. To Karl, these characteristics are not given but are rather

“the product of prior choices made mostly outside these countries, about how mining industries should be organized”(46).

This contrasts to an economic perspective, which attributes the poor development outcomes of resource endowment to“Dutch disease,”a decline in the export manufacturing and agricultural sectors, and inflation of domestic goods and service, caused by changes in real exchange rates and flows of capital and labor towards the boom sector (Ross 1999, who argues that the evidence for Dutch disease is mixed). Karl argues Dutch disease“fail[s] to capture the underlying political and institutional processes that set off economic laws and market forces in the first place and that subsequently form strong barriers to necessary readjustments”(1997, 5).

Single-resource dependence is most often coupled with state ownership of oil resources, since in most jurisdictions, the state that legally holds title to oil resources (Emel et al. 2011;

Bridge and Le Billon 2012). Whether oil-exporting states are able to collect revenue from through royalties collected from private producers, such as international oil companies (IOCs), or whether these states operate their own nationalized oil companies (NOCs) or parastatal corporations, it is ultimately the state that determines the means by which rents enter the economy and where benefits from windfall revenues are distributed. State resource sovereignty creates a tendency towards rentier-state effects, whereby states extract high rents (royalties, taxes, and sales) from resource extraction as a strategically important statefiscal goal (Humphreys et al. 2007; Zalik 2012). As a result, states become

the primary object of rent-seeking behavior, state institutions begin to orient their goals around the expansion or maintenance of oil revenues, and political rationality becomes blurred with economic rationality.

These conflated rationalities, according to Karl, are why capital-deficient oil-exporting states appeared unable to translate oil windfalls into self-sustaining, stable development:

“dependence on petroleum revenues produces a distinctive type of institutional setting, the petro- state, which encourages the political distribution of rents. Such a state is characterized by fiscal reliance on petro-dollars, which expands state jurisdiction and weakens authority as other extractive capabilities wither. As a result, when faced with competing pressures, state officials become habituated to relying on the progressive substitution of public spending for statecraft, thereby further weakening state capacity”(16).

Paradox of Plenty focused specifically the historical period of oil booms of 1973–4 and 1978–9, to the post-boom period of the early 1980s, with an extended case study of Venezuela, but also using the cases of other “capital-deficient oil exporters”like Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Iran, Ecuador, and Egypt. Karl contends that in oil booms of the 1970s induced decision-makers to believe their depletion time horizons were very short and that they had to “sow the petroleum” while prices were high. Political short-termism was wedded to great expectations for the future development. Many scholars have articulated how oil ignites the dream of development (Coronil 1997; Watts 2004b, 2008; Maass 2009; Mitchell 2011); for‘underdeveloped’states holding large oil reserves, exploitation of the resource can be seen as the fortuitous route to development and modernization, including ambitious plans for poverty alleviation and equitable development.

However, the common experience of many of these nations was poor development out- comes, rising debts, and weakened state authority. The 1970s booms initiated patterns of boom-dependent state spending; thus, when oil prices slumped in the early 1980s, rather than reign in state spending, many oil states continued boom spending patterns, taking out collateralized loans while expecting oil prices to recover. Prices never recovered to their

‘boom’ level, and debt servicing of loans became a major state expenditure (Karl 1997;

Le Billon 2005a). The record on oil-fueled modernization, therefore,“is remarkably mixed”

(Bridge and Le Billon 2012, 22–23).

Boom-time spending is but one effect of statefiscal dependence on“petro-dollars,”which has been associated with poor statecraft (the capacity to make sound decisions with limited public resources), regulatory capture, reduced transparency, corruption, authoritarian rule or very long periods of single-party rule, and increased military spending (Karl 1997;

Humphreys et al. 2007; Nikiforuk 2012). The petro-state thesis holds that increase revenues from mineral rents (either through increased rates of exploitation or high prices) create pow- erful incentives to alter state decision-making frameworks, state institutions, property re- gimes, and the loci of authority. Increased revenues can also induce a reduction in domestic taxation, which can produce a lack of accountability and arbitrary financial deci- sion-making, as governments are less inclined to craft policies with consideration of the scru- tiny of citizens. In a situation of high rent revenues,“spending becomes seen as theprimary mechanism of“stateness”” (Karl 1997, 41) in lieu of the construction of administrative au- thority and state capacity–the ability of government to“administer its territory effectively”

(Skocpol 1985), since, as Karl commented in 2012,“[i]t is simply a lot easier and faster to build a pipeline than an efficient and representative state”(in Nikiforuk 2012, 199).

Under-investment in diverse state revenue sources and a responsive state apparatus reduces the capacity for “flexible adjustment” to changes, such as exogenous changes in oil price.

Barriers to making necessary changes in development trajectories, therefore, become sustained within the state itself. This explains why the effects of the oil price collapse of the 1980s were so dramatic on oil states like Mexico, Venezuela, and Nigeria:“any regime grafted onto this [oil-rentier] structure, whether authoritarian or democratic, is likely to be considerably arbitrary, irrational, and volatile when making economic policy–the antithesis of the environment necessary to confront a boom [and inevitable bust] successfully”(190).

Since one of the effects of state‘petrolization’ is diminished state capacity, the most delete- rious examples occur in the context of countries with already low state capacity. However, many of dynamics of the petro-state can apply to the experiences of ‘high-absorbing’

jurisdictions such Iran, Saudi Arabia, Louisiana, and Alberta.

A key utility of the petro-state framework does is that it centers attention on the state as a key actor in oil production. As Bridge and Le Billon, along with other geographers, have emphasized, “Oil resources are embedded – literally – in the territorial framework of states.…Physically, legally and culturally, oil is frequently understood as part of the“body”

of the nation”(2012, 22-23, see also Coronil 1997 for an anthropological perspective). The framework also draws attention to the role the state plays in the fortunes of oil revenue, demonstrating that deleterious outcomes of oil-based development are not simply the product of private greed or‘Big Oil’but also made possible through public patrimony, state institutions, and the agency of state actors. Oil scholars such as Ross (2012), Dunning (2008), Collier et al. (2003), and many others have all taken national state frameworks in their analyses of oil. However, the petro-state is just one, albeit far from complete, element of the political geographies of oil. Indeed, the state-centric, methodological nationalism of the mainstream or political science approach to the politics of oil has been an object of critique by geographers, if often an implicit or taken-for-granted one, as the next section will demonstrate.

3. Petro-Geographies: Economies of oil Violence, Goepolitical Reason, and the New Realities of Oil This section reviews recent geographical literature on the geographies of oil, which can be grouped into three major intersecting themes: petro-capitalism and economies of oil violence, social scarcity and critiques of geopolitical reason, petro-states and expanded oil polities, and the new realities of oil. Watts (2009) draws out three frameworks through which geographers have carried out “thinking with oil”: as a natural resource/resource commodity of geostrategic and political significance to “hydrocarbon capitalism” (the perspective taken by the petro-state thesis and most mainstream approaches to oil); as aglobal production network (GPN), a political economy of a particular regime of accumulation and a mode of regulation with a series actors, institutions, governance structures, and networks (for example, Bridge 2008; Bridge and Le Billon 2012); and as an assemblage/oil complex (Watts 2004a,2004b, 2009), which refers to “a configuration of firm, state, and community that is territorially constituted through oil concessions, pipelines, and refineries and reproduced via modern prac- tices of oil exploration, extraction, and transformation”(Valdivia and Benavides 2012, 71).

Watts contends that seeing oil as a complex, rather than a production network, broadens the lens on the types of actors and processes constituting‘carbon capitalism’to also include

“engineering companies andfinancial groups, the shadow economies (theft, money laundering, drugs, organized crime), the rafts of NGO’s…, the research institutes and lobbying groups, the landscape of oil consumption…, the oil communities, the military and paramilitary groups, and the social movements which surround the operations of, and shape the functioning of, the oil industry narrowly construed”(2009, 8-9). While most geographical scholarship has not explicitly critiqued mainstream approaches to the politics of oil (such as the petro-state thesis)

(although see Huber’s 2012 review essay, which does explicitly critique some of the blindspots of the mainstream‘geopolitical imagination’ of oil), thinking through oil with both GPN or oil complex frameworks (or related frameworks such as Marxist political economy or political ecology) represents one of the key contributions by geographers to social science scholarship on oil, accounting for a broader‘complex’of actors, and therefore a wider set of geographically, culturally, economically, and physically mediated processes shaping the politics of oil than possible using the petro-state framework. As Bridge and Le Billon elucidate in their comprehensive introductory book, Oil, a “key feature of the contemporary politics of oil…is the way actors and spaces the conventionally have lain out- side of oil are now drawn within it”(36), changing the terrain of oil governance and political possibilities of oil in the process. Through attention to processes andflows across space, social space, and scales– “following the oil”(Mitchell 2011)–geographers have attended to the multitude of“governable spaces”that constitute the variegated landscapes of hydrocarbon – the colonial concession, the enclave, the cul-de-sac, and the ethnic community, – and to their“particular politics of scale which are more or less coherent, more or less stable, more or less violent”(Watts 2004a: 54).

PETRO-CAPITALISM AND ECONOMIES OF SECURITY AND VIOLENCE

The history of engagement with oil is relatively new in geography, and the themes of early scholarship on oil geographies – ‘petro-capitalism’ (Watts 2004a,2004b) and associated economies of violence and security (Le Billon 2005a, b) – continue as a major thread of work. Watts’ notion of petro-capitalism expresses both that modern capitalism is made possible with oil (Huber 2009) and that the rentier economy of oil-producing states heavily dependent on oil is the driving force of their entire state-political economy, producing a

“paradoxical coupling of vast resource wealth and desperate poverty in countries dependent on oil”(Reed 2009: 2). Watts does not differentiate petro-capitalism from the petro-state, leaving possible differences between the two unclear. However, petro-capitalism draws explicit attention to the inherent violence of oil-based development, articulating the link between extraction and authoritarian governmentality, militarization, exclusion, and displacement.

Reed’s work on Angolan oil examines how state-corporate resource control strategies such as concession contracts, military campaigns, and corporate compensation emerged

“from particular convergences of violence, exclusion, and degradation” of environment and traditional livelihoods near extraction areas (2009: 2). Her work shows how the exclusionary form of the oil enclave shuts out local populations from economic and ecological sustenance, even while environmental externalities, political and military repression ‘bleed out’from such spaces.

Zalik’s (2009) comparative case study of the Nigerian Niger Delta and the Mexican Gulf also demonstrates the exclusionary violence of geographies of oil development, in this case, through “welfare interventions” resulting in displacement of communities and livelihoods from offshore extraction sites. These cases reveal not only “the overlap between social development/humanitarian and industrial security policies”(575) but also how the “social and spatial disembedding of production”(577) made possible by the spatial isolation afforded by offshore environments – a “so-called “deregulated” exterior of the offshore” (577) is nonetheless still necessarily dependent on re-regulatory processes within the state.

Labban (2011) critically presents how discourses justifying militarization and exclusion in the name of energy security are constructed through expert statements about the impact of potential supply disruptions on market elasticity. Largely emanating from the USA, such

discourses make“claims for…structural transformation of the world energy market and the militarization of global space, justified by imminent threat to global energy security”(326).

Threats include growing demand for oil in developing countries [and expansion of their national oil companies (NOCs)], threats of disruption and price hikes from energy infrastructure attacks, and reduced global production capacity due to resource nationalism, all identified as threats because of the possibility they will produce ‘tight markets’ (reduced spare capacity). Thus, Labban argues, contemporary notions of energy security intertwine arguments for the expansion of open markets with those for military protection of infrastruc- ture and trade routes.

Detailing the history of the 1931 declaration of martial law in the oilfields of east Texas and Oklahoma, Huber (2011a) offers an example of how violence is deployed in the name of enforcing scarcity, as the intersection of glut in supply from‘free market’oil production and depression-era demand reduction resulted in collapsing oil prices that threatened large producers’ profits. This case of “militarizing scarcity” (820) leads Huber to argue that

“contemporary debates on petro-imperialism might consider questioning the role of violence not as a product but as a generator of scarcity”(2011a, 816).

SOCIALLY PRODUCED SCARCITY

Huber’s contribution makes an important link between the cluster of work on violence, security and exclusion, and a set of research on the social production of scarcity, particularly as it relates to peak oil, as well as the increasing role offinance in the social regulation of oil.

Both classical economics and peak oil narratives alike treat scarcity as a static, geophysical constraint–a natural limit to economic life that acts as the main driver of resource conflicts.

Geographers, however, have shown that scarcity is socially produced and mediated by capitalist relations. Since scarcity in the form of limited supply“must itself be produced for commodity markets and the price mechanism to function” (Huber, 2011a: 817), it is

“surplus and glut,”(Retort 2005, 59), not scarcity, that has plagued the oil industry for most of its history (Mitchell 2011 provides numerous examples of industry supply-limiting strategies in the 20th century). Instead, Le Billon and Cervantes suggest that“scarcity is in part a narrative constructed for and through prices” (2009, 842) to advance a range of commercial and geostrategic interests.

Bridge and Wood (2010)find that peak oil is not a pressing priority for Big Oil producers, who are instead generally more concerned about scarcities“above-ground”: their declining structural position with respect to NOCs in terms of reserve access and replacement, the politics of resource access, and the changing structure of the international oil industry.

Labban (2010) links the social construction of scarcity tofinancialization, demonstrating how oil trade is increasingly mediated and shaped by the infusion of the logic offinance into oil markets. Labban provides a clear exposition of both peak oil narratives and orthodox critiques of peak oil, arguing both arguments is deeplyflawed because they do not account for the degree to whichfinance“has emancipated the circulation of oil in the world market from its circulation in physical space”(541). The result has been the creation of a“space–time parallax”where the physical supplies no longer have direct bearing on the price of oil and where “high market price does not automatically induce investment in exploration and production capacity”(542). Only by accounting for the role offinancialization in oil trade, Labban argues, can scholars begin to account for increasing oil prices and price volatility since the turn of the millennium.

Zalik (2010) explores the active role of strategic business discourse like Shell’sScenariosand International Energy Agency’sOutlookspublications, arguing that such documents are crucial

in shaping oil markets, including market price. Through their claims, energy actors’percep- tions regarding future supply heavily influence trading on commodity exchanges, and

“through [their] very expression intervene in the social perceptions that condition speculative markets”(554). Zalik demonstrates how physical stocks of oil and price signals are not “out there”but are made (larger or smaller and higher or lower) through metrics and discursive projections. For Zalik, overlooking the role of speculative futures trading in global oil prices risks obscuring the active role of oil market beneficiaries in the social construction of the oil market.

PETRO-STATE(S) AND EXPANDED OIL POLITIES

The work of geographers to show the socially constructed character of scarcity, price, and future supply is part of a larger project by geographers to problematize and critically reformulate some of the otherwise naturalized key categories and concepts that tend to frame geopolitical reasoning around oil. This includes not only the naturalization of scarcity but also the fetishization of oil that Watts argues undergirds much of the scholarship the resource curse and petro-state. In these accounts, oil“has causal powers: it is a purveyor of corruption, it undermines democracy, promotes civil, and inter-state wars (‘blood for oil’), is the mother forms of corporate power (‘Big Oil’) and condemns oil-rich states to devastating economic, political, and social pathologies”(2009, 6–7). Bebbington similarly cautions against analyses that“may convey a form of resource based determinism in which economies of extraction are cast as driving political formations and modes of governing” (2012: 56), while Huber contends that even “critical literature surrounding the political economy of oil tends to reproduce…fetishistic narratives of oil as a strategic “thing” ” (2011: 35). The petro-state concept, furthermore commits what Huber argues, is“the ultimate geopolitical fetish”: the

“thingification of the state … [as] a subject; an actor on a world stage whose actions can be explained as emerging from a specific set of motives and interests” (2012: 402). Huber reminds us that space and power underwrite all geopolitical thought and action, and as such, geographers can play a role in uncovering how “particular visions of space have become constitutive to certain visions of environment and resources”surrounding oil (2012, 402).

Bouzarovski and Konieczny (2010) examine the proposed Russia–Germany Nord Stream sub-sea pipeline (completed in late 2012). While literally bypassing Eastern European transit states like Ukraine and Poland, Nord Stream fails to bypass regional politics, both condensing and exacerbating political and economic tensions surrounding Europe’s energy dependency on Russia. They suggest that “international gas pipelines can impact a country’s spatial formations both directly (through the physical structures associated with the pipelines themselves) and indirectly (by affecting national economic development and energy policies)”

(17), creating a‘quasi- material’paradox in which oil produces space“in material and discursive terms alike”Bouzarovski and Konieczny (2010). This echoes Bebbington’s examples from Latin American experiences, which reveal how even “imagined extraction of the subsoil can elicit rapid political economy changes”(2012, 1155).

Geographers have shown that terms such as scarcity and national interest are not only social constituted but are also performative – the discourses and actions of actors actively constitute the realities of the categories they operate with. Analyzing claims made by the Russian state about Russia as a rising“energy superpower,”Bouzarovski and Bassin (2011) examine the ways in which hydrocarbon energy systems“shape, and are shaped by, narratives and practices of identity building at different scales” (784). They analyze Putinism’s

“existential dependency” on the belief that Russia’s national resurgence depends on the development of its energy resources (788), positioning Putin as a classical geopolitical thinker

who “sees international relations as driven not by international cooperation but rather by antagonism and rivalry between contending states” (790). In doing so, the Putinist vision helps constitutes the realities it envisions, as dramatically exemplified by the Russian–

Ukrainian ‘gas wars,’ thus demonstrating that the statements, predictions, and strategies around oil constitute part of what become the“realities”of oil.

Emel, Huber, and Makene, whose 2011 paper on gold mining offers numerous helpful means to think through oil similarly problematizes the faulty bounding of methodological nationalisms used in the reasoning of politicians like Putin, as well as most scholarship on mineral resources – those that treat territorial states as discrete containers of nature-society and state-society relations. This critique points not only to the limits of the national-level analyses of resources, such as the statistical indicators of economic performance and“territo- rially contained discussions of state corruption, and inequality”used in the petro-state thesis (72). It also problematizes one of the “occluding tropes” of resource nationalism, which formulates the struggle for self-determination as that of a factionless unified national‘inside’, in opposition to othered outside forces. Instead, rather than buffering against capital, Emel et al. argue that state resource sovereignty frameworks are, in fact, formulated attract and incentivize (often foreign)firms, in order to“perform the nation through foreign capital”(76).

As such, they argue, sovereignty is relational– “understood not as territorially circumscribed within the state apparatus, but as a centered node in a broader network of power relations and capitalflows”(74).

Work on the complex intersections of oil resources, sovereignty, and geopolitical reasoning also points to the role of territorially rooted discursive claims of identity and rights on the space of the nation, in which resource nationalism and oil (national) identity have multiple possible valences. This group of contributions show that extraction is“bound up with … the forms taken by state-society relationships and their particular intersections with the economy”(Bebbington 2012, 1154), pointing to multiple possible petro-state forms, and to the expanded oil polities that influence the“oil complex”, often by making claims on, or to, the state.

Drawing on Mommer’s (2002)‘landlord state’thesis –which distinguishes between two fiscal regimes for oil: the proprietorial model, where resource-holding states seek ground rents (exemplified by OPEC producers), and a liberal model, where the oil extraction is regarded as a standard industrial activity and rents to the state are minimal (UK model) – Zalik (2012; see also Bridge 2008) uses disputes over oil revenues in Canada, Nigeria, and Mexico to demonstrate the indeterminate relationship between fiscal regime type and the leveraging for claims of redistribution of rents. While the petro-state thesis shows the ways in which state landlord claims can undermine the progressive resource rent distribution, she argues that “fragmented”landlord claims (at local or individual level), combined with liberal(izing)fiscal regime can also obstruct collective redistribution claims. Zalik’s contribu- tion also emphasizes the central role of social struggles over collective ownership and sovereignty claims“to organizing more or less redistributive corporate forms”of oil produc- tion, a political dimension absent from many conventional account of oil politics (70, see also Mitchell 2011).

Echoing Zalik, Cumbers (2012) demonstrates sizeable divergences in the development trajectory between Britain and Norway’s national strategies to exploit North Sea oil.

Cumbers argues that despite deepening process of economic globalization,“there continue to be marked differences in the economic trajectories, institutions, and policy arrangements operation at the national level”in relation to oil development (221). States’ different roles in international oil geopolitics and geo-economics are very much affected by endogenous, historically contingent relations between elements of business, labor, and civil society, and

therefore“have a fundamental bearing on which groups and places benefit from oil develop- ment and which are exploited or marginalized”(222).

Through a comparative analysis of hydrocarbon resource conflicts in Ecuador and Bolivia, Perreault and Valdivia (2010) show that petroleum resource struggles are profoundly shaped by the ways in which “imagined hydrocarbon communities articulate state institutions of hydrocarbons governance with citizenship and national belonging” (690). In the face of threats to the public national ownership of Ecuadorian and Bolivian oil, movements seek to restore state sovereignty over petroleum by re-scripting capitalist spaces of hydrocarbon production – refineries, concessions, and pipelines – into moral geographies of nation- making. These cases show not only that political economy and cultural politics of identity and nation are inseparable but also that hydrocarbon politics “involves the possibility of imagining new capital-state-population relations” (698), by showing how various identity categories can be deployed to make a “national consciousness in relation to hydrocarbons governance”.

Valdivia’s work with Benavides (2012) also demonstrates the role of moral geographies and strategic use of claims to the nation in resource conflicts, in this instance, in relation to labor’s role in resource governance. Presenting a historical overview of the petroleum labor movement in Ecuador, they show how employees of the NOC Petroecuador strategically engaged a succession of administrations from the 1970s - 2000s (including populist, military juntas, and neo- liberal governments), so that by the 1980s the movement became a defining actor in petroleum governance. In its struggles against the neo-liberalization of the petroleum industry by the 1990s, the movement scaled-up action beyond class-centered rights, publicly positioning themselves as defenders of the national mineral patrimony (70). In doing so, movement leaders did not seek to

“undermine state authority…but to remind administrations of the state’s moral responsibility toward the nation”(2012), through the construction of nationalist state“petro-ethic.”

NEW REALITIES OF OIL

The growing complexity of actors, processes, and infrastructures in the contemporary oil complex is one aspect of what Bridge and Le Billon have referred to as the“oil’s new reality”

–a series of intersecting dynamics shaping contemporary geographies of oil, including price volatility andfinancialization, changes in the relative power of oil actors (civil society groups, national oil companies, etc.) – discussed above – as well as new dilemmas associated with energy security and climate change. Energy security concerns about possibilities of supply interruptions permanent declines in availability combine with the problem of climate change to produce what Bradshaw (2009) calls a“global energy dilemma,”which is ushering forth

“a new geopolitics of oil…centered on changes in the availability, accessibility, affordability, and acceptabilty of oil”(Bridge and Le Billon 2012, 3).

Bradshaw’s 2009 review of the geopolitics of global energy security offers an entrée to the range of issues shaping the ‘new realities’ of the geopolitics of global energy security.

Bradshaw points out that price volatility over last decade has made energy security a high priority on the political agenda of both energy importing and exporting states. He points to several issues – recent global shifts in the location of energy production towards the Middle East, Africa, and the former Soviet Union, and demand growth in India and China (Kuby et al. 2011), the issue of European Union’s dependence on natural gas imports from Russia (Bosse 2011), and “China’s strategy of ‘going out’ to secure equity oil in Africa (Power 2012), as productive of new discursive articulations and materialflows.

Bradshaw’s 2010 article elucidates the processes of globalization that are the driving force behind both shifts in energy demand and carbon emissions, emphasizing that,“while there

may be a single global energy dilemma, it is played out in very different ways across the states that make up the global political economy”(275). In a context of shifting supply, growing demand, declining resource quality, uncertainties about reserve size, and price volatility, Bradshaw concludes that the traditional definitions of energy security are now outdated products of OECD nations’concerns after the OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s. In oil’s new reality, energy security is a “much more multidimensional concept, full of constraints and compromises,

…related to sovereignty, transparency, equity and justice, human rights, international conflict and cooperation, environmental degradation”(2009, 1933). In other words,“[e]nergy security is now a lot more complicated than the reliable supply of energy at reasonable price”(2009).

Echoing Dalby (2009), Bradshaw considers how the perils of climate change are also forcing us to‘rethink security’in terms less narrow terms, as the interactions between energy security and climate– “the yin and yang of a high-energy, fossil fuel society: two apparently contrary elements–abundance and scarcity”that“now increasingly frame the space in which environmental futures will be worked out”(Bridge 2010, 523). Thus, the‘new reality’of oil points to the need to further link geographical work on oil to the active research program in human geography on climate change, for which Bridge’s (2011) “carbon optic” serves a useful unifying lens.

4. Conclusion: The Petro-Geographies of Everyday Life

Events like the BP Deepwater Horizon blowout illustrate how the scale, urgency, and in some cases spectacle, of the new realities of oil have “put energy security centre stage of (geo-)political contestation, therebyfirmly reinforcing the role of the state in energy affairs”

(de Graff 2011, 262). Yet through these‘new realities’, the role of the state is revealed to extend beyond the state as patrimonial holder of resource sovereignty, or as incipiently corruptible collector of resource revenues, as it viewed in the petro-state thesis (or as handmaiden to Big Oil as framed in both mainstream and critical oil realpolitik accounts), demanding an expanded framework of analysis on petro-politics.

Uniting work on in four major areas of recent work – petro-capitalism and violence, socially produced scarcity, petro-state(s) and expanded oil polities, and the new realities of oil– is an overall geopolitical optic, which Bridge and Le Billon describe as “the struggle to define who wins and who loses as oil moves from underground reserves to the point of consumption” (2012, 27). Geographers have demonstrated that the geographies of oil are limited not just to ‘grand strategies’ of supply security, imperial conquests, and zero-sum

‘oil wars’ for static and scarce resources (2012; Yergin 1991 is exemplary here). It is also a question of wins and losses as a result of value creation, development projects, the allocation of rights and responsibility, and the social construction of price, scarcity, and security. The geopolitics of oil is at once about territoriality and the control of particular spaces–geographically uneven social relationsarticulated with uneven natural deposits, as well as aboutgeopolitical discourses and claimsmade by actors and groups, who variously posit oil“as a resource, as a traded good, as a source of tax revenue, as a set of development possibilities, and as environmental burdens to be allocated and addressed”(Bridge and Le Billon 2012, 27). Recent work on petro-capitalism and economies of oil violence, and the“new realities of oil”has attended to the former, while work on socially produced scarcity and expanded oil polities has examined the latter. The conclusion maps out two mutually supporting paths forward, suggesting work on geographically uneven social relations of oil is being extended via a consideration the prosaics of the state, while an extension of our understanding of geopolitical discourses and claims that moves beyond a reified state draws out the political possibilities of seeing the state as a social-relational site of contradiction and contestation.

New realities like oil price shocks and impasses on mitigating climate change have begun to reveal some of the true costs of oil, particularly the ways in which daily life for most in the minority world is deeply locked into structural dependencies on oil. Given the crucial role of oil in supporting contemporary life as we know it, Huber argues that ‘the politics of oil’

cannot be containerized as such but is rather constitutive of contemporary politics more broadly, and of“the social and material geographies of capitalism itself”(2013b, 18, see also 2013a), and his recent work points to fruitful trajectories for considering not only the politics oil production but also the politics of oil consumption, and the political formations and subjectivities made possible by oil. He argues that US neoliberalism in particular, as a political formation, cannot be fully understood apart from post-war social relations to resources and energy: through an embedding of a high-energy petro-Fordism into the very geographical fabric of that country,“the geography of this particular“way of life”privileged private over public forms of politics”(2011b: 41). Huber’s project urges us to see that oil“does political work”(2011b, 42): it is“not simply an inert, lifeless“object”of geopolitical conflict, but rather a highly energy-dense, volatile substance that actively coproduces certain lived practices,”(2011b) such as the“privatized freedom”enabled by“the socioecological relations of gasoline stations, single-family homes, automobility, and the dominance of petrochemicals and plastics in everyday life”(Huber 2013b, 13,19).

While following politics through the socio-spatial formations and political subjectivities made possible through abundant, cheap oil, Huber maintains a focus on the ways oil depen- dence was gradually, yet inexorably furnished by concerted state action, in more or less or- ganized ways. Beyond readily visible instances of the role of the state on oil, such as Obama’s symbolically-loaded impending decision on the Keystone XL pipeline, oil is state-ified and the state petrol-ized, through such things as highway infrastructure budgets, municipal zon- ing laws, oil-dependent export strategies, and the state-mediated conflation of identity with mobility in driver’s licenses and passports. Thus, Huber’s work makes use of a key contribution from political geography, Painter’s (2006) work on the prosaics of the state, which aims to forefront the“intense involvement of the state in so many of the most ordinary aspects of social life”(753). The prosaics of the state undermines the reification of the state (discussed above) and disrupts the‘separate spheres’ assumption, where the state constitutes a unified, distinct, and identifiable sphere, within or separate for the social sphere.

Using the prosaics of the state need not overcome the limitations of the petro-state frame- work by outright jettisoning its insights but rather add layers, perforations, and extensions to the state in relation to oil. State prosaics is part of a larger project of seeing the state as a social relation (Mitchell 2006), as a container of contradictions– and an arena of contestation – between fossil fuel based economic interests, and the other social, ecological, and economic interests of varied and interconnected polities (Cumbers 2012). A social-relational view of the role of the state in the political geographies of oil can capture some of the promising petro-politics emerging in the face of oil’s new realities, such as calls for increased interna- tional energy governance, fossil fuel divestment campaigns, climate justice movements, and calls for deep democratic renewal in petrolized jurisdictions.

A strength of the geographical research has been to consider politics and the state beyond the notion of the‘petro-state’sensu strictoand has done well to connect the dots between oil, the state, and the wider‘complex’ of actors, geographies, and socially produced discourses mediating the political life of oil. Huber’s recent work ties the state-political geographies of oil to geographies everyday life, pointing to a promising research agenda for integrating the consideration hydrocarbons into wider geographical inquiries. More work on the ways in which geographically mediated social phenomena (neoliberalism, hyper-mobility, late modern warfare, and the “everyday life” of work and social reproduction under modern

fossil fuel capitalism) do political work by virtue of the‘lifeblood’of oil points the way to a more-than-oil geography of oil, in which geographical practice as a whole has to think through the invisible affordances of oil.

Acknowledgement

The support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada is gratefully acknowledged. The constructive and insightful comments of two anonymous referees are gratefully acknowledged. Thanks to Philippe Le Billon, Matt Huber, and Max Ritts for guidance and encouraging discussion. All errors or misinterpretations are of the author’s sole responsibility.

Short Biography

Emilia Kennedy is a PhD candidate at the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her research is on the climate change-energy nexus, with a particular focus on the production of policy, regulation, and expertise on carbon capture and sequestration technologies. Her dissertation work is funded by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes

*Correspondence address: Emilia Kennedy, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada, 1984 West Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada. E-mail: emilia.kennedy@gmail.com

1 The largest single fuel share source. Adding coal/peat (at 20.0%), and natural gas (at 24.9%), fossil fuels account for 81.2% of total primary energy supply (International Energy Agency 2012). Over 80% of transportation (air, road, rail, and sea) is fueled by petroleum (World Petroleum Council 2009).

2 For example, in mid-2013, Guardian UK’s George Monbiot argued that Canada was“turning into a thuggish petro- state,”succumbing to the resource curse in the same ways as Nigeria or Saudi Arabia,“where you basically have a group of oligarchs who control the fossil fuel revenues and end up controlling the political system.”[Online]. Retrieved 27 September 2013 from: http://www.thegreeninterview.com/blog/monbiot-canada-has-become-thuggish-petro-state

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