Geography

▪   One of the most important aspects of the rise of post-1945 global capitalism has been the call for transnational corporations to conform to basic human rights principles. This chapter reviews the efforts within the oil industry (with a particular focus on their operations in the less-developed countries) to develop corporate social responsibility and the related development of voluntary, legal, and statutory programs by governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), civic groups, and multilateral agencies to ensure that the oil industry is compliant with important human, social, political, and environmental rights. In reviewing these developments, I outline the current political economy of the oil industry, new bodies of research on the relations between oil, violence, and human rights violations, which include case studies of the human rights records of transnational and joint-venture oil operations.

Watts Résumé M. J. Watts-Économie politique des accidents climatiques: perspective villageoise sur la sécheresse et l'économie paysanne dans une région semi-aride d'Afrique occidentale. A partir d'une analyse des conséquences sociales de la récente sécheresse en pays hausa, une critique de l'approche purement géographique de l'étude des accidents climatiques et de leurs effets sur les sociétés qui en sont victimes. Même la description en termes d'écologie sociale, d'adaptation collective aux contraintes du milieu physique, doit être replacée dans le contexte plus général du système de reproduction de la société en cause. Dans le cas d'espèce étudié, la vulnérabilité des sociétés paysannes hausa résulte du conflit entre deux modes de production, le passage d'un mode précapitaliste local à un mode capitaliste global. L'accident climatique n'est pas « naturel » : s'il agit comme détonateur d'une crise, celle-ci est, en fait, le résultat d'une incapacité du système socio-économique à répondre aux conditions écologiques.

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Alternative non-Persian Gulf sources of oil-supply are central to American geostrategic interests in the period since 2001. Vice President Cheney's National Energy Strategy Report in 2001 bemoaned a dependency on foreign powers that "do not have America's interests at heart". Africa has emerged as one of the major new sources of US oil and gas supply. If Africa is not as well endowed in hydrocarbons (both oil and gas) as the Persian Gulf states, the West African Gulf of Guinea has nonetheless become the subject of fierce competition by energy companies over the continent's copious reserves of natural gas and its sweet light oil. IHS Energy-one of the oil industry's major consulting companies-expects African oil production, especially along the Atlantic littoral, to attract huge exploration investment contributing over 30% of world liquid hydrocarbon production by 2010. Over the last five years when new oilfield discoveries were a scarce commodity, Africa contributed one in every four barrels of new petroleum discovered outside of Northern America. This article addresses the new scramble for Africa in the context of a new conjuncture of global forces: military neoliberalism and the Global War on Terror (GWOT). I lay out the broad landscape of oil production on the continent and the extent to which, in the wake of a catastrophic two decades of neoliberal structural adjustment, investment in oil and gas dominates direct foreign investment in Africa. I then turn to the specific case of Nigeria-the most important producer of oil and gas on the continent and the petro-state of most geostrategic concern to the US-and use it as an exemplar of the failure of oil-based development. Central to this analysis is the emergence of new forms of armed insurgency in the oil producing Niger Delta that has rendered the entire area virtually ungovernable, increasingly so since the emergence in late 2005 of a new armed group MEND (the Movement for the Emancipation of the Nigeria Delta). I conclude with an account of the dynamics of this ungovernability-a pattern replicated throughout the Gulf of Guinea-and how this instability feeds into an American imperial vision to militarize the region. Zusammenfassung: Imperial Oil: Anatomie eines nigerianischen Öl-Aufstandes. Seit 2001 sind Ölquellen, die nicht am Persischen Golf gelegen sind, von zentraler Bedeutung für die US-amerikanischen geostrategischen Interessen. In seiner 2001 vorgelegten National Energy Strategy bedauerte Vizepräsident Cheney die Abhängigkeit der USA von anderen Staaten, denen "nicht die US-amerikanischen Interessen am Herzen liegen". Afrika ist inzwischen eine der wichtigsten neuen Quellen für US-Öl and Gas. Auch wenn Afrika nicht mit so viel Kohlenwasserstoffenergieträgern (sowohl Öl als auch Gas) ausgestattet ist wie die Staaten am Persischen Golf, so ist doch der westafrikanische Golf von Guinea zum Objekt des harten Wettbewerbs zwischen Energiefirmen geworden, die dort um die Kontrolle über die reichlichen Reserven an Gas und Öl ringen. IHS Energy-eine der wichtigsten Beratungsfirmen der Ölindustrie-erwartet, dass für die afrikanische Ölproduktion, insbesondere entlang der Afrikanischen Küste, riesige Investitionen für die Erforschung neuer Quellen getätigt werden, so dass bis zum Jahr 2010 30% der weltweiten Öl-und Gasproduktion aus diesen Ländern kommen werden. In den letzten fünf Jahren waren neu entdeckte Ölfelder ein seltenes Gut. Dennoch kamen von vier Barrels außerhalb von Nordamerika neu entdeckten Öls jeweils einer aus Afrika. Dieser Artikel beschäftigt sich mit diesem neuen Kampf um Afrika im Kontext von einer Reihe von globalen Tendenzen: Militärischer Neoliberalismus und der "War on Terror" bildeten den Hintergrund für die Ölproduktion auf diesem Kontinent. Zugleich dominieren, nach zwei katastrophalen Jahrzehnten von neoliberalen Strukturanpassungsprogrammen, Investitionen im Bereich Öl und Gas die ausländischen Direktinvestitionen in Afrika. Danach wende ich mich dem spezifischen Fall von Nigeria zu-dem wichtigsten afrikanischen Produzenten von Öl und Gas und dem Ölstaat, der in den Mittelpunkt US-amerikanischer geostrategischer Besorgnis gerückt ist. Ich zeige am Beispiel von Nigeria das Versagen einer auf Öl gegründeten Entwicklungsstrategie auf. Von zentraler Bedeutung für diese Analyse ist dabei das Erscheinen von neuen Formen bewaffneter Aufstände im ölproduzierenden Nigerdelta, das die ganze Gegend praktisch unregierbar gemacht hat, und dies in zunehmendem Maße seit dem Auftreten einer neuen bewaffneten Gruppe, der MEND (Movement for the Emancipation of the Nigeria Delta). Abschließend betrachte ich die Dynamiken dieser Unregierbarkeit-einem Muster, das sich am Golf von Guinea mehrfach wiederholt-und erkläre wie diese Instabilität in eine US-amerikanische imperiale Vision passt, die vorsieht, die Region zu militarisieren.

This article traces the emergence of an “oil insurgency” in the Niger Delta, Nigeria. A key concept deployed in the analysis is the oil complex, understood as a sort of corporate enclave economy and also a center of political and economic calculation expressed through the operations of a set of local, national, and transnational forces that can only be dubbed as imperial oil. The operations of the oil complex under conditions of U.S. military neoliberalism create the violent and unstable spaces that David Harvey identifies as “accumulation by dispossession”. The insurgency is understood in terms of a deep history of political and economic marginalization and deepening political mobilization and militancy within the Niger Delta. What the oil complex has thereby produced is a fragmented polity with parcellized sovereignty rather than a robust, modern oil nation.

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A general trend in the modern world is that the populist forces gain better electoral results and greater relevance in the management of public goods. Every political system is based on a particular political culture. The advancement of populism in democratic political systems may point to serious social changes that condition the changing of political culture. This article will deal with the exploration of relations between capitalism as a socioeconomic formation, political culture as the foundation of the political system and populism as a form of governance.

In Globalising Food, Goodman and Watts present a fascinating collection of essays that deal with the changing character of agriculture and the food industry in the light of recent re-organisations of the global economy. More specifically, as the editors make clear in their introductory chapter, the aim is to think through the ways in which agrarian questions posed by writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (particularly those outlined by Karl Kautsky) have some resonance in contemporary worlds of food production. As such, the book seeks to address concerns of the changing relationship between rural locales of production and the increasingly globalised markets they serve, the impact of developments in technology upon agriculture and agro-industry and the changing face of class and politics in agricultural regions. This parallel drawn between the shape of today's agro-food systems and the dilemmas faced by those at the end of the nineteenth century lends a very sharp analytical edge to the collection as a whole, even though the theme is drawn upon unevenly by the various contributors. The book is very effectively structured by the editors into six sections, each containing two or three chapters that speak primarily to a particular strand of contemporary agrarian questions, and each rounding off with a brief commentary by authors who both critique these chapters and broaden the discussion into wider conceptual concerns and research agendas. Outlining, first, the substantive concerns of the book, the collection begins with three essays on 'Institutions, embeddedness and agrarian trajectories'. These explore alternative trajectories of the organisation of milk production in southern Brazil (Wilkinson), different paths of rural industrialisation in South Africa (Hart), and the dynamics behind the growth of the knitwear industry in Tiripur, India (Chari). The focus here is mainly upon the active role played by particular farms and organisations in pathways of agricultural and rural development in different contexts. The second section takes up the theme of 'Restructuring, industry, and regional dynamics'. As is noted by the commentator on this section, FitzSimmons, the two chapters evaluate the fortunes of different kinds of region as a result of global restructuring; the first looking at the supra-national region of the Caribbean, and the second providing a remarkable analysis of the subnational region of Iowa, USA, in light of the restructuring of pork production. While these first two parts of the collection are organised to focus on slightly different categorical concerns, the overlap between them is evident, hence drawing out the interlinkages between institutions and regions in processes of agrarian restructuring. In Part III, the terrain of geographical focus shifts to the creation of value in systems of food production which provide for increasingly globalised markets. Taking the varied case studies of Brazil, the Caribbean and the UK, Marsden demonstrates how quality, value and safety are socially, technically and politically constructed. Boyd and Watts then use the following chapter to examine the practices of just-in-time production systems in the American chicken industry since the Second World War, drawing particularly on the analytical resonance with Kautsky's agrarian question and establishing the centrality of power to the construction of quality in this industry. Part IV provocatively presents two very different approaches to, and case studies of, power and regulation in the food system. Wells adopts traditional theories of agrarian political economy to make sense of conflict in the strawberry producing regions of California. In contrast, Ward and Lowe use methods of actor-network theory to study the use of bureaucratic organisational practices in the regulation of pollution discharged by dairy farms in the UK. The fifth section of the collection also embodies conceptual contrasts between the two chapters, concerned this time with 'Transnational capital and local responses'. While Gouveia asserts the importance of relating the complexities of agency back to large-scale structures in the assessment of the impact of globalisation and restructuring on Venezuelan production systems, Whatmore and Thorne maintain an emphasis on the role of agency itself in simply lengthening networks in the context of fairly traded coffee. The final part of the book rounds off the collection by focusing on 'Nature, sustainability and the agrarian question', with Redclift thinking through the contrasting ways in which different schools of thought deal with concerns of sustainability, and Buttel looking at the agency of social movements in the forging of agro-food systems and agricultural sustainability in the US. Neatly bringing the discussion back round to the focal point of Part I, the commentary on Part VI by Le Heron and Roche highlights the centrality of particular institutions in the construction of sustainable agriculture. The six parts of the book work well as coherent themes, which often interlock with one another in productive ways. Added to this, the commentaries also make for interesting reading, provoking the reader to think more broadly about the

The focus of this article is two home-grown insurgencies which arose in Nigeria after the return to civilian rule in 1999: Boko Haram in the Muslim northeast, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) in the oil producing and Christian southeast. The two insurgencies arose, I argue, from frontier spaces in which the limits of state authority and legitimacy intersected with a profound crisis of authority and rule on the one hand, and the political economy of radical precarity on the other. Boko Haram and MEND share family resemblances-they are products of the same orderings of power-despite the obvious fact that one is draped in the language of religion and restoration (but as we shall see modernity) and the insistence that Nigeria should become transformed into a true Islamic state, while the other is secular and civic (and also modern) wishing to expand the boundaries of citizenship through a new sort of federalism. There are striking commonalities in the social composition of the armed groups and their internal dynamics; each is deposited at the nexus of the failure of local government, customary institutions, and the security forces (the police and the military task forces in particular). Each, nevertheless, is site specific; a cultural articulation of dispossession politics rooted in regional traditions of warfare, in particular systems of religiosity, and very different sorts of social structure and identity, and very different ecologies (the semi arid savannas of the north, and the creeks and forest of the Niger delta). In both cases state coercion and despotism and the ethicomoral decrepitude of the state figures centrally as does the politics of resentment that each condition generates among a large, alienated but geographically rooted group of precarious classes.

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This paper is one of a series aimed at deepening the World Bank’s capacity to follow through on commitments made in response to the World Development Report (WDR) 2011, which gave renewed prominence to the nexus between conflict, security, and development. Nigeria is a remarkable illustration of how deeply intractable the cycle of poverty, conflict, and fragility can become when tied to the ferocious battles associated with the political economy of oil. This paper places the corpus of analytic and programmatic work concerning institutional reform in conversation with a now substantial body of work on resource politics and most especially, the debate over the politico-institutional character (sometimes called political settlements or pacting arrangements associated with the order of power) and reform landscape of the petro-state. Recent institution reform policy writing appears to have little to say about the political and economic conditions in which crises and institutional disjunc...

My emphasize on Bohle’s distinctive approach to vulnerability is related to the arc of  my broad concern in this contribution, namely how vulnerability has since his writings on the topic in the early 1990s has become attached to three other keywords – or concepts – in novel ways that dominate both current analytical and prescriptive work across many domains from global poverty to conflict to urban governance to global pandemics and financial crashes: namely security, resilience and risk. Take for example, the new book by the President of the Rockefeller Foundation, Judith Rodin, entitled The Resilience Dividend .  She has, according to the blurb on the back cover, recalibrated the foundation to address the disruptions, shocks and stresses associated with our interconnected world. In this age of complexity says Rodin, the ability to quickly and effectively bounce back is an urgent social and economic issue.  The five characteristics of resilience (2015:14) – awareness, diversity, in...

Per una storia del tempo presente. Rivista semestrale dell'Istituto storico di Modena direttore: luca baldissara redazione: giuliano albarani, lorenzo bertucelli, elisabetta bini, luigi cavallaro, laura cerasi, stefano gallo, vito francesco gironda, vincenzo lavenia, michele nani, stefano petrungaro, michela ponzani, giovanni ruocco, simone selva, luca scuccimarra, marica tolomelli direttore responsabile: federica pinelli autorizzazione del tribunale di modena n. 667 del 13 marzo 1981 redazione e amministrazione: istituto storico di modena via ciro menotti, 137 41100 modena tel.