Between 2015 and 2022, the Venezuelan economy was crumbling to an extent otherwise only seen in war-ridden economies. This collapse is mostly attributed to failed economic governance and the collapse of the oil sector, the most important contributor to the country’s foreign income. However, starting in 2017, the US imposed sectoral sanctions limiting financial transactions and oil and gold exports from Venezuela. The main debate about the effects of the US-imposed sanctions has been about their relative responsibility for the plummeting oil-production. This chapter instead discusses the impact of sanctions on the Venezuelan non-oil private sector. Sanctions affected companies through a credit crunch and severe limitations in access to supplies and markets. The sanctions have had the overall effect of informalizing and increasingly criminalizing the Venezuelan economy, while we also see the emergence of a new business elite with close ties to the government. We argue that in the case of Venezuela, sanctions were counterproductive as they had strong negative impacts on groups sharing the cause of those imposing the sanctions. In this case, US-imposed sanctions weakened and divided the private sector (as much as the Venezuelan opposition), which has been a main supporter of the political opposition supporting the US goal of regime change.

The final chapter generalizes the theoretical development from other chapters of this book to states in different regions. Venezuela, similar to Zimbabwe, has also experienced many similar dynamics: hyperinflation, decline of the formal sector, and while at one time having a similar if not better level of development to other countries in its region, has now fallen distinctly behind. However, similar to ZANU-PF and the large diamond production after 2006, the PSUV in Venezuela also had a source of funding to perpetuate its rule after 2012: alluvial gold. Eritrea also has some similarities to Venezuela and Zimbabwe, as they have produced and continued to discover a large amount of resource wealth in a single-party dominant political system. Nonetheless, Eritrea may have avoided some of the extreme pitfalls of Venezuela and Zimbabwe. The rapid increase in Zimbabwean diamond wealth and the resulting “opaque” institutions provide lessons for states with a large amount of resource wealth. This study illustrates that different types of resources offer some commonalities but also distinctly different challenges for the institutional trajectory of states and overall capacity.

In the first years of the twenty-first century, Presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush sought to develop a strategic and economic partnership. Yet by 2007 US–Russian relations were marked by friction, and after 2012 they deteriorated into bitter enmity. This chapter argues that blaming the degeneration of relations on the KGB background, paranoia, and imperial ambitions of Putin is too simple and one-sided. It shows that the United States also spurred the decline by supporting “color revolutions” in countries around Russia, promoting NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, pushing regime change in countries such as Syria, Libya, and Venezuela, and placing missile defense systems in Eastern Europe. Although Russia and the United States cooperated on a strategic arms reduction treaty, Russian entry into the World Trade Organization, and restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, conflict increasingly overshadowed such collaboration. That outcome was not inevitable. Instead, unwise policy choices led to clashes, dishonest statements eroded trust, needlessly provocative rhetoric exacerbated tensions, and media sensationalism inflamed antipathies between Americans and Russians.

This chapter delves into the multifaceted challenges and strategic approaches associated with energy pricing reform policies in the Gulf states, focusing on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. This chapter provides a rigorous analysis of the steps implemented until the early 2020s, investigating their multifaceted implications for economic development, environmental sustainability, and long-term fiscal stability. Furthermore, it critically examines the institutional barriers that could impede the comprehensive implementation of energy pricing reform.

Chapter 2 turns to loco-descriptive lyric poetry, read in the context of expanding highway infrastructure. It opens with a consideration of oil maps deposited in Ezra Pound’s Cantos, some of which critique the expropriation of former Ottoman territories by Anglo-American cartels. At that very locus, the Iraqi modernist poet Nazik al-Malā’ikah envisioned a very different kind of energy poetics, where the dividing line between oil’s extractive and consumptive spheres is decidedly smudged. In postcolonial counterpoint, the chapter closes by reading the automotive aesthetics in Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. The US highway system provides them with a conflicted linguistic resource, where the trace of oil’s violent extraction is smeared by the exhilarations of their lyrics.

This chapter takes a comparative approach to fossil fuel narratives to consider whether there are continuities between coal fiction and oil fiction in different periods of modernity and whether there are identifiable formal features that unify fossil fuel fiction. The chapter pursues these questions by examining correspondences between Helon Habila’s 2010 novel Oil on Water, which depicts the socio-environmental consequences of oil extraction in the Niger Delta, and several exemplary fictions of extraction written 100 or 150 years earlier, including Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), Joseph Conrad’s ‘Youth’ (1898) and Heart of Darkness (1899), and D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913). The commonalities that persist across the historical gap from coal fiction to oil fiction express distinguishing aspects of life under fossil fuels and constitutive elements of the writing of fossil fuels.

Are civil conflicts driven by resource crises? Research suggests that the root of conflict, in part, is explained when analyzing how economic deprivation drives groups into turmoil. Resource ownership, especially when unevenly distributed, often leads to violence. Research remains divided, however, on which resources drive violence, and the precise mechanisms that are involved. While many scholars argue that inequality drives violence, there exist many other factors that can help to explain civil wars. Evidence in this chapter suggests that while oil dependence may trigger conflicts, the duration of conflict is heavily influenced by factors beyond resources alone. Contrarily, agricultural commodities lack significant ties to civil war onset or duration, challenging our understanding of deprivation on a country-specific basis. Conflict is inextricably tied to maintaining political order, which for resource-rich countries hinges on interacting factors that governance structures facilitate. Further analysis on these topics – like the greed, state capacity, and grievance frameworks – offers strong insights into why violence emerges, giving multiple avenues and case studies as evidence for explaining civil wars overall.

The introductory chapter is a brief recap on the history and origins of wind power, from windmills in ancient times to today’s multi-megawatt turbines. Energy security has arguably been the historic driver for wind power, and it was a primary source of mechanical power until the advent of the Industrial revolution when it was superceded by coal and oil. The first electricity generating wind turbines were built in the late nineteenth centry, and the technology was pursued most vigorously in Denmark, a country with limited energy reserves: the role of this country in creating the modern wind turbine is described. The worldwide energy crisis of the 1970s brought wind power into the frame internationally, and the pivotal role of legislation under President Carter in expanding the market for wind energy in the US and elsewhere is outlined. Since then the rationale for wind power has expanded to include climate change and the technology has grown exponentially in terms of global installation of wind power and the physical size of wind turbines. The chapter concludes by introducing some of the technological steps that have enabled this process, and which are detailed in subsequent chapters.

This chapter explores the knowledge creation aspect of contemporary tax reforms in Nigeria. It offers a historical perspective on this process which lets us see today’s reforms not only as the re-creation of long-retreated systems of state taxation-led ordering, but against the backdrop of what intervened in the meantime – a four-decade late-twentieth-century interregnum where revenue reliance on oil profits created a very different distributive system of government-as-knowledge. Today’s system of tax-and-knowledge is not just reform but an inversion of what came before.

This chapter explains what has been meant by energy security in different periods and research contexts. It elaborates on the history of energy security research and creates a typology of internal and external dimensions of energy security. Subsequently, the chapter describes the research on the geopolitics of energy, focusing on the geopolitics of renewable energy and the different implications envisaged to unfold from the energy transition. The chapter ends with a brief summary of the EU’s approach to energy security. The chapter, thereby, creates a research context for the empirical analyses conducted in this book.

I introduce the topic, theme, central argument of the study, and its setting in Gulf petro-monarchies. I discuss the relevant scholarly literature, especially as it concerns ways in which religion (and specifically, Islam) has been used by political actors to advance particular interests. I provide a detailed elaboration of the argument and its various parts, as well as the method of analysis and justification for the choice of cases. I then discuss the context and cases in greater detail, with attention to key features of the historical development of the petro-monarchies from their pre-oil contact with the British imperial power, the arrival of oil companies, the importation of labor, the definition of borders and emergence of “modern” states. I illustrate noteworthy structural peculiarities of each of the four states. Finally, I outline the architecture of the manuscript, with an overview of each chapter.

What happens when we read the Irish literary canon for energy? We find numerous mentions of wind power, solar power, petrol, coal, peat, gas, and dung, and we find these energy resources and infrastructures trellised into plot lines and character arcs in some unexpected ways in Irish literature, from Joyce and Beckett to Heaney and McCormack. What emerges is a partial but suggestive cognitive map – of Irish energy economies, ecologies, and phenomenologies – that reveals Ireland’s unique energy signature and at the same time links Ireland to other imperial and global regimes of petromodernity.

A handful of governments can rewrite the rules for the global car industry, doubling the pace of the transition to zero-emission vehicles and radically cutting the costs. The COP26 campaign woke some countries up to this opportunity, while some of the world’s largest carmakers continued to fight back.

This chapter focuses on explaining the powerful logic of perilous promises and hidden information, as well as the dangers of low opportunity costs and attractive rents. We start out by explaining how in many circumstances peaceful bargaining succeeds in preventing hostilities – as the “peace dividend” creates a range of win–win bargaining solutions. Sadly, though, asymmetric information, commitment problems and political bias can lead to bargaining failure and the outbreak of war. Further, when the stakes of contest are high and opportunity costs low, the scope for peaceful bargaining shrinks. In particular, we show that being out of work and out of options makes somebody easy prey for rebel headhunters. This is exemplified by the dreadful consequences of bad harvests. Next, we examine the role of ethnic cleavages and how they tend to be exploited by divisive ethnic politics. Finally, the chapter discusses the curse of natural resources. Countries blessed with valuable soils tend to suffer from conflict, often leaving them poorer than countries lacking natural resources.

This chapter examines the role of oil in the early Soviet period, analysing the importance Lenin and Stalin attached to this commodity for domestic development and international trade.

During his visit to Ethiopia in 1968, the shah spoke to representatives of the Organisation of African Unity about his commitment to combatting colonialism and racial discrimination. It is surprising, therefore, that not long after the shah had returned to Iran, his diplomats began to discuss with South African diplomats the establishment of political relations between the two countries. The chapter explores the origins of this engagement and examines what drove the two sides together in this period. At the United Nations and other international forums, the shah and his diplomats spoke out in harsh terms against discrimination, racism and human rights violations in Southern Africa. But in spite of this public condemnation, the shah developed and maintained strong security and economic ties with apartheid South Africa. The chapter questions to what extent the shah was able to maintain his position as a champion of independence and human dignity, while enjoying such friendly ties with the apartheid regime.

This chapter introduces topics that extend beyond the electricity market, and focuses in particular on oil, natural gas, and biofuels. Short- and long-term equilibriums are analyzed in the context of oil markets. Monopolies, cartels, and the model of the dominant firm are also analyzed in the context of the oil market. The tax incidence problem is formulated as an equivalent optimization problem and analyzed in the context of natural gas markets. One-way substitutability is analyzed in the context of biofuel markets, and the tortilla crisis is illustrated through an optimization model. Hotelling’s rule is stated and proven by considering a dynamic optimization model of a finite nonrenewable resource that is gradually depleted over time while satisfying a price-elastic demand.