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28 Nov 09

Gertrude Himmelfarb - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Todd Gitlin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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26 Nov 09

YouTube - Conversations with History: Michael Watts

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watts geography globalization

min 18-22 - Watt's description of the 60s as a global phenomena. - pickinjava on 2009-11-26
min 22-30 - the place of geography and the ignorance of geography in the U.S. - pickinjava on 2009-11-26
min 30: manifestations of space: cartography-how to transform one space into another (a territory into a map) ; types of space (urban, local, regional); how territories take on different sorts of meanings (state, nation) - pickinjava on 2009-11-26
min 30: longstanding commitment to space in its various iterations. - pickinjava on 2009-11-26
32, 35: Manuel Castells "black hole" - pickinjava on 2009-11-26
37: anti-globalization movements. - pickinjava on 2009-11-26
39: Using Nigeria oil money to purchase consent from ethnic minorities. Not productive uses, which therefore produces growing resentment. - pickinjava on 2009-11-26
42: "global forces articulating with local forces." - pickinjava on 2009-11-26
42: Edward Said "[violence as] struggles over geography, where these struggles involve not only guns and bullets but also symbols, imagining and meanings." - pickinjava on 2009-11-26
45: E.P. Thompson working class "experiences of class" - pickinjava on 2009-11-26
54: Malthus key theorist because of connection between population and development. - pickinjava on 2009-11-26
54: genealogies of Marx and Malthus. - pickinjava on 2009-11-26
48: development "...dialogue and negotiation but we should always remember that development's primary reality remains struggle, strife and conflict..." - pickinjava on 2009-11-27

21 May 09

Massive Casualties Feared in Nigerian Military Attack on Niger Delta Villages

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niger delta michael watts sandy cioffi petroleum industry nigeria shell

23 Aug 08

LRB | Retort : Blood for Oil?

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iraq petroleum war us intervention watts nitzan bichler

22 Aug 08

bnarchives - The Scientist and the Church

The April 21, 2005 issue of the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS carried a lead article titled ‘Blood for Oil?’ The paper is attributed to a group of writers and activists – Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts – who identify themselves by the collective name ‘Retort.’ In their article, the authors advance a supposedly new explanation for the wars in the Middle East.

Much of their explanation – including both theory and fact – is plagiarized. It is cut and pasted, almost ‘as is,’ from our own work. The primary source is ‘The Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition,’ a 71 page chapter in our book THE GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ISRAEL (Pluto 2002). The authors also seem inspired, incognito, by our more recent papers, including ‘It’s All About Oil’ (2003), ‘Clash of Civilization or Capital Accumulation?’ (2004), ‘Beyond Neoliberalism’ (2004) and ‘Dominant Capital and the New Wars’ (2004).

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The April 21, 2005 issue of the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS carried a lead article titled ‘Blood for Oil?’ The paper is attributed to a group of writers and activists – Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts – who identify themselves by the collective name ‘Retort.’ In their article, the authors advance a supposedly new explanation for the wars in the Middle East.
Much of their explanation – including both theory and fact – is plagiarized. It is cut and pasted, almost ‘as is,’ from our own work. The primary source is ‘The Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition,’ a 71 page chapter in our book THE GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ISRAEL (Pluto 2002). The authors also seem inspired, incognito, by our more recent papers, including ‘It’s All About Oil’ (2003), ‘Clash of Civilization or Capital Accumulation?’ (2004), ‘Beyond Neoliberalism’ (2004) and ‘Dominant Capital and the New Wars’ (2004).

29 Jul 08

Africa: The Next Victim in Our Quest for Cheap Oil | ForeignPolicy | AlterNet

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michael watts nigeria oil industry petroleum petro-capitalism complex curse resource

What have you learned from your experience on the book?
MW: I have learned several things. The first is that oil is not always a curse, meaning that oil dependency does not always produce poverty or conflict or corruption. It did not in Norway or the U.K. But vast oil wealth captured by oil-producing governments always places the question of how that wealth is to be allocated and spent at the center. If oil is inserted into a corrupt federal system, then the combination of non-transparent Big Oil and authoritarian Big Government produces a perfect storm of violence, corruption, ecological destruction and poverty. And this storm will have a huge blowback.

11 May 08

Monthly Review September 2006 Michael Watts ¦ Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispossession and the Scramble for Africa

In reality what is on offer is an even bleaker world of military neoliberalism. At one pole are enclaves of often militarily fortified accumulation (of which the oil complex is the paradigmatic case) and the violent, sometimes chaotic, markets so graphica

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angola development empire history imperialism kenya nigeria oil us michael watts compliance human rights

Although Africa is not as well endowed in hydrocarbons (both oil and gas) as
the Gulf states, the continent “is all set to balance power,” and as
a consequence it is “the subject of fierce competition by energy
companies.” 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 percent of world liquid hydrocarbon production by 2010.
Over the last five years when new oilfield discoveries were scarce, one in
every four barrels of new petroleum discovered outside of Northern America was
found in Africa. A new scramble is in the making. The battleground consists of
the rich African oilfields
Africa is, according to the
intelligence community, the “new frontier” in the fight against
revolutionary Islam. Energy security, it turns out, is a terrifying hybrid of
the old and the new: primitive accumulation and American militarism coupled to
the war on terror.
15 more annotations...
- To see the African crisis, however, as a moral or ethical failure on the
  part of the “international community” (not least in its failure to
  meet the pledges promised by the Millennium Development Goals of reducing
  poverty by half by 2015) is only a partial truth. The real crisis of Africa is
  that after twenty-five years of brutal neoliberal reform, and savage World Bank
  structural adjustment and IMF stabilization, African development has failed
  catastrophically.
- The pillaging and privatization of the
  state—whatever its African “pathologies”—and the African
  commons is the most extraordinary spectacle of accumulation by dispossession,
  all made in the name of foreign assistance. The involution of the African city,
  notes Davis, has as its corollary not an insurgent lumpenproletariat but rather
  a vast political universe of Islamism and Pentecostalism. It is this occult
  world of invisible powers—whether populist Islam in Kano or witchcraft in
  Soweto—that represents the most compelling ideological legacy of
  neoliberal utopianism in Africa.
- The African accumulation crisis, and the dynamics of capital and trade
  flows, are in practice complex and uneven. In addition to oil (and the very few
  cases of manufacturing growth in places like Mauritius which are little more
  than national export-processing platforms), the other source of economic
  dynamism is the (uneven) emergence of global value chains. This can be seen
  especially in relation to high-value agricultures (fresh fruits and vegetables)
  in South Africa, flowers in Kenya, green beans in Senegal. Such forms of
  contract production, typically buyer-driven commodity chains in which retailers
  exert enormous power, have created islands of agrarian capitalism that
  contribute to and deepen patterns of existing inequality across Africa and
  further the interests of business elites, which are often not African. The
  deepening of commodification in the countryside in tandem with demographic
  pressures (caused as much by civil war and displacement as high fertility
  regimes) has made land struggles a vivid part of the new landscape of African
  development.
- It is no surprise that against this backdrop the development establishment
  flails around wildly. On the one side stands former World Bank economist
  William Easterly for whom all aid (“planning”) has been a total (and
  unaccountable) failure.
- On the
  other stands the one-man industry otherwise known as Jeffrey Sachs who seeks to
  expand foreign aid—$30 billion a year for Africa—and to
  initiate a Global Compact by which “the rich will help save the
  poor,” who are as much hampered by poor physical geography as governance
  failure.
- In reality what is on offer is an even bleaker world of military
  neoliberalism. At one pole are enclaves of often militarily fortified
  accumulation (of which the oil complex is the paradigmatic case) and the
  violent, sometimes chaotic, markets so graphically depicted in the documentary
  film Darwin’s Nightmare. At the other pole are the black holes of
  recession, withdrawal, and uneven commodification. These complex trajectories
  of accumulation are dominated at this moment by the centrality of extraction
  and a return to primary commodity production.
- All African governments have organized their oil sectors through state oil
  companies that have some forms of collaborative venture with the major
  transnational oil companies (customarily operated through oil leases and joint
  memoranda of understanding).
- In general the international oil companies
  operating in Africa have production share arrangements with state oil companies
  (Nigeria is the exception which operates largely through joint ventures).
- The nightmarish legacy of oil politics must be traced back to the heady boom
  days of the 1970s. The boom detonated a huge influx of petro-dollars and
  launched an ambitious (and largely autocratic) state-led modernization program.
  Central to the operations of the new oil economy was the emergence of an
  “oil complex” that overlaps with, but is not identical to, the
  “petro-state.” The latter is comprised of several key institutional
  elements: (1) a statutory monopoly over mineral exploitation, (2) a
  nationalized (state) oil company that operates through joint ventures with oil
  majors who are granted territorial concessions (blocs), (3) the security
  apparatuses of the state (often working in a complementary fashion with the
  private security forces of the companies) who ensure that costly investments
  are secured, (4) the oil producing communities themselves within whose
  customary jurisdiction the wells are located, and (5) a political mechanism by
  which oil revenues are distributed.
- The oil revenue distribution question—whether in a federal system like
  Nigeria or in an autocratic monarchy like Saudi Arabia—is an indispensable
  part of understanding the combustible politics of imperial oil.
- there has been a process of radical fiscal
  centralism in which the oil-producing states (composed of ethnic minorities)
  have lost and the non-oil producing ethnic majorities have gained—by fair
  means or foul.
- the oil complex. First, the geo-strategic interest in oil
  means that military and other forces are part of the local oil complex. Second,
  local and global civil society enters into the oil complex either through
  transnational advocacy groups concerned with human rights and the transparency
  of the entire oil sector, or through local social movements and NGOs fighting
  over the consequences of the oil industry and the accountability of the
  petro-state. Third, the transnational oil business—the majors, the
  independents, and the vast service industry—are actively involved in the
  process of local development through community development, corporate social
  responsibility and stakeholder inclusion. Fourth, the inevitable struggle over
  oil wealth—who controls and owns it, who has rights over it, and how the
  wealth is to be deployed and used—inserts a panoply of local political
  forces (ethnic militias, paramilitaries, separatist movements, and so on) into
  the operations of the oil complex (the conditions in Colombia are an exemplary
  case). In some circumstances oil operations are the object of civil wars.
  Fifth, multilateral development agencies (the IMF and the IBRD) and financial
  corporations like the export credit agencies appear as key “brokers”
  in the construction and expansion of the energy sectors in oil-producing states
  (and latterly the multilaterals are pressured to become the enforcers of
  transparency among governments and oil companies). And not least, there is the
  relationship between oil and the shady world of drugs, illicit wealth (oil
  theft for example), mercenaries, and the black economy.
- oil complex is a sort of corporate enclave economy but also a center of
  political and economic calculation that can only be understood through the
  operation of a set of local, national, and transnational forces that can be
  dubbed as “imperial oil.” The struggle for resource control that has
  taken center stage o
- The current crisis points to the fact that the oil-producing region in
  Nigeria now stands at the center of Nigerian politics—for four reasons.
  First, the efforts led by a number of Niger Delta states for “resource
  control” expanded access to and control over oil and oil revenues. Second,
  there was the struggle for self-determination of minority peoples in the region
  and the clamor for a sovereign national conference to rewrite the
  constitutional basis of the federation itself. Third, there is a crisis of rule
  in the region as a number of state and local governments are rendered helpless
  by militant youth movements, growing insecurity, and ugly intra-community,
  inter-ethnic, and state violence which—as the recent events point
  out—can threaten the flow of oil and the much vaunted energy security of
  the United States. And not least, there is the emergence of a so-called
  South-South Alliance making for a powerful coalition of small and hitherto
  politically marginalized oil producing states (Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River,
  Delta, Ondo, and Rivers) capable of challenging the ruling ethnic majorities
  (the Hausa, the Yoruba, and the Ibo) in the run-up to the 2007 elections.
- Not surprisingly the deadly operations of corporate oil, autocratic
  petro-states, and the violent potentialities of the oil complex have forced the
  question of transparency and accountability of oil operations onto the
  international agenda. Tony Blair’s Extractive Industries Transparency
  Initiative, the IMF’s oil diagnostics program, and the Soros
  Foundation’s Revenue Watch are all (voluntary) efforts to provide a veneer
  of respectability to a rank and turbulent industry. But the real action lies
  elsewhere. The danger is that the ongoing U.S. militarization of the region
  could amplify the presence of mercenaries and paramilitaries, creating
  conditions not unlike those in Colombia.

31 Jan 07

Antimonies of Community

Community is a fundamental modality for the conduct of modern politics. This paper explores the antinomies of community in an oil nation: Nigeria. Oil states stand in relation to a particular sort of capitalism (what I call petro-capitalism) . . .

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michael watts petroleum capitalism petro-capitalism nigerdelta nigeria africa oil industry politics for:larsj8 complex for:alancordova

The sinister Political Life of Community Economies of Violence - Watts

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michael watts oil industry multinational petroleum corporations africa nigeria nigerdelta corporate led globalization for:larsj8

ope-l-0312: (OPE-L) Economies of Violence More Oil, More Blood

Petroleum in the Nigerian context has produced a combustible politics marked by violence. Rather than see oil-dependency as a source of predation or as a source of state military power, this paper explores how oil capitalism produces particular sorts of e

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nigeria nigerdelta oil industry politics repression oppression multinational petroleum corporations africa michael watts governable spaces governmentality for:larsj8