Search

Is there an association between oil and terrorism? If so, how are they linked to each other? While there are literature and anecdotes about oil money financing terrorism, this article identifies three mechanisms through which oil is linked to terrorism: funding, targeting, and motivating. Oil-producing countries are prone to terrorism because they are important targets of terrorists who may attack oil facilities to cause greater impact and to harm powerful countries’ overseas interests and also because oil often generates grievances or greed among local people who may in turn engage in terrorist activities. Using data on terrorist incidents and oil income, this article finds a strong, positive relationship between oil and terrorism. To test the mechanisms, this article uses both large-N and small-N data analyses, and the findings suggest that while all three mechanisms appear to explain the oil–terrorism linkage, the targeting and motivating mechanisms are more likely than the funding mechanism. Oil-producing countries have a higher tendency to sponsor terrorism, but no direct evidence indicates oil money flowing to terrorists except for money from kidnapping or extorting oil workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New research has emerged that suggests there is a troubling relationship between elections and civil wars; primarily, elections increase the risk of civil war recurrence. I investigate this relationship further by examining the economic factors associated with the connection between postwar elections and peace failure. Specifically, how does the presence of oil wealth impact the risk posed by postwar elections. Drawing on previous findings in the democratization literature, I suggest the immobility of oil wealth dramatically increases the stakes associated with postwar elections. As postwar elites use irregular electioneering to consolidate their control of oil revenue, it increases the incentives for postwar opposition to use violence as a means to achieve their objectives. Using post-civil war data from 1945 to 2005, I demonstrate that postwar elections that occur in oil-rich economies dramatically decrease the durability of postwar peace. Once controlling for petro elections, though, I demonstrate that subsequent postwar elections actually increase the durability of postwar peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses association of petroleum and culture in Warren Cariou's essays "Petrography" and “Tarhands: A Messy Manifesto". It challenges legitimacy of petromodernity and scientific rationality. Topics include effect of petromodernity on society, insensible realism in Cariou's work, and environmental damage, sequestration and waste.

A literary criticism of the Three Californias Triptych including the "Wild Shore" (1984), "The Gold Coast" (1988), and "Pacific Edge" (1990)by Kim Stanley Robinson is presented. It examines petrofictional and science-fictional qualities of novels. The novels deal with nuclear destruction and petrocultures, infratructural development and lifestyle and history California, respectively.

Why do members of some ethnic groups rebel against the state? One approach holds that groups subject to exclusion from national politics engage in armed conflict. We theorize that the presence of resource wealth moderates the effect of political exclusion. Ethnic groups subject to exclusion whose settlement area includes oil wealth are more likely to experience the onset of armed conflict than groups experiencing exclusion alone. We depart from the convention of cross-national analysis to examine subnational, geocoded units of analysis—ethnic group settlement areas—to better capture the impact of natural resource distribution. Using data on ethnic group political exclusion derived from the Ethnic Power Relations database and geo-coded indicators, we conduct a series of logistic regression analyses for the years 1946 to 2005. We find that exclusion alone increase the likelihood of conflict, while the presence of oil wealth further raises the risk of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This article examines the genealogies of the Ilaje and the narrative of belonging that reinforces claims to ownership of land and natural resources such as oil. The article maps [...]

Can the discovery of petroleum resources increase the risk of civil conflict even before their exploitation? We argue that it can, but only in poorer states where oil revenues threaten to alter the balance of power between regimes and their opponents, rendering bargains in the present obsolete in the future. We develop our claims via a game-theoretic model of bargaining between a government and a rebel group, where decisions over war and peace occur in the shadow of increasing oil wealth that both increases national wealth and shifts relative power in the government's favor. To test the model's main hypothesis, we leverage data on newly discovered oil deposits as an indicator of the state's expected future power resources. Our argument has important implications for the literature on credible commitments, power shifts, and violent conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the effects of colonisation, materials such as food, tools and medicines are appropriated and transformed to appeal to different consumer groups creating new points of interaction and combined histories. These products flow through colonial pathways between indigenous peoples and Europeans and create a connection in which interactions are inevitable. In Australia, dugong oil was a product that traversed the spatial and racial divide being consumed by both Aboriginal and white people. I argue that whether used as a 'scientific' medicine bought at the local chemist, a detested medicine enforced by colonial authorities, or a remedy passed down through generations, the story of dugong oil uncovers the duality of objects and complicates the history of Aboriginal-European interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely recognised that the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ fluctuated following the Second World War. A “Persistent rivalry” was especially evident in policy towards the Middle East and its oil. Immediately after the war, the American attitude to Palestine seemed to complicate British policy. Events in Iran also reflected the clash between the British imperative to protect its national and imperial interests in the region on the one hand, and the American preoccupation with the Cold War and containment on the other. The subsequent differences over Egypt/ Nasser are a matter of public record as are the problems which arose over the British withdrawal from “East of Suez”. Perhaps the very closeness of the relationship between the UK and the US served to heighten expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The ‘Yom Kippur War’ of October 1973 is thought to have triggered one of the most serious rifts in the history of the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’. The established view of events has been shaped most successfully by the writings of Henry Kissinger, US Secretary of State and National Security Advisor (NSA) at the time. However, this article argues that the reasons for Britain's reservations were understandable and that Kissinger's criticisms were often an overreaction, exacerbated by existing diplomatic tensions. Meanwhile, the international oil crisis, a concomitant development of the conflict, provided an opportunity for the two allies to resume confidential cooperation in a manner befitting ‘special relations’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The spectre of American decline is once again animating both observers and practitioners of US foreign policy. The global financial crisis, a faltering American economy and continued costly and controversial military engagements overseas have been presented as conclusive proof that American foreign policy will soon lack the resources needed to sustain its previous international hegemony. Arguments of domestic weakness have been linked to analyses of the economic vitality of America's competitors to demonstrate a seemingly watertight case for relative decline. The inexorable rise of China has been presented from various quarters as evidence that the American era will soon be drawing to a close. Yet, such declinist arguments continue to suffer from fundamental weaknesses, overestimating the likely future strength of America's rivals while concurrently downplaying the capacity of the US to rejuvenate its economy and thus revivify its liberal universalist creed. The most interesting development in this regard has been the sudden resurgence of the US energy sector. Written off less than a decade ago as being in terminal decline, the American oil and gas industry has staged a remarkable recovery. Vast reserves of shale gas and accompanying tight oil offer the potential to aid the revival of the American economy, with some forecasts pointing to US energy self-sufficiency within two decades. Notions of US relative decline may yet prove premature. The geopolitical impact of American energy self-sufficiency is likely to be very significant, making an important contribution to a reversal of the US trade deficit, a revival of America's industrial base, and the possibility of a corresponding relative decline in power for conventional fossil fuel exporters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In seeking to maintain their power, many African regimes rely on strategies of extraversion, converting their dependent relations with the external world into domestic resources and authority. This article assesses the relationship between extraversion and political liberalization, a dimension of African democratization that has been somewhat underappreciated in recent empirical studies. African countries vary in their extraversion portfolios, or the dimensions of their relations to the outside world that they can instrumentalize, and these variations correspond both to different degrees of vulnerability to the demands of foreign donors and to different preferences from the donors themselves. We find four quantitative measures of extraversion vulnerability to be statistically associated with the initial transitions of the 1989–1995 period and with the ‘consolidations’ at different levels of democracy observable between 1995 and 2011. These findings shed new light on both democratic and hybrid regime trajectories in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Theoretical models do not reach an unambiguous conclusion concerning the effects of natural resource endowment on the duration of dictatorial regimes. We assess empirically, for the first time, the relationship between oil endowment and the duration of autocratic leaders. Using a dataset comprising information for 106 dictators, our empirical analysis indicates that dictators in countries which are relatively better endowed in terms of oil tend to stay longer in office. The result is robust to changes in the definition of dictatorial regimes and in the specifications used in the econometric analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oil vulnerability is likely to impact upon one group of citizens - children - in critical ways, since children have borne a special brunt of a car-dependent culture. Children's freedom to explore the city has been curtailed, in large part because of the perceived risks of traffic and 'stranger danger'. Children are over-represented in road fatalities involving cars and pedestrians and cyclists. Children are also subject to chronic conditions associated with inactivity such as obesity. In order to address this situation, advocates of child-friendly cities have suggested measures to increase children's independent mobility (CIM) and encourage children's active transport. In this paper, we argue that there is a conflation of CIM and children's active transport, which perpetuates the separation of children from adults. To take both children's rights and desires seriously, as well as to take into account the concerns of parents, the active transport needs of both groups must be addressed simultaneously. One cost effective and immediately available strategy is to reduce car speeds in order to minimise the damage to all users of active transport. A holistic understanding of urban transport and children shows that reducing speeds produces the co-benefits of increased health and reduced reliance on oil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our goal is to show that contrary to the claims made in several recent papers, the effect of a large endowment of oil and other mineral resources on long-term economic growth of countries has been on balance positive. Moreover, the claims of a negative effect of oil and mineral wealth on the countries' institutions are called into question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that, contrary to received wisdom, political corruption is not necessarily associated with a higher risk of civil war in oil-rich states. Political corruption can be used to accommodate opposition and placate restive groups by offering private privilege in exchange for political loyalty. Since oil wealth is associated with large rents accruing in state treasuries, it provides an economic foundation for such clientelist rule. This article thus argues that oil-rich governments can use political corruption to buy support from key segments of society, effectively outspending other entrepreneurs of violence. Based on a logit analysis of civil war onsets, 1985-99, the article finds support for this 'co-optation argument'. A negative and statistically significant interaction term between oil production and political corruption is consistent across different models and robust to a number of specifications. While both variables per se increase the risk of conflict overall, higher levels of corruption seem to weaken the harmful impact of oil on the risk of civil war. This finding suggests the need for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between natural resource wealth, governance and armed conflict. Political corruption has prolonged poverty and bred economic and political inequality in many oil-rich states, but it has also helped cement powerful alliances with a stake in the continuation of the corrupt regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author offers possible scenarios facing cities as oil peaks. The "die-off" scenario suggests that billions will die as the world's cities failed to adapt to the decline phase of the oil cycle. The ruralization of cities could occur if populations of cities will respond to the possibility of collapse by dispersing, and then create a more sustainable semi-rural lifestyle. The divided city reflects the movement of people with the means to centers where electric transit and short walkable destinations are easily available, while those who cannot afford will occupy the dispersed suburbs which become poorer and poorer. The features and possibility of a resilient, sustainable and solar city are also discussed.

The creation of the automobile led to many social changes in the 20th century, and the century could be called the oil era because of these changes. The 21st century will likely see less reliance on oil because of its limited supply and limited development of engines that use petroleum. Development of alternative fuels will become greater as well.

The article criticizes United States President George W. Bush for his failure to discuss global warming and renewable energy sources in his State of the Union message in 2006. His father, the former president George Bush, and other previous US presidents failed to address alternative fuels, energy conservation and alternative energy systems. Their foreign policies were focused on oil. The French government is also criticized by the author for its failure to address rural electricity problems and rural drift. The European Union needs to address nuclear energy and to redirect the Common Agricultural Policy towards biofuels.

The authors reflect on the scientific article "Energy and Public Health: The Challenge of Peak Petroleum," by H. Frumkin and colleagues. They state that it should be read by policymakers, business executives, health care providers, and general health professionals because it delves on the issues concerning carbon-based energy. They cite that the team emphasize the impact of peak petroleum to public health and health care and provides conclusion on the work.