Oil, materiality and International Relations

Bibliographic Data

ID4444899
AuthorsRoland Dannreuther (0000-0002-3045-7672, University of Westminster, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume40
Issue2
Pages175-197
Publication date2024-02-13
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Relations (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0047-1178 • E-ISSN: 1741-2862
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/00471178241231726
OpenAlexW4391817011
LanguageEN
References cited35

Oil is a major topic in International Relations (IR). However, the discipline has tended to focus primarily on the effects and impacts of oil, particularly in relation to conflict, war and empire, and on the international political economy of oil, such as the role of the large oil companies and the oil-rich producer states. This article offers a more holistic approach by adopting a new materialisms framework. This framework has the physical materiality of oil, and its agentic capacity to produce social and political relations over time and space, at its centre. This offers new perspectives along the material journey of oil from exploration, production to transportation, processing and consumption. This, in turn, provides a more differentiated history of oil as a material force that shapes human and political interaction. The benefit of this approach is that it requires IR to be in a more substantive dialogue with other disciplines, most notably with human geography which has a strong tradition of research on energy and spatiality, but also with other disciplines in the social sciences and with the growing body of work in energy humanities. In addition, adopting a new materialisms approach to the study of oil acts as a potential template for the study of other energy resources and products, such as gas and coal as well as renewables such as wind and solar energy

Aesthetics · Art · Materiality (auditing) · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts

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