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Resource Peripheries in the Global EconomySpace, Scale, and the Global Oil Assemblage: Commodity Frontiers in Resource Peripheries

Resource Peripheries in the Global Economy: Space, Scale, and the Global Oil Assemblage:... [The purpose of this chapter is to make use of this expansive notion of extraction to explore the multi-scalar aspects—the socially produced space—of the oil and gas in resource peripheries. The scope of such a task is of course vast. As a consequence, my focus is a limited and rather unusual entry point into the global oil assemblage, namely oil theft (sometimes rereferred to as illicit bunkering). My goal is to use the illicit underbelly of planetary oil and gas as a way of exploring how scales are produced, how they intersect and overlap, and the tensions and politics associated with particular scales and with scale colliding or overlapping. In this story, the (petro) state figures centrally: not only in terms of the state itself as a sociospatial configuration engaged in the production of ‘matrices of social space’ that enable the extension of power and control and enabling the circulation of oil capital but also in terms of the rescaling of state territorial power that undergirds, and drives, globalization of the oil industry. The illicit aspects of the global value chain shed considerable light on how the operations of the oil assemblage entail a reconfiguration and re-territorialization of superimposed spatial scales, and not as a mono-directional implosion of global forces into sub-global realms; the relation between global, state-level and urban-regional processes can no longer be conceived as one that obtains among mutually exclusive levels of analysis or forces. The multi-scalar operations of the oil and gas assemblage—what is typically seen as the largely smoothly running global supply chains—exposes how the licit and illicit, the regulated and unregulated, and the ordered and disordered are operating together in tandem and often through the same mechanisms, infrastructure, and channels. Scale is multiple, overlapping, and often clashing replete with their own political orders and forms of authority. These are the circulation struggles—the imperatives to control place, space, and territory and what moves through and across it—which do not produce a clean logistical space, a well-ordered supply chain in which place has been thinned out or eviscerated. Quite the reverse. Forces of calculability and order fulfill “disorderly” functions and vice versa. They are organically and dialectically related and constituted. Logistical and infrastructural orders can be and regularly are disrupted, blocked, diverted, and appropriated in novel and creative ways, and all of this points to the co-production of logistical and political orders. Making things move and circulate is both an expression of power while constructing and depending upon systems of public and private authority.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Resource Peripheries in the Global EconomySpace, Scale, and the Global Oil Assemblage: Commodity Frontiers in Resource Peripheries

Part of the Economic Geography Book Series
Editors: Irarrázaval, Felipe; Arias-Loyola, Martín
Watts, Michael John
Resource Peripheries in the Global Economy — Oct 12, 2021
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38 pages

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Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Copyright
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
ISBN
978-3-030-84605-3
Pages
145 –182
DOI
10.1007/978-3-030-84606-0_8
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[The purpose of this chapter is to make use of this expansive notion of extraction to explore the multi-scalar aspects—the socially produced space—of the oil and gas in resource peripheries. The scope of such a task is of course vast. As a consequence, my focus is a limited and rather unusual entry point into the global oil assemblage, namely oil theft (sometimes rereferred to as illicit bunkering). My goal is to use the illicit underbelly of planetary oil and gas as a way of exploring how scales are produced, how they intersect and overlap, and the tensions and politics associated with particular scales and with scale colliding or overlapping. In this story, the (petro) state figures centrally: not only in terms of the state itself as a sociospatial configuration engaged in the production of ‘matrices of social space’ that enable the extension of power and control and enabling the circulation of oil capital but also in terms of the rescaling of state territorial power that undergirds, and drives, globalization of the oil industry. The illicit aspects of the global value chain shed considerable light on how the operations of the oil assemblage entail a reconfiguration and re-territorialization of superimposed spatial scales, and not as a mono-directional implosion of global forces into sub-global realms; the relation between global, state-level and urban-regional processes can no longer be conceived as one that obtains among mutually exclusive levels of analysis or forces. The multi-scalar operations of the oil and gas assemblage—what is typically seen as the largely smoothly running global supply chains—exposes how the licit and illicit, the regulated and unregulated, and the ordered and disordered are operating together in tandem and often through the same mechanisms, infrastructure, and channels. Scale is multiple, overlapping, and often clashing replete with their own political orders and forms of authority. These are the circulation struggles—the imperatives to control place, space, and territory and what moves through and across it—which do not produce a clean logistical space, a well-ordered supply chain in which place has been thinned out or eviscerated. Quite the reverse. Forces of calculability and order fulfill “disorderly” functions and vice versa. They are organically and dialectically related and constituted. Logistical and infrastructural orders can be and regularly are disrupted, blocked, diverted, and appropriated in novel and creative ways, and all of this points to the co-production of logistical and political orders. Making things move and circulate is both an expression of power while constructing and depending upon systems of public and private authority.]

Published: Oct 12, 2021

Keywords: Space; Scale; Oil assemblage; Hyper-extraction; Oil theft; Rent

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