Carbon Democracy. As tumultuous events in Egypt unfold at speed, with former President Morsi currently in custody, we present Verso's updated reading list of key titles and articles addressing the challenges facing Egypt and the Middle East.
Seamus Milne considers the current situation in Egypt in the context of the Arab Spring and its historical precedents in the "Spring of Nations" of 1848 in his latest article for the Guardian. His latest book, The Revenge of History, follows the events of the Arab Spring as they unfold, as well as providing a rich geopolitical context for the uprisings. The Journey to Tahrir: Revolution, Protest, and Social Change in EgyptEdited by Jeannie Sowers and Chris Toensing. The Nature of Oil: Reconsidering American Power in the Middle East. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil.
New York: Verso, 2011. Toby Craig Jones, Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Robert Vitalis, American Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006. For most of those who consider themselves politically liberal, oil—along with environmental degradation and foreign occupation—form a kind of political axis of evil on the American political landscape. In the past few years, three new books in Middle Eastern studies have complicated this picture considerably. The Government of Uncertainty: how to follow the politics of oil.
Global production networks and the extractive sector: governing resource-based development. This article explores the opportunities a GPN approach provides for understanding the network configurations and regional development impacts associated with extractive industries.
The article elaborates two core claims: (i) that the application of the GPN analytical framework provides a way to make progress in a stalled policy debate regarding the linkages between resource extraction and socio-economic development (popularly known as the ‘resource curse thesis’); and (ii) that the encounter between GPN and a natural resource-based sector introduces distinctive issues—associated with the materiality and territoriality of extractive commodities—that, to date, GPN has not considered fully. The article examines the global production network for oil as an empirical case of how extractive industries can provide (limited) opportunities for socio-economic development.
JEL classifications © The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Columbia University. Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist who studies the political economy of the Middle East, the political role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge, the politics of large-scale technical systems, and the place of colonialism in the making of modernity.
Educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he received a first-class honours degree in History, Mitchell completed his Ph.D. in Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 1984. He joined Columbia University in 2008 after teaching for twenty-five years at New York University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies. He is now professor and chair of the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. Richard-auty-oil-and-development-in-the-middle-east. Oil and Democracy revisited. 2012.03.19_the_oil_curse. America's Kingdom - Robert Vitalis. America's Kingdom - review by S hertog. Business History Review The Business History Review is a scholarly journal that seeks to publish articles with rigorous primary research that address major topics of debate, offer comparative perspectives, and contribute to the broadening of the subject.
AmericasKingdom. Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. In and out of Kingdoms. [A guest post by Tipu Sultan] Once, I Was An Oil Drop I was taught that oil was the most glorious thing that had ever happened to humankind.
My first memory of this education was at age six. I was inducted into the girl-scouts, along with some of the other girls in the corporate-garrison town-city of Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where I grew up. We were made to dress up as oil drops for the annual Saudi ARAMCO Day Parade. Who dresses six-year-old girls in large black plastic garbage bags to be paraded around for two hours, in over a hundred degrees of heat? Saudi Arabia was a land, we were constantly told, that time forgot—until the Americans and the oil. In the 6th grade, I went on a school trip to the first museum I remember: the Saudi ARAMCO Exhibit. The Middle East Center at Penn. Robert Vitalis joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in July 1999 as associate professor of political science and director of the Middle East Center.
He stepped down as Center director in July 2006. Penn promoted him to full professor in July 2008. America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. Reviewed by G.J.H.
Dowling, Author and journalist; ARAMCO government affairs (ret.) Verso, 2009. 354 pages. $19.95. This book by American historian Robert Vitalis was reissued in 2009 in a paperback edition, a testament in part, no doubt, to the unrelenting interest in U.S.