AAG CFP: Responsibilization of Petropolitics: Finance, Violence, and Discourses of Security

Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers
Las Vegas, March 2009
CFP: Responsibilization of Petropolitics:  Finance, Violence, and Discourses of Security
Paper Session organized by Nayna Jhaveri and Mazen Labban

Oil companies have repeatedly justified their record high profits by the high costs and risks involved in ensuring a stable and reliable supply of energy to satisfy growing global demands. This self-representation is buttressed by stories of increasing difficulty in finding new reserves and the growing demands of high technologies and investment to extract oil from more difficult places. Rather than an imagined responsibility towards consumers and concern about energy security, however, oil companies are driven by the capitalist imperative to make profit. Record high profits since 2005, however, have been accompanied by a decline in the ratio of investment in extractive activities to dividends distributed to shareholders and to ‘investments’ in non-extractive activities. The diversion of the tsunami of petrodollars accumulating in the coffers of national oil companies and transnational oil majors alike into speculative economic sectors has opened up new channels in the lucrative and liquid web of value flows through the oil industry. Simultaneously, this very phenomenon has also increased the pressure on oil companies to responsibilize their activities at different geographical scales and on a number of fronts: consumer price equity, militarization, violence, economic and gendered equity, and environment. There has been little investigation of how the oil companies have negotiated these strategically necessary forms of responsibilization within the buoyancy of the new capital flows. We seek interventions that deconstruct the contradictory geographical landscape of corporate social responsibilities and uncover the exercise of social, economic, military and environmental violence underlying the discourse of responsibility towards energy security.

If interested, send an abstract to both organizers at njhaveri@mail.colgate.edu<mailto:njhaveri@mail.colgate.edu> (Nayna Jhaveri) and mlabban@miami.edu<mailto:mlabban@miami.edu> (Mazen Labban).