This course examines violence and its relationship to oil as a non-renewable natural resource. The course will focus on the close examination and comparison of discourses and practices concerned with resource extraction, resource distribution, energy security, and ‘modernity’ in the United States, North America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America. Emphasis will be on case studies on oil as a non-renewable natural resource and how its extraction has contributed to reshaping livelihoods, energy security and creating spaces of violence as well as the possibilities for ‘development’. The course investigates how oil explorations in postcolonial states have given rise to projects of ‘nation building’, state-making and challenges of governance that continue to confront and reshape the idea of what constitutes the ‘nation’. We will focus on how abundant oil resources have changed the ‘face’ of the state and its people bringing about discourses of power, culture, energy security, and modernity. We will also focus on how extraction of oil constantly produces violence and challenges to state power over its control. We will investigate how such conflicts, sometimes violent, have and continue to redefine state, multinational corporations, and communal production of power in resource extractive enclaves around the world. At the end, we will ask "what if there is no oil"?

Intended Audience:

First and second year students in LSA Honors Program