Jeff Colgan is a political scientist with an expertise in international oil politics and oil-related conflicts.[1] Colgan’s Partial Hegemony deals cleverly with oil and climate change, working to conceptualize and systematize these two issues by using the analytical category of “subsystems.” Subsystems are managed by different actors (both states and private entities), and are enforced…
Tag: oil
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 14-23 on Wight, Oil Money
David Wight opens his book with a stunning example of the hubris inspired by the petrodollar bonanza of the 1970s: a proposal by White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld for an Arab space agency, developed in partnership with the United States but paid for by Arab oil producers. Wight notes Rumsfeld’s belief that such…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable Review 14-11 on Wolfe-Hunnicutt, The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy
It is my great pleasure to introduce this roundtable review of Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt’s Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq. I began corresponding with the author almost two decades ago, when he was a new graduate student and thinking about dissertation topics. Since then, I watched as he turned a first-rate…
Roundtable 13-4 on Black Gold and Blackmail: Oil and Great Power Politics and on The Oil Wars Myth: Petroleum and the Causes of International Conflict
Rosemary A. Kelanic’s, Black Gold and Blackmail: Oil and Great Power Politics and Emily Meierding’s, The Oil Wars Myth: Petroleum and the Causes of International Conflict are deeply engaging and important books that advance our knowledge on the politics of energy security.[1] Both books challenge many existing assumptions on the role of oil in international…
Article Review 86 on “Does Oil Cause Ethnic War? Comparing Evidence from Process-Tracing with Quantitative Results.”
Shiping Tang, Yihan Xiong, and Hui Li’s recent article, “Does Oil Cause Ethnic War? Comparing Evidence from Process-Tracing with Quantitative Results,” is a companion piece to another article, by Hui and Tang, published in the Chinese Political Science Review: “Location, Location, and Location: The Ethno-Geography of Oil and the Onset of Civil War.”[1] That article…
Article Review 64 on Special Forum on Oil, Security Studies 25:2
What do states do when faced with the threat of oil scarcity? The three articles under review address different aspects of a single problem: what they might do; what they have done; and whether they should believe that there is any scarcity. As befits students of international relations, the authors view this problem primarily as…
Review Essay 19 on Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War
In Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War, Jeff Colgan provides an indispensable starting point for researchers interested in the relationship between oil and international conflict. Although the term ‘energy security’ is now ubiquitous in political speeches and the media, international relations scholars have only just begun to rediscover the topic after a thirty-year hiatus. The 1970s…