ACAS Blog Series: The Geopolitics of Petroleum

By Meredeth Turshen | 2 June 2009

Oil issues include a very wide range of problems: food security, scarcity of resources (sometimes referred to as the problem of peak oil), global climatic changes as a result of hydrocarbon consumption, human rights, and resource wars over oil (in Sudan, Chad, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Nigeria, and Western Sahara, inter alia). As the price of oil rose to over $100 a barrel last summer, oil issues came to dominate U.S. foreign policy (competition with China for oil, the Bush Administration’s position on Venezuela, and OPEC), as well as domestic policy (tax policy, energy conservation initiatives, preservation of wilderness, etc.). Some issues have been extensively debated (for example, peak oil), but others—such as the impact of the high price of oil on the oil-importing economies of Africa—have scarcely been mentioned in analyses.

AFRICOM and the Geopolitics of African Oil

By Daniel Volman | 2 June 2009

On 1 October 2008, the new Africa Command (AFRICOM) officially became operational as America’s newest combatant command, with its headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, to oversee U.S. military activities on the continent. Until the creation of AFRICOM, U.S.-African military relations was conducted through three different commands: the European Command, which had responsibility for most of the continent; the Central Command, which oversaw Egypt and the Horn of Africa region along with the Middle East and Central Asia; and the Pacific Command, which administered military ties with Madagascar and other islands in the Indian Ocean. This reflected the fact that Africa was chiefly viewed as a regional theater in the global Cold War, or as an adjunct to U.S.-European relations, or—as in the immediate post-Cold War period—as a region of little concern to the United States.

From The Geopolitics of Petroleum ACAS Blog Series

Film Review: ‘Blood and Oil’

By Mark Major | 2 June 2009

Middle Eastern oil resources have long been considered “a stupendous source of strategic power” by the United States, evidenced by a State Department memo from August 1945. According to progressive energy analyst Michael Klare in the new documentary Blood and Oil, the same oil resources are also a “source of weakness” for the US. Based on Michael Klare’s book of the same name, Blood and Oil examines the relationship between oil and US foreign policy. Serving as the film’s commentator, Klare sheds light on the importance of access and control of oil in presidential doctrines from FDR through the Bush administration. He argues that the control of the world’s energy resources has been foundational to US foreign policy since World War II. Blood and Oil demonstrates how US foreign policy and energy policy are essentially intertwined.

From The Geopolitics of Petroleum ACAS Blog Series

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Reflections on Mahmood Mamdani’s ‘Lessons of Zimbabwe’

A new ACAS Bulletin edited by Sean Jacobs and Jacob Mundy

Mahmood Mamdani, a university professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York City remains one of the pre-eminent scholars of African Studies in the West. He also remains prolific, often taking the lead in unpacking controversial debates. For example, this month he has a new book out on the Darfur crisis, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (Knopf, 2009). And few can disagree about the impact of his previous two books. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (Pantheon, 2004) certainly contributed—especially in popular media—to our understanding of the historical roots of the “War on Terror”: to the United States’ engagement in proxy wars in Southern Africa, Latin America and Afghanistan and the antecedents of “collateral damage.” A decade earlier, his Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, 1996) became a must-read in universities. So when, in early December 2008, the London Review of Books (hereafter LRB) published a long essay by Mamdani on the ongoing political and economic crises (at least for a decade now) in Zimbabwe, it was inevitable that it would provoke debate. As one critic of Mamdani’s concedes in this issue, “…whatever Mamdani writes he is always brilliant and provocative.”
Read more here

More on Zimbabwe here

Making Peace or Fueling War in Africa?

New Analysis by Daniel Volman and William Minter

Ever since the announcement by President Bush of the new Africa Command, or AFRICOM, in early 2007, resistance to this new imperial formulation has grown on the continent of Africa and in the West, including in the US itself. Other than Liberia, with its historic ties to the US, and Djibouti which already has a US military base, the rejection of AFRICOM on the Continent has been resolute. Yet, as the Bush II era comes to an end, Jr. has decided that he wants his legacy to be one which includes “compassion” towards Africa, and the mainstream media [the CNN to FOX continuum] appear to be ready to concede at least this to the lame duck, self-proclaimed “anti-terror” warrior. Bush’s ‘humanitarian’ goals in Africa, from mosquito netting to his PEPFAR Aids initiative, are strategically removed from both his domestic and his Middle East debacles. But they are also a counter balance to his Pentagon reformulations of AFRICOM at a tactically significant moment in US/China contestation in Africa, and his administration’s attempt to institutionalize change beyond his tenure. President Bush’s marginal humanitarian gestures, played up in the media and his Spring Africa tour, belie a major and continuing investment in military industrial and security spending in Africa as a new global geopolitics take shape. Read more here.

See also ACAS Bulletin 79: The Politics of AFRICOM