Book review: Flammable Societies: Studies on the Socio-Economics of Oil and Gas, by John-Andrew McNeish and Owen Logan (eds.)

Abstract

John-Andrew McNeish and Owen Logan (eds.) Flammable Societies: Studies on the Socio-Economics of Oil and Gas, Pluto Press, London, 2012; 369 pp: 9780745331171, 25 [pounds sterling] (pbk) If we are to believe George Soros's Open Society Institute (Humphreys et al. 2007) and Paul Collier's Natural Resource Charter, there is a simple cure for the resource curse. Apply transparency, competitive bidding, and 'multi-stakeholder groups' made up of civil society, industry and government, and corruption, conflict and susceptibility to oil price volatility will disappear. The editors of Flammable Societies are unconvinced by this prescription. The transplantable tools of oil technocracy proceed by 'ruling out other influences and factors, ceteris paribus' (p. 31), in order to treat problems of resource governance in isolation from the larger body politic. And, as has been noted elsewhere (Watts 2004), the language of the resource curse encourages the excision of history from analyses of conflict, substituting for it a moralising language of greedy militants and patrimonial elites. Logan and McNeish signal early on their intention to escape this framework, which 'risks producing a self-fulfilling prophecy for the global south by wrenching the theory of rent from its counterpart, the labour theory of value, the latter being an integral concept that shaped development in the global north' (p. 6). What really makes Flammable Societies stand out against other recent anthropologically-inspired attempts to engage with the resource curse, though (e.g. Behrends et al. 2011), is their refusal to bracket the 'exceptional' well-managed oil states from those apparently prone to the curse. As such, McNeish and Logan open and close the volume in Norway. Rather than treating the model as a technocratic achievement suitable for export (p. 8), they point to the hard-won social-democratic consensus that preceded the Norwegian discovery of oil, influencing outcomes for labour, extraction tares and national ownership. The extent to which negotiating a social-democratic consensus can mean the difference between rapid or sustained periods of extraction, and between strong unions or fragmented and enclaved working populations, is taken up again by Folorunso et al. in relation to Nigeria, and by Brotherstone and Cumbers in relation to North Sea oil. In a standout chapter that aims to unpick the wilful historiographical blindness that has removed the labour history of British oil workers from that of Britain's 20th century, Brotherstone argues convincingly that 'Oil revenues helped make Thatcherite neoliberalism possible' (p. 74). Papering over the rising welfare bills caused by Thatcher's war on the collieries, and providing reassurance to the City, oil revenue flowed--too rapidly--into the Exchequer. Moreover, it was pumped there by US contractors with little time for trade unions, and a dismal safety record. Thus it was not technocratic differences between the UK and Norway, bur the breakdown of Britain's social-democratic consensus in the mid-1960s that, for Brotherstone, made their North Sea oil experience a 'determined' one (p. 85). Brotherstone argues that little has changed since Thatcher's economic experiment. Post-financial crisis union negotiation now takes place over how public spending will be cut--concessions are made over distribution while 'An antagonist mode of production [is retained] fetishistically intact' (Meszaros 2010: 286, cited on p. 88; see the chapter by Kjaernet on oil welfare in Azerbaijan). The resource curse literature is certainly far too concerned with the morality of distributional politics to ever attend to questions of reorganizing production--and in truth, this volume does not devote substantial attention to the violent organisation of production that dominates in the oil industry. The majority of chapters relate to efforts to carve out spaces of autonomy and sovereignty through which claims might be made on oil revenues. …