Crude geopolitics: territory and governance in post-peak oil imaginaries

Abstract

ABSTRACTCrude geopolitics: territory and governance in post-peak oil imaginaries. Territory, Politics, Governance. Concerns over diminishing access to cheap fossil fuels and the impacts of their use on the environment have engendered the production of novels in which new ways of living and alternative forms of governance are imagined. From pioneering self-sufficiency expert John Seymour in the 1990s to twenty-first century novelists dealing with the twin crises of climate change and ‘peak oil’, these stories draw on existential concerns over resource depletion, environmental degradation and climate change to portray fundamentally altered socio-political futures. This article explores the political geographies of these imaginary futures as depicted in post-peak oil novels from the UK and the US. It traces the reterritorialization and rescaling of governance following the imagined disintegration of social and political structures post-peak oil, highlighting an emphasis on the creation of small, localized communities, drawing for their survival on their immediate physical geography. In doing so, the article also demonstrates how the novels provide a conceptual space in which diverse threads of political philosophical thought are drawn upon in order to construct new political geographies in the imagined post-oil societies.