The Afterlives of Resource Sovereignty MECACS Seminar Series with Guest Speaker Professor Laleh Khalili

In 1959, nearly sixty percent of the global reserves in oil were held by five US-based companies, another eighteen percent by two British firms, and the remainder by the USSR, Mexico, and smaller producers (MEED 1958).Thirty years later, after the tumultuous struggle for resource sovereignty, nationalisation of oil had enacted “the most concentrated peacetime transfer of wealth in history” (Dietrich 2017: 4). A great deal of scholarship focuses on the politics leading to and the political aftermath of the process of nationalisation. What I hope to do in this talk is to address the less visible effects of resource sovereignty on political economy, knowledge production, and social relations across the globe. I am particularly interested in how the politics of nationalisation cascaded into ostensibly apolitical (or technical) milieus, such as finance, the pricing of oil, geophysics and engineering of exploration, and the arcana of fiscal legislation.
Laleh Khalili is an Iranian American Professor of Gulf Studies at University of Exeter.
She was formerly a Professor of Middle Eastern Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and a Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London.