The Politics of Energy: from the Industrial Revolution to the Green New Deal
By the mid-nineteenth century, an “energy revolution”—the advent of coal-powered steam engines—transformed capitalism, enabling the massive expansion of manufacturing we call the industrial revolution. Over the next hundred years, another hydrocarbon energy source—oil—grew to supreme economic and geopolitical importance. Meanwhile, a series of technological advances in energy distribution and use—the internal combustion engine, mass electrification, and mechanized agriculture—deepened global dependency on hydrocarbons. And, starting in the 1970s, a new globalized system of production and trade—facilitated by a vast network of container ships and ground transport—exacerbated this dependency. Fast forward to 2019. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report clearly stating the dire consequences of hundreds of years of accumulated carbon emissions and calling for urgent action to avert climate chaos, including a rapid drawdown of the extraction and burning of hydrocarbon energy and its replacement with renewable, no-carbon sources such as wind and solar. With the emergent momentum around the Green New Deal, the possibility of just such a transition is now a subject of national debate. This course will equip students for navigating the new terrain of energy politics, grounded in a longer-term understanding of the evolution of energy, and the contextually-specific processes of policymaking and conflict that mark this history.
The first part of the class will introduce students to key terms in understanding energy systems, including their physical infrastructure, as well as how they structure and are structured by power relations across class, race, gender, and geography. We will also interrogate the concept of “energy” itself, which can be traced to the Victorian age “discovery” of thermodynamics, itself deeply connected to transformations in capitalist production. The second part of the course examines the extraction, refining, transit, trade, governance, and consumption of hydrocarbons from the industrial revolution to the current fracking boom in the United States. We will see how hydrocarbons are bound up with transformations in global capitalism, state-making, democratization, and the construction of national identity, as well as social conflict and protest, from early 20th-century coal worker militancy to Standing Rock. We will also analyze oil from an institutional perspective by investigating how resource dependency structures the relationship between political and economic actors. The third part of the class will transition to the possibilities of a post-hydrocarbon energy system. The construction of an energy system that primarily relies on solar and wind energy presents a number of political, environmental, and social challenges, including the entrenched power of the fossil fuel industry, the contested definition of a “just transition” that aligns renewable energy with social justice goals, the vast amount of land needed for utility-scale solar and wind farms and the massive expansion of transmission lines, and the demand for primary resources such as cobalt and lithium to manufacture electric cars and buses. Finally, to conclude the course, we will evaluate the possibilities for some combination of public policy, investor decisions, and social mobilization to catalyze another “energy revolution.”
Politics of Oil
Around the world, we rely on hydrocarbon resources. These resources are increasingly extracted from harder to reach and more ecologically sensitive places. The recent boom in demand for primary commodities on the part of emerging economic powers and industrialized nations has renewed concerns about the “curse” of resource dependence as well as its socio-environmental consequences. Meanwhile, resource-related conflicts, both local and international, appear to be intractable. This course examines the extraction, refining, transit, trade, governance, and consumption of hydrocarbons as processes at once political, economic, cultural, and environmental. Drawing on a range of disciplinary perspectives, we will read case studies of policymaking around and resistance to coal, oil, and natural gas. We will see how hydrocarbons are bound up with processes of state-making, democratization, and the construction of national identity, as well as the mobilization of indigenous movements, workers, and contaminated communities. We will also analyze oil from an institutional perspective by investigating how resource dependence structures the relationship between political and economic actors. Finally, we will see how the concept of “nature” is itself contested in these processes, and how distinct actors lay claim to different forms of expertise regarding the environment and its resources.
This course opens with an introduction to hydrocarbons as natural, political, and social resources. We then delve into the literature on rentier state theory and the resource curse. In Part Two of the course, we complicate and critique the resource curse hypothesis from a number of vantage points. We first historicize the so-called “rentier state” through an exploration of European and American imperialism in the Middle East during the first half of the twentieth century. Then, we explore the labor of extraction, with a focus on coal miners and oil workers in Saudi Arabia, Ecuador, and the United States. Next, we examine the dynamics of “crude democracies”: democratic regimes wherein the main source of revenue is oil, and which seem to defy the dictum that “oil hinders democracy.” We learn how the extraction and consumption of hydrocarbons shapes individual and collective identities, producing “petro-citizenship.” And we zoom in on a particular fraught period of global oil politics: the so-called “energy crisis” of the 1970s. In Part Three of the course, we focus on oil as a site of social conflict and as an object of governance—and explore alternative models of oil policy and the transition to a post-hydrocarbon energy system.
Introduction to Comparative Politics
What accounts for the stark differences in political regimes and economic systems across different countries, and at different moments in world history? Why do social movements and revolutions erupt in some contexts, and not others? How should we define “development,” and what conditions facilitate it? These are some of the core questions that guide the study of comparative politics. In order to answer them, we will examine the processes — both global and local — that created the “unit” of comparative analysis: the nation-state. These processes are colonialism and imperialism, state-formation, nationalism, and capitalism. We will examine how the construction of nations, states, and political economies followed distinct, but deeply inter-related, trajectories in formerly imperial powers versus colonized (now “postcolonial”) countries. With this perspective as our foundation, we will proceed to survey key research areas in the field of comparative politics: political regime types; economic development; social movements; and revolutions. In addition, we will learn about the climate and environmental impacts of the global economic model. For the final unit of the course, we will reflect on the logic and research methodology of comparative inquiry. We will focus on the tasks of literature review, case selection, and hypothesis formation. Each student will then apply what we have learned over the semester, working individually and collaboratively to craft research proposals of their own design.
Participatory Democracy in Latin America
From the Occupy Movement to the indignados in Spain, recent social mobilizations have called into question the capacity of representative democracy to address grievances such as income inequality, corporate power, and political corruption. These citizen movements have enacted forms of direct democracy to make decisions regarding protest strategy and to experiment with modes of political engagement that might replace the status quo. Latin America offers a plethora of examples of participatory democratic institutions and thus offers a unique perspective on their possibilities and limits. This course will critically examine over two decades of innovations in democratic politics across the region, from the first participatory budget process established by the Workers' Party in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989 to more recent proliferation of citizens' councils in Venezuela and indigenous community consultations on development projects in Guatemala, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Our study will comprise both formal institutions established by constitutional and ordinary law, as well as the social movement proposals and practices that were often — but not always — the origins and models of these reforms. For each empirical case we review, we will interrogate the institution's history, its functioning, and the degree to which it complements or disrupts existing forms of democratic representation. Ultimately, each case will offer an opportunity to rethink our assumptions regarding the nature of democratic citizenship, the content of democratic participation, and the potential for enacting socio- economic transformations through democratic institutions.
The course will begin with an overview of contemporary democratic political thought with the aim of providing students with a conceptual vocabulary for analyzing the empirical cases, focusing on issues such as deliberative democracy and constituent power. Next, we will historically situate our study of participatory democracy in the context of the broader challenge of democratic consolidation in the region. We will examine scholarship on the history of weak institutions and political exclusion dating to the colonial period, the coincidence of democratic transitions and neoliberal economic reforms, and the uneven territorial distribution of democratic norms, resulting in pockets of authoritarianism. By the early 1990s, these historic trajectories culminated in what has been referred to as a crisis of representation and democratic accountability, setting the stage for proposals for new forms of democratic decision-making and even wholesale redesigns of the polity via constituent assemblies. We will take a close look at the social movement critiques of representative democracy as well as the new symbolic salience of indigenous modes of deliberation and governance. Next, we will delve into the case studies of institutional reforms: the evolution of participatory budgets at the local and national level in Brazil, the experiences of indigenous parties elected at the local level in Bolivia and Ecuador, community consultations on development and extractive projects in Guatemala, Bolivia, and Ecuador, and the citizens' councils of Venezuela. We will conclude by evaluating recent work on the fate of participatory democracy in postneoliberal Latin America: has the rise of the new left deepened democracy and led to more substantive understandings of citizenship and forms of participation — or not?
Contemporary Latin American Politics
Political-economic transformations have swept across Latin America from the 1980s to the present. This course explores these transformations as processes that are made and unmade from below (the mobilization of marginalized groups) and from above (the political projects of elites). We will critically engage a range of theoretical assumptions and social scientific methodologies in the study of the region. Finally, we will bring our knowledge of the past three decades to bear on the recent rise of the Latin American left.
The course begins with an in-depth historical contextualization of contemporary contentious politics, focusing on state-formation, nation-making, economic dependency and development, authoritarianism, and democratic transition. Next, we will consider the wave of structural adjustment programs that swept the region in the mid 1980s through the 1990s, with the aim of analytically conceptualizing neoliberalism, and attending to the diversity in the politics and content of reform across cases. Since neoliberal reforms accompanied or immediately followed processes of democratic transition, we will proceed by examining the challenge of democratic consolidation. Neoliberal economic policies and the deficit of democratic accountability set the stage for our next three topics: the emergence of anti-neoliberal protest, the rise of the indigenous movement, and new social movements (with a focus on the case of environmental politics), which are all key to understanding the rise of the new left. We will consider a range of explanations for the rise of left-wing parties at the national and local level. We conclude with a detailed look at how they have governed once in power: has the new left deepened democracy and reversed the long-standing patterns of socio-economic inequality that have historically marked the region?
Making and Unmaking Social Life
Social institutions such as gender, language, and nationality appear to us as fixed and objective realities rather than the emergent outcome of collective labor. Rather than reproduce this fetishized view, this course examines the making and unmaking of social life by analyzing the relationship between meaning and institutions. Specifically, we will investigate the conditions under which practices of meaning- making crystallize into predictable patterns of behavior and, alternately, the processes of re- signification, improvisation, and problematization that enable the transformation of those patterns. Over the course of the semester, we will critically interrogate the conceptual divides that dichotomize social life — structure and agency, objective and subjective, material and symbolic, macro and micro — and learn how these categories are produced through meaningful social action. We will draw on an array of disciplinary approaches to orient our study, including sociology, anthropology, hermeneutic philosophy, literary theory, and political science from the 19th century to the present, reading select texts by Marx, Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, Foucault, Bourdieu, Taylor, Ricoeur, Geertz, Sahlins, Anderson, Butler, Silverstein, Glaeser, and Wedeen. We will challenge the conceptual architectures of social theory by bringing them into conversation with historical and ethnographic research. Conversely, the social theory texts we read will give us analytic leverage on the empirical studies, revealing unexplored facets or unexamined assumptions. Ultimately, we will ask: how can the study of meaning-making practices produce new theories about the world?