Energy and America's Long War in the Middle East

Time: 3:30 to 5:00pm

Location: Hagerty Library, 302, Drexel University

Oil and war have a deeply entangled history. Nowhere has this been more true than in the oil rich Persian Gulf, where oil producing states and outside powers, especially the United States, have struggled sometimes violently to secure their primacy over what has become a global energy regime. While it is commonly posited that wars in the region can or should be understood as struggles for control over oil, "Energy and America's Long War in the Middle East" encourages a new way of seeing the relationships between oil, energy, war, and global capitalism.

By examining the techno-political and militarized relations that came into being around oil and its distribution in the 1980s, I argue that the distinction between energy and war were erased, collapsed in a new material order of militarized-energy networks with its epicenter in the Persian Gulf.