A Tale of Two Gulfs: Life, Death, and Dispossession along Two Oil Frontiers
A Tale of Two Gulfs: Life, Death, and Dispossession along Two Oil Frontiers
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两个海湾的故事：两个石油边境的生、死和剥夺
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发表时间：
2012
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通讯作者：
M. Watts
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作者：
M. Watts
本文的框架是两个主要产油区。第一个是全球南部的陆上石油世界（尼日利亚的尼日尔三角洲是几内亚湾的一部分），第二个是美国深海石油和天然气勘探和生产的海上世界（特别是墨西哥湾和深水地平线井喷）。这两个领域都可以被视为石油前沿——积累和剥夺的前沿——植根于特定石油组合的操作。我追溯了石油世界的深层基础设施——管道、钻井平台、油站、油轮、金融家、工程公司、安全部队等等——与后殖民时代的南方和发达资本主义的北方的生死制度之间的关系。正如蒂莫西•米切尔所指出的那样，政治、经济和社会关系是由能量流动设计出来的。无论是在安哥拉、巴西的深水、俄罗斯的西伯利亚，还是现在越来越多的北极的冰冻边界，开放这些类型的石油边界，都需要与特定地区的社会和政治力量进行接触，这些力量都不一定或很容易与一些假定的石油资本公司的愿望——政治稳定、盈余管理、价格控制——或实际上是帝国主义石油消费国的愿望相兼容。在一种情况下，终点是叛乱和可燃的政治，威胁到石油工业和石油国家本身的运作；在另一种情况下，它是井喷的暴力——人类和环境生命和生计的损失——以及以技术和金融风险取代政治风险的致命后果。
Two major oil-producing regions frame this article. The first is the onshore oil world in the global South (the Niger delta in Nigeria as part of the wider Gulf of Guinea), and the second is the offshore world of deepwater oil and gas exploration and production in the United States (specifically, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Deepwater Horizon blowout). Both arenas can be seen as oil frontiers—frontiers of accumulation and dispossession—rooted in the operations of specific oil assemblages. I trace the relations between the deep infrastructures of the oil world—pipelines, rigs, flowstations, tankers, financiers, engineering firms, security forces, and so on—and to the regimes of life and death in the postcolonial South and the advanced capitalist North. Political, economic, and social relations are, as Timothy Mitchell notes, engineered out of the flows of energy. Opening up these sorts of oil frontiers—whether in Angolan or Brazilian deepwater, Russian Siberia, or increasingly now the frozen frontiers of the Arctic—necessitates engagements with place-specific social and political forces, none of which necessarily or easily are compatible with some presumed set of desires of corporate oil capital—political stability, surplus management, price control—or indeed of imperialist oil-consuming states. In one case the terminal point is an insurgency and combustible politics threatening the very operations of the oil industry and the petrostate itself; in the other it is the violence of a blowout—the loss of human and environmental life and livelihoods—and of the deadly consequences of substituting technical and financial over political risks.