ABSTRACT
The UN-enforced no-fly zone after the first Gulf War, to begin with, and the regime change following the second US-led military campaign in Iraq commenced a new era. In the same vein, this research challenges the assumption that oil is merely a high-yield commodity imbued with extraordinary corrupting power. The oil commodity chain is considered here as a relational setting within which political subjectivity is renegotiated in new forms. The upshot is an interdisciplinary, critically committed, and ethnographically oriented piece of research that is aimed at re-politicising oil environments through imports from political geography, anthropology, and ecological economics. Based on the epistemological rejection of binary distinctions that separate human and non-human domains, it presents the added value of a political ecology approach to environmental issues. In line with well-established research, it is argued that conflicts in extractive areas need to be understood within the commodity chain, from local to global.
