ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some historical notes about the oil industry with a special focus on the evolutionary relation between International Oil Companies (IOCs) and host governments. It will be clarified as the empirical puzzle will be mapped out and the research introduced. It will be positioned into the existing literature and the state-of-the-art research. A fourth body of literature is used to strengthen the case studies in the empirical part, that is, Middle East Area Studies. The chapter introduces the primary data collection method, i.e. semi-structured expert interviews, spells out the advantages of the approach to the present research, discusses the structure of the applied questionnaire as well as the professional distribution of the high-level interviewees. It further identifies the contributions as well as the limitations, spells out its relevance for the current political and economic developments in several hotspots across the globe, and proposes several research ways forward.
