Periodization
- Pre-OPEC (1900-1960)
- Active OPEC (1960-1986)
- Passive OPEC (1986-)
Themes
- OPEC and its Role in the Global Economy
- International Cooperation and Transnational Cultural Trends (UNCTAD, OPEC)
- International Law and its Changing Paradigms (rise and fall of “permanent sovereignty)
- Workers in Oil-Producing Countries (...)
- Oil Policies/Oil Myths (conservation, modernisation, consumerism, oil curse, and the like)
- Nation-Building in OPEC countries (architecture, infrastructures, welfare, economic trends)
- Imagining the Oil Nation (novels, movies and art imagining the oil nation)
Participants
Dag Harald Claes
Dag Harald Claes is professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Oslo. He is also adjunct professor at Molde University College. He holds a doctoral degree in Political Science from the University of Oslo.
He specializes in international energy relations, in particular studies of oil-producer cooperation, the energy relations between Norway and the EU, the role of oil in Middle East conflicts, and Arctic oil and gas. At present he is head of the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo.
His publications include: The Politics of Oil-Producer Cooperation. Westview Press 2001. Governing the Global Economy - Politics, Institutions and Economic Development. Routledge 2011 (edited with Carl Henrik Knutsen). “Arctic Petroleum Resources in a Regional and Global Perspective”, in Rolf Tamnes & Kristine Offerdal (ed.), Geopolitics and Security in the Arctic. Regional Dynamics in a Global World. Routledge 2014, with Arild Moe. “Cooperation and Conflict in Oil and Gas Markets”, in Andreas Glodthau (ed.), The Handbook of Global Energy Policy. Wiley-Blackwell 2014.“The interdependence of European–Russian energy relations” in Energy Policy (59)2013, with Øistein Harsem.
Duccio Basosi
Duccio Basosi is Assistant Professor in History of International Relations at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. In 2011 Dr. Basosi obtained a FIRB National Research Grant from the Italian Ministry of Scientific Research, for the project "The engines of growth: for a global history of the conflict between renewable, fossil, and fissile energies, 1972-1992." He specializes in international relations from the 1960s to the present, with a focus on monetary and financial affairs and international energy politics.
He has written extensively on the international political economy of the 1970s and 1980s. Recent publications are "The European Community and International Reaganomics, 1981-85," in K. Patel, K. Weisbrode (eds.), European Integration and Atlantic Community in the 1980s, Cambridge University Press, 2013; "The 2015 Countershock and the Prospects for a Low-carbon Energy Transition", in IAEE Energy Forum, no. 3, vol. 24, 2015 (with R. Basosi); and the volume Countershock/Counterrevolution. Energy and Politics in the 1980s, IB Tauris, 2016 (co-edited with G. Garavini and M. Trentin). He teaches History of International Relations at the MA-level program in International Relations at Ca' Foscari University, and International Oil Politics from the 1970s to the Present at the Ca' Foscari-Harvard Summer School.
Einar Lie
Einar Lie is a professor of Economic History at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo. He served as a Vice Dean at the Faculty of Humanities from 2010 to 2014 (on sabbatical fall 2013), and Board Chairman of The Norwegian University Center in St. Petersburg and of the interfaculty research area Kultrans.
Lie (b. 1965) holds a Master degree in Economics and a PhD in Economic History (1996). He has published widely on economic planning and policy making in the Nordic countries. Over the last two decades, Lie has been engaged in a number of business history projects, as a researcher and academic advisor. Main research interests have been the development of state-business relations especially in banking, manufacturing industry, and the oil sector. Currently, he is commissioned on a part time basis as a project manager for the history of the Central Bank of Norway 1816-2016. Lie is also a regular op-ed columnist in the Norwegian daily Aftenposten.
Giuliano Garavini
Giuliano Garavini is Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi and Assistant Professor of International History at the University of Padua.
He headed the Padua unit of the FIRB National Research Grant from the Italian Ministry of Scientific Research, for the project "The engines of growth: for a global history of the conflict between renewable, fossil, and fissile energies, 1972-1992."
His last book is After Empires: European Integration, Decolonization and the Challenge from the Global South 1957-1986. He is writing a book provisionally titled OPEC. A History of Oil.
Gopalan Balachandran
Gopalan Balachandran is Professor of International History and Politics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. He studied Economics to graduate level before completing a PhD in economic history from the University of London.
His research engages South Asia and the Indian Ocean in a global frame and spans labor, capital, entrepreneurship, and development. He is also interested in histories of colonialism and decolonisation, and their continuing significance for the present. Professor Balachandran’s current research focusses on cultures of commerce in the Indian Ocean and Atlantic worlds. His books include John Bullion’s Empire: British Gold Problems and India between the Wars (1996, 2013, 2015); Globalizing Labour? Indian Seafarers and World Shipping, c. 1870-1945 (2012); and the Reserve Bank of India, 1951-1967 (1998). He is also a Managing Editor of the Indian Economic and Social History Review.
Juan Carlos Boué
Juan Carlos Boué was born in Mexico City and was educated at El Colegio de México. Upon graduating from university in 1990, he started working at the international trading arm of Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), the Mexican national state oil company. Ever since, his professional activities have been focused primarily on the political economy, industrial economics, and international governance structure of petroleum, alternating between academia and the oil industry proper.
From 2005 to 2009, he was special advisor to the Venezuelan Minister of Energy and Petroleum, the president of the Venezuelan state oil company (Petróleos de Venezuela, PDVSA) and the Venezuelan Vice-Minister for Hydrocarbons. In 2010, Boué returned to the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies as a research associate.
Boué has written widely on the industrial economics of the oil and gas exploration and production, and petroleum refining industries, as well as on auction design for oil and gas bidding rounds and the taxation and political economy of oil in general. Among his recent monographs: La internacionalización de PDVSA. Una costosa ilusión. Caracas, Ediciones del Ministerio de Energía y Minas de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela (Fondo Editorial Darío Ramírez), 2004. (The Internationalisation of PDVSA. A Costly Illusion)
Majid Al-Moneef
Majid A. Al-Moneef is the Secretary General of the Supreme Council of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Aramco). He was previously Secretary General of the Supreme Economic Council of Saudi Arabia and a member of the Majlis Ash-Shura of Saudi Arabia. He formerly served as Saudi Arabia’s Governor to OPEC. He is the President of the Executive Committee of the Arab Energy Club, a member of the Economic Research Forum, the Oxford Energy Policy Club, and the editorial Board of OPEC Energy Review.
Dr. Al-Moneef earned his PhD from the University of Oregon (US) and was Professor of Economics and Vice Dean at King Saud University in Riyadh and President of the Saudi Economics Association. He was a lead author of the second and third assessment reports on climate change of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Vice President of the World Energy Council. He was also advisor to the Saudi Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources, and representative of Saudi Arabia to the OPEC Economic Commission Board.
Dr. Al-Moneef has published extensively on energy economics, international finance, and public policy.
Robin Mills
Robin Mills, CEO of Qamar Energy (Dubai), is an expert on Middle East energy strategy and economics, described by Foreign Policy as “one of the energy world’s great minds.” He is the author of two books: The Myth of the Oil Crisis and Capturing Carbon, columnist on energy and environmental issues at The National, and comments widely on energy issues in the media, including the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Atlantic, CNN, BBC, Bloomberg, and others. He worked for a decade for Shell, concentrating on new business development in the Middle East, followed by six years with Dubai Holding and the Emirates National Oil Company. He is Non-Resident Fellow for Energy at the Brookings Doha Center, holds a first-class degree in Geology from the University of Cambridge, and speaks five languages including Arabic and Farsi.
Sophia Kalantzakos
Sophia is Global Distinguished Professor, Environmental Studies and Public Policy at NYU and NYUAD. She holds a BA from Yale University; an MA from Columbia University, and a PhD from the UOP in Greece. Sophia Kalantzakos spent ten years as a policy maker, an elected Member of Parliament and Member of the Greek Government until the end of 2009. In 2010, she entered Academia as Global Distinguished Professor in Environmental Studies and Public Policy at NYU. Her interdisciplinary research has drawn upon international affairs (her area of study) and climate change as the threat that is reshaping power politics across the globe. Her research focuses on resource competition, the challenges of a new energy mix and the potential of an EU-China partnership for the Anthropocene. She is focusing her attention on EU-GCC relations. She most recently co-edited a book entitled Energy and Environmental Transformations in a Globalizing World: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue.
Summer Said
Middle East Energy and OPEC Correspondent, The Wall Street Journal
Touraj Atabaki
Touraj Atabaki is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History and Emeritus Professor of Social History of the Middle East and Central Asia at Leiden University. Touraj studied first theoretical physics and then history.
Touraj has written extensively on Iranian history. His latest publications include: Oil and Beyond Expanding British Imperial Aspirations, Emerging Oil Capitalism, and the Challenge of Social Questions in the First World War, co-author Kaveh Ehsani, in Helmut Bley and Anorthe Kremers (eds), The World During the First World War (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2014); “Far from Home, But at Home: Indian Migrant Workers in the Iranian Oil Industry,” Studies in History, 31(1), 2015; Editing the issue of “Writing the Social History of Labor in the Iranian Oil Industry,” for the International Labor and Working-Class History, 84 (Fall), 2013. And: “From ‘Amaleh (Labor) to Kargar (Worker): Recruitment, Work Discipline and Making of the Working Class in the Persian/Iranian Oil Industry,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 84 (Fall), 2013. Touraj Atabaki has been the coordinator of a research project on the hundred years social history of labour in the Iranian oil industry, funded by the Netherlands for Scientific Research.
Victor McFarland
Victor McFarland is an assistant professor of history at the University of Missouri. He received his doctorate in history from Yale University and has served as a Miller Center Fellow at the University of Virginia and a Dickey Center Fellow at Dartmouth College. Dr. McFarland studies the history of the energy industry, US-Middle East relations, and the United States in the late 20th century. His current book project focuses onthe oil crisis of the 1970s.
Bassam Fattouh
Bassam Fattouh is Director of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies and professor at SOAS.
Matthew Leimgruber
Matthew Leimgruber is a professor at the University of Zurich.
Walid Khadduri
Walid Khadduri is former MEES Editor in Chief.