Episode description

Oil / Coal as Sites and Struggles of Global Dis/Ordering

Rather than concentrating only on how the commodities of oil and coal are regulated as objects of international law, this episode foregrounds patterns and imaginaries of global dis/ordering that these materials generate. It thereby traces the multiple entanglements between fossil fuels and the infrastructural and institutional conduits of global power. This also entails an attentiveness to the relation between the carbon world and forms of political violence, collective resistance, and the chains and geographies of global capitalism through which these unfold. How are histories of empire and its reverberations in current economic and geopolitical conditions intertwined with the materiality of carbon – as expressed in patterns of ‘coalonalism’? Which arteries of power and authority can be traced to the infrastructures of rule that the extraction of oil and coal require and enable? How can these be diagnosed and disrupted?

The Speakers:

Dr. Lys Kulamadayil is Senior Research Fellow at Helmut-Schmidt University in Hamburg, and incoming Fellow at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, where she will lead a project on Law by Colour Code: Locating Race and Racism in International Law, funded by an FNS Ambizione Grant. Lys holds an LLM from the LSE, and a PhD from the Graduate Institute. Lys’s research interests include mineral resources, corruption, climate change, development, international legal knowledge production, and human rights legal theory. In her forthcoming book with Hart Publishing – titled The Pathology of Plenty – she explores the role international law has played in the extraction of mineral resources in post-colonial countries. 

Professor On Barak is a social and cultural historian of science and technology in non-Western settings. He is specialized in the history and current politics of the climate crisis in the Middle East and the Global South. On is Associate Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University, and the author of four books: Rishumey Peham (2024), Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (2020), On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (2013), and Names Without Faces: From Polemics to Flirtation in an Islamic Chat-Room (2006). His latest book, Heat, A History: Lessons from the Middle East for A Warming Planet is forthcoming with University of California Press in 2024. Prior to joining Tel Aviv University, he was a member of the Princeton Society of Fellows and a Lecturer at the History Department at Princeton University. In 2009, he received a joint PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from NYU. 

Event Resources:

·      Lys Kulamadayil, ‘Petro-States’ Shaping of International Law’ (2022) Journal of the History of International 

·      Lys Kulamadayil, The Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law (forthcoming) 

·      On Barak, Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (UCP, 2020)

·      On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (UCP, 2013)

·      Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives (2023)

·      Laleh Khalili, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso, 2020)

·      Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso, 2013)