Scholarship on the political economy of natural resources in the Global South has often relied on the concept of the “resource curse” to explain the negative features of extractive economies and their alleged tendency to promote rent capture at the expense of national sovereignty and development. Such theories link the behavior of social actors to an excess of “unearned income,” with little reference to the concrete forms of political and cultural mediation that reproduce this structure of growth. This article explores the role of the devil symbol in populist discourse in Venezuela and how this spectral figure comes to mediate subaltern consciousness. Tracing the origins of this image to colonialism and efforts to grasp the dynamics of the modern petrostate, the analysis shows how use of this symbol to mediate the forecast transition from a rentier to a productive economy has given workers in a state enterprise a potent set of signs to articulate opposition to unjust labor conditions. Venezuelan leaders have deployed figures drawn from local folklore to divide society into two competing power blocs. Yet, while these discourses are effective at forging coalitions and justifying specific reallocations of oil wealth, they do not obviate the tensions of this transition, and a counternarrative using these same figures has arisen in response. The article concludes with an analysis of parallels between global theories of the resource curse and local Venezuelan iterations of this discourse as well as a discussion of the role of translation in theories of culture and modernity.

In 2011, lawyers for the Chevron Corporation filed a civil suit against an aqueous geochemist under federal racketeering and corruption laws. They claimed that the geochemist and her colleagues had ghostwritten significant portions of a report attributed to a court-appointed expert in Ecuador, although the accusation was subsequently withdrawn. The original case addressed the environmental impact of Chevron’s operations in lowland Ecuador, the subject of a $9 billion judgment against the oil company. This article treats legal transcripts and depositions as examples of life writing to examine the contribution of experts to environmental litigation. It adds to recent scholarship on the instability of scientific authorship by comparing different forms of ghostwriting. Whereas the pharmaceutical industry employs ghostwriters to conceal the potentially harmful consequences of its products, the scientists contributing to the case against Chevron sought to make the company’s environmental impacts visible. The company undermined confidence in the legal proceedings in Ecuador by criticizing the experts for the plaintiffs rather than their data, preventing people whose lives and livelihoods have been affected by oil contamination from collecting the judgment against Chevron. This corporate strategy may have a chilling effect on the willingness of environmental scientists and other expert witnesses to provide evidence against powerful corporations. There is a need for better accounting of scientific research undertaken in support of environmental litigation, especially given the high stakes of legal contests like this one, in which corporate fortunes, human lives, and the fate of the environment are contingent on their technical expertise.

Oil is a metonym for terms in books and articles in diverse disciplines in African studies. Some portray oil as a causal agent that thrusts formerly low-income countries into the highly competitive neoliberal global economy. Others present it according to the oil curse/blessing binary. As a curse, petroleum causes dysfunctional and costly behavior. But increased revenues from oil just as certainly result in concrete improvements demonstrating a resource blessing. Heilbrunn uses case materials to explore environmental degradation, oil theft, community-company relations, post-conflict reconstruction, local content in contracts, and corruption. These key concepts form a basis for the keyword/concept essay on oil in Africa.

With much fanfare, Ghana's Jubilee Oil Field was discovered in 2007 and began producing oil in 2010. In the six coastal districts nearest the offshore fields, expectations of oil-backed development have been raised. However, there is growing concern over what locals perceive to be negative impacts of oil and gas production. Based on field research conducted in 2010 and 2015 in the same communities in each district, this paper presents a longitudinal study of the impacts (real and perceived) of oil and gas production in Ghana. With few identifiable benefits beyond corporate social responsibility projects often disconnected from local development priorities, communities are growing angrier at their loss of livelihoods, increased social ills and dispossession from land and ocean. Assuming that others must be benefiting from the petroleum resources being extracted near their communities, there is growing frustration. High expectations, real and perceived grievances, and increasing social fragmentation threaten to lead to conflict and underdevelopment.

The map of the American petroleum industry shifted rapidly from the Northeast to the Southwest at the turn of the twentieth century when spectacular gushers were struck first in Texas and soon in California, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The flood of small and mid-size oil producers broke the hold that the Standard Oil Company had for decades held on the industry. Competition defeated monopoly. Or so the conventional story goes. This article offers a more complicated narrative by focusing on conflicts between Standard Oil and independent producers in the booming towns of southeast Kansas in 1904 and 1905. In those years, John D. Rockefeller's firm established a monopoly through technologies of distribution and distillation and the production of scientific knowledge and opaque classifications of commodities. Oil producers revolted. A reform movement turned to the rhetoric and policy ideas of Populism as it sought to use state power to challenge the stranglehold of the “octopus.” This article explores the previously unrecognized significance of this movement by showing how the Kansas oil war contributed to the breakup of Standard Oil by the Supreme Court in 1911 and constituted one of the bottom-up sources for the reconstruction of American capitalism.

Although technological learning is indispensable for economic transformation in developing countries, recent research on industrial policy both lacks consensus regarding policy models and engages in little long-term analysis of policy impacts. This study contributes to this literature through a controlled case comparison of the varied addition of new and unique functional capacities in the Mexican and Brazilian automotive and petroleum industries from 1975 to 2000. It offers a dynamic industrial policy perspective that underscores the explanatory role of alternating state- and market-led industrial policy approaches and their associated cumulative processes of “exploration” and “exploitation” (March (1991)). It also suggests that two background conditions—prior investments in learning and exogenous shocks that undermine the status quo—intervene decisively in the successful sequencing of policy approaches. The study concludes by proposing a framework that recognizes three main learning pathways formed through different configurations of the main independent variable and background conditions. This framework can be deployed as a rough predictive tool to assess how other industries might most effectively increase their technological sophistication.

The Miocene Monterey Formation constitutes a fracture-controlled petroleum reservoir, with intercalated calcareous and fine-grained siliceous rocks serving as both the source and reservoir for oil accumulations. Petroleum is produced from macroscopic fractures, and numerous tar and asphalt seeps at the surface attest to the present-day movement of hydrocarbons through fractures in the Monterey Formation. Many fractures are filled with carbonate (mostly calcite and dolomite), quartz, baryte and anhydrite. These same fractures often contain tar or oil filling openings, and occasionally a thin layer of oil can be seen coating growth surfaces between two generations of vein-filling minerals.

Evidence for migration of fluids through these fractures in the geological past is provided by aqueous and petroleum fluid inclusions contained within vein-filling minerals. Vein-filling dolomite from Jalama Beach contains three different types of primary petroleum inclusions (based on fluorescence characteristics)—indicating that oils with significantly different API gravities flowed through the fractures. Petrographic and microthermometric analyses of oil and coexisting aqueous inclusions indicate that the fracture-filling minerals precipitated from aqueous solutions of seawater salinity at ∼75–100°C, and that oil was introduced into the fracture system episodically during mineral growth. A sample from the Lion's Head area consists of early calcite and late quartz, both of which contain aqueous inclusions with seawater salinity. Inclusions in quartz homogenize at slightly higher temperatures than those in calcite. These data are consistent with calcite deposition during an early heating event, followed by quartz deposition during cooling. No petroleum inclusions were observed in the Lion's Head sample.