Since the early 1900s oil has grown increasingly important to economic growth, military power, and political influence. This course will explore why oil became central to both state power and economic growth by examining how control over oil resources and markets has been used by states and corporations to achieve their often divergent objectives (e.g., states-alliance maintenance, companies-cartel maintenance/source country pliancy). Among the contending actors seeking to establish order over oil resources (e.g., great powers, private oil companies, producing and demanding countries, and cartels among companies or producing states), leading states' interests often appear to determine outcomes despite periodic challenges from producing states. This course will examine how these struggles for order and advantage amidst varying degrees of state and corporate competition have affected international relations and the broader economic structure of the world economy. After reviewing the post-WWI competition among rival great powers and leading oil companies for political autonomy and oil source control, we will examine how producing countries paradoxically gained greater political leverage and earning from their own oil resources in the 1960s and 1970s by binding themselves financially to the leading great powers through reinvestment of their earnings with these states' banks. The final part of this course will examine whether the world's existing oil-based economic and security relationships will continue. We will explore the possibility of upsetting technological advances, rising great powers' demands, the competition over new supply sources, and greater producing country leverage over the leading industrial states. Format: seminar. Requirements: three 5- to 7-page papers or a research paper, and a final exam. Prerequisites: Political Science 202 or 204, or Political Economy 301. Enrollment limit: 18 (expected: 18). Preference given to Political Science majors.

Hour: LEHMANN