Results by title

A study of oil-rich Alberta reveals the entwined relationships among geoscience, governance, and power.

The Canadian province of Alberta holds the world’s fourth-largest reserve of fossil fuels, with oil sands famous for bitumen, a viscous form of petroleum. A critical testing ground for international environmental ideas and energy policies, Alberta pioneered state-led efforts to understand, extract, and sell bitumen. Without natural access to ocean ports, Alberta must negotiate pipeline routes with neighboring provinces and nations to reach global markets. But Alberta is also landlocked in another sense: it is caught in an extractive relationship with oil-rich earth.

In Landlocked, Jeremy J. Schmidt focuses on Alberta’s energy industry, particularly its use of water and oil, to argue for a new way of understanding how political authority is forged and maintained through the environment. Schmidt details how water and oil were enrolled in early state-making projects, such as irrigation, and examines the consequences of Alberta’s efforts to extract value from land, including a series of events in 2013 that released 4.2 million barrels of bitumen into underground environments. By uncovering the ways that geosciences supported activities—from land settlement to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples—that produced environmental policies and approaches to management and governance, he shows that they aren’t merely instruments of state power but central to Alberta’s political identity and legitimacy.

The rapid growth of organized crime in Mexico and the government’s response to it have driven an unprecedented rise in violence and impelled major structural economic changes, including the recent passage of energy reform. Los Zetas Inc. asserts that these phenomena are a direct and intended result of the emergence of the brutal Zetas criminal organization in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas. Going beyond previous studies of the group as a drug trafficking organization, Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera builds a convincing case that the Zetas and similar organizations effectively constitute transnational corporations with business practices that include the trafficking of crude oil, natural gas, and gasoline; migrant and weapons smuggling; kidnapping for ransom; and video and music piracy.

Combining vivid interview commentary with in-depth analysis of organized crime as a transnational and corporate phenomenon, Los Zetas Inc. proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding the emerging face, new structure, and economic implications of organized crime in Mexico. Correa-Cabrera delineates the Zetas establishment, structure, and forms of operation, along with the reactions to this new model of criminality by the state and other lawbreaking, foreign, and corporate actors. Since the Zetas share some characteristics with legal transnational businesses that operate in the energy and private security industries, she also compares this criminal corporation with ExxonMobil, Halliburton, and Blackwater (renamed “Academi” and now a Constellis company). Asserting that the elevated level of violence between the Zetas and the Mexican state resembles a civil war, Correa-Cabrera identifies the beneficiaries of this war, including arms-producing companies, the international banking system, the US border economy, the US border security/military-industrial complex, and corporate capital, especially international oil and gas companies.