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1 Introduction
1.1 Introduction
I have never considered myself wealthy. Luckily, I have also never known hunger or thirst and the longest period I have been without electricity involuntarily has been half a day at most. In other words, I have had the fortune to grow up and live in a society with the norms, institutions and markets that cater for an abundance of natural resources. In fact, as this book shows, I live in a society that has completely structured its political markets to ensure this. That said, these same political markets produce several adverse effects for those at its fringes. Climate change, energy poverty, scarcity, food banks and a degrading biodiversity are but some of the terms that indicate the negative sides of our current political economy. A political economy that has benefited many, but not without excluding some and harming others.1 Simultaneously, this political economy is constantly defended and secured against the threats and dangers that its beneficiaries believe to exist. This calls for a need to understand the security processes at work in the production, distribution and consumption of energy, food and other natural resources. While the security processes behind each of these resources (and their nexus) is important, ânothing exists that is not energy, or not affected by energyâ.2 This book will therefore focus on the concept, practice and politics of energy security.
There are many ways to study energy security. Some scholars approach it conceptually, historically or quantitatively, a lot take a policy-oriented route, and a select few offer a broader social critique.3 What many of these analyses have in common is that they search for an answer to what energy security is or ought to be â often simultaneously. What is studied are questions like how energy security should be defined, what exactly needs to be secured, what the threats are, who is in need of energy security, what needs to be done to counter the threats, and so on.4 This book is not concerned with such questions. Instead it argues that the studies asking these questions only partly help us understand what energy security is, because it does not allow for an understanding of what energy security does politically. The book thus shifts the question to: what does energy security do? A question which it pursues by studying how energy security is approached in current scholarship and then further unpacks with another shift in focus from the current energy security literature to the security politics around energy security and by answering a different set of questions: what is security and what does security do? How does energy security relate to the materiality of energy, its infrastructure and resources? How does energy security work politically as a form of governance? And how can we operationalize such a performative approach to energy security?
Following these questions, the book promotes a shift away from a pre- and descriptive understanding of the concept of energy security towards an understanding of energy security as performative: to see the designation and use of the concept of energy security as an act in itself.5 By seeing energy security as an act, the repeated practice of its use âconstitutesâ, âmaintainsâ or âchangesâ the meaning of the concept itself and the enactment of its material effects, and thereby the potential involvement and identity of the actors behind it and the possible routes of action that are open to them.6 Such a performative approach forces scholars to move away from the âquest for certaintyâ inherent in studies that want to understand what energy security is, and replace this with the acceptance that the concept of energy security is embedded, structured, productive, malleable and used differently by different people in different places at different times.7
The performative reading of energy security (PRES) that is proposed in this book builds primarily on critical international relations (IR) theory and critical security studies (CSS), but also draws on insights from new materialism, development studies, political geography, sociology and philosophy. By unpacking the concept of energy security with the help of these different literatures, a reflexive stance is imposed on both the author and reader towards the triangle of political economy, security and natural resource policies and their trade-offs (closely related to the energy trilemma within energy studies depicting the trade-offs between economic concerns, security concerns and environmental concerns).8 Importantly, these trade-offs point to the fact that energy security is only one aspect within the wider debate on energy, which also includes discussions that start from an energy transition or energy justice perspective.9
To be clear, the goal here is not to offer a specific performative reading that explains energy security, but to problematize current understandings of energy security through a rigorous theoretical reflection on the concept and the practices that shape it. These include the different security logics (Chapter 4), the interaction between energy security concerns and the materiality of the actual energy infrastructures (Chapter 5) and a deeper understanding of the politics and power relations behind the organization of energy (Chapter 6). These three, in all their intricacy and heterogeneity, explain part of how people approach and secure the production, transportation and consumption of current and future energy use.
1.2 Argument, contribution and approach
One of the main problems identified within the energy security literature involves the realization that any definition of energy security is inherently unstable, which leads ensuing research to question the âslipperyâ, âblurredâ, âpolysemicâ, âmultidimensionalâ, âdeepening and wideningâ, âtotality or banalityâ of the concept itself.10 Those few studies that do reflect upon the concept either quantify, categorize or try to find logics behind different forms of energy security (Chapter 3). Instead of problematizing this openness, this book argues for an acceptance of its inherent empty and contextualized nature and calls for an understanding of energy security as a security practice that is always already political, in line with earlier work from CiutÄ and Bridge.11 It calls for a performative understanding of energy security that does not stop at the identification of the threat and the success or failure of its countermeasures. Instead it moves beyond such questions to the acts that are needed to make energy security come into being in the first place and the subsequent broader socio-material implications and effects that follow from this becoming.
Such an approach immediately highlights three alternative insights for energy security. First, the proliferation of energy security does not stand on its own. It is for example mirrored in food security, where the concept has also kept expanding to include ever more elements.12 Likewise, the analyses of security (Chapter 4) highlight multiple logics that can all be used to approach energy security. However, to repeat, instead of seeing this as a challenge that needs to be overcome we can also accept the multiplicity of it. That might add a layer of complexity, yes. But, if anything, such complexity should strengthen the need for a different way of thinking about energy security. Second, the acceptance of such a multiplicity imposes a reflective stance on energy security scholars, on how their work acts politically as well. This follows the red line of this book, about the importance of knowledge gathering on and within sociotechnical energy systems and the normative and ethical dimension inherent to these observations. A third, but not final, insight centres on the self-referential aspects of the theories that are used to examine and explain energy and energy security, like neorealism and neo-liberalism. From a performative approach, these theories are not just explaining energy security but are actively involved in producing its future through what they observe and the assumptions that they justify, for example on whether to trust the state, the market or humankind.
In short, by unpacking some of the underlying practices and assumptions behind energy security and by offering a performative understanding of energy security, this book contributes to a deeper understanding of energy security based firmly in the otherwise overall deplorably absent humanities literature in energy studies.13 In the process, it opens up the concept of security, reflects on the role of the material world in social research and argues for more reflexivity and attention to the knowledge practices behind energy security practices. In addition to its contributions to the energy security literature this book also contributes to the CSS literature, which currently is mostly absent from energy and other natural resource debates, while in turn these sociotechnical systems around natural resources hardly return within the CSS literature.14 True, CSS has excellent contributions on the relation between finance and security,15 but always in relation to terrorism or migration, not in relation to natural resources, even though there are clear connections, especially with the recent research into the materiality of security.16
Besides CSS, another notable absence from this book is international political economy (IPE). This is notable considering this book studies the security processes behind the political economy of energy, a topic for which IPE has very little if anything to add. Yet, it is also notable because of the origins of the discipline of IPE itself, as this field traces its own roots to the 1973 oil crisis.17 This absence can be explained by a combination of the relative independence of natural resource debates and the overwhelming focus on economic and financial institutions, globalization, and the organization of markets in IPE. As Strange remarks in her 1988 classic States and Markets, energy is a âclassic case of the no manâs land lying between the social sciences, an area unexplored and unoccupied by any of the major theoretical disciplinesâ.18 Recent work by Hughes and Lipscy shows that this mismatch remains valid, as current energy issues are still conspicuously absent in top-tier IR/IPE journals.19 Hancock and Vivoda explain this through the preselection practices in the publication strategies of energy scholars, which make them bypass IR and IPE journals and thus the debates and agenda-setting functions of these journals.20 Interestingly, Hancock and Vivoda still refer to energy as part of IPE and do not see it as a separate field that follows its own progression, nor do they see it as a topic that belongs to a broader natural resource debate. What is more, their future research options for energy cover a range of issues, but a focus on security and the politics energy security is not one of them. Instead, they argue for a move away from the focus on oil to other energy resources and issue areas like renewables, biofuel, electricity and sovereign wealth funds. That they feel the need to mention such basics is shocking, and further evidence of the lacking integra...
