Oil and National Identity in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

Conflicts at the Frontier of Petro-Capitalism

Alessandro Tinti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000479591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Economia dello sviluppo

Examining the interplay between the oil economy and identity politics using the Kurdistan Region of Iraq as a case study, this book tells the untold story of how extractivism in the Kurdish autonomous region is interwoven in a mosaic of territorial disputes, simmering ethnic tensions, dynastic rule, party allegiances, crony patronage, and divergent visions about nature.

Since the ousting of Saddam Hussein, the de-facto borders of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq have repeatedly changed, with energy interests playing a major role in such processes of territorialisation. However, relatively little research exists on the topic. This book provides a timely, empirical analysis of the intersections between extractive industries, oil imaginaries, and identity formation in one of the most coveted energy frontiers worldwide. It shines a light on relations between the global production networks of petro-capitalism and extractive localities. Besides the strained federal relationship with the Iraqi central government, the transformative effects the petroleum industry has had on Kurdish society are also explored in depth. Moreover, the book fills a gap in the literature on Kurdish Studies, which has devoted scant attention to energy-related issues in the re-imagination of Kurdish self-determination.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the extractive industries, energy studies, conflict studies, Middle Eastern politics, and political ecology.

1

The nature of conflict

On oil and violence

DOI: 10.4324/9781003161103-2

An interpretive approach

Can we really see the world in a grain of sand, as William Blake wrote in the opening line of Auguries of Innocence? Whatever the answer, in View With a Grain of Sand, Wislawa Szymborska replies that human experience cannot emancipate from the irreducible variety of perceptions through which the world is sensed and interpreted.

We call it a grain of sand,

but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.

It does just fine, without a name,

whether general, particular,

permanent, passing,

incorrect, or apt.

Just like the view from a window looking out over a lake does not view itself, as another stanza of the poem goes, the representation of inanimate objects around us does not grasp their ontological status. Our knowledge of them is imperfect, incomplete, and inconsistent. This implies that a lasting consensus on what passes as “reality” is actually beyond human reach. Szymborska’s insight puts into question naturalistic theories of knowledge upon which a monocular vision of science is built and thus introduces some decisive questions on scientific authority that, in my view, have plagued the common conceptualisation of environmental issues in IR. Overall, most studies on the relationships between natural resources and violent conflicts are firmly rooted in the positivist canon. As I see it, this large body of research suffers from some serious shortcomings – starting with the Malthusian framing of nature as an apolitical entity limiting human action, while modernity is instead defined by the purposive production of nature in culturally competent and politically charged ways. The polysemy of nature recommends embracing a phenomenological approach, which ought to consider natural resources as social constructs embedded in the power relations surrounding the commodification of material substances. In so doing, the ostensible de-naturalisation of natural resources is in fact conducive to the re-politicisation of the many ways these are framed, valued, and exploited. A critical reconsideration of the politics of nature allows putting resource conflicts into a richer perspective, thus avoiding the deterministic assumptions of mainstream theories on environmentally induced or driven conflicts (the wording is telling). The debate on the “oil curse” is a good example. The implications are not limited to the bounded space of academia. As the matter of nature lies at the confluence of knowledge production and policy prescriptions, it also goes to the heart of the politics of science itself.

This consideration stems from certain dissatisfaction with the solipsistic boundaries of IR. The need for imports from other fields calls into question statute and boundaries of the discipline. Nevertheless, I should like to make it clear that such judgement is not for the sake of dispute nor reflects antagonism between schools of thoughts at war with each other. It rather comes from an effort of harmonising the themes that are central to this piece of research, and tells about the routes I took to solve these theoretical puzzles. My hope here is to indicate a productive terrain of convergence where the cross-fertilisation of ideas emerges as added value. Truth be told, this was quite a destabilising exercise since it runs counter to the increasing specialisation of labour within academia that we are accustomed to. As any researcher is well aware, scientific work is evaluated according to the standards set by each epistemic community (Haas, 1992). The compartmentalisation of knowledge leads to the formation of hyper-specific professional identities, but this comes at the expense of communication across fields of study. When dealing with multifaceted phenomena such as climate change that cannot be reduced to a single method of inquiry, theoretical pluralism is instead required in order not to find ourselves “endlessly trapped in narrow, discipline-specific fields of inquiry, reinventing the wheel again and again” (Bourbeau, 2015: 4).

From this perspective, this chapter first lays down a critique of the spatial ontology underpinning IR and then takes its cue from political ecology to offer a more nuanced approach to resource-related conflicts. The point of arrival is the conceptualisation of oil environments as relational settings within which political identities are called forth and re-negotiated. I take a long road to support this argument. This paragraph, in particular, sets out the epistemological foundations of the work, which followed an interpretive logic of inquiry focusing on inter-subjective meanings, or rather on “how meanings are embodied in the language and actions of social actors” (Schwandt, 1994: 222). Interpretivism fundamentally deviates from the positivist presuppositions that undergird mainstream studies in search of law-like universal general-isations. The interpretive bent is rooted in hermeneutic phenomenology and reflexive positioning in line with a time-honoured epistemological tradition, which is however still at the margins of IR.¹ In my view, interpretivism provides the tools for grounding a context-sensitive analysis of meaning-making processes, without falling into either the barren empiricism running through much positivist research or the postmodern radical dismantling of every claim to knowledge.

Having laid out these preliminary considerations, what does it mean to embrace an interpretive approach in the first place? According to Weeden, despite the whole variety of voices within the so-called “interpretive turn,” interpretivists agree on four features at least: i) the conception of knowledge “as historically situated and entangled in power relationships”; ii) the baseline idea that the world we live in is socially made; iii) the rejection of rational-choice and behaviourist theories of social action; and (iv) a semiotic practical approach centred on symbolic systems (Wedeen, 2009: 80–81). All these lines converge towards a critical viewpoint that overturns the usual dialectic between subjectivity and objectivity, at least according to how positivism propounds it. The first two points in particular are worthy of note here. Social constructionism as famously introduced by Berger and Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge, which elaborates on Schuzt’s social phenomenology, emphasises “the empirical variety of knowledge in human societies” and draws attention to “the processes by which any body of knowledge comes to be socially established as ‘reality’” (Berger & Luckmann, 1991: 15). According to this formulation, the heart of the matter concerns the knowability (i.e. epistemology) of social world more than its reality status (i.e. ontology): to be more precise, it deals with the perception of what exists outside the knowing subject, how that perception is manufactured in manifold ways, and ultimately what are the appropriate means to represent those ways. Whereas the Durkheim-inspired classic sociology pretends to study given and observable facts (that is to say, self-evident and independent from human mind) waiting to be explained, social constructionism claims that the “theoretically constituted entities” – to borrow from Hawkes-worth (1988) – around us cannot be accessed prior to any cultural mediation.

This crucial difference breaks down the Cartesian duality between subject and object, which is central to the notion of knowledge as accurate representation. Positivism rests on the belief that if the object is observed scientifically, representation equals replication. Then, the whole issue of objectivity boils down to a matter of methods and how to employ them properly. However, if we accept instead that cognition cannot be abstracted from the conscious and lived experience of the reality “out there,” then there is the need, as Richard Rorty suggests, to eliminate the “contrast between contemplation and action, between representing the world and coping with it” (Rorty, 2009: 11). Thinking along these lines, any claim of depicting the world “as it really is” is a mystification given that an external vantage point is unreachable to human sight. In fact, the world comes into view through cultural and social filters that make it intelligible, and every form of knowledge is necessarily incomplete insofar as it is bounded in time and space.

This epistemological angle owes much to Heidegger’s phenomenological erosion of Western philosophy, which postulates the ontological accordance between observation and representation. Phenomenology maintains, indeed, that a theory-free observation of real-world objects is not possible since the observer cannot place themselves out of their own categories of representation. Taking an external view from an Archimedean point wherein the knowing subject can see the whole order of things while being detached from it, “keeping the eye steadily fixed upon the facts of nature and so receiving the images simply as they are” (Bacon, 1620), as positivism purports to do, would be therefore no more than “an illusion, a God trick” (Haraway, 1988: 582).² Put differently, positivism does not problematise the very conditions of knowledge, reducing social reality to semantics of variables, mathematical modelling, and laboratory-like rules of conduct – showing a fascination for certainty that from the side of social scientists reflects the desire to compete with so-called hard sciences on equal footing.

Quite the contrary, post-positivist research is by definition anti-foundational, meaning that no philosophical principle or belief is thought to ground legitimate claims to knowledge. Rorty, in particular, developed the historicist legacy of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey into a paramount critique of foundationalism, stressing that “the foundations of knowledge or morality or language or society may be simply apologetics, attempts to eternalise a certain contemporary language-game, social practice, or self-image” (Rorty, 2009: 9–10). Consequently, there are no independent and unbiased criteria to assess whether a particular representation of reality is objective or subjective, with this same distinction resting upon a contestable judgement. Even science, Rorty points out, cannot be considered “the mirror of nature.” Therefore, the ways in which knowledge claims are accepted as accurate are value-laden in a twofold sense: they are situated in the specific context in which they arise and also part of the “general politics of truth” structuring and disciplining society (Foucault, 1980: 131–132).

Seen in this light, what is considered to be a true statement is not only a social construction that acquires gravity in the social world through a process of objectification but also a manifestation of power. In the Foucauldian deconstruction of modern political theory, power is impersonal and diffused in society, instead of being possessed and located in the sovereign authority as contractualism maintains. The “battle around truth” is then understood as a power field in which dominant apparatuses organise the social body through the institutionalisation of multiple strategies of control. What is relevant for this epistemological excursus is that truth is not a universal and extra-linguistic account of reality to be discovered but a historically contingent representation of reality in “which the true and the false are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true” (Foucault, 1980: 132). Hence, discourses are not to be understood as the ever-shifting mirror of the bourgeoisie, to put it in Marxist terms, but as the necessary epistemic basis for grounding shared knowledge – be it variously typified into norms, institutions, or mechanisms of exclusion.

Interpretivism is born out of the encounter between these various philosophical underpinnings (social constructionism, phenomenology, anti-foundationalism, and post-structuralism) that I have briefly touched upon in these pages, without doing enough justice to their complex trajectories. Since the path-breaking anthropological work of Clifford Geertz (1973), the interpretive turn has spread across social sciences (for a summary, see Rainbow & Sullivan, 1979; see also Denzin, 2008), moving qualitative research towards the purpose of understanding context-dependent meaning “rather than seeking generalized meaning abstracted from particular contexts” (Yanow & Schwartz-Shea, 2012: 23). In this perspective, getting into the dynamics of social action in the Weberian sense³ is interpretation all the way down; an “attempt to clarify the foundation of knowledge in everyday life, to wit, the objectivations of subjective processes by which the inter subjective common-sense world is constructed” (Berger & Luckmann, 1991; original emphasis).

Of borders and orders

The state of the art in IR is quite poor concerning environmental issues, broadly intended. These were brought under the light cone only after the end of the Cold War, at a time where IR scholars were busy with the unorthodox threats ensuing from the end of the bipolar confrontation. It might be said that the natural environment was securitised, as if the spectre of “resource wars” (Klare, 2001) in the anarchic peripheries of the globe would replace the peril of a nuclear war. Kaplan (1994) dubbed it “the coming anarchy.” That security language influenced the way the environment was incorporated in the research agenda. Attention was paid to the role of environmental stressors such as water scarcity in contexts of organised violence.⁴ As will be shown later, that debate has faded away over time because of some dead-ends. In my view, those have a great deal to do with the spatial ontology ingrained in the discipline.

It is interesting to note that all the “turns” through which IR has evolved over time (from the constructivist turn to more practice-oriented approaches, up to the most recent aesthetic turn) are somewhat the product of theoretical imports from tangential fields in social sciences. The opposite does not hold true though, meaning that the innovative capacity of IR has been very limited in comparison. For a discipline “concerned with the delineation of borders, the inscription of dangers and the mobilisation of defences” (Walker, 1993: 15), this arguably results from the in-built temptation of determining the horizons of political imagination through the reification of historically specific spatiotemporal understan...