Oil Governance

Two perspectives dominate the literature on global oil governance. The realist perspective assumes that global oil governance is shaped by the will, interests, and behavior of powerful states and reminds the anarchic nature of the international system. The liberal-institutional perspective proposes that international institutions can coordinate the conflicting policies and interests of international actors. However, these two conventional IR theories maintain to ignore European/Western colonial and postcolonial world orders. This chapter thus examines oil governance from postcolonial IR theory, which locates colonialism at the center of its research agenda. Postcolonial perspective speaks of oil colonization, oil imperialism, and oil exploitation, which deprived host countries of exercising their free will and authority over national oil resources. It reveals anarchic power structure of colonial oil order and institutional means of exploitation in postcolonial oil order.