Preliminary Programme

Wed 4 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 5 April
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    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30
    19.00 - 20.15
    20.30 - 22.00

Fri 6 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 7 April
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    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.00 - 17.00

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Wednesday 4 April 2018 11.00 - 13.00
W-2 LAB15 Rethinking Oil, Labour and Politics II
6 CP/01/037 6 College Park, School of Sociology
Networks: Economic History , Labour , Politics, Citizenship, and Nations Chair: Touraj Atabaki
Organizer: Peyman Jafari Discussants: -
Peyman Jafari : Linkages of Oil and Politics: Oil Strikes and Dual Power in the Iranian Revolution
Examining the role of oil strikes during the Iranian revolution (1978-79), this article challenges dominant narratives of the relationship between oil and politics and the processes that shaped the outcome of the Iranian revolution. The main arguments of the article are presented in critical dialogue with Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy. ... (Show more)
Examining the role of oil strikes during the Iranian revolution (1978-79), this article challenges dominant narratives of the relationship between oil and politics and the processes that shaped the outcome of the Iranian revolution. The main arguments of the article are presented in critical dialogue with Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy. Firstly, the article argues that the scale of the oil strikes and their central role in the creation of organs of revolutionary power call into question Mitchell’s generalization about the material characteristics of oil. Secondly, the article argues that the fact that oil workers were able to organize mass strikes, but failed to create an independent organization, calls for an explanatory approach that combines material factors with the role of consciousness, ideology and organization. This leads to a rereading of the Iranian revolution that highlights the role of the oil strikes in the emergence of dual power in early 1979, and the contingency of its outcome. (Show less)

Maral Jefroudi : Embeddedness in the Iranian Oil Industry before Revolution: Labour, Capital , and State
In his study on the development of modern market economies, The Great Transformation, Polanyi argued and demonstrated, mostly based on anthropological studies, that economy is embedded in social relations, and any attempt to disembed it has been challenged by society. Until 1973, when all operations of the oil producing consortium ... (Show more)
In his study on the development of modern market economies, The Great Transformation, Polanyi argued and demonstrated, mostly based on anthropological studies, that economy is embedded in social relations, and any attempt to disembed it has been challenged by society. Until 1973, when all operations of the oil producing consortium was handled to the National Iranian Oil Company, the production and marketing of oil was managed by foreign companies. The three actors in the oil industry were the companies, the workers, and the state. It was the interaction among these three actors that shaped the organization of relations of production. In different time frames, these three actors built temporary or longer-term alliances. Their interests clashed or converged at times.
Both the multinational company and the Iranian state shared “state-like attributes” in the oil producing South. For example, the Company provided housing, health and education services for a part of the population living in the oil towns and closely collaborated with the Iranian state in suppressing dissident voices and labour activism. Even at the time of the peak point of nationalization where the foreign company’s (Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) and the Iranian state’s interests were seemed to be in grave conflict, we observe close cooperation between the two in suppressing workers’ collective actions. In fact, that is when the question of the relationship between the Company and the state becomes pressing. How did these two entities that had similar loyalty claims over workers co-exist and work together? What were the limits of this cooperation?
In this paper, building up on examples from my archival work in US, UK and Iran I will elaborate on this question and and analyze the dynamics of the relations between the workers, the company and the state in Polanyi’s framework of embeddedness. (Show less)

Gemma Jennings : Oil, Identity and Inequality: a Transnational History of Labour
This paper will examine the history of the labour force which extracted, transported and refined Algerian oil over the late twentieth century. The focus will be on oil operations in both France and Algeria, to explore this history across both former colony and metropole. Ultimately, I argue that the history ... (Show more)
This paper will examine the history of the labour force which extracted, transported and refined Algerian oil over the late twentieth century. The focus will be on oil operations in both France and Algeria, to explore this history across both former colony and metropole. Ultimately, I argue that the history of this workforce provides a unique and valuable perspective to wider historiographies of labour and decolonisation in the Franco-Algerian context.
Despite the size and influence of the oil sector, particularly in Algeria, the industry’s labour history has attracted surprisingly little research. This omission is particularly striking given that the labour structures of the oil industry have purportedly had significant social impacts, particularly on gender roles, in other contexts.
This paper, therefore, will focus on oil workers’ activism and labour structures to consider how they shaped the oil sector and its wider social impacts at a local, national and international level. In particular, I trace the extent to which the oil labour force upheld or undermined archetypes of gendered and ethnic difference. The analysis will therefore consider how the workforce interacted with and impacted on a range external groups including national trade unions, non-governmental organisations and local communities (Show less)

Marta Musso : Algerian Oil Workers' and the Independence War
One of the most interesting and less studied aspects of the Algerian independence war is the fight for the management of the oil industry engaged between France and Algeria during and after the War (1954-1962). Vast reserves of hydrocarbons were discovered by France in the midst of the war, in ... (Show more)
One of the most interesting and less studied aspects of the Algerian independence war is the fight for the management of the oil industry engaged between France and Algeria during and after the War (1954-1962). Vast reserves of hydrocarbons were discovered by France in the midst of the war, in 1956, and became one of the most heated points of discussion between the Algerians and the French throughout the peace negotiations and in the post-war years.
Building a national oil industry that would directly manage the Saharan hydrocarbons became one of the main goals pursued by both Ahmed Ben Bella first and Houari Boumediénè later; but already during the war, the acquisition of information on the Saharan reserves and know-how on the oil industry became a fundamental part of the Algerian strategy.
This paper analyses the role of the Algerian oil workers and of professional training in the Algerian independence process, showing that indirect help to Algeria during the war came from foreign companies, and nations such as Italy and the US, in the form of professional training and technical information on the industry.
The paper aims to reflect on the importance of building a class of technical and managerial experts in order to claim “control” over the oil resources, one of the leitmotifs of the post-colonial years; and it analyses a relevant case of technology transfers from the West (and the USSR) to newly-independent countries. (Show less)

Shira Pinhas : From the ‘a’ in Haifa to the Last ‘k’ in Kirkuk: Oil Workers', Infrastructure and the Structuring of the Post-Ottoman Middle East
Mark Sykes’ famous aspiration to draw a line “from the ‘e’ in Acre to the last ‘k’ in Kirkuk” and the subsequent Sykes-Picot agreement are usually seen as the foundations for the establishment of the post-Ottoman ‘Middle East’ as a new space and territory. Yet what this paper seeks to ... (Show more)
Mark Sykes’ famous aspiration to draw a line “from the ‘e’ in Acre to the last ‘k’ in Kirkuk” and the subsequent Sykes-Picot agreement are usually seen as the foundations for the establishment of the post-Ottoman ‘Middle East’ as a new space and territory. Yet what this paper seeks to explore are the ways in which this new space was restructured and redefined by the oil infrastructures that connected Iraq and the Mediterranean coast – pipelines, roads and airfields – and by the labor force that constructed and operated them. Unlike the vast literature emphasizing diplomacy as a determinant of imperial space, this paper seeks to demonstrate how the relationship between infrastructure, mobility and socio-political mobilization of labor collectively facilitated the restructuring of new imperial spatialities.

I will demonstrate these ideas with an analysis of the Kirkuk-Haifa-Tripoli pipelines. Built in 1932-1933, the pipelines connected the oil fields of northern Iraq with the Mediterranean port cities of Haifa and Tripoli. In 1940 the construction of the pipeline’s adjacent Baghdad-Haifa road was completed. During their 16 years of operation, the pipeline and its accompanying road constituted a site along which commodities, technology, labor and management from across the Mashriq intersected. Oil workers from Palestine, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq met along the pipeline and developed joint repertoires of work, leisure, protest and cooperation. These social networks were mobilized by oil workers to demand that better wages, housing and work safety schemes achieved at one depot of the pipeline would also be established at its other end. Workers also mobilized the new oil animated transport infrastructure that supported the pipeline – the road and the airfield – to demand that people killed in work accidents be returned to their home country for a proper religious burial. Yet workers did not only struggle against the oil companies, but also mobilized the power of these international companies to attain political and social rights from their own governments. Through negotiating nationalism, colonialism, religion and capitalism in a transnational sphere, these oil workers played an important role in redefining the political and economic order of the post-Ottoman Middle East. (Show less)



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