oil

Monday, March 4th, 2013

Oil in the Angolan President’s Family: Keeping it Global

A few months late to this story, the Wall Street Journal published a piece last Wednesday entitled “Angola Wealth Fund is Family Affair.” This was widely reported in the international press back in the fall when the Fundo Soberano de Angola was officially announced. The Fund, started with $5 billion, now puts Angola in line

Tuesday, December 11th, 2012

Documentary: Fuelling Poverty in Nigeria

Kicking off with an introduction from Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, the short documentary Fuelling Poverty amounts to a very brief Nigerian Fuel Subsidy 101 course. In thirty minutes, it covers the history of the issue and methodically...

Monday, September 17th, 2012

The world’s media watched (sort of) as Angola votes

The three most interesting things about the recent Angolan elections were: one, that we knew the result before election (the question was by how much). Two, why did the Angolan ruling party, MPLA, spent so much on...

Sunday, April 22nd, 2012

Goldman Sachs’s Angolan interests

The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating Cobalt International Energy, a Houston based company with investments in the Angolan oil sector, for possible violation of anti-corruption legislation. Last week the Financial Times reported that three Angolan officials –...

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

The Two Sudans

On July 6 2011, the world’s diplomatic elite flocked to one of the globe’s most underdeveloped regions to bask in the warm glow of the birth of a new nation. That South Sudan’s struggle for independence had...

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

‘The Oil Complex’

Video of a worthwhile lecture (recorded in February this year) by Berkeley geographer Michael Watts breaking down the workings of the oil industry. In the lecture–titled “Dispossession and Oil Violence”– Watts riffs off David Harvey’s explanation of the...