How will traumatic decarbonization affect peace processes and political settlements in fragile oil-producing states in Africa and the Middle East?
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Based on an empirical comparison of peace processes in carbon-dependent economies over time, this article investigates the impact of decarbonisation and the related decline of political finance in respective political marketplaces on peacemaking. It argues that, while the period of high oil prices in the mid-2000s was characterised several significant peace deals that attempted comprehensive settlements, the decline of oil prices in the years from 2013 to 2021 has led to a new era of turbulence. The reasons for these patterns are the availability and subsequent decline of political finance that enabled elite buy in at a large scale in “big tent” politics, as well as the rise and decline of strategic interest in geopolitical stability by international powers.
Author
Jan Pospisil is Associate Professor (Research) at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations at Coventry University and co-investigator in the Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, PeaceRep (University of Edinburgh). From 2018 to 2022, he was research director at the Austrian Centre for Peace in Stadtschlaining, from 2015 to 2017, he was researcher at the Edinburgh Law School, from 2006-2015 researcher at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs. His work engages with processes of enduring transition in armed conflict, investigates alternatives to liberal peacebuilding, and is concerned with the transition processes in South Sudan and Sudan. He is the author of Peace in Political Unsettlement: Beyond Solving Conflict (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and numerous articles.
The Carbon Compacts, Decarbonization, and Peace in Fragile States in Africa and the Middle East project was a 21-month research project led by the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University and funded by the United States Institute for Peace. Our goal within the project was to analyze how traumatic decarbonization—a rapid loss of oil rents—would affect peace processes and political settlements in fragile oil-producing states in Africa and the Middle East.
Photo: Photo: Oil Drum Composition, Carsten ten Brink, 2010 | FLICKR (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
