Invisible power,visible dispossession: The witchcraft of a subterranean pipeline

There has been a lack of attention to the role of la sorcellerie (witchcraft) and the occult in geographical work on extraction, power and resistance, despite the ways in which these epistemologies inform conceptions of power, wealth and violence. In two towns along the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline, epistemologies of la sorcellerie frame understandings and critiques of the invisible actors and processes that effect the pipeline's uneven distributions of violence, wealth and risk. Far from expunging the experience(s) of extraction by erasing the pipeline's visible traces on the landscape, the oil consortium's infrastructural and discursive erasures serve to situate the pipeline within a knowledge system that associates invisible actors and materials with evil, wrongdoing, suspicion and distrust. This article addresses (i) how the production of dispersed extractive landscapes reinforce epistemologies of witchcraft by alienating the people who live within them from networks of power in ways that provoke a mistrust and jealousy that is absorbed within families and communities and (ii) the socio-political significance of this epistemological structuring of the pipeline as a logic of resistance against hydrocarbon capitalism.     

Ukraine’s unfinished natural gas and electricity reforms: one step forward,two steps back

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to explain Ukraine’s natural gas and electricity sector reforms, to outline the challenges facing these two sectors going forwards and to identify prospects for renewables. It makes three core arguments: First, the regulatory templates promoted by the European Union do not lend themselves to swift implementation. This is because the EU’s approach has been supply-driven, in the sense that it exports regulatory templates already developed within the EU; it is not, therefore, a suitable problem-solving measure for a crisis-stricken country with limited capacities and powerful vested interests. Second, there has been very slow progress made in innovative and creative shifts in Ukrainian energy transition policy, showing a lack of commitment to the transformation and modernisation of energy systems that should in principle be based on the promotion of new business models backed up by reformed political, regulatory and industrial infrastructures. Third, Ukrainian elites have been formally open to the flow of rules as evidenced by a number of agreements concluded between the EU and Ukraine. But, in practice, the pre-existing, deep-seated preferences of those elites have perpetuated the opaque gas trading system, resulting in them being very selective about the rules that they are actually prepared to adopt.