- 18 Dec 2012
READING THE HISTORY OF MIDDLE EASTERN OIL AS URBAN VIOLENCE: The Case of Iraq
Abstract
This lecture examines how Iraq’s oil industry structured different types of violence in Kirkuk and its oil conurbation during the period of the Hashemite Monarchy (1921-1958). After a discussion of the different qualities of oil as a substance, commodity and extractive industrial enterprise, the lecture will briefly analyse oil’s association with violence, urban life and processes of urbanisation in the Middle East before the nationalisation of oil industries across the region. It will then consider the case of Iraq and contrast developments in Kirkuk with those in the oil stations that mushroomed around the city in the 1930s. The focus is on how forms of structural violence became embedded in the new urban geographies and disciplines of oil production, and on how they became ‘operational’ in the context of the labour unrest triggered by the socio-economic and political dislocation brought about by the Second World War.
About the Speakers
Nelida Fuccaro is Reader in the Modern History of the Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London . Her research focuses on the Arab States of the Persian Gulf, Iraq and Syria with particular reference to historical and contemporary urbanism, the history of oil and violence, ethnicity, nationalism and Middle Eastern frontier societies. She is the author of The Other Kurds: Yazidis in Colonial Iraq (London: IB Tauris, 1999), Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama since 1800 (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), and the guest editor of the thematic contribution ‘Histories of Oil and Urban Modernity in the Middle East’ in Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2013). As a specialist on urban history and culture of the Persian Gulf region and Middle East she has been the recipient of several grants for international collaborative research projects. She is now leading an international AHRC/DFG sponsored project on the history of urban violence in the modern Middle East and writing a book for Cambridge University Press entitled ‘ Urban Violence in the Middle East: from the Imperial Age to the Arab Spring’.
Event Details
National University of Singapore
469A Bukit Timah Road
Tower Block Level 2 Singapore 259770
