Timothy Mitchell Challenges Conventional Wisdom Which Suggests Essay

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Timothy Mitchell challenges conventional wisdom which suggests that oil-producing countries tend to be less democratic, specifically by referring to the current state of affairs in the Middle East. Mitchell discusses the role of oil by placing it within a larger context of fossil fuels and their effect on political mobilization, and argues that the existence of large reserves of fossil fuel may limit democracy but also made certain kinds of democratic processes possible. He calls the latter carbon democracy.

Mitchell argues that viewing the impact of oil as necessarily anti-democratic is narrow-minded. The role of oil should be analyzed in a larger context, he says. For instance, those who argue that a dependency on oil and the ability of the ruling elite in the Middle Eastern countries make them less democratic only look at the political processes of using oil for the benefit of the rulers. But we need also to look at the processes of exploration, extraction, storing, and distribution of oil and how those processes affect democratic politics. Mitchell also notes that the leading industrialized countries of the world also heavily depend on oil. So, the anti-democratic nature of a country cannot be attributed to just the existence of oil in a given country.

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Mitchell proposes to look at the history of coal and its impact on mass politics as a context for understanding the impact of oil and carbon democracy in general. This seems to be a particularly important point. As he notes, the introduction of coal to Europe two hundred years ago totally changed the economy and politics of European countries. Coal provided a greater concentration of renewable energy which would be much harder to get from the traditional source of energy: the sun. Coal helped them to industrialize and also speeded up the process of urbanization because the availability of coal removed the need for having large "adjacent pastures and wood" (402). At the same time, coal changed agrarian politics in Europe and encouraged them to expand agricultural production to distant lands, which led to colonization and enslavement of Africans and indigenous populations. So, the introduction of….....

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