Energy Security in Europe and Eurasia

RESEARCH PROJECT

Over the last several years, energy security (assuring an adequate energy supply and stability of energy prices) has become increasingly prominent in European public spheres and policy agendas. Although one can find global agreements, for example the G8 Global Energy Security Principles (St. Petersburg in 2006), understandings about the sources of insecurity and their means to remedy are contested.

In this project carried out in association with the Aleksanteri Institute's Eurasia Energy Group at the University of Helsinki, an interdisciplinary and international research team is working to identify the cultural politics of energy security in Europe and Eurasia. We seek to identify how various actors influence and transform the meanings, identities, values, and representations accompanying the exercise of power and influence around the definition and address of energy security, with special focus on the European Union and its relationship to energy coming from Russia and the Caspian Sea.

We begin by explaining how problem formation around energy security coheres and how it varies.  We elaborate how a unifying narrative around ideal markets, accompanied by the rule of law alongside socially and environmentally sensible policies, physically secure investments, and inclusive international agreements, provides the dominant normative foundation for assessing and developing more particular notions of energy security.

We then explicate how interpretations of energy security articulate with variously located political, economic, scientific and social agents, and with other issues that may (e.g. the value of environmentally sustainable development) or may not (e.g. competing definitions of national security or corporate interests) resonate with that dominant framework.

Finally, we wish to consider the kinds of evidence and interpretative methods used to establish those claims, by considering various anticipations of profitability, future energy needs, and the reliability of trading partners and transit routes.

We are particularly interested, however, in how the logic of diversity is variously used to justify new investments.  Although we consider different pipelines now providing, and potentially providing, energy resources out of Russia and Central Asia and the Caucasus, we are especially interested to compare the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan Pipeline and Northern Europe Gas Pipeline in order to identify the ways in which the common value of diversifying energy supplies can be used by different actors to realize different, and potentially competing, economic goals, political alliances, and public goods.  

Beyond this particular empirical comparison, we are also working to extend theoretical insights of scholars like Anthony Giddens, William Sewell, Ole Waever, and Alexander Wendt into the field of energy studies. We find especially useful the ways in which their notions of cultural schema, material resources, and events can be used not only to explain particular historical transformations, but also to better anticipate alternative futures around the development of energy security.

 

 

INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EUROPEAN UNION ENERGY SECURITY

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