Seeing like an oil company differs from seeing like a state
The concept of seeing like an oil company offers one way to understand what’s at play, with climate change, and with efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
I recently read a library copy of a book about climate change entitled Red Pockets: A Tale of Inheritance, Ghosts and the Future (2025) by Alice Mah, a professor of urban and environmental studies at the University of Glasgow.
Among the sources cited in Mah’s interesting and valuable study is What the Buddha Taught (1974) by Walpola Rahula.
What the Buddha Taught
What the Buddha Taught was among several books I read after completing an MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) course in 2004. Further reading about Buddhism in Sri Lanka, in Buddhist Warfare (2010) and elsewhere, has enabled me to note that things are not always as they seem.
Rahula’s study, originally published in 1959, asserts (p. 5) that there is nothing in the history of Buddhism that links it with violence in any form. The statement contradicts the available evidence, including as it relates to Rahula’s own involvement with conflicts in Sri Lanka. A good overview of the latter author’s influence on warfare in Sri Lanka is provided by a paper entitled:
Politics of Sinhala Saṅgha: Venerable Walpola Rāhula
I write at length about such topics at a page I set up years ago.
Alice Mah, James C. Scott, and James Ferguson
I recently read an interesting article by James Ferguson, published in 2005, entitled “Seeing Like an Oil Company: Space, Security, and Global Capital in Neoliberal Africa.”
Having read Red Pockets (2025) by Alice Mah, I’m now reading another study by the same author, Petrochemical Planet: Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation (2023), which speaks of seeing like the petrochemical industry.
I am very pleased to have the opportunity to read this book. It adds immeasurably to my understanding of the forces driving climate change; I also draw inspiration from the message of hope that underlines the work of Alice Mah and like-minded colleagues across the globe.
It was in Petrochemical Planet that I also learned of Ferguson’s concept of seeing like an oil company.
A faith-based, high-modernist ideology
A previous post addresses a related concept – that of seeing like a state.
In the latter post, James Scott refers to the “pernicious combination” of four elements of a series of historical twentieth-century disasters:
- Development of a state-level way of seeing
- High-modernist ideology
- Authoritarian state
- Civil society incapable of resistance
Element No. 3, the authoritarian state, had to be willing and able to use its coercive power. The potential for lethality arose when Element No. 1, state simplification, and Element No. 2, high modernity, were combined with Element No. 3, an authoritarian state.
Element No. 4, civil society incapable of resistance, would be brought about through war, revolution, or economic collapse. Late colonial rule occasionally met this last condition.
Scott argues that state-socialist and free-market systems were equally capable of bringing together the four elements of state-initiated disasters.
Scott cautions that what he calls high modernism is not to be confused with scientific practice. Instead, it was a belief system – based on a form of faith – which borrowed the legitimacy of science and technology. The high-modernist ideology was uncritical – driven by an unwarranted optimism – with regard to the possibilities of comprehensive state-level planning.
A high tide in the ideology, according to Scott, was the national economic mobilizations which took place during the First World War.
Seeing like an oil company
In the 2005 article, Ferguson lauds the analytical power of Scott’s concept of seeing like a state.
“The power and clarity of Scott’s analytic vision,” the article notes, “make it easy to apply his theoretical schemes to a wide range of cases; indeed, once we have learned about ‘moral economies,’ ‘weapons of the weak,’ or ‘state simplifications,’ we tend to see them almost everywhere we look.”
Having said this, Ferguson adds, however, that concepts associated with seeing like a state, such as standardization, homogenization, and grid making are not, in fact, of great utility when we seek to make sense of what is happening in a contemporary world of “downsized states and unconstrained global corporations.”
In the article, which focuses on resource extraction – in particular, the extraction of oil – Ferguson describes how capital investment in Africa has been “territorialized.”
In explaining how such a form of capital investment functions, he favours the concept of seeing like an oil company, rather than seeing like a state.
The article notes, as well, that in the twentieth-first century, we are no longer dealing with schemes for the planned improvement of “developmental or socialist states” – an area of state-level planning that Scott focuses upon in Seeing Like a State (1998).
In the article published in 2005, Ferguson speaks of the end of most state socialisms, skepticism about development (I assume with reference to what is called the Global South), and the dominance of neoliberalism.
Contrast between state capitalism and previous modernizing developmental state
Ferguson rejects the notion that “globalization” is now the agent – as the “developmental or socialist states” were previously the agents – of a worldwide process of increasing abstraction and standardization.
He disagrees, that is, that “development,” “the state,” and “globalization” qualify “as different aspects or moments of a single process.”
He disagrees, we can add, “that contemporary global capitalism works through a fundamental mechanism of homogenization and the gridlike standardization of space.”
Investment in Africa
Writing in 2005, Ferguson notes that investment in Africa had increased in recent years, but only in certain countries, and overwhelmingly in the area of mining and oil extraction. The investment “has been largely concentrated in secure enclaves, often with little or no economic benefit to the wider society.”
Ferguson underlines that the “political-economic logic of the privately secured enclaves” is vastly different from the “universalizing grid of the modernist state described by Scott.”
He describes offshore oil extraction in Angola, in which very little of the resulting oil revenue reaches the wider society in Angola. The industry employs very few Angolans, relying on short-term foreign workers living in gated communities.
He notes that private armies and security forces, as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere in Africa, serve to protect territorial enclaves of mineral extraction.
He refers, as well, to the Republic of Sudan, where oil concessions are advertised as existing on “uninhabited land” – rendered uninhabited by paramilitaries systematically driving off residents.
“But this,” the article notes, “is only an extreme version of a very common maneuver, in that enclaves of mineral-extraction investment on the continent are normally tightly integrated with the head offices of multinational corporations and metropolitan centers, but sharply walled off from their own national societies (often literally walled, with bricks and razor wire).”
Flow of investment capital does not encompass contiguous geographical space
The movements of capital in the enterprises Ferguson describes are “global” in the sense they cross the globe, but they do not cover contiguous geographical space. Rather, the movements jump point to point, with vast areas bypassed. Such investments do not involve construction of national “grids” of legibility as occurred in the era to which James Scott refers.
Ferguson notes that in late-colonial and early-independence periods in Africa, mining investment often brought with it extensive social investment. Copper mining in Zambia, for example, initially brought with it extensive social investment such as the construction of “company towns” – with workers who were skilled, unionized, and highly paid.
These town were “classic examples of colonial-era corporate paternalism” in which “the business of mining – as exploitative as it undoubtedly was – entailed a very significant broader social project.”
When the copper industry went into decline in the mid-1970s, however, previous gains – such as higher wages, good social services, and nation-state control over national wealth – “were identified by the advocates of privatization and neoliberal reform as ‘inefficiencies’ responsible for the industry’s decline.”
“Rolling back” of the state
Ferguson speaks of a “mythology of globalization” according to which reforms of Africa’s “structural adjustment” were enacted in order to “roll back oppressive and overbearing states and liberate a newly vital ‘civil society.'” The outcome,” Ferguson notes, “was to be a new sort of ‘governance’ that would be both more democratic and more efficient.”
Things did not work out that way: “the best scholarship on recent African politics suggests that the ‘rolling back’ of the state provoked or exacerbated a far-reaching political crisis.”
As functions of the state were “outsourced” to NGOs, state capacity deteriorated. State officials in turn set out a “privatization plan” of their own leading to what has been called “the criminalization of the state.”
Governance by NGO
The article speaks of two forms of governance in Africa. One is described as “usable Africa,” consisting of secured, policed enclaves that are linked in a selective, point-to-point fashion.
The other is characterized as “unusable Africa,” which most often amounts to “a kind of governance by NGO, often in a humanitarian mode, with a hodgepodge of transnational private voluntary organizations carrying out the day-to-day work of providing rudimentary governmental and social services, especially in areas of crisis and conflict.”
Such a “global” model of resource extraction is not new
In some respects, the article notes, the “global” model of resource extraction is not new. Private companies with their own armies, such as in King Leopold’s Congo, pioneered resource extraction in the absence of modern state institutions.
The article notes that “mineral-extraction investment in ‘unstable’ environments is seen as a ‘growth industry,’ and the use of private military and security firms appears as a ‘cutting edge’ new technology of spatial and social regulation.”
We can say, based on the article, that seeing like an oil company entails the pursuit of oil-extraction opportunities, even in the midst of chaos and disorder: the pursuit of oil is the primary consideration. In this context, Ferguson quotes an oil executive who says, in response to a question about political volatility, “You’ve got to go where the oil is. I don’t think about it very much.”
New tools for critical analysis
The article, which I found of interest, seeks to enhance understanding of the “emergent forms of specialized order and disorder” in the world. Ferguson notes that the logic inherent in such forms “is not one of ever-expanding homogenization and standardization.” As a result, he concludes, new tools such as the concept of seeing like an oil company are required.
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