This chapter covers Germany’s view on international environmental law and international watercourses. In doing so, it deals with Germany’s position on decommissioning oil platforms in the context of Shell’s activities in the North Sea.

The scholarly debate on the causes of the end of the Cold War has placed significant emphasis on the role of communist economic stagnation in bringing about the collapse of communism. This chapter brings a new material factor – communist sovereign debt – to the forefront, and in so doing, it offers a redefinition of the materialist explanation for the end of the Cold War. The global financial history of the end of the Cold War has four important implications. First, it makes the timing of the end of the Cold War far less contingent upon Gorbachev’s rise than previously thought. Second, it allows us to refine the causal connection between Soviet relative decline and the peaceful nature of the end of the Cold War. Third, global financial history transforms our understanding of Western leverage over the events that comprise the end of the Cold War. And fourth, the history of sovereign debt in the Eastern Bloc de-exceptionalizes the revolutions of 1989 in world history and places them within the context of broader global currents that continue to this day.

Access to natural resources and the allocation of revenue generated by resource exploitation is at the core of many conflicts and plays an important role in many others. Yet natural resources can also be a key factor in promoting a durable peace. This chapter explores the puzzle of whether and how to address natural resource ownership, management, and revenue allocation in a manner that promotes durable peace. This chapter reviews the peace processes related to conflicts in Papua New Guinea and Bougainville, Indonesia and Aceh, Iraq and Kurdistan, the Philippines and Bangsamoro, Sierra Leone, Sudan and South Sudan, Sudan and Darfur, and Yemen to understand if and when parties broach the subject of natural resources in the peace process, and how they then decide upon matters such as the ownership, management, and revenue allocation.

The transition to a low-carbon economy will increase mineral commodity demands by up to tenfold by 2050. Improving the quality of lives in developing countries will further increase resource demands. Mineral ores are critical for manufacturing low-carbon technologies. The projected increase in demand provides a major business opportunity, in turn providing a driver for the required investment to move to low-carbon mining, processing and recycling. To improve efficiency and reduce the carbon footprint of mining and metals recycling, the industry can take advantage of solar photovoltaics, wind and batteries, and renewable energy power purchase agreements, and reduce flaring, venting and fugitive emissions. Adaptation to cope with extreme weather events is critical to ensure materials can be delivered to low-carbon technology producers. Reducing exposure to climate risks through an integrated adaptation–mitigation approach lessens operational, maintenance and insurance costs. This chapter reviews tools to help the sector simultaneously achieve both climate mitigation and adaptation cost-effectively.

Chapter 7 examines the numerous difficulties Iran faced following the invasion of Iraq. In its last six years, the Iran-Iraq War became more and more difficult for the Islamic Republic to prosecute, forcing Iranian political and military leaders to come up with ways to keep the war going. The liberation of Khorramshahr had greatly bolstered morale and popular support and had generated enough initiative to drive the war into Iraq. But that initiative began to run dry after the invasion, as successive Iranian operations failed to produce the desired results – a decisive victory that would force the acceptance of Iran’s ceasefire terms and ensure the security of the country. In addition to these military challenges, in the later stages of the conflict Iran was forced to confront the war’s pluralization as the parties to and the scope of the conflict expanded.

The modern Navajo Nation government was founded in large part so that oil leases on the reservation could be approved. But as Chapter 3 shows, the Navajo Nation government did not act as mere rubber stamp for non-Indian interests. Though it did permit oil leasing, the tribe went on to reject the signature piece of New Deal policy directed at Indians, the Indian Reorganization Act. After presenting this foundational period of the Navajo Nation government, the chapter then presents one of the most tragic events in the collective memory of the Navajo people, federally-imposed livestock reduction, which continues to shape tribal land use patterns as well as federal-tribal relations.

This chapter investigates the multiple ways that coal and oil generate story, revealing humanity’s abiding intimacy with unearthed matter throughout history. Spotlighting the influential term “petrofiction” coined by the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh (from Latin petra, meaning “rock”), it introduces authors, critics, and activists whose works interrogate fossil fuels’ lively and lethal geological agency. Recent tales of coal and oil often portray conjunctions between embodiment and environment that are unhealthy, chronic, and entrenched; furthermore, these detriments are predominantly borne by the poor, Indigenous peoples, and communities of color. Both Ida Stewart’s poem naming the many degradations caused by mountaintop removal mining (Gloss)and Ann Pancake’s novel narrating the failed containment of coal slurry impoundment dams (Strange as This Weather Has Been) confront the toxic enmeshment of human beings in the Appalachian coalfields. Petrocritical approaches magnify harms of coal and oil and point out their pivotal role in ongoing climate crises. Petrocriticism also suggests that paying attention to human and nonhuman voices inflected by coal and oil supplies the energy needed for ecological remediation, and for more just, and more inhabitable, futures.

Chapter 3 focuses on relationships and accountability and looks at the role of colonial rule in contributing to continuing state fragility in Africa today. This chapter also considers colonialism from the perspective of internal and external relationships. The implications of colonial governance and legal structures for accountability and recourse in instances of harm are also discussed.

Chapter 4 shows how state power and industrial interests turned oil into Mexico’s most important energy source in the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1890s, Mexico imported US crude and refined it domestically to be used as a source of artificial illumination and industrial lubricant. Reliance on imported oil ended when domestic production on a commercial scale began after 1901. By 1921, Mexico was the second largest oil producer in the world after the USA, representing one-quarter of total global output that year. By the 1930s, Mexico’s electricity generation, industries, and transportation (railroads and motor vehicles) largely relied on oil. By mid-century, the majority of energy consumed in Mexico was derived from oil and increasing amounts of natural gas (typically mixed with oil in underground deposits).

Arguing that literature requires alternatives to genres such as cli-fi – that focus on the ‘after’, the catastrophe, rather than causes or solutions – this chapter examines Palestinian literature. It draws on Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Men in the Sun (1962) to narrate a tradition of writing that has emerged from interconnected processes of resource extraction, colonialism and fossil capital; and, historically, from the nakba (‘catastrophe’) – the displacement or ethnic cleansing of 70,000 Palestinians in 1948 – and enforced migration to, for example, an unbearably hot Iraq. He notes that a twentieth-century literary tradition – of poets (Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Marwan Darwish) and novelists (Susan Abulhawa, Liyana Badr) – both recalls a fecund Palestine, pre-oil, and resists the forces and interests of the fossil economy. With the experience of displacement and environmental devastation increasingly globalised, the enduring resistance that characterises Palestinian literature can be an exemplar for literature not as resignation but as resistance to the accelerating, imperialising forces underlying the Capitalocene.

Despite the centrality of place to H. P. Lovecraft and Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction, weird regionalisms have largely been ignored in literary criticism. This essay not only reads The Southern Reach trilogy through the lens of region, but also reads region through the lens of The Southern Reach trilogy. It contrasts Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” with VanderMeer’s trilogy to highlight how they both develop a weird aesthetics of the Plantationocene. The chapter argues that weird fiction in the U.S. has always been underwritten by racialized and regionalized ideologies that derive from slavery and the plantation. The New England exceptionalism Lovecraft endorses is founded on concepts of personhood, nature, and region that legitimate the dehumanization of African Americans and other people of color. In contrast, VanderMeer presents the indisputably southern terrain of the Gulf Coast in a way that does not rely on “the South” as a significant framework. The Southern Reach portrays a sparsely populated Gulf Coast that is not so much post-southern as it is post-Earth: VanderMeerian Florida camouflages something very different, and much more weird, than region as southern studies scholars often think of it.