Empire and Capitalism: A Renewed Exploration of Extractive Activities in the North Sea

This research initiative aims to shed light on imperial logics embedded in extractive activities within the North Sea and to develop a comprehensive research agenda for rethinking extractive activities in the region by considering the North Sea as a site of Northern European imperial ambitions (Quijano 2000; Ince 2018; Koshy et al. 2022). This reconsideration is prompted by the perplexing narrative portraying North Sea oil and gas as a cleaner and greener fossil fuel. Notably, this perspective has been championed by Norway, positioning Norwegian oil and gas extraction as the superior fossil fuel alternative. However, these arguments for the continuation of offshore oil and gas activities in the Norwegian continental shelf reflect racist imperial legacies that attempt to portray activities around the North Sea as "better" than other oil and gas sites in the Global South, North America (tar sands & fracking), and Russia.

Applying the concept of imperialism to the North Sea's extractive history does not equate the region's activities with the atrocities committed by imperial powers around the world. Our central argument contends that North Sea activities are deeply influenced by imperial logics and practices, necessitating a re-evaluation of the North Sea as a frontier space intimately connected with the practices and logics of exploitation and expropriation developed in the former European colonies. These imperial logics, practices, and actors laid the foundation for transforming the North Sea into an extraction frontier from during the 20^th century into the 21^st. This initiative wishes to examine how the North Sea emerged as an extractive frontier especially in the post-World War II world order, for instance through the geo-politics, capital, knowledge, and technologies of European imperial enterprises.  The initiative is a platform for multidisciplinary research across the social sciences and humanities that explores these continuities of imperial logics, practices and actors in the development of North Sea extraction past, present and future.

The initative is paertly funded by a grant from the Green Transition Seed Fund at UiS. We are always open to collaboration.

For further information, please contact Associate Professor Anders Riel Müller.