Energy Sovereignty in the Age of Fracking: Rethinking Power in Globalizing Lithuania

• In Event: 119 - Regular Session. Corporate Power, Politics and the Environment

Abstract

Current definitions of energy sovereignty tend to focus on the national level and are rooted in the political theories of natural resource management developed over the course of the twentieth century. Recent advancements in shale resource explorations have dramatically expanded the geography of extractions, effectively challenging the economic and geopolitical order built on conventional energy sources. Using the case of shale gas and oil explorations by Chevron in western Lithuania, this paper examines the ways in which national economic progress in general, and energy sovereignty in particular, are understood, imagined, and constructed in the emerging frontiers of energy markets. Our analysis reveals that popular definitions of energy sovereignty are inseparable from the concerns with community rights and global markets, suggesting that community is emerging as a new locus of power struggles in unconventional energy infrastructures. To capture these processes, we rely on the scholarship on land and food sovereignty movements and the neo-materialist approaches to studying energy. Our research points to a rescaling of sovereignty from the preoccupation with national self-determination, to contestations over regional autonomy and geopolitical influences. We argue that in order to conceptualize the changing contours of the state power in the context of the new energy infrastructures, it is important to engage not only with the globalizing and neoliberalizing state, but also the competing sovereignty projects that draw on powerful global activist networks, geopolitical imaginaries, and values of community self-determination.

Authors

• Diana Mincyte, City University of New York

• Aiste Bartkiene, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences

• Leonardas Rinkevicius, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences