Contracting Risk: Oil and the Licit Life of Capitalism in Equatorial Guinea

• In Event: Risk, Race and Financial Capitalism

Abstract

Charles Mills and Carol Pateman have argued that contract is the major mechanism through which … unfree institutions are perpetuated and presented as free institutions. More specifically, they write that “the global racial contract underpins the stark disparities of the contemporary world.” In this presentation I discuss Production Sharing Contracts (PSCs) between US based transnational oil firms and the state of Equatorial Guinea. Negotiated and signed at the beginning of a company’s relationship with a given sovereign state, each PSC details the production parameters for millions of barrels of oil and billions of dollars in profit for companies and countries over the life of the concession, generally thirty to fifty years. Drawing on ethnographic work in and around the oil industry in Equatorial Guinea, I explore the inordinate power of Production Sharing Contracts in the country--their capacity to supersede local law; to sanction tax evasion--as an illustrative example of racial capitalism. The daily making and remaking of Equatorial Guinea and Africa more broadly as "risky," as a place that lacks the rule-of-law, provides Production Sharing Contracts with their expansive conditions of possibility and power. Here, histories of imperial debris--racialized histories of colonialism and extraction--create market conditions; they create the terms in which profit is to be made.

Author

• Hannah Appel, University of California-Los Angeles