Dr. Douglas J. Rogers (Yale University) will investigate the changing nature and functions of "petro-states" in the modern world economy. His research will focus on oil companies in present-day Russian society, using the Perm Region of the Urals as a case study. Lukoil, the primary oil company operating in the Perm Region, has pumped enormous sums of money into social and cultural projects over the last decade, often partnering with state offices and other companies to fund everything from museums and youth festivals to the reconstruction of churches and scholarly research on ethnicity. Rogers will explore the effects of these highly visible sponsorship activities on configurations of state and market, concepts of citizen and citizenship, and, ultimately, the petrostate itself, which appears to becoming quite distinct from the postcolonial oil-exporting states most familiar to social scientists.
Rogers will conduct research in four different districts of the Perm Region, in order to investigate the local significance of social and cultural projects funded by new oil wealth. He will collect primarily qualitative data through a variety of ethnographic research methods. Data will come from semi-structured and unstructured interviews, employment and training histories, cultural project narratives, histories of particular cultural objects, participant observation, and archival and newspaper research.
This research is important because existing social science research focuses primarily on international pipeline politics or the manipulation of oil wealth to support and contest political power. Very little is known about how oil has affected local society, culture, and state in today's global political economy. This project will be among the first to approach recent developments ethnographically, exploring and then theorizing the effects of oil-driven social and cultural change at the ground level.
The purpose of this research was to better understand the role of oil and the oil industry in contemporary Russia. Many existing studies, as well as a good deal of foreign policy (both in the United States and elsewhere) focuses on the relationship between Russian "oligarchs" and the Kremlin, and on the ways in which the Russian federal government's budgeting depends on revenue that comes from the oil industry. In contrast to these studies, this project used culutral anthropological methods of fieldwork and extended interviews to learn how Russia's recent oil boom has been experienced "on the ground" in a single oil-producing region: the Perm Region of the Russian Urals. During a number of extended trips to the Perm Region over the course of the award, the PI interviewed state officials, current and former employees in the oil industry, and ordinary citizens. He also attended numerous events sponsored by Lukoil-Perm and completed extensive archival and library reserach. The result was a multifaceted picture of the growing importance of oil and oil companies to many corners of social, cultural, political, and economic life in the Perm Region--although this importance was very different from and often contrasted with the picture that has emerged from studies focused on national politics and economics. Publications and presentations resulting from this research describe and analyze a range of topics, including: the emergence of a new, oil-based regional elite in the Perm Region after the end of the Soviet Union; the corporate social responsibiliy programs of oil companies; and the collaboration of regional state agencies and oil companies on a range development projects, especially cultural development. The broadest findings from the research are as follows. 1) That our understandings of the role of oil in Russia should look beyond the federal government to consider the ways in which oil, oil money, and oil corporations are shaping the fates of particular regions and groups of people within them. 2) That Russia's oil recent boom, and therefore the place of oil in Russian society, is quite different in many respects from that of other oil-exporting states such as Nigeria, Venezeula, or Saudi Arabia. This difference is a result of both the Soviet past and the particular circumstances of the 1990s "transition to capitalism." Scholarly, policy, and public understandings of oil in Russia--and therefore of contemporary Russian politics, society, and culture, will be improved by taking into account these findings.
