Ghosts of Empire in the North Sea

This paper explores the material and discursive practices of frontier-making in the North Sea and Swedish North, focusing on territorial control and the framing of these regions as empty, wild, ripe for exploitation, but also as spaces to which hope is attached. Rather than seeing these regions as part of the North-Western Europe core, the paper approaches them as frontier spaces for Europe. Historically, these areas have been depicted as pioneering zones offering hope for profits, development, and jobs. While past literature views these spaces as permanent or reconfigured frontiers, we argue that green industrial expansion rearticulates their frontier status, that allows for a new cycle of extraction and sacrifice. This project reframes frontier-making as a multi-stage process, building on previous phases but rethinking the frontier characteristics of these regions with each phase. We are especially interested in examining the affective dimension of frontier-making, particularly the role of hope in driving both local development aspirations and the pursuit of profit to legitimize extractive activities.

Researchers: Anders Riel Müller & Georgia de Leeuw

From the depths of the North Sea, fossil fuels have been extracted for decades. Where oil and gas have been brought to the surface, barrels with nuclear waste were sunk to the grounds of the very same depth. With a half-a-century history of radioactive waste disposal in the North and Irish Sea, British and other West European nuclear waste politics have followed the logics of dilution as solution: casted in cement and packed in barrels, radioactivity has been moved from the surface to the grounds of the sea. The dumping of –mostly low and intermediate– radioactive waste by European energy companies with governmental permission rendered the area of the North Sea ‘empty’ and with it its organism and seabed worthless, a process the historian Traci Brynne Voyles has conceptualised as wastelanding. Wastelanding the North Sea explores the perceptions, practices, and conflicts of and around radioactive waste disposal in the North Sea.

Researcher: Melina Antonia Buns

Famously, the colonisation of much of the extra-European world was conceived and conducted not through the direct actions of state, but of semi-sovereign proxies: the so-called ‘great chartered companies’. These organisations held royal charters and thus privileged rights to conduct trade and facilitate settlement in specific regions over specific time periods. Chartered companies were the mechanism by which the great financial risks inherent to overseas expansion was mitigated and capital raised from private investors. It was also how the imperial interests of governments aligned with those of the financial, merchant, and industrial elites: creating colonial bridgeheads in the periphery and vested interests in the metropole. Interests that in turn would exert significant influence upon imperial policymaking.

The sheer weight of the capital and technology requirements of developing offshore oil and gas reserves revived the public-private model over the 1960s-70s. In the decades that followed discoveries of hydrocarbons in the North Sea basin, its littoral states, themselves often former colonial powers, established a network of national oil companies (NOCs) as central constituents of their systems of petroleum governance. Like their imperial forebears these companies held privileged concessionary rights, not over territories or trade but over production licenses. This would ensure direct state participation in the extractive activities, facilitate knowledge transfers from the private international oil companies, capture contracts for domestic industries and maximise the license-issuing states’ fiscal revenues. As the national oil companies matured, they also developed interests of their own which diverged from that of their state owner, and they sought to use their new positions of power to inter alia influence energy policy.

Whilst scholars have studied the emergence of Western NOCs through a postcolonial prism, for instance how OPEC offered inspiration for the Norwegian system of resource governance, these semi-sovereign companies have not been examined in conjunction with their colonial predecessors. By researching private and national oil companies such as British National Oil Company (BNOC), Statoil, BP or Royal Dutch Shell in conjunction with the ‘great chartered companies’ this study hopes to uncover key continuities between the colonial mode of capitalism and the imperial character of the extractive industries that emerged in the North Sea.  

Researcher: Jonas Fossli Gjersø

When the Russian-owned Nord Stream pipelines blew up in September 2022 with no obvious perpetrator, blame, rumour, and conspiracy proliferated in both the media and online. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seven months earlier meant that the West pointed the finger squarely at the Kremlin, whilst Russia launched a counter-claim back; a revival of Cold War grievances. As a result of the damage, gas prices in Europe shot up by 12% and Norway increased the security around its oil infrastructure. In the two years since the war in Ukraine began, Norway has seen its profits from North Sea oil and gas exports to Europe increase nearly fivefold. It is unlikely that either Nord Stream will ever become operational again due to seawater corrosion.
Our research into the Nord Stream sabotage investigates the ensuing complex geopolitical situation through a commitment to the process of leakage: both materially and discursively. Not only do marine environments – the North Sea and Baltic Sea – offer new ways to think through territory and infrastructure, but they are also vectors to reimagine how information emerges, travels and is understood. Leakage demonstrates how attempts to keep matter and information contained – or submerged – will invariably fall apart.

Researchers: Charlotte Alexandra Wrigley & Sebastian Lundsteen Nielsen

This project looks at the historical heritage of oil and gas extraction in the North Sea as an imperialist expansion that colonises the sea to cater for a capitalist hunger for natural resources. With the climate and nature crisis looming large on the horizon, a range of new activities are initiated in the sea. Alongside the continued expansion of fossil-fuel extraction, deep-sea mining, offshore wind parks, energy islands, power cables, are introduced into the sea.

Within this context, this project engages with Derrida’s work on hauntology and Critical Fantasy Studies to explore how ghosts of imperial adventures past might be haunting Norway’s activities in the North Sea. The empirical material includes medialised debate in national and regional hybrid media and fiction and non-fiction portrayals in Norwegian TV and film. We see that the glorification and naturalisation of “the Oil adventure” conjures a spectral presence – a “ghost”. This ghost that haunts Norway, and Stavanger in particular, is tied to the hero worship of oil “pioneers” at the North Sea “frontier”. We see similar narratives with similar characters appear in new-old settings with seabed mining, offshore wind, etc., where the pioneer worship and fantasies can live on in a new guise.

Researchers: Liv Sunnercrantz & Jens K. Fisker

The development of the oil and gas industry in the North Sea from the 1950s and 60s onwards took place against the backdrop of decolonisation. At the time when European states lost control of petroleum resources in the Middle East and elsewhere, a new source of energy was developed closer to home. This project examines an important precondition for this development – the division of the North Sea among the bordering states. The project will examine the legal negotiations of the division of the North Sea and the related legal regime of the Law of the Sea. Who participated in making these decisions? Which underlying norms, principles and values influenced the procedures of the negotiation process? How did imperial legacies and the context of decolonisation shape the process and the outcome? Through an examination of historical documents, the project seeks to answer these questions and thus to contribute to our understanding of the North Sea as an imperial project.

Researcher: Ellen Ravndal

How do the solar, lunar, and geothermal transitions of the ocean transform not only each other, but also the cultural, economic, and scientific structures that depend on them? And what are the implications of the ocean’s endless material interconnections and temporal intersections for the ways in which we give meaning to, value, and know our worlds? Across four chapters organized by distinct energetic processes, this dissertation traces the mediation and extraction of hydrothermal vents, tides, waves, and upwelling across contemporary art practices, climate sciences, and ocean energy companies.

Researcher: Aster Hoving

The Netherlands and its empire are a key context to understand global carbonization. Shell was founded in colonial Indonesia and used its colonial profits to start extractive projects in new territories. When Indonesia nationalised (parts) of the oil industry, the Dutch discovered a gas field in the Dutch province of Groningen. The field, one of the largest of Europe, kicked off the search for oil and gas in the North Sea. In the context of this research collective, my research revolves around tracing the connections between the decolonization of the Indonesian oil industry and the rise of gas extraction in the Netherlands. I map the flows of the people, practices, and capital from Indonesia to the Netherlands at the moment of decolonization and seek to show how these flows enabled and shaped the rise of gas extraction.

Researcher: Marin Kuijt

States and non-governmental agencies use space-based systems for data collection, mapping, communication, reporting, navigation, and research. While space is becoming more privatised, historically satellite constellations (several satellites working together as a system) are omnipresent instruments of authoritarianism and capitalism, defining laws and norms of acceptable and appropriate behaviour. As regimes, they have shaped the fabric of international relations, setting rules for spectrum access, forming technical standards, the establishment of multilateral agencies, and contribute billions to national economies. from the viewpoints of their respective creators, Constellations, as metaphorical Gods looking over humanity, represent the values and belief systems of the creators who made and launched them. They sustain and shape ideology and laws; they influence decisions, actions, and define rights from wrongs.

Imperial practices, which have historically incorporated certain forms of quasi-religious control, are exercised beyond the traditional ‘horizontal’ sphere, but vertically, combined with other electromagnetic emitters, at different layers of atmospheric and subterranean places. Vertical colonialism involves satellites, stratospheric systems, drones, surface-based systems, to undersea, and subterranean perimeter detection and cyber-physical systems.

The aim of this project is to develop a conceptual understanding of colonialism from a vertical perspective, considering how quasi-religious values are exercised from the perspectives of different ‘civilizations’ who own and operate satellite constellations, and, beyond space-based systems, considers the ‘depth’ at which this form of imperialism pervades.

Researcher: Tegg Westbrook

This project explores the production of the North Sea as an imperial and capitalist logistical space. Focusing both on the historical, contemporary, and, more importantly, the futuristic visions of the North Sea as a corridor for capitalist accumulation, the project deals with questions such as: How has the imperial legacies of logistics shaped the cartographies of the North Sea? How does logistical infrastructures establish the spatial imaginaries of the North Sea as a hub and terminal into Europe and as a new frontier for extraction? How is the North Sea imagined as a crucial space for logistics to claim the future? What are the envisioned logistical futures of the North Sea? The project approaches this set of questions from the perspective of critical logistics studies to show howthe North Sea is represented as a smooth and frictionless space for logistical capitalism and, importantly, how the North Sea is imagined as a crucial logistical space for the future – in particular with the imaginary of an ‘arctic or transpolar corridor’ as a new shipping route as a seemingly positive, capitalist outcome of the on-going climate crisis. Moreover, with the North Sea as a space for new energy islands, offshore wind parks or new forms of deep mining, the project is interested in the way that the North Sea historically has enabled capitalist accumulation based on its key geographical location and its relationship to State policies at the tail end of oceanic supply chains, which once also connected the imperial centre to its colonies.

Researcher: Magnus Andersen

Since the 1960s, the North Sea has undergone an astounding development of the productive forces in service of fossil capital. Today, hundreds of platforms make up an impressive oceanic landscape. In addition to the structures we can see with the naked eye, the basin is also crisscrossed with pipelines whose combined length could envelop the whole globe. Moreover, the seabed is also perforated with wells that are no longer active, but which need to undergo the time consuming and costly process of plugging and abandonment (P&A) after ceasing production. 

Inter-imperialist competition played a role behind the scenes in the development of Norwegian oil and gas during the cold war as the US saw Norwegian gas as an alternative to Soviet gas flowing into the European market. The way in which these same structures are handled after having ceased production are also conditioned by imperial logics, although these can be contradictory. We can see this through EU efforts to maximize metal circularity within the union to increase economic competitivity, while continuing to see drilling rigs that have serviced in the North Sea basin for many years end up as scrap metal on beaches of the Indian subcontinent.

As more and more fields get depleted, dealing with the ghosts of past energy production will require both time, labour power and resources. This process will be repeated in even larger proportions as the first generation of offshore wind turbines reach their end-of-life cycle. When, how and under what conditions will we handle this vast build environment full of concrete, steel, and other metals? The answers to these questions will have a wide range of economic and social implications in the time ahead.

Researcher: Peder Ressem Østring