Short take: Dusting off a dissertation

The US and oil in Colombia and Venezuela

The US moves on Venezuelan oil made me look back at the Masters dissertation I wrote (some time back!) on the US and oil, not in Venezuela, but in neighboring Colombia.

There are parts of the dissertation I now see as over-simplified, but the core argument and many of its points have strikingly stood the test of time. A reminder of the power-fueled cycles of history…imperialism, revolution, broken ideals, cronyism, imperialism, and so on. And a reminder to always be looking for the openings around the edges of headline-history, and for the humanity that is the continuous undertow.

Here’s one paragraph from the dissertation that’s a reminder that the current US maneuvers are a continuation of a long-established trajectory.

“There are clear parallels between a national security emphasis on the protection of hegemonic power, and the enhanced inequality that capitalism, despite its benefits, has brought in tow. This point was made clear when, in the same year that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted (1948), head of the US State Department’s policy planning staff George Kennan said: ‘We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of the world’s population…Our real task in the coming period is…to maintain this position of disparity…We should cease to talk about vague and…unreal objectives such as human rights’ (quoted Ishay et al, 1997: 391). A brief note is in order here in response to Kennan’s comment, on the value and role of universalism, bearing in mind that ‘rights have to be universal or do not exist at all’ (Restrepo, 2001: 111). Kennan’s statement encapsulates the realist argument against the universalism of human rights, namely, that as humanity is founded on power concepts it will always be inherently unequal, therefore efforts to work towards illusory universal goals are misguided and destined to fail. While it is true that humanity can be defined by its inequality, that is only half of the definition. It can also be defined as the perpetual struggle against inequality and against the abuse of power. Universalism is the expression of this struggle, and without it history and indeed human existence itself are rendered meaningless.”

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• The full dissertation, “To what extent does a corporate-state security consensus undermine human rights?” can be downloaded here.

• The image above is of a cover that the book binder Nina Judin, who lived with my parents while she did her book-binding training, created for the dissertation as a gift. Thank you, Nina.