What “normative orders” do you think that Rina Swentzall might identify as shaping the “rules of place” at the BIA day school?
s clear that the exploitation of water for economic benefit has led to conflict in Yemen on a community and national level. Plus, more significantly, the economic value of water exacerbated the previous fragile political conditions in Yemen to the point of the Yemeni Crisis in 2011, which ultimately led to the ongoing civil war in 2015. It is also clear that the economic significance of energy resources has ignored those on the individual level and places importance to those with significant wealth and power. A postcolonial evaluation would show the vested interests of the government and business owner in energy resources and would ask that further research to examine if there was much discourse at the top level of government about individual cases of water exploitation such as that of the Amran Basin. However, what remains clear is that conflict does inevitably occur over energy resources at it creates and exacerbates political tensions as a result of the economic significance that those resources hold.
Conflict is likely to occur in nations over energy resources as foreign powers interfere in domestic politics. This is especially likely to occur in petrostates, where the economic significance of oil is much larger than most places in the world. For instance, with the current Venezuelan political crisis of leadership, and the increasing discourse from the USA, Russia and China, each foreign nation has a vested interest in Venezuelan oil which will play out politically and result in conflict. Each nation seeks energy security, which shall be defined as the relationship between national security and the availability of natural resources for energy consumption. However, there is an issue of complexity regarding energy security that suggests conflict can occur as increased interdependency can lead to greater consequences if it something goes wrong. As Yergin mentions, “it must be recognised that energy security does not stand by itself but is lodged in the larger relations among nations and how they interact with one another,” (Yergin, 69) suggesting that matters of energy security are intertwined in a complex web, and he goes on to mention that, “different countries interpret what the concept means for them differently” (Yergin, 71). Thus, with many different
