China Ambassador speaks on Middle East, North Africa, and Human rights

100 Years of ME oil

This is a really interesting article, although it only briefly goes over the history of oil discovery in the region. It talks a lot about the effects of oil on the state and briefly about rentierism. I think its interesting when he points out that for many of the ME states, especially the small Gulf ones, the discovery of oil coincided with the making of the modern state. In effect, its difficult to separate the effects of oil since it was an inherent part of that state's rise. He also goes into oils effects on the economies and talks about the difference between "production" states and "allocation" states.  I need to look into the article more deeply, but for now it provides a good brief description of the effect of oil now in various sectors and what kind of role it will play in the future.

Article is too long to post and jump break still isn't working for me, see article below:

http://www.brandeis.edu/crown/publications/meb/MEB24.pdf

I also kind of like the way he set up his paper, maybe this is a structure we can look into??

Notes on Yergins writings

I figured it wouldn't hurt to put my notes on our assigned Yergin readings, and some of the Professors personal works we're reading, that go along with our research on MENA; I'd very much like to hear anything you've picked up from his works as we read them too if you've got time to articulate your thoughts. I always love hearing what other people take away from the same things I'm reading; just to see if there's anything I've completely overlooked or was wrong in my thought of what a particular section was about etc. I'll continually try to make some time to comment throughout my readings. I want to read some of these other chapters and put some notes on here too, this book is an excellent resource, I love it.

And I'm sure we can come back at the end and use these notes in our research paper.

Brief history of OPEC

Brief History

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is a permanent, intergovernmental Organization, created at the Baghdad Conference on September 10–14, 1960, by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. The five Founding Members were later joined by nine other Members: Qatar (1961); Indonesia (1962) – suspended its membership from January 2009; Socialist Peoples Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (1962); United Arab Emirates (1967); Algeria (1969); Nigeria (1971); Ecuador (1973) – suspended its membership from December 1992-October 2007; Angola (2007) and Gabon (1975–1994). OPEC had its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, in the first five years of its existence. This was moved to Vienna, Austria, on September 1, 1965.
OPEC's objective is to co-ordinate and unify petroleum policies among Member Countries, in order to secure fair and stable prices for petroleum producers; an efficient, economic and regular supply of petroleum to consuming nations; and a fair return on capital to those investing in the industry.

Our cumulative goals for this research assignment.

Let's establish what exactly we want to accomplish with the subject of "A Concise Geopolitical History of Oil the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)". Here are some ideas: