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The oil and gas industry is one of the most globalized sectors in the world. Its processes of extraction, production and trade cannot prescind from the collaboration of national governments, international organizations, local firms and multinational corporations. Foreign actors and their interests coexist and interact with their national counterparts; the global energy markets make the non-national a prime interlocutor of domestic energy politics. The internationalization of energy has progressively bent the space of its security and created multiple opportunities for foreign and international security interventions. Due to the growth of the energy industry, resources, infrastructure and markets flow and are not restrained by borders, stretching the spatiality of energy security outward. This has important consequences for energy security, which are both material and ideational: energy security threats are dealt with, perceived, understood and even imagined as global concerns. When Heydar Aliyev liberalized Azerbaijan’s oil and gas sector in 1994, he not only opened the industry up to foreign money, but also facilitated the presence and participation of a wide variety of foreign actors in the local energy sector. To accelerate and intensify extraction and production and to develop an international transport network, Azerbaijan partnered with several overseas companies; neighbouring countries, particularly Turkey and Georgia; regional and non-regional states, such as the US and most European consumer states; intergovernmental organizations, such as the European Union and NATO; and several stakeholders that had an interest in the country’s energy potential and related lucrative opportunities.

When Heydar Aliyev signed the Contract of the Century with a consortium of multinational corporations in 1994, he opened up Azerbaijan’s oil and gas sector to foreign investors. While the government decided not to privatize the industry and retain control over its assets and wealth, they also realized that the prospect of profits and new business projects required substantial investments. Aliyev saw external financial intervention as the main hope for the country’s economic recovery and decided to make the industry reliant on external financing. Seeing no incentive to limit foreign participation, Aliyev sought to create the most favourable investment environment by eliminating any entry barrier to foreign private companies and inviting energy multinationals to take a direct role in managing and developing the country’s natural resources. Aliyev’s decision stands out when compared to the choices made by the leaders of Azerbaijan’s neighbouring countries: in the early years after the dissolution of the USSR, among the newly born countries there was still much reticence towards international actors, to the extent that Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan opted to keep full state ownership of their energy industry and rejected the possibility of foreign investments, while the Russian Federation decided to privatize the industry domestically, opening the sector only to Russian capitalists (Luong and Weinthal 2001). Kazakhstan emerges as a peculiar and exceptional case: while in the first years of its independence (1991), the government opted for liberalizing the sector and opening the oil and gas industry to foreign investors, since the mid 2000s it has reversed its policy and opted for a progressive nationalization of its energy assets (see Orazgaliyev 2019).

Since its independence, Azerbaijan – the Land of Fire – has seen its oil and gas industry as a quintessential component of its identity and the engine that could first lead to and then consolidate the country’s economic success and international reputation. Energy is intrinsically linked as much to nation building as to state building. It has ideationally and materially defined the country’s historical trajectory. The centrality of energy has positioned it at the heart of Azerbaijan’s national security. The previous chapters have also shown that the security of Azerbaijan’s energy has received priority status also internationally, becoming a matter of global security or being embedded in the agenda of states, private companies and regional organizations that have a direct interest in the protection of the industry. These multiple processes of energy securitization have normalized a force-oriented approach to energy security, which enables the deployment of military and security professionals across large parts of Azerbaijan’s territory. At the same time, the exclusive focus on oil and gas has constrained our energy imagination to distinct forms of energy production and consumption, as well as to specific economic models. Energy securitization encircles and inhibits the possibility for energy and security outside these established categories. The analysis of energy securitization in Azerbaijan shows that the rhetorical emphasis given to energy security as existentially critical and the routinized character of its practices have trivialized any possible alternative, while making invisible the effects that energy securitization has beyond the egoistic interests of those actors that benefit from that process.

This book has explored the particular visions of order, the forms of authority and the patterns of social organization around which the problematization of energy as a security concern coheres. To do so, it has used discourse analysis to examine the discursive construction of energy as an existential security issue and conducted a critical mapping of the national, international and private actors involved in the labour of performing energy security in Azerbaijan. Unlike most studies of energy securitization, this book has not limited its inquiry to a state-based conceptualization of the analytical space. Conversely, it has been mindful of the constant intersections amidst local, national, global and private forms of authority. In fact, this research has focused on three case studies as representative of three distinct social selves involved in the securitization of energy in Azerbaijan: the state security actors, which stand for the national social universe; NATO for the international; and the British energy company BP for the private. This book has focused on four main issues. First, it has paid attention to the fixation on energy security practices that imply the actual or potential use of force, explaining how and why they have been normalized and taken for granted. In this regard, this book has exposed the similarities of discourses and practices amidst the different actors under scrutiny. Empirical evidence has shown that the construction and management of energy security threats in Azerbaijan portrays an idea of security that is fundamentally aggressive.

In Azerbaijan, the creation of a highly institutionalized structure to deal with energy security started at the beginning of the 21st century, when investments transformed the national oil industry, and the newly gained independence initiated the process of state building. Interviewees recalled that until the late 1990s it was mainly police officers who patrolled energy facilities, especially to avoid oil thefts. After the signing of the Contract of the Century, the presence of military and paramilitary professionals in the country’s energy sites proliferated. In the very early days of the negotiations for the BTC pipeline, security concerns drove much of the talks between the corporations, their countries of origin and Azerbaijan’s government. To western investors, the short life of the republic, the political instability of the region, and the fresh memories of the Cold War tension raised serious concerns, especially regarding energy transport and the physical protection of the pipelines. The deal not only established the criteria for oil extraction and production, but also posed the question of the physical security of the growing industry and defined the state commitment to grant security. Investors requested the local government to provide more security guarantees. Since then, the government of Azerbaijan has set up a rich legislative corpus that defines and regulates the provision of security in and around the energy sites. This legislation has expanded the role of law enforcement agencies, enabled the deployment of military forces in and around all those energy sites that are deemed critical, and established ad hoc security bodies that are exclusively responsible for oil and gas security.

In Azerbaijan, oil and gas pipelines draw a parallel topography, running across and beyond the national territory. Around the capital city of Baku, onshore and offshore drilling platforms shape a singular skyline. In the Absheron peninsula, Baku’s region, oil-well derricks in succession populate the dry, semi-desert steppe, creating suggestive lunar landscapes. There lie the largest oil and gas deposits. One can smell exhaust gas even from the city. The soil in the Absheron peninsula is so rich in gas that it generates spontaneous fires every time it leaks to the surface. This inspired the country’s brand: Azerbaijan, ‘the Land of Fire’. On the hillsides, particularly on the Yanar Dag mountain, flames blaze continuously due to natural combustion. In the surrounding areas of the Absheron peninsula, it is not rare to spot oil ponds, residual barrels, and sewage; these are signs of the pollution that contaminates large parts of Azerbaijan’s territory. Driving 50 kilometres south of the capital city, in a dusty, rocky and sandy area, the highway passes by the Sangachal terminal, a vital link of the country’s oil and gas industry and one of the world’s largest oil and gas terminals. The terminal, which – at the time of writing – is still under expansion, currently covers about 550 hectares and is connected to the four main gas and oil pipelines that cross the land. Among them, the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline is the second-longest pipeline in the world and runs along 1,760 kilometres from Azerbaijan to Turkey through Georgia, more than half of it underground.

This book explores energy securitization in Azerbaijan through an innovative approach to securitization theory, which combines discourse analysis to a practice-oriented approach. Overall, securitization studies champion a way of thinking that appreciates the possibility of change against the long metaphysical tradition of positivist theories of security and recognizes that security is inherently political. In this sense, securitization forces us to understand and question what is at stake in security – including the related forms of insecurity that security generates – and the conditions that make it possible. Securitization acknowledges security as an intersubjective process of construction, socially enacted and politically consequential, rather than as a universal and neutral value. This chapter locates the book’s theoretical framework within the field of International Political Sociology (IPS) and its rediscovery of securitization beyond the early formulations of the School of Copenhagen and its speech act-centred theory. When developing the theoretical arguments underpinning the book, this chapter explains how a new, highly transdisciplinary, perspective of energy securitization can offer more latitude in understanding the complexity and heterogeneity of securitization. In particular, IPS moves away from the linguistic tradition of the speech act theory and grounds securitization in French and continental philosophy with the intent of fostering a more critical engagement with the politics of security. While still recognizing the importance of discourse, IPS positions language within a wider set of practices, the analysis of which can help identify and question the ways in which power and authority intersect.

James Bond’s convertible runs fast through a giant oilfield in remote Azerbaijan. Miles of drilling bits and pumps penetrate the arid and dusty ground to extract the oil. An English visionary magnate is building a pipeline to transport Azerbaijan’s oil to Europe, but the Russians threaten to bomb the corridor and Bond needs to stop them. That is what the British spy is after: energy security. It was 1999 when the film The World Is Not Enough was released; the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline was only a project but a far-sighted one. Today, the BTC pipeline – together with the South Caucasus Pipeline – connects Azerbaijan’s oil and gas reserves to Europe’s energy-hungry market, making the 20th-century dream of connecting the west to the Caspian energy wealth a lucrative reality. Despite its questionable sensationalism and stereotyped geopolitics, the Bond film shows a common reality of the energy sector: the presence of security and military professionals in the oil and gas fields. This points to an overlap between energy and security and ties energy to practices of defence and enforcement. This book examines the large network of security professionals and the wide range of energy security practices that have spread in Azerbaijan’s energy sector. I should stress that these practices share little with the extraordinary lustre of popular imaginaries: the military and security professionals called to secure energy in Azerbaijan are much more ordinary versions of James Bond. For instance, these agents are employed to patrol infrastructure, guard access to facilities and administrative buildings, work behind their desks to monitor security technology, conduct due diligence on workers, enforce land expropriation and participate in different forms of training and capacity building.