Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development

This essay argues for the shared origins of the 1973–1974 energy crisis and the 1974 Declaration of a New International Economic Order in the United Nations. According to many contemporary actors, the energy crisis was part of a larger problem of international justice—that of unequal economic relationships between rich and poor nations. The article excavates that shared political and intellectual history from the failed Iranian oil nationalization in the early 1950s to the successful supply gambit of the Libyan Revolutionary Command Council in the early 1970s. Central throughout was an anti-colonial reading of the recent past and the present, according to which a persistent imperial influence impeded an economic equivalent to political decolonization.