Kristin Ciupa, "The Political Economy of Oil in Venezuela: Class Conflict, the State, and the World Market" (Brill, 2026)

Mar 29, 2026

Kristin Ciupa, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Regina and author of a new book on Venezuela’s oil political economy. She traces Venezuela from a coffee-based agrarian past to oil discovery, nationalization, the Punto Fijo era, Chávez’s rise, and the limits of rent-based projects. The conversation covers class conflict, state form, OPEC, sanctions, and the 2026 hydrocarbons law.

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ANECDOTE

Coffee Economy Before Oil Centralized Power

Before oil, Venezuela's economy was coffee-based with regional landowning elites and weak central state structures.
Kristin Ciupa describes how declining coffee revenues spurred military centralization and the start of modern capitalist development under Gómez.

INSIGHT

Early Oil Boom Fueled By Foreign Concessions

Gómez invited foreign oil companies with highly favorable contracts, enabling Shell to discover major reserves and start exports in 1918.
Cheap-to-produce Venezuelan oil and rising global demand turned the sector into an enclave reliant on foreign capital and expertise.

INSIGHT

Oil Created Rentier Enclave Economy

Rentier capitalist accumulation emerged as oil revenues flowed to the state while the industry remained an enclave with foreign capital and expatriate skilled workers.
Urbanization rose and a bureaucratic and commercial middle class expanded, but industrial linkages stayed weak.

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The Political Economy of Oil in Venezuela: Class Conflict, the State, and the World Market (Brill, 2026) is the latest book from Dr. Kristin Ciupa, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Regina. Published with Brill, this book provides a detailed and engaging account of the historical development of Venezuela’s political economy and interrelated oil industry. The book takes us from Venezuela prior to the advent of oil discovery where the economy was dependent on a limited range of export-oriented agricultural crops, all the way up to the Bolivarian government project instituted by Hugo Chavez. Of course, Venezuela has been at the centre of political turmoil at present, and it is crucial to get a strong, historical understanding of Venezuela’s political economy, connected as it is with broader regional and global developments, to more concretely comprehend the current moment.

Ciupa situates Venezuela within not only the broader ‘Pink Tide’ that swept different parts of Latin America since the1990s, but also within the dynamics and tendencies of oil extraction and class politics at a local and international scale. Much of the literature has seen Venezuela as trapped in the classic ‘resource curse’, where oil-exporting developing countries earn windfall revenues but have been unable to translate that to sustainable growth and development, which is usually deemed to be due to poor economic planning, weak institutions, and a lack of incentives for governments to invest. Ciupa’s book argues, instead, that the interplay between national and international structures and relations of power, in Venezuela and in the global market, serve to perpetuate oil dependence. In making this argument, Ciupa presents a detailed, historical analysis of the ways in which the country was subsumed into the global economy as an oil exporter, tracing Venezuela’s development and political economy through its prior dictatorships, the crises of the twentieth century, and then finally through the revolutionary Bolivarian government led by Hugo Chavez and then Nicolas Maduro. Kristin Ciupa’s new book is a detailed, theoretically invigorated, and careful examination of Venezuela and its oil industry, which is still at the centre of geopolitical struggles more broadly today.

Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer and tutor in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press.

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