Adam Hanieh

Adam Hanieh is one of the leading global voices on oil and the political economy of the Middle East. A Professor of Political Economy and Global Development at the University of Exeter and Joint Chair in Middle East Studies at the Tsinghua University, he explains how energy, finance and power shape today’s world.

Hanieh examines oil’s entire value chain from extraction and refining to finance, arms sales and sovereign wealth flows; and how that control structures global inequality. His most recent book, Crude Capitalism, offers a sweeping account of how vertically integrated oil giants built the modern world market and how today’s state-owned energy firms and geopolitical rivalries are reshaping it.

Previously, in Money, Markets, and Monarchies, Adam Hanieh mapped the rise of Gulf power in global finance and politics. The book was awarded the 2019 British International Studies Association International Political Economy Group Book Prize, cementing his reputation as a leading scholar of global political economy.

Across his writing and public commentary, Hanieh offers a distinctive lens on headline events. He has shown, for example, that US interventions in Venezuela cannot be understood simply as a scramble for crude reserves, but as strategic efforts to control refining infrastructure, secure corporate claims, contain China’s financial reach, and reassert hemispheric dominance. He connects oil flows to sanctions regimes, sovereign debt structures, petrodollar recycling, arms exports, and the geopolitics of China’s rise.

A former Professor of Development Studies at SOAS University of London and founding member of its Centre for Palestine Studies, Adam Hanieh also serves on the Advisory Committee of the Centre for Palestine Studies at SOAS. His work argues that struggles over fossil fuels, militarism and empire are inseparable from questions of justice in Palestine and across the Middle East and that the climate crisis cannot be disentangled from the structures of global capitalism.