Reconfiguring territoriality and energy security: global production networks and the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline

This article utilizes a Global Production Network (GPN) approach to explore how the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline in the Caspian Sea is shaping regional social, economic, political, and environmental development. The BTC pipeline now delivers more than one million barrels of oil per day from the Azeri–Chirag–Gunashli fields in the Caspian Sea off the coast of Baku, Azerbaijan, through Georgia, to the port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean Sea. The article explores the kind of social and environmental space the BTC pipeline helps create, the kind of regulatory mechanisms it gives rise to, and the sorts of conflicts that occur within the territories that the pipeline traverses. The article shows that the GPN associated with the BTC results in a “mixed” sort of development that brings with it a suite of different costs and benefits, and also that it reconfigures the very territoriality of the Caspian Sea region and alters the concept of energy security.