SUMMARY:

This article builds a conceptual framework for interpreting economic and social development in the petroleum-rich post-Soviet states surrounding the Caspian Sea. Circum-Caspian states have undergone rapid economic development enabled by petroleum revenues since the 1990s, with material consequences evident in major cities such as Baku, Astana, and Almaty. The article constitutes a programmatic statement of how research addressing those questions should be framed in order to uncover the emerging shape of petroleum-driven development in the post-Soviet Caspian region. It synthesizes separate bodies of scholarship to generate new approaches and inquiries, especially the economic and geopolitical literature about the oil and gas industries in those Caspian republics, and the critical development literature in anthropology and geography concerning energy and society. The focus is on Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, the two states addressed in most published studies on Caspian energy, though the framework aspires to apply to the entire region.