The book Energy Dependence and Supply Security: Energy Law in the New Geopolitical Reality examines how contemporary energy law frameworks have inadvertently created strategic dependencies, most explicitly demonstrated by the 2022 weaponization of Russian gas supplies. Its author, Anatole Boute, is a scholar based at Oxford University and a senior author for Oxford University Press, bringing a legal and academic perspective rooted in European energy policy. The book offers a detailed legal analysis of global energy dependencies in the aftermath of the 2022 energy crisis. Triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the collapse of Russian gas exports to Europe, the crisis revealed the vulnerability of the European energy architecture that had been built on liberal market rules, interdependence, and long-term contracts.

Boute’s central argument is that energy law itself contributed to creating the very dependencies Europe sought to avoid, and that a legal re-engineering of energy governance is crucial for the new geopolitical era. The author’s core contribution is a cogent, interdisciplinary critique that links liberal-internationalist energy law with geopolitical statecraft. He makes it evident that the liberal regime’s focus on market openness and investment security paradoxically constrained importing states within vulnerable supply chains, a point he develops through a detailed analysis of EU gas-market reforms and the International Energy Charter. The work further extends the........

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