Artigo https://revistas.ufrj.br/index.php/sg The Prize and the Quest of Energy Beyond the Oil Paradigm: Renewable energy deployment under the sustainable development agenda Sul Global. 1 (1): 60- 83 [2020] Thauan Santos (1) 1- Assistant professor of the Graduate Programme in Maritime Studies at the Brazilian Naval War College (PPGEM/EGN) and coordinator of the Economy of the Sea Group (GEM). Email: santos .thauan@gmail.com. Since the oil crisis of the 1970s, energy politics have become a key area of international relations studies (Santos, 2018, p. 5; Borovsky and Trachuk, 2015, p. 97; Duffield, 2012, p. 1). However, given the magnitude of these crises and considering their impacts mainly on the net oil importing countries of the period, it is possible to argue that this decade served as an impetus to rethink the excessive dependence on oil, whether for energy purposes or for other uses of its derivatives. In fact, since the second industrial revolution, oil has been consolidated as a key energy input, having its different uses and applications in distinct sectors of the economy. In line with the growing relevance of oil (and its derivatives), the specialized literature followed this trend, focusing excessively on the industry and the dynamics of the oil sector, sometimes based on the analysis of demand, supply, dependence, market structure, but, most of the time, without highlighting the relevance of alternative sources in this context. Here, by “alternative sources” we are not (yet) referring to renewables, but to those that, in the post-crisis context of the 1970s, constituted alternatives to oil in different regional and national contexts. The international relations (IR) area is no exception. Despite being an interdisciplinary area by nature that does not just look at the past, the discipline ends up being equally influenced by this (skewed) perception of oil. Thus, different currents and theoretical lenses deal with the energy theme, which, again from the 1970s on, leads to the need to discuss it from the perspective of “energy security” – when the central concern of the period was the reduction of dependence on oil imports, particularly in OECD countries (Vivoda, 2010, p. 5262; Yergin, 2006, p. 69). “Some of the major approaches of IR discipline like realism, neo-realism, constructivism and neo-liberal institutionalism can be employed to study the epistemology of energy 60