The first Secretary General of OPEC, the Iranian lawyer Fuad Rouhani, was invited to give a lecture series on “the various points of contact of oil with law” to a UN seminar on international law in January 1962. His topic was oil concession law, in particular the ongoing offensive by the Middle Eastern oil producing nations to change their longstanding concessions. Most people he knew, he said, disliked the very term “concession” for two reasons – its content and its connotation. “As to substance,” the concessions were transactions in which a “pre-Constitution sovereign, unmindful of the interests of his people, gave too much for too little.” Casting an even darker pall was the way the term captured the gist of the relationship between the oil nations and the companies. The problem was simple: a concession was “a giving of the weak to the strong.” This paper discusses the work of Rouhani and his colleagues in OPEC – in particular the Venezuelan Francisco Parra and the Iraqi Hasan Zakariya – as part of a broader movement to find an “economic equivalent to decolonization” in the 1960s. The paper analyzes the ways in which these and other elites from the oil producing nations sought to place their work within that other international institutions, including the Non-Aligned Movement, the United Nations Permanent Sovereignty Committee, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Using concepts that had wide currency in the decolonizing world, including economic arguments about terms of trade and legal arguments about changing circumstances, the elites of the oil-producing nations conducted an increasingly effective offensive against the oil concessions. As Rouhani put it at the United Nations seminar, the shared conditions and consciousness of the oil producers, “a corollary of national sovereignty,” had already begun to make such a project possible. In fact, it was the very “growing realization” of their common national interests that brought OPEC into being. This paper examines that perspective using research from the OPEC Library in Vienna, the United Nations archives in New York and Geneva, and a number of other repositories,