Suchergebnisse

Blood oil lubricates our economies and powers our societies, yet much of it is reliant on doing business with violent and oppressive regimes. Looking at the legal basis for today's oil trade and the violence underpinning it, and tracing a path to a world beyond blood oil.

Abstract:A global market exists only because all states have chosen to converge on rules that coordinate property rights. For property rights over natural resources and products made from them, states converge on the rule of effectiveness, or might makes right. Because of effectiveness, consumers making everyday purchases like electronics, cosmetics and gasoline cannot help but support foreign authoritarians and militias. Effectiveness in the international system puts consumers into business with highly coercive actors abroad. States' choice of effectiveness also leads to their enforcing the injustices of foreign actors within their own borders, with their own justice systems.

AbstractThe resource curse can strike countries that export high‐value natural resources, such as oil, metals and gems. Resource‐exporting countries are more prone to authoritarian governance, they are at higher risk of civil wars and they tend to suffer economic dysfunctions such as corruption and slower growth. Associations between resources and these pathologies are seen in the list of the 'Big Five' African oil exporters: Algeria, Angola, Libya, Nigeria and Sudan. The recent histories of mineral exporters support the correlations: for example, 'blood diamonds' fuelled Sierra Leone's decade‐long civil war, and the continuing conflict in the metal‐rich Democratic Republic of the Congo has cost hundreds of thousands of lives. The phenomenon is not solely African: Syria, Yemen and Turkmenistan, for example, are also resource‐cursed. Moreover, poor governance in resource‐cursed countries can engender follow‐on pathologies, such as a propensity to cause environmental damage both domestically (for example, through the destruction of forests) and globally (through increased greenhouse gas emissions). Most research on the resource curse has focused on the exporting countries. Here I focus instead on major importing countries, especially those in the G8. First I survey how the resource curse endangers the core interests of importing states, and how the laws of importing states drive the resource curse. The second half of the article describes a new policy framework for importing states that will improve international trade in resources for both importing and exporting countries.

The "resource curse" can strike countries that derive a large portion of their national income from exporting high-value natural resources, such as oil, gas, metals, and gems. Resource-exporting countries are subject to four overlapping curses: they are more prone to authoritarianism, they tend to suffer more corruption, they are at a higher risk for civil wars, and they exhibit greater economic instability.