The starting point of this chapter is the observation that would-be dictators are abundant around the globe, but some succeed in setting up and sustaining a rebel army while others do not. As argued in this chapter, a key ingredient for rebel success and conflict longevity is funding. One source of financing is the stolen spoils of nature. Think, for example, of blood diamonds. Beyond this particular example, we also discuss in this chapter systematic evidence on how access to mineral rents triggers an escalation of fighting activities of armed groups. In addition to resource rents, it is foreign funding that results in prolonged conflict, and may lead to proxy wars between fighting factions supported by rival foreign powers. The destructive potential of these sources of funding is examined by drawing on examples and empirical evidence from Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and India.

This chapter focuses on explaining the powerful logic of perilous promises and hidden information, as well as the dangers of low opportunity costs and attractive rents. We start out by explaining how in many circumstances peaceful bargaining succeeds in preventing hostilities – as the “peace dividend” creates a range of win–win bargaining solutions. Sadly, though, asymmetric information, commitment problems and political bias can lead to bargaining failure and the outbreak of war. Further, when the stakes of contest are high and opportunity costs low, the scope for peaceful bargaining shrinks. In particular, we show that being out of work and out of options makes somebody easy prey for rebel headhunters. This is exemplified by the dreadful consequences of bad harvests. Next, we examine the role of ethnic cleavages and how they tend to be exploited by divisive ethnic politics. Finally, the chapter discusses the curse of natural resources. Countries blessed with valuable soils tend to suffer from conflict, often leaving them poorer than countries lacking natural resources.

This chapter provides an overview of the global history of oil and explains how Russia, as a key storehouse of raw materials, producer, consumer and fossil energy exporter, fits into it.

Chapter 3 contextualized World War II in the Pacific as a resource war, where Japan fought in the South Pacific in order to achieve energy independence through the confiscation of oil fields in the Dutch East Indies. The Battle of the Java Sea was fought to secure oil fields.

The chapter introduces the book by presenting the puzzle it seeks to explain. During the decolonization process, colonial and regional powers frequently pursued the policy of amalgamation to avoid creating micro-states, which resulted in numerous cases of merger. However, some rejected merger projects and became independent separately. What, then, accounts for their separate existence? More generally, why did some colonial areas achieve independence separately from neighboring regions when facing pressure for amalgamation or annexation, while others became part of a larger state? This chapter then elaborates the main line of argument and the theoretical framework that underpins it. It argues that oil and a specific type of colonial administration carved out producing areas to create a state that would otherwise not exist. The introduction ends by briefly discussing methods and explaining the structure of the book.

This chapter commences by analyzing the relevance the Permanent Court of International Justice’s judgment in the Chorzów Factory case and the prevailing position that it reflects customary international law on the remedies available for treaty breaches. The analysis then focuses on why references to remedies other than compensation (available under customary international law) are rare in investor-state arbitrations and whether there is a place for restitution and/or declaratory awards in international investment law. If claimants choose to seek restitution, tribunals are empowered to make such an award, unless this is explicitly excluded by the underlying treaty or is practically impossible (or at least inadequate) on the facts of the particular case. The ‘Spanish saga’ cases on renewable energy confirm this approach. Satisfaction, a third type of remedy available under customary international law, a declaratory award, is considered as a ‘paper victory’ which, in practice, is tantamount to losing a case. The final part of this chapter analyzes various issues related to compensation itself, in practice the most important remedy in international investment law.

This chapter considers the concept of permanent sovereignty over natural resources as articulated in the New International Economic Order (NIEO) project. At the NIEO’s core was the push to consolidate the legal status of ‘permanent sovereignty’ over natural resources. This idea’s champions argued that ownership and control of resources is an essential and necessary element of statehood, one that involves the right to nationalize foreign-held property. By contrast, its critics contended that no state could lawfully seize assets of foreign investors without compensation. They also insisted that the quantity of such compensation should be determined by international law, or through international arbitration, in the event of disagreement. While most aspects of the NIEO, including resource sovereignty, had been debated for some time, partly during broader discussions of neocolonialism and uneven development within the UN Conference on Trade and Development, it was only in 1974 that the project was formalized in a set of General Assembly resolutions. This project was largely the expression of a desire on the part of political and legal elites in the global South to renegotiate their roles in the world capitalist system, reforming rather than repudiating the existing international order.

In light of Mozambique’s natural resources boom—especially its large-scale investments in mining, oil, and gas—this chapter analyses the prospects for the extractive industries to contribute to economic transformation from an institutional perspective. For this purpose, we address the institutional dynamics of the resources sector and consider the underlying causes of the identified outcomes, and we discuss the National Development Strategy, as the instrument outlining the vision for economic transformation and diversification. The chapter is based on a desk review—documental and bibliographic—and on primary data gathered by the authors as part of their research into the field of natural resources and the political economy of development. We conclude that, given Mozambique’s political patronage and clientelism, intra-ruling elite competition, limited productive base, weak state capacity, high level of poverty, and recurrent fiscal deficits, the prospects of the current resource boom leading to economic transformation, despite its considerable potential, are at best uncertain.

In this chapter, Maria Gwynn focuses on the settlement of water-related disputes in international law. This chapter evaluates agreements governing transboundary water resources from different regions of the world and highlights the different mechanisms of dispute settlement they provide. It argues that, for water-related disputes, joint or international commissions play a key role in the settlement of disputes. This chapter explores how the complementarity of different treaties, on the one hand, and international law, on the other, coupled with States’ willingness to co-operate with one another, enables States to negotiate and resolve disputes amicably and according to the principles contained in the 1997 UN Watercourses Convention.

This chapter begins with varying definitions of the Anthropocene and articulates the ways in which essayists have responded to the environmental destruction, contamination, reshaping of the earth’s surface, and exhaustion of shared resources represented by this new geological epoch. In these types of essays, science writing meets nature writing, activism meets lyricism. The essay has always been a space for ethical reflection, and those essays featured in this chapter – by writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Barry Lopez, Camille Dungy, Donna Harraway, Fred Moten, and Christina Nichol – ponder the ethics of the violence that is part of our new environmental status quo. The chapter also investigates the relationship between the Anthropocene and various bleak contemporary and historical realities: the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonization, appropriation of land, extraction of resources, genocide, and dispossession.

This is the first chapter of the synthesis of the various institutional diagnostics undertaken in IDP, including those of South Korea and Taiwan. It compares the main economic development challenges, or advantages faced by the various countries, and the major institutional causes behind them. Development is seen as the structural transformation of the economy through the absorption of traditional low-productivity activities by the modern high-productivity sectors of the economy, rather than merely GDP growth rates. The comparative analysis is conducted with systematic reference to the well-known framework proposed by Arthur Lewis to represent this progressive diminution of ‘dualism’. If South Korea and Taiwan fit this framework rather well, the structural transformation is shown not to rely on growth engines sufficiently strong and labour-intensive to proceed satisfactorily in the IDP countries, except maybe in Bangladesh where the domestic engine is supplemented by massive outmigration of workers. It turns out that the cause for such a situation most often lies in the political economy context of the design, decision, and implementation of the appropriate development strategies.

The chapter focusses on post-1721 developments, analysing the Dano-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede’s struggle to fit the new observations he made in Greenland into the framework of established ideas promoted in the texts he had read prior to his arrival. The transition from reading about Greenland in books to observing the land in situ led to a crisis of representation as the archive of knowledge that had been stored up over the centuries became difficult to reconcile with experience. The most significant error perpetuated in several texts was the idea that the Eastern Settlement was located on the east coast. Rather than dismiss the many expeditions that sought to reach this fabled settlement as irrelevant to the colonial project that eventually developed on the west coast, the chapter proposes that the search for the settlers and their resource-rich lands is significant for understanding Denmark’s political, religious, and commercial ambitions in Greenland. Attention is also paid to the maps Egede drew of Greenland as they are visual records of how traditional perceptions were allowed to coexist with new empirical data.