This concluding chapter summarizes the findings of this book, discusses their academic, policy, and normative implications, and proposes areas for future research. It briefly explains the political situation after separate independence, pointing out the contrast between the economic and diplomatic success of the three states and their persisting authoritarianism, which is a result of separate independence. It also makes suggestions for topics for future research, including the resource curse and colonial entities that never became independent.

This chapter documents the restrictive conditions under which leftwing, “Bolivarian” populism managed to destroy democracy in Latin America. Only Hugo Chavez of Venezuela (1999–2013), Evo Morales of Bolivia (2006–2019), and Rafael Correa of Ecuador (2007–2017) accomplished this feat because they benefited from the high instability plaguing their countries’ presidential systems and, at the same time, from the enormous hydrocarbon revenues provided by the global commodities boom. By distributing massive benefits to ample population sectors, they won overwhelming political support, which they leveraged for dismantling the remaining, already battered checks and balances. By contrast, presidents who did not benefit from such a huge windfall or who governed in countries not suffering from high institutional instability did not manage to still their power hunger and asphyxiate democracy. Instead, some of these leftwing populists suffered irregular evictions from office, whereas others managed to serve out their terms, but failed to perpetuate themselves in power and strangle democracy.

This opening chapter raises the research questions that motivate this book. It briefly introduces the state of mineral exploration in China and the ensuing impacts on the Chinese economy and society and pinpoints the puzzling existence of a contained resource curse in China. After critically reviewing the existing debate on the resource curse, it proposes an original theory about how mineral resources affect state–capital–labor relations, which can explain the empirical observations in China. This chapter lays out the roadmap of the whole book and explains the research methods and data sources for the empirical analysis in the following chapters.

Chapter 2 maps out major theories in peace and conflict studies dealing with the interaction between nature, war, and peace. While acknowledging that the field is characterised by a broad diversity of research traditions and methodological approaches, the aim of the chapter is to offer a review of the research that has had most influence on international policies and legal development. Although legal scholars often think of this literature as monolithic, what will emerge from this chapter is that there is a vivid debate on the linkages between environment and conflict, which is explained by the different underlying paradigms and concepts. It is important to pay attention to the contested nature of these analytical frameworks to better understand (and challenge) the approaches that emerged at the international level. The second part of the chapter introduces environmental justice as an alternative framework to move beyond certain problematic assumptions about environmental scarcity/abundance that have fed into international law. Environmental justice perspectives will be used in subsequent chapters to think about justice accordingly and beyond international law.

Africa has seen progress and setbacks with regard to the economic and socio-economic development after decolonization until ca. 2000. These are linked to historical and structural challenges, including the economic infrastructure the colonial powers left behind and the unfavourable geography of vast parts of the continent. In the post-colonial phase there has been much economic and trade dependence on the former colonial powers – giving rise to the dependency theory and the notion of neo-colonialism. There was often an unwillingness of the post-colonial leadership to set the course for the economies of their countries. And rentier states developed. Several initiatives – from Africa and beyond – have been proposed to deal with the economic misery, with those of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund being the dominant ones, pushing African initiatives aside.

This chapter is devoted to the special problems encountered by nations that are heavily dependent on a small group of commodities, or, in the extreme case, reliant on a single commodity (monoeconomies). We begin by discussing the measures of commodity dependence and definemonoeconomies in the process. We then turn to exploring the problems of export instability, fiscal extraction and exchange rate policies that often arise in commodity-dependent countries. We finally deal with Dutch disease and the resource curse, two ailments of particular significance to monoeconomies.

This chapter is devoted to one of the commodity groups, energy, and there are at least four reasons for affording a special prominence to this commodity group. The first is the heavy dominance of energy raw materials in the commodities universe. This is true both for trade and for the contribution they make to GDP. The second reason is that supply scarcities led to an extraordinary price increase for oil in the past 40 years, and its causes warrant an explanation. The third reason is that fundamental changes are occurring in oil and gas production technologies that promise to replace historical scarcity of supply and high prices with abundance. The fourth reason is the general perception that the energy system is going through a transition toward low carbon sources, due to technical advances in non-fossil energy alternatives as well as policy efforts to hinder climate change. The four reasons that make energy special also provide the structure of the chapter.

The book begins with three paradoxes of Libya, Venezuela, and Congo that juxtapose the profound importance of nationalization in the global natural resource economy with its economic risks and potential costs. The chapter then previews the answer to the puzzle of operational nationalization: when faced with the choice of nationalization, weak rulers discount the long-run costs of state intervention to seize its short-term gains; by contrast, strong leaders maintain the status quo of privately run operations to ensure long-term gains from private production. Next, the chapter illustrates the relevance of nationalization in a variety of research contexts: the effects of state intervention in the market; the roles of domestic leadership and international conditions in institutional choice; the significance of this choice during state formation; and the logic of the predatory state. After briefly introducing the theory of how, why, and when different operational nationalization pathways matter for politics, the chapter concludes by outlining how the remaining chapters of the book explain and test the operational nationalization theory.

Using human capital formation in the oil industry in Africa, this chapter shows that Africa’s experiences with oil contradict the mainstream account of human capital and economic development. Rather, (a) both the demand for and supply of education have dramatically increased during the oil boom, and (b) this boom is neither the result of local content alone nor the product of distorted public interventions. Rather, it is a function of cumulative forces and processes as well as aspirations for a different reality in the future. In turn, there are strong grounds for demanding – as of right – that the fruits in the oil industry be shared. That is, if the fruits are collectively produced and reproduced, then they must also be widely socialized and diffused. Yet, (c) investment in "oil education" has not been accompanied by the expected "returns on education" in the sense of establishing congruence between jobs expected and jobs obtained, and (d) much of the relatively little employment generated is gendered and endangered work, with annualized wages that are different and differentiated between local and imported labor, creating a labor aristocracy in the workforce that is not necessarily linked to embodied investment in education and experience