Resources & Violence: Black Curse or White Magic?

Karl Muth argues that the ‘resource curse’ rests on some questionable assumptions.

There is a popular narrative told each year in economics, public policy, international relations, and government classrooms around the world. It is a narrative that is false. But it is a narrative that is popular. What is it that drives this narrative’s persistence, even at top universities, among top academics, and among people who are otherwise empiricists who reject that unicorns exist or that Jenny McCarthy studied immunology in the basement of the Playboy Mansion?

This narrative is the so-called “resource curse” and the wonky literature surrounding it, most of it written by white authors in wealthy countries, is based in carefully-chosen case studies and notably lacking in any general theory of predictive value. The resource curse literature suggests that places on earth endowed with natural resources of certain types (particularly mineral and petrochemical wealth) are violent places where bad governance systems around natural resource management are tested, break down, and lead inevitably to brown people slaughtering each other (for an assortment of much-needed commentary on why this narrative is overly simplistic, click here).

Though this framework seems weak on its face and invites a critical race theory analysis, there is typically little discussion of race in the context of this particular theory and the assumptions upon which it depends. To understand why a race and colonialism/neocolonialism framework has generally not been applied in the (mostly) European analysis of this set of assumptions, one can simply look around the institutes and departments that make up top European universities. Many of these institutions have few, if any, formal academic structures dedicated to the study of race or race relations, focusing instead on gender and generally on micro-level debates on gender involving inclusion, individual choice, and employment (rather than macro-level discussions). Examples in the UK include the International Gender Studies Centre at Oxford (which has no equivalent to study race), the Centre for Gender Studies at Cambridge (which has no race-focused equivalent), the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics (again, with no peer in studying matters of race, though there is a masters degree offered in Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies).

And this parenthetically-noted LSE degree is a good place to begin this conversation: it is the race, ethnicity, and post-colonial aspects of the “resource curse” debate that are untrue. And the narrative is not only untrue, but particularly offensive when one examines the series of neocolonial and racist assumptions one must make in order to find this theory even plausible. The first is that “good” governance is not culturally- or geographically-specific, but refers to a very specific form of governance favoured by and advocated by white, wealthy countries (and often, through trade agreements, forced upon poorer, less white countries). This healthy and idyllic form of governance is a liberal democracy with low voter turnout (yes, the Belgians are allowed to except themselves from this comment) where ethnic minorities are systematically disempowered and where poor whites live in permanent contempt and fear of immigrants. In these democracies, elections are generally so expensive that family fortunes are won and lost through elections that have larger advertising budgets than many companies in Africa. To assume that this is what the zenith of governance looks like (and hence what the developing world should aspire to imitate) is, itself, somewhat preposterous.

The second is that some places are blessed with enormous natural resource wealth but, due to their “good governance,” are places where people can somehow control their urges to kill each other to steal wealth. This is particularly odd, as the alluvial diamond fields of Canada do not look all that different from the diamond fields of Sierra Leone; the oil platforms off the coast of Norway do not look all that different from the ones off the coasts of Nigeria or Indonesia. To claim that the differences between these places are purely cultural is insulting to people in each place; to claim that the differences are structural and that the places cleanly sort into two columns is equally problematic and overly simplistic.

The third assumption is that state-owned models are generally inferior to private models or that state-originating compensation for individuals is theft (particularly in Africa) while privately-originating compensation for individuals is a reward for good corporate stewardship (particularly in America). This assumption has within it several other assumptions, including that African governments are de facto kleptocracies and that, even where they are not, it is absurd to pay an African an amount equivalent to – or greater than – an American or European executive. While I generally favour privatisation in the extreme, I accept that state-owned and joint-venture models are the norm in many places and the inability for “resource curse” advocates to accept this – and accept that, as a result, public players in these places will enjoy high rents – is mistaking philosophy for evidence.

The fourth assumption is that informal payments – crucial to the smooth functioning of structures (including governments) in most of the world – are inferior to formal payments and that any financial flows that do not fit firmly into language and categories familiar to American and European accounting firms are “theft” or “corruption” or “fraud” rather than valid. Hence, nearly any transaction in a non-wealthy, non-western culture can be easily classified as theft or fraud and justify intervention, even if most of the world recognises such transfers and payments as acceptable (and accepted) business practices. This financial apartheid, in which a ruling white minority imposes its concepts of payment systems, banking, and accounting practices on the rest of the world (and thereby jeopardises the financial viability of the competing structures whose viability it criticised in the first instance) enables the embargoes, sanctions, and bank freezes that characterise the neocolonial offensive against financial successes in Africa.

The fifth assumption, and perhaps the most troubling, is that it is the right and mandate of the white, wealthy countries to patrol, control, shape, exploit, supply, quell, and mediate violence among less wealthy and less white people. It is the right of the wealthy countries, this assumption proceeds, to trigger violence when convenient, maintain violence as necessary, and extinguish violence eventually (generally when there is nothing left to fight over). Only countries that have heavily invested (financially, diplomatically, and structurally) in affirmatively defending themselves against these patterns of dominant behaviour by wealthy countries (Abu Dhabi, for instance) have been able to resist peacefully.

The final assumption is that sovereignty for non-western, non-wealthy countries is merely a legal fiction, something donated out of charity, like giving trinkets and crowns to Latin America’s local rulers during the Spanish conquest. This assumption, that most of the world’s governments are inferior (or not governments at all or some sort of second-tier government) to Western wealthy governments, is harmful socially, untrue legally, and untenable diplomatically. The assumption requires the listener to assume there is valid authority vested in the mostly-wealthy, mostly-white world to “tell the natives how it’s done.” The assumption, it seems, is that Western governments are, to oil and diamonds and coltan, like the parent worrying a toddler might damage an iPad or break a piece of expensive jewelry.

Perhaps those expressing this neocolonial paternalism should examine why they’ve made these assumptions and recognise that many do not hold these assertions to be true, or even relevant. And then they should remember that neither the iPad nor the jewelry would exist without ingredients from the Africa they praise for its production, resent for its wealth, and critique for its governance.