Scholars of culture, humanities and social sciences have increasingly come to an appreciation of the importance of the legal domain in social life, while critically engaged socio-legal scholars around the world have taken up the task of understanding "Law's Empire" in all of its cultural, political, and economic dimensions. The questions arising from these intersections, and addressing imperialisms past and present forms the subject matter of a special symposium issue of Social Identities under the editorship of Griffith University's Rob McQueen, and UBC's Wes Pue and with contributions from McQueen, Ian Duncanson, Renisa Mawani, David Williams, Emma Cunliffe, Chidi Oguamanam, W. Wesley Pue, Fatou Camara, and Dianne Kirkby. This paper introduces the volume, forthcoming in late 2007. The central problematique of this issue has previously been explored through the 2005 Law's Empire conference, an informal but vibrant postcolonial legal studies network.

Law's Empire

Part 1: country size and efficiency constraints on resource-based industrialization harnessing mineral enclaves - export base, mineral boom and RBI literature. Part 2 Potential and actual RBI resource rent: the potential stimulus from resource processing in the base case - a large efficient developing country the country size constraint on RBI extent and external causes of RBI resource rent overstimation. Part 3 Implementation efficiency: political constraints on macro-economic efficieny - oil windfall deployment in the low absorbing countries macro-economic constraints on the high-absorbing oil-exporting countries micro-efficiency - firm performance in RBI micro efficiency - RBI sectoral performance. Part 4 RBI impact: the impact of RBI on economic growth and structural change RBI's spatial impact - the lagged economic stimulus. Part 5 Conclusion and policy implications: a model of RBI and some policy implications conclusions - RBI risk.

Resource-Based Industrialization: Sowing the Oil in Eight Developing Countries

The Nature of Rationality

Brunnschweiler and Bulte (2008) [1] , [2] provide cross-country evidence that resource curse is a “red herring” once one corrects for endogeneity of resource exports and allows resource abundance to affect growth. Their results show that resource exports are no longer significant while value of subsoil assets has a significant positive effect on growth. But the World Bank measure of subsoil assets is proportional to current rents, and thus is also endogenous. Furthermore, their results suffer from an unfortunate data mishap, omitted variables bias, weakness of instruments, violation of exclusion restrictions and misspecification error. Correcting for these issues and instrumenting resource exports with values of proven reserves at the beginning of the sample period, there is no evidence for resource curse either and subsoil assets are no longer significant. However, the same evidence suggests that resource exports or rents boost growth in stable countries, but also make especially already volatile countries more volatile and thus indirectly worsen growth prospects. Ignoring the volatility channel may lead one to erroneously conclude that there is no effect of resources on growth.

The Pungent Smell of “Red Herrings”: Subsoil assets, rents, volatility and the resource curse

Utilitarianism for and against

This thesis investigates one of the central concepts in International Relations Theory, responsibility, and the challenges that the globalisation of production poses to its conventional understandings. As individuals’ ties extend further beyond national boundaries, a myriad of harms enters the horizon of their moral appraisal. A case in point, in affluent democracies consumers are often urged to buy ‘ethically’ so that miseries ranging from labour rights violations to climate change and armed conflicts are ameliorated. However, approaches that systematically explore the grounds of consumers’ responsibility to do so are few and far between.
Does the globalisation of supply chains give rise to consumers' moral responsibility to alleviate harms abroad? This thesis approaches the question from the perspective of global ethics. It draws on a reading of John Dewey’s work to treat actors’ capacities as a contingent compass to navigate through the challenges that global production processes present to consumers' habitual ways of moral thought and action. To generate the empirical basis for a plausible capacity-based argument, it launches a close study of consumers’ means to alleviate armed conflicts linked with the resource curse phenomenon in eastern DR Congo and southern Nigeria.
The work contributes to contemporary studies of global ethics through a mid-level approach, as it draws on empirical research to rearticulate topical moral challenges. The three perspectives of guilty consumer claims, blame games and citizen-consumers weave the theoretical analysis with contemporary practices of assigning responsibility. While it is difficult to ameliorate resourcerelated armed conflicts by buying differently, in some cases purchase action may constitute a step towards a better world and individuals more capable of orienting through its ethical complexities.

Ilari Aula

Papers

Consuming conflicts: consumer responsibility for armed conflicts in DR Congo and Nigeria