Some scholars suggest that the Middle East's oil wealth helps explain its failure to democratize. This article examines three aspects of this “oil impedes democracy” claim. First, is it true? Does oil have a consistendy antidemocratic effect on states, once other factors are accounted for? Second, can this claim be generalized? Is it true only in the Middle East or elsewhere as well? Is it true for other types of mineral wealth and other types of commodity wealth or only for oil? Finally, if oil does have antidemocratic properties, what is the causal mechanism?The author uses pooled time-series cross-national data from 113 states between 1971 and 1997 to show that oil exports are strongly associated with authoritarian rule; that this effect is not limited to the Middle East; and that other types of mineral exports have a similar antidemocratic effect, while other types of commodity exports do not.The author also tests three explanations for this pattern: a “rentier effect,” which suggests that resource-rich governments use low tax rates and patronage to dampen democratic pressures; a “repression effect,” which holds that resource wealth enables governments to strengthen their internal security forces and hence repress popular movements; and a “modernization effect,” which implies that growth that is based on the export of oil and minerals will fail to bring about die social and cultural changes that tend to produce democratic government. He finds at least limited support for all three effects.

Does Oil Hinder Democracy

In this exploratory article, we ask how states come to be understood as entities with particular spatial characteristics, and how changing relations between practices of government and national territories may be challenging long-established modes of state spatiality. In the first part of this article, we seek to identify two principles that are key to state spatialization: vertically (thestate is "above"society) andencompassm ent (thestate "encompasses" its localities). We use ethnographic evidence from a maternal health project in India to illustrate our argument that perceptions of verticality and encompassment are produced through routine bureaucratic practices. In the second part, we develop a concept of transnational governmentality as a way of grasping how new practices of government and new forms of "grassroots" politics may call into question the principles of vertical ity and encompassment that have long helped to legitimate and naturalize states' authority over "the local." [states, space, governmentality, globalization, neoliberalism, India, Africa] Recent years have seen a new level of anthropological concern with the modern

/pdf/spatializing-states-toward-an-ethnography-of-neoliberal-17uche94wu.pdf

Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality

Part I. Introduction: Developing a Regional Approach to Global Security: 1. Theories and histories about the structure of contemporary international security 2. Levels: distinguishing the regional from the global 3. Security complexes: a theory of regional security Part II. Asia: 4. South Asia: inching towards internal and external transformation 5. Northeast and southeast Asian security complexes during the Cold War 6. The 1990s and beyond: an emergent east Asian complex Conclusion Part III. The Middle East and Africa: Introduction 7. The Middle East: a perennial conflict formation 8. Sub-saharan Africa: security dynamics in a setting of weak and failed states Conclusions Part IV. The Americas: 9. North America: the sole superpower and its surroundings 10. South America: an under-conflictual anomaly? Conclusion: scenarios for the RSCs of the Americas Part V. The Europes: Introduction: 11. EU-Europe: the European Union and its 'near abroad' 12. The Balkans and Turkey 13. The post-Soviet space: a regional security complex around Russia Conclusion: scenarios for the European supercomplex Part VI. Conclusions: 14. Regions and powers: summing up and looking ahead 15. Reflections on conceptualising international security.

http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/3437/1/75.pdf

Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security

Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w5308/w5308.pdf

Politics and the effectiveness of foreign aid

Part 1 The genesis of the state: the shadow theatre of ethnicity the unequal state - "little men" and "big men" the bourgeois illusion the opportunity state. Part 2 Scenarios in the pursuit of hegemony: conservative modernization or social revolution? - the extreme scenarios the reciprocal assimilation of elites - the hypothesis of an intermediate scenario the formation of an historic postcolonial bloc. Part 3 Political action: entrepreneurs, factions and political networks the politics of the belly.

The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly

A    S is often said to be the limbo of the international system, existing only at the outer limits of the planet which we inhabit. But, again according to a widespread opinion, it is unlikely that Africa is a limbo in the sense of Roman Catholic theology—that is to say, a place where souls are prepared for redemption. ‘Africa has remained cut off from all contacts with the rest of the world; it is the land of gold, for ever pressing in upon itself, and the land of childhood, removed from the light of self-conscious history and wrapped in the dark mantle of night’, wrote Hegel.1 The vast literature produced by journalists and academics which refers ad nauseam to the marginalization of the sub-continent, or to its ‘disconnection’, even if it is only ‘by default’,2 does no more than reproduce Hegel’s idea that this part of the globe is an ‘enclave’, existing in ‘isolation’ on account of its deserts, its forests and its alleged primitiveness. For those who subscribe to this school of thought, the spread of war as a mode of political regulation over the last decade or so is a sign that the day of salvation is yet far off. Evidence is offered by those terrible messengers, the handless amputees produced by war in Sierra Leone, the Danteesque inferno of the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis in 1994, or the spread of the AIDS pandemic, a sinister companion of conflict, which decimates those populations which war has spared. Nevertheless, if we are to stay with the metaphor of limbo, it is above all in a limbo of the intellect that such a simplistic view of the relation of Africa with the rest of the world is conceived. For the sub-continent is neither more nor less than a part of the planet, and it is pointless to pretend that, to quote one French former colonial governor,3 it leads a ‘traditional existence shielded from the outside world, as though it were another planet’, which passively absorbs the shock of having been made dependent on other parts of the world.

Africa in the world: a history of extraversion

This book examines the growth of fraud and smuggling in African states, the plundering of natural resources, the privatization of state institutions, the development of an economy of plunder and the growth of private armies. It suggests that the state itself is becoming a vehicle for organized criminal activity.
The authors propose criteria for gauging the criminalization of African states and present a novel prognosis: they distinguish between the corruption of previous decades and the criminalization of some African states now taking place. Major operators are now able to connect with global criminal networks. Also, the notion of social capital has led to current attitudes towards the use of public office for personal enrichment, or even systematic illegality.
Looking at South Africa, the authors examine the decades-long tradition of association between crime and politics in this area. South Africa is now the centre of important international patterns of crime, notably in the drug trade. It has Africa's largest formal economy and the continent's largest criminal economy. Considering the economic origins of official implication in crime, the authors conclude that new forms of corruption have been unintentionally helped by liberal economic reforms.

The Criminalization of the State in Africa

L'Etat en Afrique : la politique du ventre

Democracy without democrats? The potential for political liberalization in the Middle East / John Waterbury

Jean-François Bayart

Papers

The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly

Africa in the world: a history of extraversion

The Criminalization of the State in Africa

L'Etat en Afrique : la politique du ventre

Democracy without democrats? The renewal of politics in the Muslim world