Lara Pawson writes:

Using six case studies – Nigeria, Angola, Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Indonesia and Colombia – Oil Wars explores the extent to which massive rents from oil can destabilise states and contribute to conflict. Typically, because governments in oil-rich states depend on oil for taxable income, the wealth of local citizens ceases to matter. Untaxed citizens, for their part, don’t have many ways of holding their governments accountable; elites become richer and majorities become poorer, and violence – expressed in terms of ethnic, religious or regional difference – is almost inevitable. ‘Oil wars,’ the editors conclude, ‘are rentier wars’ and might be prevented if rent-seeking were restricted by the rule of law, democracy and transparency. There’s nothing wrong with any of this, except that it’s not clear how this transformation of oil-rich states into model democracies will come about. In their concluding chapter, Kaldor and Yahia Said offer a fanciful wish list of proposals that lays bare the inherent weakness of Oil Wars: the editors’ apparent fear of upsetting the oil industry executives who helped them formulate their policy recommendations. They stress the importance of ‘multilateral’ approaches involving, inevitably, never-ending ‘dialogue’ among ‘stakeholders’, who seem to include everyone from people living on less than two dollars a day to the leaders of the great powers.

(LRB 7 February 2008)

Pluto Press | paperback 294 pp. |ISBN: 9780745324784