The Resource Curse – Resource Nationalism Nexus: Implications for Foreign Markets

While the resource curse and resource nationalism both concern negative effects derived from the possession of natural resource wealth, these two energy-related phenomena present quite different challenges for policy makers. On the one hand, resource nationalism is strongly associated with discussions of energy security. One thinks, for example, of Thomas Friedman’s “first law of petropolitics” that stresses the link between increased resource wealth in oil and gas producing countries and increasingly assertive producer state behavior. Likewise, concern voiced by the US military’s Southern Command over supply restrictions from Latin America following the nationalization of a number of Western oil companies in the mid-2000s attests to the same link between resource nationalistic behavior and energy security. In contrast however, the resource curse has normally been analyzed in terms of domestic political transformations and the socio-economic development of oil producing states (or lack thereof). The focus of resource curse analysis has tended therefore to be directed towards the internal domestic political and economic behavior of energy producing states. As a result, energy security has played a much smaller role in this resource curse context.