Saturday, October 29, 2011

Do Natural Resources Always Promote Authoritarianism?

Looking at most of the Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and African countries, people tend to claim that natural resource production promotes authoritarianism. These natural resources can be energy related like oil and natural gas or valuables like gold and diamond. Through forming rentier ties, using the resource money to buy tools for repressing the population, the leaders tend to keep their population under control, uneducated, and without political rights.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

To start...

This blog will hopefully be my personal note-taking pad on comparative politics, resource curse, oil, natural gas, democratization, and development.