The Political Economy of Natural Resources and International Law
postgraduate course, 6 ECTS
Since the 1990s, expressions such as the ‘resource curse’ and ‘paradox of plenty’ have been associated with unequal patterns of power, and wealth distribution in post-colonial and neo-colonial countries as well as to the ecological and social cost of natural resources exploitation, and the planetary costs of mineral resources-based production and consumption patterns. These negative effects of natural resources wealth can be described as ‘pathology of plenty’.
Taking various resource curse and paradox of plenty theories as a starting point, this course offers a critical examination of the role law plays in the pathology of plenty. More concretely, we will revisit how rights and principles such as sovereignty over natural resources and economic self-determination were applied in decolonisation processes, study the proliferation of international treaties protecting foreign property rights, and zoom in on various contract models used in the mineral resources sector to evaluate the distributional choices of cost and revenue.
Law by Colour Code 