Mineral wealth concentrated in a single resource typically breeds authoritarian, corrupt, unstable states

Evidence

The notion of the resource curse hinges on the paradox of plenty, whereby nation-states blessed with abundant mineral wealth are too often concomitantly blighted. As a rule of thumb, the greater a state’s reliance on a single mineral resource, the greater the chances that state is undemocratic, militaristic, corruption riddled, and governed without transparency or accountability. Abundant resources are frequently coupled to rampant injustice, fragile economic growth, and low rankings in the United Nations Human Development Index. In strengthening a country’s currency, mineral discoveries may render other economic sectors, like agriculture and manufacturing, less competitive, while the boom-bust cycles of mineral markets exacerbate social volatility. There are of course exceptions to these tendencies, but in resource-cursed societies, a mineral strike, though less immediately spectacular than a missile strike, is often more devastating in the long term, bringing in its wake environmental wreckage, territorial dispossession, political repression, and massacres by state forces doing double duty as security forces for unanswerable petroleum transnationals or mineral cartels. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 190

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the core paradox-of-plenty mechanism the chapter builds on.
• XREF: connects to: The resource curse is manufactured by Western-designed international law, not intrinsic to mineral wealth — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 191; Single-commodity dependence correlates with corruption and extreme income skew — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 299

Broader Connections

• Single-commodity dependence correlates with corruption and extreme income skew #corroborates (0.92) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 299