The resource curse is manufactured by Western-designed international law, not intrinsic to mineral wealth

Evidence

That said, the resource curse, when invoked as a free-floating cultural explanation bereft of history, can mislead. Australia and Canada are resource rich but not resource cursed. Is that merely because they are stable, long-established electoral democracies that have avoided the extreme concentrations of power that have blighted monoeconomies like Nigeria, Libya, and Angola? The historical answer is more complicated than that. … The “curse” is in part a spin-off of an international legal system that compromised decolonizing nations’ sovereignty over their natural resources. In the 1970s, when efforts to create a New Economic Order collapsed, the European powers and the United States denied newly independent states resource sovereignty by declaring, as Antony Anghie has noted, that such resources were not national in character but belonged to all humanity, by upholding old colonial treaties for resource transfer, and by granting multinational corporations equal international legal standing to third-world states. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 191

Categorization

• XREF: Supports the settler-colonial/land strand of the polyad: international law as the instrument dispossessing South nations of resource sovereignty. — connects to: Mineral wealth concentrated in a single resource typically breeds authoritarian, corrupt, unstable states — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 190; Western wealth was built by actively creating underdevelopment elsewhere — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 293
• SEED: Angle for an essay: how ‘natural’ vs national character frames in international law re-enact colonial extraction under legal cover.

Broader Connections

• Mineral wealth concentrated in a single resource typically breeds authoritarian, corrupt, unstable states #contradicts (0.82) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 190
• Western wealth was built by actively creating underdevelopment elsewhere #expands (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 293