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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Jesse Salah Ovadia
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Across the global south, new-found oil offers new possibilities for the development of capitalist social relations of production and an indigenous national bourgeoisie in areas previously peripheral to the global capitalist system. Oil has traditionally been seen as a curse for the continent; its extraction has brought about all of the negative features of capitalist development (poverty, exclusion, environmental degradation, loss of traditional livelihoods, etc.) without any of the economic growth or human development associated with capitalism in the core. The notion of a “resource curse” is based on negative oil exceptionalism, or the idea that oil can produce unique outcomes in a country’s political economy. In short, the resource curse holds that, due to petroleum resources, indigenous capitalists will fail or be less unsuccessful. This thinking has in recent years been turned on its head by local content and other strategies of state-sponsored and regulated linkage between extractive industry and the domestic non-oil economy. The creation of these linkages produces unique opportunities for previously peripherally capitalist states to break free from the limits of the global system and what Arrighi (1991) has called the “global hierarchy of wealth”. In other words they represent a form of positive oil exceptionalism. Expanding on new possibilities for positive oil exceptionalism, this chapter explores the conditions that would allow for oil-backed capitalist development in the global south built upon expanding capitalist social relations of production and prospects for local content policies to positively impact people’s everyday lives.
Author(s): Ovadia JS
Editor(s): Di Muzio, T; Ovadia, JS
Series Editor(s): Shaw, TM
Publication type: Book Chapter
Publication status: Published
Book Title: Energy, Capitalism and World Order: Toward a New Agenda in International Political Economy
Year: 2016
Acceptance date: 01/01/1900
Series Title: International Political Economy Series
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Place Published: Basingstoke, UK
URL: https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137539144
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9781137539144
