Off-University Online Course: 'The Political Economy of Natural Resources and Rentier States'

Off-University Online Course: "The Political Economy of Natural Resources and Rentier States"

Off-University Online Course: "The Political Economy of Natural Resources and Rentier States"

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[Starting from October, Off-University will offer eight brand new online courses which are – as always – free of charge and open to all. The registration to our first course “The Political Economy of Natural Resources and Rentier States” is already open.]

The 10-week course “The Political Economy of Natural Ressources and Rentier States” starts on October 13th and takes places Tuesdays 3-5 pm (CET). A simple registration on the safe learning-platform “Coworkingsquares” is enough to join. Coworkingsquares allows for the full anonymity of participants.

 Organized in cooperation with the New University in Exile Consortium, Dr. Leila Alieva and Dr. Gubad Ibadoghlu’s course will address the major effects of ‘rentier economies’ and natural resources on democracy and state building. It will also explore the role of natural resources in conflicts, including interstate wars, as well as the notion of the ‘resource curse’. Both scholars have a broad professional and academic background in political economy and have been based in various universities, research centres and international organizations in Azerbaijan and around the world. To learn more about the course and our faculty, please click here.

About This Course


Natural resources can generate vast sums, in many cases larger than official development assistance or other forms of national income. If managed prudently, natural resource wealth can have a substantial impact on a country’s sustainable development efforts, and in addition to the capital flows, natural resources can have many other direct and indirect influences and benefits for an economy. But those benefits are far from automatic and in fact, in many cases natural resource wealth is not spontaneously transformed into long term sustainable development. This course aims to build knowledge in order to make the most of oil, gas, and minerals, while mitigating the risks that these industries bring. It outlines the various complex and interrelated aspects of natural resource governance, including: (1) understanding the governance and industry fundamentals; (2) developing and implementing robust and transparent legal frameworks; (3) designing fiscal regimes to capture a fair share of the revenues; (4) managing environmental risks; (5) engaging with communities; (6) leveraging investments for infrastructure and business linkages; and (7) managing revenues for economic diversification and development, among others. It explores the major effects of the ‘rentier economy’ and natural resources on democracy and state building, as well as the role of reforms in prevention of the ‘resource curse’. The course analyses the role of the natural resources in conflicts, including domestic and interstate wars. It explores the implications of the rentier economies for development of democratic institutions, such as the opposition, putting it in comparative perspective. It will illuminate the concept of ‘resource nationalism’ as disincentive of integration. It also contributes to the debate on ‘resource curse’, bringing in a historical perspective to the analysis of the effects of ‘oil booms’.

The online seminar is organized with the New University in Exile Consortium (NuiEC) based at the New School for Social Research.

Meet Your Instructors 


Dr. Leila Alieva is an affiliate of the Russian and East European Studies at the Oxford School for Global and Area Studies and a tutor at the Oxford University Department for Continued Education. Pior to that she was a member of the Senior Common Room of the St. Antony’s College of the University of Oxford and the academic visitor. Before she moved to the UK, she had been leading a ‘think-tank’ in Baku, Azerbaijan. Dr. Alieva’s research focus is on the political economy of oil, conflicts, democracy building and energy security. She has also been a consultant to EBRD and oil companies. Previously she was a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard University, UC Berkeley, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center (Kennan Institute), NATO defense college (Rome), National Endowment for Democracy (Washington DC), and Paul Nitze School for International Studies (Johns Hopkins University). She has edited and authored books, chapters and articles published by Oxford University Press, Sharp, Janes Intelligence Review and many others. She has been awarded by various academic scholarships and is a holder of the UK ‘exceptional talent’ visa in her professional field since 2017.

Dr. Gubad Ibadoghlu is a political economist from Azerbaijan. He has commenced his career at Economic Research Center in 1999. He is a senior policy analyst for social and economic studies at Azerbaijan’s Economic Research Center, a Baku-based NGO that promotes economic development and good governance. Dr. Ibadoghlu was a member of the Steering Committee of the EU Eastern Partnership Program’s Civil Society Forum (CSF) and served as a representative of Eurasian’s civil societies representative to the international board of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) for 2013–2019. His research focuses on politics on natural resources and revenue management. He was a researcher at the Higher Economic School, Warsaw in 1999/2000, at Central European University, Budapest in 2004/2005, in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008/2009, at Duke University in 2015/2016, at Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2017/2018. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for European Studies of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA and he is teaching courses as a visiting professor at the Department of Political Sciences. 

[This course listing was originally posted by Off-University.]

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412