Book Review: General Politics: Global Urban Analysis: A Survey of Cities in Globalization
| Author | Eric Petersen |
| DOI | 10.1111/1478-9302.12016_89 |
| Published date | 01 May 2013 |
| Date | 01 May 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
not to destroy growth completely; rather there is less
growth in oil-rich countries than there should be.
Oil-rich countries are also much more prone to con-
flict, as either separatists try to take control of oil-rich
regions or rebels use oil money to fund their wars.
The importance of state ownership in making oil a
curse means that oil’s negative impact has been par-
ticularly severe since the oil nationalisations in the
1960s and 1970s.
Ross’ book is a useful and very clearly written cor-
rective to some of the more ambitious claims about the
influence of oil that can be found in the literature. His
book is a good and accessible guide to the oil curse
thesis. This does not mean that his conclusions are
incontestable. The argument that the oil cur se for
democracy begins in the 1970s with nationalisation in
the developing world may be true to the statistical tests
to which Ross subjects the data, but it is highly ques-
tionable. Oil production was largely in the hands of
international firms before nationalisation. Earlier efforts
at nationalisation and/or a fairer distribution of profits
by weak democracies and hybrid regimes were often
thwarted by these firms and their state sponsors (think
Iran under Mossadegh).
This weakened democracy’s appeal and bound
nationalism (and nationalisation) to authoritarian and
militaristic forces. Unlike weak democrats these forces
were able to take and hold oil resources and curb the
depredations of oil firms.They were also able to pump
more oil since they were freer of the oligopolistic
interests of the oil firms. They therefore had more
resources to hold on to power and also looked more
wasteful of oil’s economic potential. Arguing that the
oil curse only begins in the 1970s ignores the trans-
national politics of oil before then. The 1970s did see
the end of regimes that had democratic institutional
architectures or that were hybrid systems in some
oil-producing states, and their replacement by unam-
biguous autocracies. But if these democracies and
hybrids were not sovereign in their own lands because
they were manipulated by foreign oil firms and gov-
ernments, how could they be democratic in the sense
of embodying popular sovereignty? Arguably, all the
1970s witnessed was one type of oil curse – being prey
to big oil and Western governments – replaced by
another.
The essays in John-Andrew McNeish and Owen
Logan’s edited volume support the idea that the curse
of resource dependency varies from place to place and
over time. The collection is a series of small-N or
single case studies, and the approaches taken are reso-
lutely qualitative and include cultural and sociological
methodologies. McNeish and Logan and their con-
tributors recognise that hydrocarbons do not support
democracy, peace or growth, but their approaches do
not exclude the possibility that the hydrocarbon
problem extends beyond the global South and the
former USSR.
Flammable Societies offers a refreshing recognition
that oil and gas impact on the politics of all societies
that are large-scale energy producers, and that even
the best-managed oil economies have problems due to
their resource wealth. Consequently alongside the
usual suspects in a book on energy and politics –
Russia, Azerbaijan, Venezuela and Nigeria – there are
pieces on Britain, Norway and Bolivia, and chapters
that look comparatively at struggles for control over
energy resources, law and energy, and the cultural
political economy of hydrocarbons. The faults of the
book are stylistic. Some chapters are a bit sketchy and
underdeveloped due to lack of space; some chapters
are jargon-ridden. That said the book is a useful
reminder that the politics of energy is global, extends
beyond questions of ‘energy security’ and requires the
application of a broad range of analytical approaches if
it is to be a more positive politics than it has been in
the past.
Neil Robinson
(University of Limerick)
Global Urban Analysis: A Survey of Cities in
Globalization by Peter J. Taylor,Pengfei Ni,Ben
Derudder,Michael Hoyler,Jin Huang and Frank
Witlox (eds). London: Earthscan, 2011. 438pp.,
£95.00, ISBN 978 1849712132
The audience for this edited volume is world city
researchers, primarily at the doctoral level. While the
material is generally not too technically advanced for
undergraduates, the level of detail is inappropriate for
them. Despite the hopes and claims of the authors, the
work comes across as a massive collection of tables and
figures with short analytic sections connecting the
numbers.The first section examines 525 global cities in
terms of their city place power,which is dr iven by how
many businesses from the Forbes 2000 are headquar-
282 GENERAL POLITICS
© 2013 TheAuthors. Political Studies Review © 2013 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2013, 11(2)
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