Book Review: Transnational Law and State Transformation. The Case of Extractive Development in Mongolia
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639211054787 |
| Author | Sara Dezalay |
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
JENNIFER LANDER, Transnational Law and State Transformation. The Case of Extractive Development
in Mongolia. Abingdon, Oxon: Routlege, 2021, ISBN 9781032086064, £120 (hbk), £36.99 (pbk).
Oh, the Devil in hell, they say he was chained
(…)
So he asked the Lord if he had any sand
Left over from making this great land.
“Hell in Texas”, Frontier traditional folk song (arr. Kohn, 2018)
Over the past couple of decades, the case of Mongolia has loomed large as the “final fron-
tier”of the late phase of capitalism thanks to a still largely untapped immense mineral
wealth. A poster child of structural adjustment programs, Mongolia navigated the 1990
collapse of its overbearing neighbour, the Soviet Union, so smoothly that its political
landscape has been dominated ever since by its communist-era party, the Mongolian
People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP - which in 2010 restored its pre-1925 name,
MPP). This transition was ushered in by the party’s 1994 Gold Programme, which pro-
mised to transform this immense “land of the eternal blue sky”, sparsely populated by
nomadic herders, not only into one of the world’s biggest mineral reserves but a
country where the boon of mining would be harnessed towards the country’s develop-
ment and the welfare of its present and future generations. Mongolia’s case is not
unique in falling short of this promise. Just like other “frontier economies”in the
Global South, the country is sorely vulnerable to the periodic shocks induced by the vola-
tility of commodity prices on global markets. The authoritarian slide taken by the country
since the 2021 Presidential elections also echoes the common script of the “resource
curse”(Collier, 2008). A third of the population remains entrapped in poverty while
the prominence taken by the MPP - backed by patronage and business elites - is
paving the way for a single-party regime (see Bayarlkhagva, 2021).
Against the backdrop of this narrative - which echoes the equation drawn by the
post-Washington consensus between poor governance and underdevelopment - Lander’s
Transnational law and state transformation. The case of extractive development in
Mongolia unpacks the transnational background of this story. What if, she asks, “there
had been no decline in foreign direct investment and a ‘crisis’of investor confidence with
it in 2012 and 2013, would the post-2014 configuration be present?”(p. 219). Rather than
a“test-case”for a “‘hollowing out’of the state or even an overall weakening”(p. 220)
induced by dependence on mining rents and vulnerability to Beijing as main client and
Book Reviews
Social & Legal Studies
2022, Vol. 31(4) 644–654
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/09646639211054787
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