Oil Is Not a Curse: Ownership Structure and Institutions in Soviet Successor States. By Pauline Jones Luong and Erika Weinthal. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 444p. $95.00 cloth, $31.00 paper.

Extract

For those scholars who have bemoaned the “commodity determinism” that has characterized much of the resource curse literature, there has been, in recent years, a new crop of studies that has sought to deepen and broaden the scope of inquiry and to highlight variations in features, processes, and outcomes in mineral-rich states. These studies have done so in two ways: first, by demonstrating, via careful empirical work, that despite the supposed uniformity, mineral-rich states in fact exhibit a variety of policy environments, institutional arrangements, and experiences; and second, by tracing the pathways whereby certain variables, and combinations of variables—related to such things as institutional beginnings, leadership decisions, and competing cleavage structures—contribute to particular outcomes, as opposed to merely identifying outcomes.