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Conflict Minerals And The Law Of Pillage, Patrick J. Keenan
Conflict Minerals And The Law Of Pillage, Patrick J. Keenan
Patrick J. Keenan
The illicit exploitation of natural resources—often called conflict minerals—has been associated with some of the worst violence in the past half-century, especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Prosecutors and scholars have struggled to develop legal tools to adequately hold accountable those who have been responsible for the exploitation of civilians and resources in conflict. The most common legal tool, the crime of pillage, has been inadequate because it has been applied only to discrete, relatively small episodes of theft. As important as it has been, the episodic theory is of limited utility when applied to what have been called …
International Institutions And The Resource Curse, Patrick J. Keenan
International Institutions And The Resource Curse, Patrick J. Keenan
Patrick J. Keenan
Many countries that are richly endowed with natural resources have failed to turn that resource wealth into sustained development. In many places, a small coterie of elites have become rich while most citizens see little benefit from their country’s vast resource wealth. The principal cause of this problem, often called the resource curse, is weak domestic institutions that permit leaders to enrich themselves and ignore the development needs of the country. From this, most scholars and policymakers have concluded that the way to fix the resource curse is to reform domestic institutions. This Article challenges the conventional wisdom and argues …