Geography and resource nationalism: A critical review and reframing

Used to describe state-led efforts to secure greater benefits from a country’s resource stocks, ‘resource nationalism’ is an emerging scholarly concern. Yet writing on this topic has largely centred on work from the fields of international relations, political science and business which has been quick to warn of its limitations whilst simultaneously offering endorsements of the extant neoliberal world order that continues to dominate resource extraction globally. It is shown in this paper how a more critical framework for analysing resource nationalism can be achieved by drawing upon the insights from geography. In particular, geography’s treatment of political economy/ecology, environmental justice and the politics of space can offer insights into the politico-spatial ordering of resource nationalism in three ways. First, resource nationalism should not be seen as anathema to the imperatives of private-led extraction but rather as something more hybrid. Second, It shows in a world of ever-expanding resource frontiers, ‘national’ borders of extraction are more fluid than those currently presented by mainstream literature. Finally, it argues that the ‘one nation’ discourse of resource nationalism is misguided as it fails to factor in matters of justice that operate at different scales.