Varieties of Eurasian Petrostates: Limits of the "Resource Curse" in the FSU

• In Event: The Pluralistic Politics of Resource Extraction

Abstract

The collapse of the Soviet Union with its highly unified and centralized energy sector has produced five new energy giants, which have simultaneously started to build their independent energy policies from the common Soviet institutional, managerial and physical heritage. Today, 30 years after this fundamental critical juncture for the region, we can analyze their pathways and decisions that led to various results. Different intersections of structural constraints and agency of three of these five Eurasian energy giants – Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, are of particular focus in this paper. Crisis after crisis, each country has adapted its national policy to changing the international and domestic environment with various degrees of success.
This paper presents a comparative historical analysis of the pathways the three countries have followed. It finds that the classical resource curse thesis has severe limitations. Although the “no-curse” argument offered by Jones Luong and Weinthal (2010) has effectively differentiated ownership structures of various post-Soviet petrostates, there are other dimensions that can be usefully probed for comparative insights. Moreover, the distinctly structurationist approach adopted in this article reveals and theorizes new structural elements previously undiscussed in the literature, such as the size and quality of the domestic market, physical features of oil and gas fields, and within-energy sector diversification, and draws special attention to the political decisions of a state as it relates to management of hydrocarbons revenues, relations with foreign and domestic companies, and the broader macroeconomic developmental models each country adopted.

Authors

• Rudra Sil, University of Pennsylvania

• Mikhail A. Strokan, University of Pennsylvania