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Introduction
Need to Know Basis: The Facts about Resources, the Oil Companies
and the Oil Countries
Summary of the Book
Part I. Them vs. Them
Chapter 1. Addicted to Money
Chapter 2. Power: What Big Men Want
Chapter 3. Coercion, Corruption...
Chapter 4. ...Then Maybe Blood
Part II. Them vs. Us vs. Us
Chapter 5. Might Makes Right
Chapter 6. Curses on Us: Petrocrats, Terrorists and Conflict
Chapter 7. How Might Makes Right
Chapter 8. Gripping Dirty Hands
Part III. The People's Rights
Chapter 9. Counter-Power
Chapter 10. The Determination of Peoples
Chapter 11. Popular Resource Sovereignty
Chapter 12. The State of the Law
Chapter 13. Popular Philosophy
Chapter 14. Our Corruption: Why Leaders Must Lie
Part IV. Clean Trade
Chapter 15. Principles for Action
Chapter 16. Clean Trade Policy I: Protecting Property
Chapter 17. Clean Trade Policy II: Supporting Accountability
Part V. All United
Chapter 18. The Future
Epilogue. The Philosophy of Unity
Notes
References
Index
Leif Wenar holds the Chair of Philosophy and Law at King's College London. He earned his degrees in Philosophy from Stanford and from Harvard, where he worked with John Rawls and with Robert Nozick. He has been a Visiting Professor at Princeton and at Stanford, and has been a Fellow of the Carnegie Council Program in Justice and the World Economy.
"Philosophers rarely write big books that could change the world,
but Blood Oil is such a book. Wenar does not shy away from the
horrific consequences of current trade practices, nor from the
philosophical arguments needed to show that this trade rests on
ethically indefensible assumptions. Yet instead of leaving us to
despair, he offers realistic ways of bringing about change that
would make the world a better and fairer place." --Peter
Singer, Princeton University, author of One World and The Most Good
You Can Do
"Have you ever worried that your spending might be supporting the
'sociopathic rulers and sadistic militias' that blight so many
countries in Africa and around the world? Or that your purchases of
oil are supporting injustice and oppression, just as British
purchases of sugar once supported the enslavement of Africans? Leif
Wenar has written the indispensable guide, combining politics,
economics, and ethics to tell us just how and why we are all
involved, and
what we ought to do to make the world a better place." --Angus
Deaton, Princeton University, 2015 Nobel Prize Winner in Economics,
and author of The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins
of
Inequality
"This book is one of those rare manifestos that awaken people to a
pressing ethical issue by changing the way they see the world.
Whether or not its recommendations are practicable today, Blood Oil
is a fantastically stimulating read: analytic, informative,
rationally optimistic, and written with erudition and panache."
--Steven Pinker, Harvard University, author of The Better Angels of
Our Nature and
How the Mind Works
"Leif Wenar's objective is to devise ways in which the vicious
circle at heart of many development failures can be broken, so that
odious regimes can be prevented from appropriating natural
resources to their own advantage and saddling future generation
with much diminished national wealth. Most importantly the book
derives practical proposals on how such objectives are to be
achieved. The book's conclusions will be of great interest to all
those working in
international development, and particularly to national governments
and international organizations." --Branko Milanovic, CUNY Graduate
School, former World Bank Lead Economist, Author of Worlds Apart
and
The Haves and the Have-Nots
"It is time that we woke up to the fact that the level of our
dependence on certain resources means that we let ourselves be
blackmailed by tyrants. Our comfort is purchased by collusion with
regimes that are responsible for high levels of human misery,
injustice and bigotry. This courageous and forceful book challenges
us to make the hard decision that might change this worsening
situation. It is a serious and urgent appeal to the conscience of
the West."
--Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury and Leader of the
Anglican Communion
"Blood Oil is an inspiring book. It will make you think differently
about everything you buy- from cell phones to children's toys- and
make you realize just how complicit we have become in the
rights-crushing autocracies that produce the raw materials from
which these everyday products are made. But Blood Oil also lays
out, in careful detail, a clean trade strategy that will bring our
complicity to an end and help poor people recover
sovereignty over their resources. It is also a delight to read:
free of jargon and ideology, an engaging, ironic and eloquent tour
de force of moral passion." --Michael Ignatieff, Harvard
University, author of The Lesser Evil:
Political Ethics in an Age of Terror
"This is a long-awaited study of power in the contemporary world,
in oil markets and the often corrupted power-plays that they
engender. Leif Wenar is a philosopher with profound understanding
of the daily, practical world. His big book should become required
reading." --Lord Carlile of Berriew, Independent Reviewer of UK
Terrorism Legislation 2001-11
"As consumers we depend every day on global supply chains tainted
by exploitation and injustice. Leif Wenar's detailed and incisive
study of the trade in oil and other "blood" resources, and of its
moral and legal background, is the most sustained analysis yet of
the responsibilities we bear as beneficiaries of the plunder of
authoritarians and kleptocrats. Not everyone will agree with
Wenar's moral arguments and policy recommendations but anyone who
reads this
book will see the urgency of the problem." --Charles Beitz,
Princeton University, author of Political Theory and International
Relations and The Idea of Human Rights
"Leif Wenar puts the oldest principles of ownership and justice to
new use in his attack on the human disaster that is the notorious
'resource curse.' His proposal is original, exact, and morally
admirable. It should stir us away from the coldly comforting idea
that some peoples will always be poor and tyrannically governed.
This is a fine marriage of moral seriousness and institutional
imagination." --Jedediah Purdy, Duke University, author of
For Common Things and After Nature: A Politics for the
Anthropocene
"'Telling the person in the seat next to you that you are
interested in philosophy,' observes Leif Wenar, 'will often result
in an uninterrupted flight.' This lively book gives strong evidence
that interruption is sometimes a wise course of action. Writing in
an engaging, conversational style, Wenar trenchantly and
provocatively explores one of the great moral challenges of our
time. Although the benefits from development and global
connectedness-in which we
are all inescapably complicit-have been huge, some of those
benefits have flowed to people who have systematically made the
lives of others desperate and miserable." --John Mueller, Ohio
State University
and the Cato Institute, co-author of Chasing Ghosts: The Policing
of Terrorism
"Blood Oil is a brilliant inquiry into ethical implications of our
dependence on the petroleum trade-and the uncomfortable fact that
it fuels many violent conflicts and funds a large fraction of the
world's autocrats. Wenar shows that much of this oil has been
stolen from the citizens who rightfully own it, nests this issue in
the historic struggle for the right of self-determination, and
suggests a way to rectify this injustice that is surprisingly
practical. This book is not merely a major scholarly achievement;
it is both politically urgent and compulsively readable." --Michael
Ross, UCLA, author of The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes
the
Development of Nations
"LOOK at the tablet or the paper that you are reading. Its making
will probably involve oil, minerals or metals. Some of those
resources will have come from a country whose government steals
from and oppresses its citizens. By one estimate, almost 10% of
what the average American household spends on petrol each year goes
directly into the coffers of such regimes. This is a nasty, if
familiar, thought. But Leif Wenar, a philosopher at King's College
London,
pushes these ideas further, with uncomfortable consequences . . .
In jargon-free prose, Mr Wenar argues persuasively that Western
consumers are blinded to the fact that international trade still
operates
according to the 'law of the jungle' . . .He reveals a horrible
truth: that global free trade is, at times, bound up in blood."
--The Economist
"Leif Wenar's Blood Oil prompts us all to think a little more
closely about the terrible side effects of oil production and about
the role that our own consumption plays in that cycle . . . by
putting a human face on the 'resource curse' - a discussion which
is too often confined to dry academic and statistical texts - the
book's central contribution is in forcing us to confront our own
role in enabling the damaging domestic and international
effects
of oil production. For those who think that the only tie between
oil and U.S. foreign policy is the question of energy security,
this book offers a valuable corrective. For that alone, it is well
worth reading."
--War on the Rocks
"Informative, thoughtful, exceptionally well organized and
presented, thoroughly researched and impressively argued from
beginning to end...Very highly recommended." --Midwest Book Review
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