resource nationalism

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a political and economic tendency in which states assert greater ownership, control, and benefit from natural resources — including oil, gas, minerals, and land — within their territory, often through nationalisation of resource companies, renegotiation of contracts with foreign investors, increased taxation and royalties, and requirements for domestic processing rather than raw material export; resource nationalism surges when commodity prices are high and resource revenues are large, as the potential gains from asserting state control are maximised; it has been expressed in different forms in twentieth-century Latin America through the nationalisation of oil in Mexico (1938), Venezuela (1976), and Bolivia (2006), in Africa through the Africanisation of mining in Zambia and Zimbabwe, and in Russia through the Kremlin's reassertion of state control over energy assets in the 2000s; it creates ongoing tension between host-country sovereignty aspirations and foreign investor expectations of stability and contract sanctity