Blood Oil: Fossil Curse and Political Violence
Kapitál
It is a well-known fact that countries with abundant natural resources often fail to translate this wealth into economic growth and human development.
It is a well-known fact that countries with abundant natural resources often fail to translate this wealth into economic growth and human development. This phenomenon is known as the resource curse and has been studied for decades by economists and social scientists. Their research has shown that resource wealth—fossil fuels, minerals, and other valuable natural resources—often coexists with poor economic performance, corruption, authoritarianism, and, in some cases, civil war. Resource wealth is captured by ruling elites, corrupt networks, foreign corporations, or armed groups, while ordinary people struggle with poverty, oppression, and lack of development.
There are many examples of countries affected by this dynamic—Nigeria, Angola, South Sudan, Venezuela, Equatorial Guinea, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, and Myanmar are just a few. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a textbook case. It is extraordinarily rich in minerals. Cobalt from its vast reserves powers devices used every day across the globe—from smartphones in people’s pockets to the batteries in their electric cars. Yet the country has one of the world’s lowest Human Development Index scores and struggles with high child mortality rates, malnutrition, and low life expectancy. Cobalt extraction is associated with violence, child labour, displacement, severe labour exploitation, and environmental degradation.
Oil Curse
The resource curse is particularly politically charged in the case of fossil fuels. Oil and gas are the most valuable resources in the global economy and generate exceptionally large and concentrated revenues in countries with large oil resources—the so called petrostates. These rents reduce governments’ dependence on taxation and, with it, their accountability to citizens. They are often captured by ruling elites not only for private enrichment, but also to consolidate power, weaken accountability, remove checks and balances, and suppress political opposition through restrictions on political rights and civil liberties. This phenomenon is often described as petrocracy—a form of oil-dependent autocratic rule.
The autocratic oil curse, a subset of the broader resource curse, is not a rare pheonomenon. A glance at the global oil map reveals that this prized commodity is, to a remarkable extent, controlled by authoritarian governments. There are a few democracies with significant oil resources—the United States, Canada, and Norway are notable examples. However, many of the world’s largest oil-producing states are undemocratic. Of the top ten oil producers, seven are classified as unfree by Freedom House: Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, Iraq, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait. In the Persian Gulf, a region that holds approximately two-thirds of the world’s proven oil reserves and one-third of its natural gas reserves, most states are monarchical petrostates in which unaccountable and effectively irreplaceable royal families control oil-dependent economies and use resource revenues to enrich themselves and their loyal networks while keeping their citizens unfree.
Saudi Arabia holds the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves and was for decades the world’s leading oil producer before being surpassed by the United States. It is an absolute monarchy with no elections, no separation of powers, and no meaningful political rights or civil liberties. Political opposition is effectively impossible, dissent is criminalised, and the country is marked by extensive gender discrimination and labour exploitation. The royal family effectively treats the kingdom’s fossil wealth as its own. It is the majority shareholder in Saudi Aramco, the national oil company, whose market value stands at approximately 1.7 trillion US dollars—more than Amazon, Meta, or Tesla. In 2025 alone, Aramco paid out over $85 billion in cash dividends to its owners, the Saudi government, which directly controls 81.5 percent of the company and is itself dominated by the ruling royal family.
Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Iran, and Venezuela are other examples of highly authoritarian countries endowed with substantial fossil fuel wealth. The same pattern can be found among several major oil producers in Africa, including Libya, Angola, Algeria, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea. In many of these states, elections are neither free nor fair, political rights and civil liberties are severely restricted, dissent and opposition are repressed by security forces, and vulnerable groups often face systematic discrimination. Natural resources are typically controlled by ruling elites and opaque networks of government officials, middlemen, and oligarchy who operate through state-owned companies. Key aspects of oil governance—including the granting of concessions, the negotiation of contracts with foreign firms, and the allocation of revenues—take place with little transparency or public oversight. As a result, oil and other resource wealth often serve not as a foundation for broad-based prosperity, but as a crucial pillar of authoritarian power, helping ruling elites maintain their grip on the state while much of the population remains impoverished and oppressed.
Blood Oil and Political Violence
Political theorist Leif Wenar, in Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence and the Rules that Run the World, describes oil that funds dictators as “blood oil.” The term evokes “blood diamonds”—diamonds originating from mines seized by rebel groups who controlled extraction and trade and used the proceeds to finance violent campaigns against civilians and governments in countries such as Sierra Leone, Angola, Ivory Coast, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These diamonds are “bloody” because their extraction and trade are bound up with violence: terror imposed by armed groups on civilians and government forces, brutal control of mining areas, forced and child labour.
Like diamonds, oil can also be tainted by violence. In the petrocracies discussed above, it functions as a central source of power that enables multiple overlapping forms of violence. There is political violence in the form of repression, surveillance, imprisonment, and the suppression of dissent. There is structural violence that manifests through poverty, inequality, discrimination, and weak public services. There is also social and environmental violence in the form of labour exploitation, unsafe working conditions, pollution, environmental degradation, and the acceleration of climate change. Finally, there is violence in the form of wars and military interventions financed through fossil fuel revenues.
No country illustrates this constellation more clearly than Russia. It is the largest country in the world possessing vast fossil fuel and other natural wealth. Oil, gas, and coal have been its main export commodities. Revenues from Russia’s oil and gas industry have accounted for between 30 to 50 percent of total federal budget revenues over the past decade, making them the most important single source of cash for the Kremlin. For years, these revenues have helped sustain Putin’s authoritarian rule. Today, Russia is among the world’s most unfree countries. There is no separation of powers, no free elections, no free media, the people have no rights, and the opposition figures are persecuted. The corrupt economy is based on a centralized and non-transparent distribution of privileges, resources, and cash through a network of nomenklatura and oligarchs who are granted a share of the spoils in exchange for loyalty to Putin’s regime.
Russia’s hydrocarbons sustain not only the dictatorship and corruption at home but also violence across borders. For decades, Russia interferes with other countries through a mix of military force, covert operations, support for separatists, mercenary deployments, election interference, cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, and economic coercion. In 2022, it launched an illegal, unprovoked military assault on Ukraine that involves multiple forms of violence: the bombardment of cities and energy infrastructure, killing, detention, torture of soldiers, kidnapping of children in occupied territories, sexual violence. This violence operates hand in hand with the political repression and information control at home where censorship, propaganda, and the criminalisation of dissent shape what can be said and known about the war. Russia’s war machine is in significant part sustained by revenues derived from oil and gas exports which remain a major source of state income and foreign exchange despite international sanctions. Currently, Russian oil and gas are arguably among the “bloodiest” fossil fuels, given their direct financing of war and sustained authoritarian violence. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly argued that Russian oil and gas revenues amount to “blood money,” as they directly finance the war against Ukraine.
Blood and Theft – Injustice Maintained by Trade
The main victims of “blood oil” are the people living under autocratic petro-states. Not only do they suffer in unfree societies, they are also effectively excluded from benefiting from what is, in principle, their collective wealth. As Leif Wenar rightly pointed out, petrocrats violate not only individual human rights but also the collective property rights of their citizens over natural resources. This right is firmly embedded in international law, including the binding Human Rights Covenants. Article 1 of both Covenants states that “All peoples have the right of self-determination” and that “All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources.” The collective ownership of natural wealth is also entrenched in many national constitutions. It implies that citizens are entitled to the benefits of resource wealth and should be able to shape resource policy through democratic governance.
According to Wenar, oil from corrupt and unfree countries is thus not only a “blood commodity” but also a “stolen good”. The central problem is that the petrocrats’ capture of natural resources—the blood and theft—is sustained through the structure of global trade. On the one hand, governments sell off national resources regardless of how constitutional and democratic they are. On the other hand, buyers purchase these resources from such regimes, effectively funding their control. Companies and states that import fossil fuels from oil despots and dictators transfer vast revenues into their hands and thereby strengthen their capacity to govern and repress. In this sense, they are complicit in the violence and deprivation inflicted on these populations. We do not want to see these links, but they are nonetheless obvious, direct, and very consequential.
It is striking to realize how extensive this morally defective global trade in oil and other valuable commodities remains. For decades, the EU has imported oil from authoritarian regimes and conflict-affected regions—including Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Libya—and gas from Russia, Azerbaijan, or Algeria. African petro-states such as Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, and Angola have supplied oil to China, India, and the EU alike. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Europe continued to import large volumes of Russian oil, gas, and coal due to political and economic expediency—driven by price, convenience, structural dependence, and a persistent belief in Russia’s liberalisation through trade. Just before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia supplied roughly 40 percent of EU gas imports, around a quarter of its oil, and nearly half of its coal imports, despite Russia’s growing repression and escalating aggression toward its neighbours.
The Utopia of Clean Trade
Critical theorists and global justice scholars have argued that there is a duty of justice not to trade in stolen or violent goods and have proposed “clean trade” reforms. They call for democratic and human-rights-respecting states to adopt clean trade legislation that restricts commercial exchange with governments or firms that do not meet basic accountability criteria and whose citizens lack fundamental political rights. Wenar’s clean trade framework combines import restrictions on the most corrupt and autocratic regimes, certification of resource legitimacy, and coordinated trade instruments such as tariffs and sanctions, in order to align global commerce with basic principles of political and human rights legitimacy.
Yet such reforms that seek to align global trade with basic ethical principles of political legitimacy and human rights remain tragically rare and difficult to push through. There is the Kimberly process that certifies whether diamonds are “conflict-free.” The EU’s Conflict Minerals Regulation, implemented in 2021, requires EU companies to ensure that imports of 3TG minerals (tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold) come from responsible and conflict-free sources. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the EU gradually but significantly reduced its dependence on Russian fossil fuels. This response was driven partly by moral considerations, but also by concerns over price stability and energy security. These economic concerns are important. However, there remains a strong ethical case that democratic societies should not purchase bloody and stolen fossil fuels. If resource revenues sustain coercive power, repression, and conflict, then it is a demand of justice to end such commercial relations and not be complicit. Is this a utopian vision of transformation of global trade? Maybe, but it remains one of the most important moral projects of our time.
The text was produced with the support of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Representation in the Slovak Republic.