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Smith, Benjamin

Shaw, Aidan

Howlett, David C.

Basic Sciences

Cambridge University Press

A behind-the-scenes look at America's favorite country music stars features stories and full-color photographs, culled from the pages of Country Spectacular magazine, that focus on such stars as Garth Brooks, Randy Travis, Clint Black, and Wynonna Judd.

Country Music Stars

Arts & Photography

Music

Crescent

Hard Times in the Lands of Plenty: Oil Politics in Iran and Indonesia

That natural resources can be a curse as well as a blessing is almost a truism in political analysis. In many late-developing countries, the "resource curse" theory predicts, the exploitation of valuable resources will not result in stable, prosperous states but rather in their opposite. Petroleum deposits, for example, may generate so much income that rulers will have little need to establish efficient, tax-extracting bureaucracies, leading to shallow, poorly functioning administrations that remain at the mercy of the world market for oil. Alternatively, resources may be geographically concentrated, thereby intensifying regional, ethnic, or other divisive tensions. In Hard Times in the Land of Plenty, Benjamin Smith deciphers the paradox of the resource curse and questions its inevitability through an innovative comparison of the experiences of Iran and Indonesia. These two populous, oil-rich countries saw profoundly different changes in their fortunes in the period 1960–1980. Focusing on the roles of state actors and organized opposition in using oil revenues, Smith finds that the effects of oil wealth on politics and on regime durability vary according to the circumstances under which oil exports became a major part of a country's economy. The presence of natural resources is, he argues, a political opportunity rather than simply a structural variable. Drawing on extensive primary research in Iran and Indonesia and quantitative research on nineteen other oil-rich developing countries, Smith challenges us to reconsider resource wealth in late-developing countries, not as a simple curse or blessing, but instead as a tremendously flexible source of both political resources and potential complications.

Business & Money

Economics

Cornell University Press

That natural resources can be a curse as well as a blessing is almost a truism in political analysis. In many late-developing countries, the "resource curse" theory predicts, the exploitation of valuable resources will not result in stable, prosperous states but rather in their opposite. Petroleum deposits, for example, may generate so much income that rulers will have little need to establish efficient, tax-extracting bureaucracies, leading to shallow, poorly functioning administrations that remain at the mercy of the world market for oil. Alternatively, resources may be geographically concentrated, thereby intensifying regional, ethnic, or other divisive tensions. In Hard Times in the Land of Plenty, Benjamin Smith deciphers the paradox of the resource curse and questions its inevitability through an innovative comparison of the experiences of Iran and Indonesia. These two populous, oil-rich countries saw profoundly different changes in their fortunes in the period 1960–1980. Focusing on the roles of state actors and organized opposition in using oil revenues, Smith finds that the effects of oil wealth on politics and on regime durability vary according to the circumstances under which oil exports became a major part of a country's economy. The presence of natural resources is, he argues, a political opportunity rather than simply a structural variable. Drawing on extensive primary research in Iran and Indonesia and quantitative research on nineteen other oil-rich developing countries, Smith challenges us to reconsider resource wealth in late-developing countries, not as a simple curse or blessing, but instead as a tremendously flexible source of both political resources and potential complications.

Although the Arab states of the Persian Gulf are leaders in many of the measures of absolute wealth that have traditionally defined success in the global economy, they have had a much harder time becoming accepted in the equally fractured and hierarchal realm of the cultural economy, where practices, signs, and perceptions of propriety matter. Market Orientalism examines how emerging markets are imagined as cultural economic spaces―spaces that are assembled, ranked, desired, and sometimes punished in ways built on earlier forms of dealing with “backward” economies and peoples. Such imaginations not only impact investment and guide policy, but also create stories of economic value that separate “us” from “them.” While market Orientalism functions anywhere that questions of “deserved” wealth come down to cultural/economic differences between places, Smith focuses on the Arab states of the Gulf. By combining field research with extensive analysis of news archives concerning the cultural economies of the Gulf states, Market Orientalism addresses important motivations for economic relations and provides a framework to analyze how prejudice, fashion, taste, and waste are vital to both narrow and widespread forms of economic activity.

Market Orientalism: Cultural Economy and the Arab Gulf States (Syracuse Studies in Geography)

History

Syracuse University Press

Joy is a children's book author and illustrator who's recently gone through a divorce. She's lost custody of her son. Now she's moved back to the small Kansas college town where a long-forgotten family property looms.Jake, the part-time caretaker, is probably out of a cushy job with this new owner moving to town. That's okay. Jake is easy going, and this new owner is also a not-bad looking only-slightly-older woman. Maeve Daniels was the wife of a well-to-do South Texas minister. But, alas, a scandal has forced her to hit her mid-forties as a tenant in her aging mother's house. To boot, she is only afforded an adjunct's salary in a third-rate theology department. For Corky, Aunt Maeve and Kansas have been hell on roller-skates. The only relief she got was when she slithered into the cellar of the old nearly-abandoned house next door. Now her hiding place is ruined. How will she get through her summer in exile without...Binx. Binx remembers little Joy. The house has been quiet since the night her father went missing. They took little Joy away from him. All the details will be his to share if only he can get Joy all alone.

Familiar: A Full-Length Play

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Independently published

This Element documents the diversity and dissensus of scholarship on the political resource curse, diagnoses its sources, and directs scholarly attention towards what the authors believe will be more fruitful avenues of future research. In the scholarship to date, there is substantial regional heterogeneity and substantial evidence denying the existence of a political resource curse. This dissensus is located in theory, measure, and research design, especially regarding measurement error and endogenous selection. The work then turns to strategies for reconnecting research on resource politics to the broader literature on democratic development. Finally, the results of the authors' own research is presented, showing that a set of historically contingent events in the Middle East and North Africa are at the root of what has been mistaken for a global political resource curse.

Rethinking the Resource Curse (Elements in the Politics of Development)

Sunshine in the Kitchen; Or, Chapters for Maid-Servants

Nabu Press

The Power of the Tongue: Or, Chapters for Talkers

Literary

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Books by Smith, Benjamin