It’s a familiar story, and I won’t be the first one to tell you. As documented widely, the rapid industrial rise of the BRIC economies has created an unexpected demand crush on natural resource commodities, generating all sorts of anomalies for foreign investors in extractive industries. We have seen resource nationalism issues pop up in [...]

This is my speech from the Houston World Affairs Council on May 19, 2008 – covering the comparative investment environments of Venezuela and Nigeria, the rise of state-owned energy companies, the decline of Washington’s soft power, and the new competition gap facing investors.

The year 1995 was very tragic for Nigeria: after years of starvation and exploitation, the ethnic minority in Ogoniland, an area rich in oil and gas, began mounting a peaceful civil society movement to demand a greater share of the oil wealth to fund infrastructure in their impoverished communities. Led by the political activist Ken [...]