Leaders of Bolivia’s rightist opposition today denied any links to an alleged plot to kill President Evo Morales, and condemned last week’s shooting of three suspected mercenaries by police.   Officials in the eastern city of Santa Cruz called for an international investigation into the killings in the city when police moved to arrest a [...]

“If a continent is divided in to a patchwork of tiny countries, countries too small to have internalized key externalities, vital public goods will be missing.”  - Paul Collier, Wars Guns and Votes Infrastructure Reform – a critical platform for one running for elected office in Africa against the incumbent. Roads, schools, houses and yes, [...]

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 [...]

Things are looking worse than ever in Zimbabwe, as the increasingly isolated President Robert Mugabe defied international pressure and outright condemnation to proceed with a “one-candidate poll” in the runoff election for the presidency on Friday – leaving not only the beleaguered public, but also foreign and domestic businesses, between a rock and a hard [...]

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 [...]

Robert Amsterdam was profiled in the new issue of Upstream magazine, an energy trade magazine, on how international energy companies can and should defend their rights in resource nationalist market conditions. Download the full PDF of the article here.

Earlier this week, I gave a short presentation in London on the legal and political remedies available for foreign investors to protect their assets in emerging markets undergoing resource nationalism trends. In coming weeks, I will be doing similar workshops in Stockholm and Dubai, and I thought it might be helpful to post the “checklist” [...]