The Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law opens with a striking vignette that sets the tone. On the eve of his assassination in 1961 by Belgian and Congolese soldiers in the secessionist province of Katanga, Patrice Lumumba, then Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo—today the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—sensed the tides turning against the newly independent republic, as rumours of partition and external interference intensified. Increasingly isolated on both the national and international stage, Lumumba, like many postcolonial African political actors, lost faith in international law and institutions.1 He wrote that ‘certain high officials of the United Nations’ (UN) were supporting economic and political interests in Belgium and other Western States, with the United States at the forefront (at 1). There is ample scholarship on the role played by the UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, in the unfolding of these events, and on the ways in which international legal safeguards failed the DRC in a succession of developments that ultimately protected local and Western extractivist interests at the expense of the Congolese people's peaceful and prosperous enjoyment of their natural resources.2 With this story, Kulamadayil sets the stage for what she terms the ‘pathology of plenty’: The cycles of impoverishment, dispossession, violence, extractivism and environmental degradation brought about by the presence of natural resources in the subsoil of many postcolonial States. The book examines the role of international law in constructing and sustaining such territories as sacrifice zones that benefit global trade networks and a narrow elite within the States concerned. Kulamadayil thus offers both a legal and an institutional history of the ‘pathology of plenty’ across decades, drawing on diverse sources and engaging both law and political economy. Although doctrinal in orientation, this timely contribution is distinctly multidisciplinary and firmly grounded in critical scholarship. Across six chapters structured around diverse yet interconnected case studies, the author traces the varied configurations of resource capture, fossil capitalism and distributional failure in postcolonial States. The book does not aim to advance a single, overarching argument. Instead, it uses detailed case studies to extensively outline the various manifestations of the ‘pathology of plenty’. In doing so, Kulamadayil situates her work within a rich postcolonial critique of international law, while extending it by examining institutions operating both within and beyond formal legal frameworks in order to narrate the broader political-economic architecture of extraction and dispossession. The first chapter reads largely as a literature review of two economic concepts: the ‘paradox of plenty’ and the ‘resource curse’. The book's central neologism, ‘pathology of plenty’, which lends its name to both the volume and this opening Chapter 2, emerges as a synthesis of these two notions. The author provides a thorough account of the key economic theories and specialised vocabulary that inform her intervention. These theories serve as the baseline against which, and at times through which, the book develops its argument. Accordingly, the chapter surveys a wide range of economic scholarship, from liberal approaches to Marxist and environmental critiques. Its central finding at this stage is that the political dimensions underpinning both the ‘paradox of plenty’ and the ‘resource curse’ are too often marginalised. By reframing the adverse effects of resource extraction on the peoples and ecologies of postcolonial States under the rubric of the ‘pathology of plenty’, Kulamadayil advances the hypothesis that such outcomes are neither natural nor accidental, but the product of corporate and elite state capture. In this sense, the book seeks to reintegrate the political into the economic and the critical into legal analysis, addressing a literature that remains overly siloed and fragmented. Chapter 3 on ‘The Foundation of Plenty’ offers a rich institutional and doctrinal history of the principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources (PSNR). Rather than presenting it as a straightforward triumph of the Global South within the framework of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), the author reconstructs the dense and often conflicting debates that shaped its emergence. The Global South does not appear here as a monolith. Instead, the positions of differently situated States are carefully contextualised in light of their political and economic priorities. Against this backdrop, the chapter interrogates how international law structured the transition from colonial to postcolonial control over mineral resources. It traces how principles such as uti possidetis juris, pacta sunt servanda, rebus sic stantibus and PSNR governed decolonisation in ways that preserved rather than ruptured existing property relations. In this account, uti possidetis operated as a precondition of self-determination, stabilising colonial-era territorial and contractual arrangements and thereby protecting entrenched corporate interests. Although newly independent States mobilised the language of economic self-determination and struggled for the emergence of a NIEO, international law often maintained a conceptual separation between political and economic sovereignty. This position was echoed in parts of the scholarly community, where colonialism was framed as political domination while economic dependency was treated as neutral capital exchange. The result is the endurance of a distributional logic in postcolonial times in which wealth—which under colonialism flowed from colonised territories to imperial metropoles—continues to flow from resource-rich postcolonial States to corporate and metropolitan centres abroad. Chapter 4 on ‘The Hope of Plenty’ continues this inquiry by examining how Third World internationalism, particularly as articulated by petro-States, reshaped postcolonial international legal doctrine. Kulamadayil traces how Iran left a ‘permanent mark’ (at 42) on the conception of PSNR, reframing it as a right of the people rather than merely a prerogative of the sovereign State. Through detailed analysis of nationalisation, contract renegotiations and the emergence of production-sharing agreements, the chapter shows how Iran sought to unsettle concessionary regimes inherited from colonial rule. The second case study turns to Algeria's nationalisation of oil and the legal architecture of the Evian Accords with France, the former colonial sovereign. Here, Kulamadayil carefully reconstructs the doctrinal debate between acquired rights and rebus sic stantibus in the postcolonial context, with Algeria arguing that State succession should not automatically renew predatory concessionary regimes. What emerges from this chapter is a moment of genuine normative contestation. International law appears not only as a vehicle through which deference to markets and extractive imperatives is naturalised but also as a terrain upon which newly independent States attempted to inscribe economic justice and challenge its imperial roots. Postcolonial States led this hopeful project of normative transformation from inequality to redistribution through the United Nations system. The chapter thus captures a historical juncture in which international law embodied both constraint and ‘a glimpse of hope that counter-hegemonic moves’ (at 60) might be possible. Chapter 5 on ‘The Temptation of Plenty’ turns to ‘grand theft’ (at 61) as a further manifestation of the ‘pathology of plenty’, examining how anti-corruption law and anti-money laundering (AML) law respond to the large-scale diversion of public wealth. Although grand theft is not specifically addressed by international law, it is covered by a dense and fragmented legal framework that combines criminal law, corporate compliance obligations and domestic enforcement. Kulamadayil argues that, while this regime appears robust on paper, it remains structurally limited in practice. Originally developed to combat organised crime and promote good governance, AML and anti-corruption regimes tend to individualise responsibility, rely heavily on domestic bureaucracies and operate within financial systems shielded by secrecy and corporate autonomy. Through detailed case studies, the chapter shows that grand theft occurs not at the margins of the global economy but at its core, often with the cooperation or acquiescence of major financial institutions. The difficulty, therefore, lies less in detection than in enforcement and deterrence. By shifting the analytical focus from corruption in the Global South to the infrastructures of finance in the Global North, Kulamadayil reframes grand theft as a structural problem embedded in global legal and economic governance. Chapter 6 on ‘The Peril of Plenty’ explores how armed conflicts can precipitate moments of natural resources redistribution and wealth profiteering. In such moments, international law's protective aspirations collide with its deference to State power and capital. An extensive body of law regulates pillage, occupation, and environmental harm. Yet, its application reveals persistent asymmetries: Foreign and private property often receive stronger protection than communal or public resources, and—as established in Chapter 3—PSNR remains largely State-centred. Through case studies, including the International Court of Justice's 2024 Advisory Opinion on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Kulamadayil shows how doctrines meant to prevent exploitation are frequently reframed through developmental or security logics that legitimise continued extraction. While recent jurisprudence signals normative clarification in favour of peoples' rights, enforcement remains uneven. The chapter ultimately concludes that legal proliferation has not displaced the enduring logic that favours the enjoyment of the spoils by the powerful. The final chapter, titled ‘The Pain of Plenty’, returns explicitly to the book's conceptual foundations and core theme. Why do some of the world's poorest people live in nations with abundant natural resources, while the profits of multinational companies like Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Equinor, TotalEnergies and BP continue to soar? Revisiting the distinction between the ‘resource curse’ and the ‘paradox of plenty’, Kulamadayil situates these debates within the broader framework of neo-extractivism. This model captures the symbiotic relationship between transnational capital and domestic political elites and explains the stagnant or regressive trajectories of natural resources-rich countries. The chapter then turns to international human rights law, interrogating whether it offers meaningful resistance to this dynamic. While minority rights jurisprudence has recognised the cultural and land-based claims of Indigenous communities, the Human Rights Committee's interpretation of Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) has simultaneously embedded a balancing logic that privileges extractive development as a majoritarian economic interest. PSNR, then, though formally articulated as a right of peoples under Article 1 of the ICCPR, remains largely inaccessible to individuals. The State continues to be centred as the legitimate sovereign. As a result, extractivism is not prohibited but managed: Resource exploitation is permissible so long as it does not extinguish the ‘traditional lifestyle’ of Indigenous communities and minorities (at 114). Even landmark corporate accountability cases, such as the litigation against Royal Dutch Shell in the Netherlands, reveal these structural limits of redress. Modest compensation schemes do not fully address the enduring environmental devastation or the uncertainty of redistribution. The chapter ultimately shows that human rights law has struggled to detach economic progress from extractivist development, weaving the ‘pain of plenty’ into the fabric of international legal reasoning itself. This chapter reads as the book's apotheosis. The preceding chapters appear, in retrospect, as the scaffolding necessary to grasp the full ecosystem of the ‘pathology of plenty’—and its distributed and enduring pain. International law is read broadly and goes beyond treaties and multilateralism to encompass domestic jurisprudence, transnational regulatory regimes, soft law and financial governance. What emerges is less a single argument than a typology of the many legal vantage points from which the ‘pathology of plenty’ can be approached—property, sovereignty, corruption, armed conflict and human rights—each revealing how extraction is normalised, managed and, at times, legitimised. The book is particularly compelling in that it engages with materials lawyers do not traditionally centre, revealing how opacity, financial secrecy and sub-regimes of governance sustain neo-extractivism. The book leaves the reader with a more unsettling insight: that international law's relationship to extractivism is not merely a story of regulatory gaps, but of structural ambivalence. International law, taken in its widest sense, both constrains and enables struggles over resources. It appears as a legal order that promises dignity and justice while remaining deeply entangled in regimes of (dis)possession, sovereignty and developmentalism that result in the disciplining of the political economy from which powerful actors continue to benefit. In that sense, Kulamadayil demonstrates an impressive ability to keep a finger on the pulse of issues pertaining to resource governance, while compelling the reader to confront the limits of international law's emancipatory claims.
Gildelen Aty‐Biyo (Tue,) studied this question.