Peter Harling, senior Middle East analyst with the International Crisis Group, tells Bauer, "The pillaging of state resources is not a particularly good strategy.
As it turns out, doling out civil liberties distracts a duped electorate, allowing the governing elite to continue their pillaging of state resources without worrying about being voted/overthrown out of office.
The accusations that Congolese government officials are implicated in the pillaging of local resources are also backed by a report recently in January by Holly Dranginis for the Enough Project, in which she also points to the "lucrative income" pillaging provides for factions of the Congolese army, and calls for an ending of the culture of impunity that is associated with this.
James G. Stewart, Associate Professor at Allard Law School, University of British Columbia, will speak on the issue of the pillage of natural resources as a restraint on the use of force.
Even worse than wasting resources, today's zero-sum management imposes ever heavier burdens on society as a whole: witness the credit crunch, colossal inequalities and the pillaging of Earth's resources without provision for the future.
That same kind of pillaging of assets — natural resources, development aid, the meager savings of a million Kabul Bank depositors and crony contracts — has fueled a similar anger against the regime in Afghanistan and undermined our nation-building efforts there.
Originally Massasoit, the Wampanoag leader, had formed an alliance with the British to help protect his people against tribal rivals, but the relationship proved tenuous when the population of colonists, and hence the pillaging of land and resources, swelled.
Scientists in recent years have run afoul of a law aiming to clamp down on what Brazil perceived as rampant pillaging of its biological resources.
► Brazilian scientists will now have some relief from a 2001 law intended to protect against "rampant pillaging of its biological resources" that ended up "stifling biodiversity studies," Herton Escobar wrote in this week's Science.
Such a "digital bill of rights" may also catalyse a new approach by governments around the globe, one that no longer merely sanctions the exploitation of our natural data resources just like it allowed the pillaging of our natural energy resources for the benefit of so very few.
