The Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law

This book critically examines the role international law plays in post-colonial countries, which primarily rely on the exploitation of their natural resources for economic and human development.

Since the 1990s, expressions such as the 'resource curse' and 'paradox of plenty' have been associated with unequal patterns of power and wealth distribution in post-colonial and neo-colonial countries. They have also been applied to the ecological and social costs of natural resources exploitation, and the planetary costs of mineral resources-based production and consumption patterns.

Taking various resource-curse and paradox-of-plenty theories as a starting point, the book illustrates how the law's role in resource-cursed countries is at once constitutive, preventive, remedial and punitive. It does so by engaging with various fields of public international law.

The book revisits how rights and principles such as sovereignty over natural resources and economic self-determination were applied in decolonisation processes; studies the proliferation of international treaties protecting foreign property rights; and zooms in on various contract models used in the mineral resources sector to evaluate the distributional choices of cost and revenue.

Bio

Lys Kulamadayil is a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Fellow and principal investigator of the four-year research project Law by Colour Code: Locating Race and Racism in International Law, based at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy and the International Law Department.

Her research interests span extractivism, mineral resource governance, the legal regulation of food and ecosystems, human rights, economic law, legal theory and philosophy, as well as international law’s role in social hierarchies, particularly with regard to racism and ableism.

She has published widely on these subjects in peer-reviewed journals, including the London Review of International Law, the Leiden Journal of International Law, Transnational Legal Theory, and the Journal of the History of International Law.

She is also the author of the monograph The Pathology of Plenty (2025) and the co-editor of Social Hierarchies in Catastrophic Times (2026).

She serves on various scientific advisory boards, including those of the European Journal of International Law and Völkerrechtsblog, and teaches in several doctoral academies, including LPE in Europe.

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