ABSTRACT
Most of the oil exporting regions of the world have remained fairly stable over the last two decades in terms of their populations of producers. Southeast Asia is one of three regions, however, that stand out as having undergone substantial change, along with South America and Western Africa. The first generation of studies focused on oil and politics tended to take a mono-causal approach, assigning more or less the same (negative) effects to resource wealth across the board. The oil industries in Southeast Asia's original exporters, Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia, all had their origins under colonial rule. Following independence, oil has continued to play an important role in the export sectors of all three countries and to varying degrees in their politics. The chapter discusses three oil-shaped dynamics: the trajectories of older exporters like Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia, broad regional trends since 1990, and the emergence of three new exporters Cambodia, Timor-Leste and Vietnam since 2000.
