ABSTRACT
This chapter examines resource nationalism, understood as the discursive forms and material practices that bind imaginaries of the nation to nature and natural resources. Resource nationalism is a potent idiom through which the imagined community of the nation is constructed. Actors from across the political spectrum employ resource nationalist discourses, usually with the same fundamental sentiments: that residents of a given country (or region, province, etc.) should benefit from the exploitation of resources found in that locale, and that control of resources by outside actors (however defined) represents a threat to local political and territorial sovereignty. Resource nationalism, then, necessarily entails discourses of territoriality, sovereignty, state authority, citizenship, and belonging. Conservative, mainstream accounts of resource nationalism tend to focus almost exclusively on economic measures, such as protectionist trade policies, and treat the central state as the sole locus of resource nationalism. By contrast, a critical-geographical approach considers resource nationalism as existing along two axes: political economy and cultural politics. While resource governance is universal, resource nationalism is not. The contingent nature of resource nationalist politics is therefore considered, in an effort to understand where, when, and why the moral geographies and spatial imaginaries of resource nationalism emerge as they do.
