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Transnational trade rules endow authoritarians and armed groups with unaccountable power in states rich with natural resources. This structural flaw in international trade generates the ‘resource curse’ phenomena that have driven many of the world's most serious crises since the 1970s. Attempts to curtail this unaccountable power from outside resource-rich states have not been successful, and crises caused by this structural flaw continue to plague the global community. The shipping sector provides a promising location for reforms to fight the resource curse, as it is a sector where extensive, unified and enforceable regulations have long been established.

The West has intervened violently in oil-rich states for decades. Western oil companies have been shamelessly exploitative. Because of climate change, we should be getting off fossil fuels as fast as we can. Those things we know. But there is a deeper story to oil in world affairs, that hasn't yet been told. Every day we are forced to send our money to some of the most ruthless men in the world. And by empowering those men, we endanger ourselves.

Article 1 of both of the major human rights covenants declares that the people of each country “shall freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources.” This chapter considers what conditions would have to hold for the people of a country to exercise this right—and why public accountability over natural resources is the only realistic solution to the “resource curse,” which makes resource-rich countries more prone to authoritarianism, civil conflict, and large-scale corruption. It also discusses why cosmopolitans, who have often been highly critical of prerogatives of state sovereignty, have good reason to endorse popular sovereignty over natural resources. Those who hope for more cosmopolitan institutions should see strengthening popular resource sovereignty as the most responsible path to achieving their own goals.

A global market exists only because all states have chosen to converge on rules that coordinate property rights. For property rights over natural resources and products made from them, states converge on the rule of effectiveness, or might makes right. Because of effectiveness, consumers making everyday purchases like electronics, cosmetics and gasoline cannot help but support foreign authoritarians and militias. Effectiveness in the international system puts consumers into business with highly coercive actors abroad. States’ choice of effectiveness also leads to their enforcing the injustices of foreign actors within their own borders, with their own justice systems.

Because of a major flaw in the system of international trade, consumers buy stolen goods every day. Consumers may buy stolen goods when they buy gasoline and magazines, clothing and cosmetics, cell phones and laptops, perfume and jewelry. The raw materials used to make many of these goods have been taken—sometimes by stealth, sometimes by force—from some of the poorest people in the world. These goods flow through the system of global commerce under cover of a rule that is little more than a cloak for larceny. The plainest criticism of global commerce today is not that it violates some abstract distributive standard, but that it violates property rights. The international commercial system breaks the first rule of capitalism in transporting stolen goods, and does so on an enormous scale. The priority in reforming global commerce is not to replace “free trade” with “fair trade.” The priority is to create trade where now there is theft. Ending the global traffic in stolen goods will require no new theories or novel international agencies. The principles of lawful trade are well understood, and global commerce has already created powerful institutions to enforce property rights. What is required is to use these institutions to bring all international resource sales into the system of enforced market rules. This article sets out a framework for doing this.

Contemporary movements for the reform of global institutions advocate greater\ud transparency, greater democracy, and greater accountability. Of these three, accountability is the\ud master value. Transparency is valuable as means to accountability: more transparent institutions\ud reveal whether officials have performed their duties. Democracy is valuable as a mechanism of\ud accountability: elections enable the people peacefully to remove officials who have not done\ud what it is their responsibility to do. “Accountability,” it has been said, “is the central issue of our\ud time.”\ud \ud \ud The focus of this paper is accountability in international development aid: that range of\ud efforts sponsored by the world’s rich aimed at permanently bettering the conditions of the\ud world’s poor. We begin by surveying some of the difficulties in international development work\ud that have raised concerns that development agencies are not accountable enough for producing\ud positive results in alleviating poverty. We then examine the concept of accountability, and\ud survey the general state of accountability in development agencies. A high-altitude map of the\ud main proposals for greater accountability in international development follows, and the paper\ud concludes by exploring one specific proposal for increasing accountability in development aid.