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A particularly perceptive quote is below: "Oil has specific properties (it is a fluid, it tends to be moved in pipelines, it has a particular market structure, oil corporations have distinctive attributes and so on). But in this sort of analysis it is not clear what causal powers these material and other features of oil actually possess. Ross's analysis [of the "resource curse"] on its face might just as well hold for gold in South Africa. Furthermore if oil hinders democracy (as though copper might liberate parliamentary democracy?), one surely needs to appreciate the centralizing effect of oil and the state in relation to the oil-based nation-building enterprises that are unleashed in the context of a politics that pre-dates oil."