Blood Oil: tyrants, violence and the rules that run the world [Audio]

Speaker(s): Professor Leif Wenar | Natural resources empower the world's most coercive men. Autocrats like Putin and the Saudis spend oil money on weapons and repression. ISIS and Congo's militias spend resource money on atrocities and ammunition. For decades resource-fueled authoritarians and extremists have forced endless crises on the West - and the ultimate source of their resource money is us, paying at the petrol station and the mall. In this lecture, Leif Wenar will talk about his new book, Blood Oil, which goes behind the headlines in search of the hidden global rule that puts shoppers into business with the men of blood - and discovers an ancient law that once licensed the slave trade, apartheid and genocide. The abolition of this rule marked some of humanity's greatest triumphs - yet the rule zombies on in today's multi-trillion dollar resource trade, enriching tyrants, warlords and terrorists worldwide. By our own deepest principles, over half of the world's traded oil is st