Book review of "The Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law"
There is a tooth. That is all that remains of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of an independent Congo, after Belgian and Congolese soldiers dissolved his body in acid in January 1961. Lys Kulamadayil begins her book with this fact, and she is right to do so. The tooth is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the book’s argument. Lumumba, a man who had international law on his side and was still destroyed, illustrates the gap between what international law promises and what it delivers when mineral wealth is at stake...