The Dictionary of Human Geography

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concerns over supplies of minerals andoil

were part of its military planning. A large lit-

erature has documented the relationship

between fights to control resources andgeo-

politics, although it has also pointed out that

simple conflicts over resources are less fre-

quently a direct cause of warfare than simplis-

tic Malthusian assumptions of scarcity leading

to conflict usually suggest (Le Billon, 2004: cf.

malthusian model). The recent growth of the

global economy and the ability to substitute

and invent new materials in industrial pro-

cesses has substantially reduced the concern

with potentialwarsover many resources on

the large scale. However oil may yet turn out

to be the ‘resource war’ exception that proves

this rule.

Research in the 1990s gradually connected

resources with contemporary violence in

manystatesin the globalsouth. It became

clear that in many places in the developing

world where there were large supplies of

natural resources, there was also a prevalence

of violence, corruption and in some cases

outright warfare (Le Billon, 2005). Research

has now documented how this ‘resource curse’

distorts development by making the political

elites who control the resource rents hugely

wealthy, and in the process frequently stifles

national economic innovation. It also makes

clear that there are large incentives to fight to

control therentfromresourceextraction,

which, in the absence of a strong state and

available economic alternatives, frequently

fuels civil wars (Bannon and Collier, 2003).

At the largest scale, these matters are now of

concern in the discussion of global oil supplies

and the sometimes severely distorted political

structures of oil-exporting states, in particular

in themiddle east. This now directly connects

resource curse arguments with the traditional

geopolitical themes of ensuring supplies for

distant markets. In particular after the Iranian

revolution, and during the subsequent war

between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, American

military power became increasingly involved in

the Gulf to control the flow of oil. This has

grown dramatically as a consequence of inva-

sion of Iraq in 2003, where the US policy in

the region is now directly tied to enforcing the

flow of oil, with all the potential this has for

further violent conflict (Klare, 2004). sd

Suggested reading

Klare (2004); Le Billon (2005).

restructuring Change(s) in and/or between

the constituent parts of a circuit ofsocial

reproduction, emanating from the dynamics

of the circuit itself or from contradictions and

crises within it.

Such changes may represent a response to

changed conditions induced, for example, by

time–space compression, technical change,

or conflicts between labour andcapitalin

the workplace, or transmitted through the

competitive conditions endemic tocapital-

ism. The inherently competitive social rela-

tions of capitalism generate a permanent

tendency to transformation or restructuring,

but the term has come to be more widely used

since the end of the long boom in the late

1960s and early 1970s (seecrisis;modern-

ity). For some, it is a process closely associ-

ated with the transition from onekondratieff

cycleto another or from oneregime of accu-

mulationto another or with the speed of the

circulation of capital and the increasingglob-

alizationof the world economic geography.

As such, restructuring may be thought to be

synonymous with development (Streeten,

1987), or at least with certain forms of devel-

opment. But it goes beyond that. Thus

Laurence Harris (1988, p. 10) points out that

although there is ‘no easy, obvious way to

distinguish structural from other changes in

the abstract. .. some periods seem to see

greater and more significant shifts than

others’. He identifies four such periods in the

UK since the early nineteenth century: the

1830s and 1840s; the 1880s and 1890s; the

1930s and 1940s; and the 1970s and 1980s.

But what marks these out as periods of

restructuring? Apart from certain specific and

system-wide components of changes (e.g.

those identified by Harris, 1988, pp. 11–14),

restructuring involves not just quantitative

change but pronounced qualitative transform-

ations of the ways in whichconsumption,

production and exchange take place and

relate to each other. Furthermore, as a set of

essentially qualitative changes operating on

the circuit of social reproduction, restructur-

ing necessarily involves transformations of the

conditions in which such circuits create and

find their conditions of existence.

At an extreme of structural change, such as

occurred in the transformation of the former

state socialist societies during the late 1980s

(see post-socialism), the social relations

through which the dynamic, direction and

mode of evaluation of social reproduction are

shaped are themselves transformed and the

circuit of social reproduction comes to operate

on completely different principles, often asso-

ciated with profound economic disruption and

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RESTRUCTURING