The politics of natural resource use: A comparative study of forest exploitation in Indonesia and Cambodia

This paper address two questions. First, it examines the question of why authoritarian rulers rely on natural resources to stay in power. Second, it address the mechanism of how authoritarian rulers extract rents from natural resources and distribute the rents to construct patronage systems to cement political pacts and gain popular legitimacy. In this paper I argue that the characteristics of the state determine the strategy employed by authoritarian rulers to use natural resources for political purposes by distributing monopolies to business elites and receiving financial donations in return. This paper examines the cases of forest exploitation in Indonesia and Cambodia to explain how authoritarian rulers exploit natural resources to construct a patronage system and perpetuate their power.