The Oil Curse and the Jamaeriah

The title of the chapter is oil consumerism and capitalism eternity. Many Libyans believed that they had not benefited from oil during the last decades of the Jamaeriah. They perceived their country as being underdeveloped compared with other resource reached states in the Arab region, particularly the Persian Gulf. After the 1969 revolution, an abundance of oil led to the rise of an authoritarian leader and rancid elite who ended up controlling the population by a system of subsidies and co-optation also called coercive distribution.