The recent resource curse literature suggests that oil promotes authoritarian regime stability. Yet the causal linkages underpinning the political resource curse remain less well understood. Using a case study of Azerbaijan, this article first examines how oil revenues benefited the existing...

This article looks at the impact of low oil prices and the resulting shortfall in oil rents on the Azerbaijani government's social-assistance policies and related expenditures and discusses its implications for social cohesion in the long run. It argues that the deployment of strategic fiscal...