Is Oil a Blessing or a Curse for the Middle East Essay

Is Oil a Blessing or a Curse for the Middle East - Essay Example The reality that many nations face with regards to being nearly entirely dependent upon their natural resources as the basic foundation of their economies is referred to as both â€Å"renterism† and the â€Å"Dutch disease†. The first term, renterism has to do with the fact that these nations ultimately rent out the access to their resources in exchange for direct payments for such an agreement. Similarly, the term Dutch disease is with regards to the Dutch nation’s dependence upon the revenues from the natural gas fields in the 1960’s and 1970’s. For purposes of this brief analysis, the issue of the resource curse will be viewed within the prism of seeking to understand it as it is exhibited within the nations of Saudi Arabia and Iran. These two nations have been selected due to the fact that they are both regional powers that have defined their economies around the oil wealth that they possess; albeit through slightly different means. Moreover, ev en though a similar economic stance has been taken with regards to a centrally planned economy in both nations, the overall levels of extreme wealth and pervasive poverty, social divisions, non-democratic forms of governance, problems with radical forms of Islam, and a host of other byproducts of the uneven economic development that oil wealth dependence portends crates a great deal of similarity between these two nations. History and Background: Prior to the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia and Iran, both of these regions were seeking to integrate at a rather rapid rate with the rest of the world by developing their economies and seeking to industrialize. Although it is not fair to say that these nations were particularly backwards as compared to their neighbors, they exhibited a relatively low level of growth and change as compared to Western Europe and parts of Asia at that time. It can be noted that within both Iran and Saudi Arabia, there existed and much more decentralized und erstanding of governance and power. Although it is not the purpose of this analysis to go into a great deal of defining the means by which resource wealth encourages further levels of despotism, it should be understood that once a high level of valuable resources are located within a given region, it necessarily encourages individuals within government to more fully and completely exert their control over these resources as a means of promoting sovereignty, stability, and deriving profitability; both for themselves and for the nation in general. A byproduct of this increased level of centralization and control is necessarily the loss of specific civil liberties and freedoms. Aside from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and redefining the post-colonial borders, the discovery of oil and natural gas resources has had the most profound impact upon the course of development, politics, war, and even radical forms of Islam. With respect to the actual discovery of oil within the Middle Eas t, Iran was the first in 1908 (Neilberg, 2012) followed by Saudi Arabia in 1923 (Jones, 2012). Oil came to be an even more coveted resource to which all developed nations sought to procure. Accordingly, it was not abnormal to merely take over another country as a means of extracting its mineral wealth and diverting it back to the homeland. Such a model was utilized for nearly 25 years as the British extracted oil wealth from Saudi Arabia and Iran (Mainuddin, 2007). The ways in which key actors within

Museum Project Movie Review Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Museum Project - Movie Review Example The personages in the art piece are elongated, and the artist has emphasized linear decoration as well as remote facial expressions. The artist also uses decoration technique that was common in the 14th century known as punched decoration. This is evidence in the painting where one can see flattened pieces of metalwork with designs embedded in the piece. To the viewers’ one could say that this painting is unusual and unique. The audience can see that the child is wearing a coral necklace depicting that it will protect him from evil while also he is holding a goldfinch in his hand symbolizing his future sacrifice. The donor Knight on the left can be said to possess an affluent, aristocratic background because of the Cross of Malta that he wears on his sleeve (Soares 1). The other man on the right dressed in red can be said to be a high-ranking church official because of the style and colour of his clothing. These two instances of portraiture represent the increasing grandness of the individual in the Renaissance era. The child and Madonna are painted in tempera on wood, and the viewer can see the different armaments of the painting’s dimensions. The aspect of the painting is 48.75 by 21 inches and was painted in Late Medieval. According to Soares, the inscriptions and markings of the painting are Cecchus Petri de Pisis Mepisit AD MCCCLXXXVI, which are painted along the bottom of the painting frame (1). The use of punched decoration by Pietro is one of the painting’s characteristic that was used in the Early Italian Renaissance painting. This technical innovation used is depicted by the use of flattened pieces of metalwork with designs embedded in the art piece (Soares 1). The Renaissance paintings had engaged frames, which were made of wooden strips affiliated to the outside edge of the panel, which is the case in Madonna and Child painting. This is also evident in the painting Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata