There is a tooth. That is all that remains of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of an independent Congo, after Belgian and Congolese soldiers dissolved his body in acid in January 1961. Lys Kulamadayil begins her book with this fact, and she is right to do so. The tooth is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the book’s argument. Lumumba, a man who had international law on his side and was still destroyed, illustrates the gap between what international law promises and what it delivers when mineral wealth is at stake.

Kulamadayil’s subject is the “pathology of plenty”, her term for the cluster of afflictions – corruption, authoritarianism, ecological destruction, armed conflict, and immiserating inequality – that disproportionately haunt postcolonial states rich in oil, copper, cobalt, and other mineral resources. Scholars of political economy and development have long diagnosed this paradox. What distinguishes this book is the question it adds: what is international law’s relationship with the resource curse? Kulamadayil’s answer, built patiently across 135 pages, is that international law is far more implicated in the problem than it acknowledges, and far less capable of solving it than it claims.

The book’s animating insight is that international law does not stand outside the pathology of plenty as a potential cure. It is woven into its fabric. The same principles that were meant to liberate postcolonial peoples – sovereignty over natural resources, economic self-determination, the right to development – were shaped, in their very drafting and application, by distributional choices that favoured former colonial powers and transnational capital. International law’s promise of universality, Kulamadayil argues, has consistently stood “diagonally opposed” to its actual role. This is not a counsel of despair. It is a call to see the law clearly.

Kulamadayil is at her most compelling when she excavates the founding moments of this relationship. She shows how the legal architecture of decolonisation – “freedom” granted on terms that locked new states into inherited property regimes and externally dictated fiscal frameworks – set the conditions for the resource curse before the ink on independence treaties had dried. Iran’s nationalisation of its oil industry and Algeria’s multilateral diplomacy through OPEC and UNCTAD stand out in her account not as footnotes to Third World idealism but rather as the moments that came closest to genuinely democratising mineral resource governance. That they were ultimately contained, by the International Court of Justice in Iran’s case, and by the collapse of the New International Economic Order in Algeria’s, is itself evidence of her thesis.

Equally unsettling is her treatment of the present. The massive theft of public mineral revenues, which she names “grand theft” to distinguish it from ordinary corruption, is shown to be not a failure of law but rather a product of it. The anti-money laundering regimes of New York, Geneva, and Singapore are sophisticated enough to recognise what is happening but are structurally incentivised to look away. Similarly, in resource wars, from the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories to the US invasion of Iraq, international humanitarian law reliably protects foreign concessionary rights over the communal and sovereign rights of the people actually living on the land.

The book does not offer a manifesto or a reform agenda. It offers something rarer and more useful: a clear-eyed account of how international law arrived at this moment, holding a tooth and calling it justice.