It is a common adage in development circles that “oil corrupts.” The extraction of petroleum breeds billions of dollars each year in graft, bribery, and myriad other private rewards. Corruption deprives citizens in oil-rich states of revenues that could have benefited economic growth and social welfare. Scholars of the natural resource curse argue that such corruption is one mechanism through which oil enables kleptocracy, weakens political competition, and fosters repression and the deprivation of human rights. But why does oil corrupt? How exactly does corruption manifest itself in the sector? Where in the many layers of government and within the oil supply chain is corruption most likely to thrive? And what tools and policies are effective in tackling corruption?

In Crude Intentions: How Oil Corruption Contaminates the World, Alexandra Gillies carefully illustrates how corruption works in practice and the strategies used by governments and firms to perpetuate power and profits via malfeasance. Through a deeply researched and diverse set of comparative case studies, Gillies shows how oil wealth is captured, in one form or another, by companies and political leaders through a bevy of intermediaries and the key enabling role of the international financial system.

The book’s cases span the kleptocratic regimes of Angola, Azerbaijan, Nigeria, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, many of which will be familiar to scholars of corruption. But the book also shines new light on the democracies of Brazil, Malaysia, and the United States, where Gillies analyzes the powerful role of oil-facilitated corruption in reelection campaigns and the revolving door between bureaucracy and industry. In constructing these case studies, she draws from a rich variety of qualitative data, including diplomatic cables, prosecutorial documents, and investigative reporting on individual cases of corruption, as well as quantitative evidence assembled from individual company reports and government disclosures. The latter are an essential public good that Gillies and her colleagues at the Natural Resource Governance Institute have generously made available.

One of the central claims of Crude Intentions is that leaders capture oil revenues via corrupt means to facilitate their stay in power. Although scholars of authoritarian and democratic politics often assume this relationship as given, Gillies shows exactly how leaders survive by engaging in malfeasance. Consider the case of Azerbaijan, examined in detail in chapter 4, where President Ilham Aliyev and his clan dole out oil revenues to loyalists who are directed to engage in a gamut of regime-strengthening activities. These range from bolstering the regime’s international reputation through lavish events like Eurovision 2012 and the 2015 European Games, to denying building permits to and facilitating the arrest of reporters unfavorable to Aliyev, and then to engaging in outright repression of members of the opposition. Such activities were orchestrated by elites whose loyalty was purchased by funneling oil money via overpriced and noncompetitive contracts to the construction, manufacturing, retail, tourism, and trade sectors. Of course, this is hardly news to students of corruption; prior literature has pointed to many of these mechanisms as underpinning corruption’s pernicious effects on governance. But rarely have scholars been able to show with such precision how corruption actually works in practice to ensure leader and regime survival.

Like any groundbreaking book, Crude Intentions also raises important questions for the study of corruption that are not addressed in the text. One such topic is the use of national oil companies (NOCs) to advance political agendas. The book draws on cases of Russia’s Rosneft, Angola’s Sonangol, Brazil’s Petrobras, and Nigeria’s NNPC to show how leaders use NOCs to break up opposition oligarchs and build up loyalists, to hide revenues from central government actors, to facilitate vote buying and finance reelection campaigns, and sometimes just to steal money for personal use. And in nearly all cases of NOCs examined in the book, these entities were the key source of revenues needed for leaders to stay in power. Yet this question remains: What accounts for the incredible variation in political survival and “successful” execution of corruption across the oil world? Despite the near ubiquity of NOCs, why are some oil states plagued with so much more corruption than others? And why do some political figures covered in the book—such as Isabel dos Santos in Angola, Najib Razak in Malaysia, and members of the Workers’ Party in Brazil—fail to wield the many tools of corruption to stay in power, while others like Vladimir Putin, the Aliyev family, and the Saudi royal dynasty survive?

Nevertheless, Crude Intentions makes several lasting contributions to the scholarship on natural resource politics and the broader study of corruption. Drawing from the literature on clientelism, Gillies introduces the concept of brokers—or “middlemen,” as they are termed in the book—to the study of grand corruption. Scholars have grappled with how corruption is logistically facilitated when transaction costs are high, typically in the form of information asymmetries and a lack of credibility when dealing with unknown parties. For instance, firms are often unaware whom to bribe without getting caught and how much to bribe to win a contract, whereas government agents do not know whom to trust with corrupt solicitations. Hence the importance of middlemen who, while offering legitimate intermediary services, can “sometimes help their clients engage in corrupt behavior while providing a layer of insulation from the wrongdoing” (p. 38). These brokers not only include familiar faces such as disreputable consultants, service companies, and investors but also unwitting players such as law firms, real estate agents, public relations firms, and—in the case of Malaysia’s 1MDB scandal—even Hollywood production companies. Crude Intentions describes, again in stunning detail, the many ways in which middlemen enable corruption, and it opens up a rich avenue of future research for how a largely understudied class of brokers can prop up dictatorships and weaken democratic institutions.

Of particular interest to scholars of international political economy, Crude Intentions illustrates how the international system perpetuates corruption through four novel channels. Multinational firms and their brokers assist with the corrupt capture of oil wealth; banks and shell companies launder this money into the global financial system; safe havens in advanced economies help corrupt leaders spend their money with minimal public scrutiny; and publicity and marketing firms aid these leaders in buying prestige on the international stage and, in the process, effectively hide the illicit capture and expenditure of public funds. Analysis of the initial part of the chain is an especially important contribution, because scholars have struggled with how and why leaders rely on international actors to capture domestic wealth in the first place. This leads Gillies to conclude that tackling corruption requires a holistic approach that combines domestic, foreign, multilateral, and nongovernmental organizations. With much of the scholarly focus on how domestic actors abet corrupt activity, future research could explore the complicit role of the international system and the degree to which strengthening transnational oversight can stymie corruption.

Crude Intentions arrives at a time of waning influence for many oil-rich kleptocrats, driven in part by the collapse of commodities markets during the pandemic and by the existential threat of stranded oil in a decarbonized future. It is thus an exciting moment when scholars can make a lasting impact to tackle grand corruption with evidence-based policy solutions. Crude Intentions is a boon to these efforts, one that makes an invaluable contribution to the study of corruption by political scientists, development economists, and policy makers alike.