Introduction
For the convenience of several enquiring readers, I begin today’s column with a brief recap. As readers should recall, thus far in this new field of analysis that I have embarked upon, I have been addressing the second of three concepts that I posited as being central to the growing portrayal of Guyana by academics and other analysts as “the newest petrostate in the Americas”.
Having considered extractivism [ the first concept] and its standard definition, which I have adopted; I had started addressing last week the second concept; that is a petrostate. This was portrayed there as a function of two basic features. Firstly, a nation empirically demonstrated economic dependence on oil and gas production and their exportation. And secondly, the consequential emergence from this dependency of related and/ or associated distinctive social, cultural, political and institutional features, practices and systems.