There had been a period of time going back up to around five years ago, when international media reporting on Guyana and Suriname, including the Corentyne River dispute, was sprinkled with images of endemic poverty, underdevelopment and chronic instability. Reportage on the two countries offered a microcosm of a wider group of so-called ‘Banana Republics,’ unviable portions of ‘real estate’ in South America that counted among the ‘also rans’ among states in the international community. Guyana and Suriname began to experience their earliest taste of some measure of positive international exposure just over a decade when the two countries began to attract the more serious attention of the international media as likely emerging regional players in a hemispheric energy sector that had already had its own fair share of ‘big names.’