Government capacity without public statehood: Resource authoritarianism in Equatorial Guinea, 1959–early 2026

This article explains Equatorial Guinea’s movement from late colonial institutional shallowness to resource authoritarianism, understood as rents enlarging executive fiscal, infrastructural and diplomatic capacity while limiting accountability. It advances a pre-rent state fragility thesis: oil did not create the state-formation problem, but reorganized weaknesses produced by Spanish colonial underdevelopment, compressed decolonization and the Macías-era collapse. Drawing on historical institutional analysis and process tracing of colonial legislation, United Nations records, Equatoguinean historiography, human rights reports and International Monetary Fund and World Bank assessments, the article distinguishes government capacity from public statehood and links the case to Asia–Africa debates on resource authoritarianism.