Extractive Resources, Conflicts and Migration

This chapter focuses on non-renewable resources and their relation to conflict and migration. It explores the argument that conflict is not brought by scarcity of these resources, but rather by resource abundance and the fact that they make looting possible. Access to valuable non-renewable resources, such as energy resources, can create crises of governance. Accountability decreases and rent seeking and corruption become common behaviors. ‘Lootable’ resources increase the possibilities of high political repression and income inequality, which then cause small and large-scale ‘uprooting’. Thus, tackling the issue of bad governance is key in order to solve migration flows caused by ‘lootable’ conflicts.

Sleep, bark, or bite: Do natural resources make the difference regarding peaceful or violent conflict?

Natural resources can create state-based and other conflicts through several causal mechanisms. Debate, however, has remained silent on forms of conflict, especially why violent or peaceful collective action occurs. Combining the literatures on nonviolent- and armed conflict with work on the resource–conflict link, we developed a number of hypotheses on how resources affect the conditions under which collective actors such as ethnic groups remain dormant, voice grievances peacefully or engage in violent rebellion. A grid-cell analysis of ethnic groups in Africa largely confirmed our expectation on the effect of resources. Resource deposits increased the risk that violent conflict would occur; the effect was reversed and ethnic groups become dormant when groups living in resource regions were politically included. We also found some evidence that lootable resources fuel violent but not peaceful conflict. However, the non-resource context best explained the difference between violent and nonviolent conflict. Democracy, political exclusion and geography such as distance from capital and transborder ethnic kin were key in explaining why violent and not peaceful protest emerged. Future research should dig deeper into mechanisms of how resources affect forms of conflict and should further study non-resource conditions that can have functionally equivalent effects.

Rebel funding and child soldiers: Exploring the relationship between natural resources and forcible recruitment

Why do some rebel groups forcibly recruit children while others largely refrain from using this strategy? We argue that it depends, in part, on their ability to profit from natural resources. Rebel groups that earn funding from natural resources have less incentive to restrain abusive behavior such as the forced recruitment of children and more incentive to tolerate and even promote this recruitment strategy. To test our expectations, we collected new data on the level of forcible recruitment of children by rebel groups. This is distinct from the broader use of child soldiers, a significant portion of whom volunteer to join armed groups. We combined the information on forced recruitment with a recent data set on rebel groups’ exploitation of natural resources. Our analyses show that rebel groups that profit from natural resources are significantly more likely to forcibly recruit children than groups that do not exploit natural resources. Looking at specific characteristics, rebels that extract lootable resources are more likely to engage in the forced recruitment of children than groups that profit only from non-lootable resources or from no natural resources at all. The findings have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between rebels’ revenue streams and their engagement in human rights violations.

Maps of mayhem

Disaggregated studies of civil violence attempt to predict where violence is most likely to break out within states, but have been limited by a near-exclusive focus on political, economic, and accessibility-based factors in explaining local patterns of violence. These factors are important, but the calculus of military conflict does not focus solely on lootable resources or population distributions. Both states and insurgents try to exert control over geographic territory in order to increase their resource base and political legitimacy. Historic evidence suggests that groups use violence to contest control over strategically important locations that allow them to effectively attack and defend territory. I use GIS and social network analysis to operationalize strategic location based on the network of roads and population settlements that make up a country. I find that during conflicts, locations with high degree and betweenness centrality in the road network – in other words, locations that control access to other areas within the state – are significantly more likely to be fought over, even after controlling for a wide range of variables suggested by previous literature and testing for reporting bias. These findings expand on the previous body of literature studying disaggregated violence and show that the calculus of violence during civil conflict encompasses strategic considerations as well as economic, political, or topographic factors.

Natural resources and the dynamics of civil war duration and outcome

How do natural resources influence the duration of civil wars? Previous studies argue that resource wealth increases rebels’ motivation for private gain (motivation mechanism) and provides rebel leaders with sufficient funding opportunities to continue their insurrectionary activities (feasibility mechanism), thereby increasing the likelihood of prolonged conflict. While these two mechanisms are very important arguments for explaining the role of natural resources in the continuation of civil wars, there are not enough existing studies that analyze these two mechanisms separately. To examine the two mechanisms, this article introduces three important factors to the analysis: the lootability of natural resources, types of conflict termination, and power balance between government and rebels. Empirically, this article examines the effect of natural resources on conflict duration for the period of 1946–2003, using a competing risk modeling approach. Findings from the quantitative analysis reveal that lootable resources (onshore oil production) are negatively related to the duration of a civil war that ends in rebel victory and positively related to the duration of a civil war that ends in peace agreement when rebels have enough military capability. On the other hand, empirical analysis shows that non-lootable resources (offshore oil production) tend to reduce the duration of a civil war that ends in government victory.

Maritime Piracy and Foreign Policy

With piracy in the Greater Gulf of Aden seemingly eradicated, some analysts suggest that attacks against shipping no longer remains a salient global security concern. Indeed, the number of attacks attributable to Somali pirates dropped dramatically from 2011 to 2015, and small private maritime security firms have begun to go out of business as demand for armed guards on ships has diminished. But recent increases off the coast of Nigeria and around the Straits of Malacca confirm that the threat has not been entirely eliminated. In fact, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines recently agreed to conduct coordinated naval patrols to stem the rise in attacks in and around their waters and some Indonesian elites warn that the problem will only grow worse (Jensen & Kapoor, 2016). While the international community mounted a significant counter-piracy response to attacks in the Greater Gulf of Aden beginning in 2009 and shipping companies started to implement protective measures to safeguard their transports, piracy endures because the conditions driving it persist. Successful attacks against ships produce sizable payoffs and the risk of capture remains low in most places. Further, the continued presence of fragile governments, corrupt elites, joblessness, and illegal foreign fishing ensure that pirates will continue to pose a threat to marine traffic. Current research efforts focus on the microlevel drivers of pirate attacks. While structural (country-level) indicators of poverty and institutional fragility correlate with piracy, local conditions on land proximate to anchorages and shipping lanes where incidents occur will likely provide additional leverage in explaining where pirates locate and why piracy endures. Existing research also suggests piracy may be connected to armed insurgency. As rebels seek resources to help fund their anti-state or separatist campaigns, piracy, like gemstones, oil, and narcotics, may serve as a means to pay fighters and purchase weapons. Spatially and temporally disaggregated analyses as well as the synthesis of research on civil war and maritime piracy will open up new lines of inquiry into the relationship between lootable resources and armed conflict.

Organizing Insurgency: Networks, Resources, and Rebellion in South Asia

A central question in civil war research is how state sponsorship, overseas funding, involvement in illicit economics, and access to lootable resources affect the behavior and organization of insurgent groups. Existing research has not arrived at any consensus, as resource wealth is portrayed as a cause of both undisciplined predation and military resilience. A social-institutional theory explains why similar resource wealth can be associated with such different outcomes. The theory argues that the social networks on which insurgent groups are built create different types of organizations with differing abilities to control resource flows. There is no single effect of resource wealth: instead, social and organizational context determines how these groups use available resources. A detailed comparative study of armed groups in the insurgency in Kashmir supports this argument. A number of indigenous Kashmiri insurgent organizations received substantial funding, training, and support from Pakistan from 1988 to 2003, but they varied in their discipline and internal control. Preexisting networks determined how armed organizations were built and how material resources were used. Evidence from other South Asian wars shows that this is a broader pattern. Scholars of civil conflict should therefore explore the social and organizational processes of war in their research.