Natural Resource Wars in the Shadow of the Future
Publisher: Journal of Peace Research
Author(s): Kaisa Hinkkainen and Joakim Kreutz
Date: 2018
Topics: Cooperation, Dispute Resolution/Mediation, Extractive Resources, Governance, Peace Agreements
Previous studies on natural resources and civil wars find that the presence of natural resources increases both civil conflict risk and duration. At the same time, belligerents often co-operate over resource extraction, suggesting a temporal variation in the contest over this sub-national space. This study argues that parties’ fight over natural resources primarily when they expect that the conflict is about to end. In contrast, belligerents that anticipate a long war will not fight in natural resource rich areas since that will negatively influence extraction and thus provide them with less income. We test our argument using yearly and monthly grid-cell level data on African civil conflicts from 1989-2008, and find support for the expected spatial variation- in the location where battlefield events take place- depending on whether parties are involved in negotiations or not.