Natural Resources and Civil Conflict: Evidence from a New, Georeferenced Dataset
Publisher: University of Texas at Austin
Author(s): Michael Denly, Michael Findley, Joelean Hall, Andrew Stravers, and James Igoe Walsh
Date: 2019
Topics: Conflict Causes, Extractive Resources
Over the last two decades, social scientists have investigated the “resource curse”—the proposition that an an abundance of non-renewable natural resources has negative political, social, and economic consequences (for a recent and thorough review, see Ross (2015)). Much of this work has focused on links between resources and violent conflict at the country level (De Soysa, 2002; Fearon and Laitin, 2003; Collier and Hoeffler, 2004; Ross, 2004, 2012; Humphreys, 2005; Ross, 2006; Cotet and Tsui, 2013; Bazzi and Blattman, 2014; Lei and Michaels, 2014; Esteban, Morelli and Rohner, 2015; Paine, 2016; Menaldo, 2016). The role of petroleum wealth in fomenting conflict has received the most attention because it is the most valuable commodity at the global level (Ross, 2012) and because of the availability of data measuring national petroleum production and reserves at the national level. This has led some to conclude that the “resource curse” is, at the national level, really an oil curse (Ross, 2012), and studies of multiple resources have found few links between countries’ overall resource wealth and conflict (Bazzi and Blattman, 2014) or that the link between resources and conflict is likely moderated by geographic and political factors (O’Brochta, 2019).