Natural Resources: A Catalyst for Conflict and Peace? (Chapter in "Peacebuilding and Natural Resource Governance after Armed Conflict")
Publisher: Palgrave
Author(s): Michael D. Beevers
Date: 2019
Topics: Conflict Causes, Extractive Resources, Governance
Countries: Liberia, Sierra Leone
In this chapter, Beevers examines the rise of environmental security in the larger international security discourse and highlights how the perceptions of security threats changed in the 1990s, giving rise to a focus on natural resources and armed conflict. Beevers reviews the scholarship linking natural resources to armed conflict including the idea that civil conflicts in the post-Cold War era were triggered by the looting of the so-called conflict resources or the consequence of the “resource curse.” The chapter reviews how these interpretations influenced how peacebuilders came to understand the ways in which natural resources can help build peace and shaped interventions to reform resource governance after armed conflicts end.