Pre­dict­ing Nat­ural Re­source Vi­o­lence

Jun 4, 2020 | Jessica Anderson
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Be­tween 1949 and 2009, at least 40 per­cent of in­trastate con­flicts were linked to nat­ural re­sources, ac­cord­ing to es­ti­mates in a UN re­port. A grow­ing body of re­search ex­plores these links to try to ex­plain vari­a­tion across fac­tors like time, ge­og­ra­phy, and re­source type. One puz­zle in­volves the ques­tion of why armed groups some­times fight one an­other di­rectly in re­source-rich ar­eas for ter­ri­to­r­ial con­trol, yet at other times, avoid fight­ing in these ar­eas com­pletely — even reach­ing co­op­er­a­tive arrange­ments to ex­tract re­source rev­enues.

Kaisa Hinkkainen and Joakim Kreutz in­ves­ti­gate a the­o­ret­i­cal frame­work that could help ex­plain why pat­terns of fight­ing around nat­ural re­sources vary over time. They sug­gest that the vari­a­tion re­flects strate­gic cal­cu­la­tions about what is most im­por­tant to an armed group at dif­fer­ent points in a vi­o­lent con­flict. When armed groups ex­pect that vi­o­lent con­flict will con­tinue in­def­i­nitely, one of their top strate­gic pri­or­i­ties is to main­tain ca­pac­ity to carry on the war by en­sur­ing re­li­able ac­cess to rev­enue. When this rev­enue comes from nat­ural re­sources, groups do not nec­es­sar­ily need ter­ri­to­r­ial con­trol to ex­tract rev­enue and may not want to dis­rupt their rev­enue streams by fight­ing di­rectly around the re­sources.