Rethinking Resource Conflict

Resource conflict is one of several destabilizing phenomena commonly cited as defining many of the extractive economies of the global south. In the post-Cold War in which stability has become a key concern of international governance and investment it has also been an issue that has encouraged a proliferation of scholarly and policy interest. In these studies and policy discussions a large number of terms are now in use in an attempt to account for the complicated state of affairs faced by resource-rich countries in the global south: intractable conflicts, new wars, resource wars, complex political emergencies, conflict trap, resource securitization, petro-violence, blood diamonds (Collier 2005; Kaldor 1999; Kaplan 1994; Nafzinger & Auvinen 1996; Watts 2008). The consensus built between these different terminologies and theories is that an abundance of natural resources is frequently at the root of violent conflict. As a result general acceptance has been made of the existence of a paradox of plenty (Karl 1997) i.e. that the vast majority of conflict prone and war ravaged states in the global south, including those recently emerging from violent conflict, are extractive economies who are endowed with strategic natural and mineral resources yet cannot avert declining into debilitating violence and war. Equally puzzling for many scholars is the observation that while these states contribute essential inputs to the global economy, they largely remain underdeveloped and politically unstable with a sizeable majority of their citizens living on less that a dollar a day.

In this thematic paper I will reconsider the connections between natural resources and conflict. Aimed at producing a state of the art review of the research on the connections between natural resources and conflict, the paper will outline and discuss the mainstream theories and policy initiatives that have been created to address this issue. The paper underlines in line with Rosser (2006) and Wennmann (2007) that whilst there is, as the general consensus of scholarship suggests, considerable evidence that natural abundance is associated with various negative development outcomes, this evidence is by no means conclusive. Whilst recognizing the value of existing ideas and practices, in highlighting the lack of consensus, gaps and weaknesses of current theoretical and practical approaches, the paper suggests that other complementary approaches need be developed. It is argued that this demands an extension beyond what have almost exclusively been macroeconomic and national governance studies and initiatives, to approaches that qualitatively acknowledge the role of historic grievances and conflicting resource sovereignties. In stressing the social nature of economy and state, and the often inconclusive and ideological nature of existing theories and policy, the paper proposes the need for recognition of a new socio-economics of resource governance. This socio-economics picks up on the current scholarly drift towards reinstating grievance alongside greed as a factor defining natural resource conflict, and suggests the further study of contrasting resource epistemologies as another layer in such friction. Such an approach moreover moves the focus away from only looking at civil wars, to one in which sub-level and regional conflict are recognized and studied. The inclusion of a larger spectrum of conflict reveals the importance of civil society, and with it of bargaining and confrontation to secure public agreements on natural resource management and the distribution of rents. The paper‘s review of current short and mid-term policy initiatives reveals a developing corpus of relevant solutions, but also the limited impact of the international community through anti-corruption and transparency measures. Side by side analysis of the problematics of both renewable and non-renewables I suggest reveals the everyday and working relationships between resource that exist in peoples‘ minds, and the possibility of drawing from a wider range of policy experiments in the search for specific and generalized solutions to conflict. Here, I argue, it becomes obvious that research and policy needs to work harder to not only pick up on the rationale of patronage systems, but on how political elites fit into larger systems of class and ethnicity, and how resources link to organized and petty crime. Moreover, it demonstrates that as well as clear examples of success and failure, recognition must also be made of median advances of countries that are struggling with the question of resource rents and management. These are conclusions that in stressing a focus on collective identities and recognizing the challenges of cohesion, match the forthcoming World Development Report‘s expressed proposals to broaden and deepen shared interests and values.