Governing the Resource-Conflict Nexus: Commodity Management and Internal Violence

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The resource curse literature has argued that an abundance of natural resources depresses a country´s economic growth and spurs the risk of the intrastate war. Yet, not all resource-rich countries experience violent conflict. Understanding such variation between peace and social instability requires a systematic analysis of how states regulate access to these abundant resources and try to solve uprisings and conflicts over them. This is the basic premise of the research project “Governing the Resource-Violence Nexus” (GRVN); it advances the proposition that this puzzling diversity of outcomes can be traced with considerable accuracy to the micro-level governance of commodities and resources. For this purpose, the GRVN project will focus on two interrelated topics, namely resource access governance and the design of natural resource management. While we will test whether the type of ownership structure (private versus public) is associated with the conflict potential of a country or region, we further differentiate between specific characteristics of resource management designs (e.g., specific contractual terms of resource exploration, competition structure within the resource extracting sector, inclusion of the local population in managerial decisions, among others) in a more detailed manner. As the comprehensive analysis of resource conflicts and their avoidance requires a systematic database, our project will build global datasets on resource governance. Also, it will explore country-level differences in the governance of metals such as copper, cobalt or tantalum in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Relying on a mixture of advanced tools in formal theory, econometrics and qualitative research techniques, our project intends to show which form of resource conflict management allows states to evade unjust arrangements and political violence.