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

资源诅咒的文献认为，丰富的自然资源抑制了一个国家的经济增长，并刺激了国内战争的风险。然而，并非所有资源丰富的国家都经历过暴力冲突。要理解和平与社会不稳定之间的这种差异，就需要系统地分析各国如何管制对这些丰富资源的获取，并试图解决因这些资源而引发的起义和冲突。这是“治理资源-暴力关系”（GRVN）研究项目的基本前提；它提出了一个命题，即这种令人困惑的结果多样性可以相当准确地追溯到商品和资源的微观治理。为此目的，全球自然资源网络项目将侧重于两个相互关联的主题，即资源获取治理和自然资源管理的设计。虽然我们将测试所有权结构类型（私人与公共）是否与一个国家或地区的潜在冲突有关，但我们将以更详细的方式进一步区分资源管理设计的具体特征（例如，资源勘探的具体合同条款，资源开采部门内的竞争结构，将当地人口纳入管理决策等）。由于资源冲突的综合分析和避免需要一个系统的数据库，我们的项目将建立全球资源治理数据集。此外，它还将探讨刚果民主共和国在铜、钴或钽等金属的治理方面的国家层面差异。依靠形式理论、计量经济学和定性研究技术的先进工具，我们的项目旨在展示哪种形式的资源冲突管理可以让国家逃避不公正的安排和政治暴力。

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.