Natural resource wars in the shadow of the future: Explaining spatial dynamics of violence during civil war

Previous studies on natural resources and civil wars find that the presence of natural resources increases both civil conflict risk and duration. At the same time, belligerents often cooperate over resource extraction, suggesting a temporal variation in the contest over this subnational space. This study argues that parties fight over natural resources primarily when they expect that the conflict is about to end, as the importance of controlling them increases in the post-conflict setting. In contrast, belligerents that anticipate a long war have incentives to avoid fighting near natural resources since excessive violence will hurt the extraction, trade, and subsequent taxation that provide conflict actors with income from the resource. We test our argument using yearly and monthly grid-cell-level data on African civil conflicts for the period 1989–2008 and find support for our expected spatial variation. Using whether negotiations are underway as an indicator about warring parties’ expectations on conflict duration, we find that areas with natural resources in general experience less intense fighting than other areas, but during negotiations these very areas witness most of the violence. We further find that the spatial shift in violence occurs immediately when negotiations are opened. A series of difference-in-difference estimations show a visible shift of violence towards areas rich in natural resources in the first three months after parties have initiated talks. Our findings are relevant for scholarship on understanding and predicting the trajectories of micro-level civil conflict violence, and for policymakers seeking to prevent peace processes being derailed

Global energy governance : a review and research agenda

Over the past few years, global energy governance (GEG) has emerged as a major new field of enquiry in international studies. Scholars engaged in this field seek to understand how the energy sector is governed at the global level, by whom and with what consequences. By focusing on governance, they broaden and enrich the geopolitical and hard-nosed security perspectives that have long been, and still are, the dominant perspectives through which energy is analysed. Though still a nascent field, the literature on GEG is thriving and continues to attract the attention of a growing number of researchers. This article reviews the GEG literature as it has developed over the past 10 years. Our aim is to highlight both the progress and limitations of the field, and to identify some opportunities for future research. The article proceeds as follows. First, it traces the origins of the GEG literature (section “Origins and roots of GEG research”). The subsequent sections deal with the two topics that have received the most attention in the GEG literature: Why does energy need global governance (section “The goals and rationale of global energy governance”)? And, who governs energy (section “Mapping the global energy architecture”)? We then address a third question that has received far less attention: How well or poor is energy governed (section “Evaluating global energy governance”)? In our conclusions (section “Conclusions and outlook”), we reflect on the current state of GEG, review recent trends and innovations, and identify some questions that warrant future consideration by scholars. This article is published as part of a thematic collection on global governance

Resource Warfare, Pacification and the Spectacle of ‘Green’ Development: Logics of Violence in Engineering Extraction in Southern Madagascar

Bringing political ecology's concern with the critical politics of nature and resource violence into dialogue with key debates in political geography, critical security studies and research on the geographies and phenomenology of violence and warfare, this paper explores strategies ‘from above’ in relation to the establishment and operation of the Rio Tinto QIT-Madagascar Minerals (QMM) ilmenite mine in southeast Madagascar. While QMM claims to be a responsible ‘green’ self-regulator and sustainable development actor, it has triggered serious social, environmental and legal conflicts since its inception, including allegations of a ‘double land grab’ to accommodate mining activities and compensatory biodiversity offsetting. We argue that ‘pacification’, theorised as a productive form of violence that works through the re-ordering of socio-nature, underwrites the forms of ‘security’, ‘stability’ and even ‘sustainability’ that facilitate multiple and overlapping strategies of value extraction in the territorial and extra-territorial spaces occupied by the QMM mine partnership. By situating these dynamics historically, we identify ways in which pacification draws upon sedimented and evolving logics of racialised violence to facilitate operations and silence opposition

Tipos de recursos naturales e iniciativas para la finalización de conflictos.

There is mounting evidence that natural resources can influence the likelihood, course and outcome of armed conflicts. Much of these relationships depend on the institutional setting in which the conflict and resource exploitation occurs, and the specific characteristics of resources involved. This paper examines the relevance of two broad resource characteristics—lootability and legality—for conflict termination initiatives. Observing revenue sharing, economic sanction and military interventions in a total of 26 conflicts between 1989 and 2006, the paper suggests that resource characteristics can affect the effectiveness of resource-related conflict termination instruments