Natural Resources, Conflict, and Conflict Resolution

The interpretation of the resource-conflict link that has become most publicized—the rebel greed hypothesis—depends on just one of many plausible mechanisms that could underlie a relationship between resource dependence and violence. The author catalogues a large range of rival possible mechanisms, highlights a set of techniques that may be used to identify these mechanisms, and begins to employ these techniques to distinguish between rival accounts of the resource-conflict linkages. The author uses finer natural resource data than has been used in the past, gathering and presenting new data on oil and diamonds production and on oil stocks. The author finds evidence that (1) conflict onset is more responsive…