Natural Resources and Armed Conflict
Abstract
Major Goals: Research Aim Develop theory, data, and tools to understand how armed actors resource bases influence their political, strategic,and military choices during civil conflicts. Research Problem: What explains the choice of strategies of violence by civil war combatants and outside actors? Governments and rebel groups, as well as their external supporters, can pursue their wartime goals with a range of violent strategies. This project improves understanding how the resource bases of actors, including their access to natural resource wealth, involvement in criminal activities, and control of territory, influence the dynamics of violence during civil wars. Approach: Combatants need resourcessome combination of people, money, weapons, and territoryto sustain their activities. We on how variation in the source and scale of such resources influences the strategic choices and violent behavior of both rebel movements and the governments they oppose.Existing research has hypothesized relationships between the exploitation of natural resources, transnational crime, and the control of territory, and the dynamics of civil wars. But theory and data limitations make it difficult to determine if these relationships are specific to particular conflicts or regions of the world, and if these three factors have distinct effects on combatants choices and actions. For this reason, a key goal of our project is to develop new theory and test this with new data collected at the micro- and organizational levels. We use this data to test novel explanations of how the political and economic activities that sustain rebel groups influences conflict dynamics. Existing work has implicitly assumed that different sources of income for rebel organizations have similar consequences. In contrast, we theorize that the social relationships between rebels and producers shapes the course of violence during armed conflicts.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 28, 2018
- Accession Number
- AD1070281
Entities
People
- James Walsh
Organizations
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill