Natural resource wars in the shadow of the future: Explaining spatial dynamics of violence during civil war
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343318821174 |
| Date | 01 July 2019 |
| Author | Kaisa Hinkkainen Elliott,Joakim Kreutz |
| Published date | 01 July 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
Natural resource wars in the shadow
of the future: Explaining spatial dynamics
of violence during civil war
Kaisa Hinkkainen Elliott
School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds
Joakim Kreutz
Department of Political Science, Stockholm University
Abstract
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.
Keywords
civil war, conflict dynamics, disaggregated data, natural resources, peace processes
Introduction
The contest over territory occupies a central position in
the study of conflict processes. A state’s ability to dom-
inate its territory is seen as a prerequisite for rebellion
(Tilly, 1978; Fearon & Laitin, 2003) and influences the
severity of civilian victimization (Kalyvas, 2006; Wood,
2014), conflict duration (Buhaug, Gates & Lujala,
2009), and outcome (Greig, 2015; Butcher, 2015). The
ebbs and flows of fighting also have an immediate impact
on the international community, creating vast refugee
flows and posing a challenge for mediation attempts and
where to deploy peacekeepers (Walter, 1997; Cederman
et al., 2013; Ruggeri, Dorussen & Gizelis, 2018).
But a growing research agenda has noted that armed
conflict does not only consist of ‘battles’
1
but also dif-
ferent forms of cooperation between ostensibly opposed
Corresponding authors:
K.Hinkkainen@leeds.ac.uk; Joakim.Kreutz@statsvet.su.se
1
Kalyvas & Balcells (2010) find that ‘conventional’ warfare for
decades has been an exception rather than the rule in civil wars.
Journal of Peace Research
2019, Vol. 56(4) 499–513
ªThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343318821174
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