RESOURCES AND CAUSES OF CONFLICTS

Links between resources and conflicts are often popularized through the concept of ‘resource war'. Mediatized in the late 1970s as a metaphor describing renewed tensions between the USA and the Soviet Union over the control of fuel and minerals in disputed ‘peripheries', such as the Middle East and Southern Africa (Russett, 1981), the term refers to conflicts revolving over the ‘pursuit or possession of critical materials' (Klare, 2001, 25).

The term of resource wars often implies an exclusive analytical focus on resources, and asserts a direct link between conflicts and resources. Such narrow engagement overlooks the multidimensionality of conflicts and resources. First, the term ‘resource war' reduces conflicts to a single factor, and thereby risks oversimplification, as in the case of ‘ethnic war'. Second, it risks missing the political dimensions of resources by focusing on the economic (exchange) or utilitarian (use) value of resources. As such, the term may underplay the influence of resource sectors in the making of places, political systems and social movements involved in conflicts. The mere presence of resources should also not be simply understood for the current or future stakes that they represent. Rather, the influence of a resource in conflicts needs to be understood in historical terms. The significance of oil in contemporary conflicts in Iraq, for example, should be situated within their historical context, such as coercive British colonialism in the early 20th century (Atarodi, 2003).

Geopolitical perspectives

Classical geopolitical perspectives have most frequently linked the concept of ‘resource war' to interstate conflicts over the supply of ‘strategic resources', giving way to a narrow and militaristic notion of ‘resource security' (and in particular ‘energy security'). Western geopolitical thinking about resources has been dominated by the equation of trade, war and power, at the core of which were overseas resources and maritime navigation, with resources providing some of the means and motives of early European power expansion, and being the focus of interstate rivalry and strategic denial of access. During the mercantilist period of the 15th century, trade and war became intimately linked to protect or interdict the accumulation of the ‘world's riches', mostly in the form of bullion, enabled by progresses in maritime transport and upon which power was perceived to be determined (Lesser, 1989). Since sea power itself rested on access to timber, naval timber supply became a major preoccupation for major European powers from the 17th century onwards; a situation comparable to the case of oil in the 20th century. With growing industrialization and increasing dependence on imported materials during the 19th century, Western powers intensified their control over raw materials, leading to (along with many other factors e.g.

Strategic thinking about resources during the Cold War continued to focus on the vulnerability arising from resource supply dependence and the potential for international conflicts resulting from competition over access to key resources (Westing, 1988). Emphasis was placed on concepts of ‘resource security' (through strategic reserves and alliances with producing countries), and a military ‘balance of power' between the US and Soviet blocks. The decolonization pro­cess, 1956 Suez crisis, 1973Arab oil embargo, and 1979 Iranian revolution also contributed to an increase in focus of Western strategic concerns (as well as resource businesses) on domestic and regional political stabil­ity and alliances (Russett, 1981). Beyond the Cold War, such security of ‘resource supply' continues to inform governmental and corporate decisions in the management of several minerals, particularly concerning high-tech and radioactive materials, even if oil stands largely alone in terms of global strategic importance (Anderson and Anderson, 1998).

By the 1970s, broader geopolitical conceptualizations of security had started to incorporate issues such as population growth, environmental degradation and social inequalities in poor countries (Brown, 1977; Ullman, 1983). The ensuing concept of ‘environmental security' came about to reflect ideas of global interdependence, illustrated through the debates on global warming, environmental ‘limits to growth', and the political instability caused by environmental scarcity in the South. The concept, however, was decried as representing a skewed and controversial ‘securitization' of environmental issues, occasionally casting the blame on the poor, calling for ‘military' and ‘international development' solutions and constructing biased identities and narratives of endangerment (Dalby, 2002).

As further attention was devoted to the internal mechanisms of wars at the end of the Cold War, a view emerged that a new and violent scramble for resources amongst local warlords, regional hegemons and international powers was becoming a major feature of contemporary conflicts (Annan, 1998; Reno, 1999; Klare, 2001). A popular understanding of future ‘resource wars' is that a combination of population and economic growth leading to a relentless expansion in the demand for raw materials, expected resource shortages and contested resource ownership might stimulate further armed conflicts (Klare, 2001). Asia's growing mass consumerism and energy demand, for example, are of specific concern for the militarized control of the South China Sea (especially the Spratly Islands), Caspian region, Gulf of Guinea and the Middle East. While the role of oil or diamonds in several civil wars in Africa had already drawn renewed attention to resource-funded conflicts, the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 put the concept of ‘resource war' at the forefront of global antiwar activism.

Like the Cold War, the ‘war on terror' conducted by the Bush junior administra­tion has rearticulated security threats and strategies along corporate interests. In this case, it has aimed at regimes opposing the USA, which are also reluctant to open their oil and gas fields to Western companies (i.e. Iraq, Iran, Venezuela). Akin to the Cold War, interventions have been framed upon the conflation of concepts of freedom and security. Debates on oil and the United States' security agenda have significantly shifted as a result of the ‘9/11' attacks in the US, however. If on one side, those opposing US military interventionism have argued that the ‘war on terror' provided one more convenient cover for a renewed ‘imperialist oil grab' in the region; on the other, links between oil and terrorism pointed at problems of authoritarian (and warmongering) governance in several oil-producing countries. As the ‘war on terror' became justified as a war of liberation against oil-funded dictatorial regimes, the USA portrayed its foreign policy as shifting from ensuring a free flow of oil from the Middle East to the world market, to delivering ‘freedom' to local populations in oil-producing regions through democracy and market reforms (Le Billon and El Khatib, 2004).

Critical geopoliticians also point out that the stereotyping of resource exporting coun­tries plays an important role in ‘essentializ- ing' places and actors supposedly involved in ‘resource wars'. Drawing on simplistic representations of ‘resource geography', the regions at war often become caricatured through the concept of resource war, brushing aside issues of scale and the multiplicity of distinct spaces and places. As each particular region becomes caricatured through its dominant resource sector, other aspects of conflict get brushed aside. Narratives of ‘blood diamonds' fuelling the war in Sierra Leone during the 1990s, for example, overlooked agrarian issues (Richards, 2005). Geopolitical perspectives also often assert to provide a ‘big picture' of the future of international tensions over ‘strategic' resources, thereby informing and reflecting dominant geostrategic policies and world­views. Yet, as suggested above, such classical perspectives have often reflected Manichean constructs of places and identities, and biased conceptions of security. Given contemporary geopolitical narratives of ‘war on terror', ‘clash of civilizations' and ‘empire', there remains much need for critical approaches to geopolitical interpretations and forecasting of ‘resource wars' (Dalby, 2004).

Political economy perspectives

The second set of perspectives originate from political science and development economics studies, and are based on the assumption that the significance of resources in wars is largely rooted in questions of resource scarcity, abundance or dependence (de Soysa, 2002).

Moving beyond scarcity and finding pri­mary commodity export dependence to con­stitute ‘the strongest single driver of the risk of conflict', Collier (2000, 101) argued that ‘the true cause of much civil war is not the loud discourse of grievance but the silent force of greed' (see also de Soysa, 2002). In response to the controversy and broad media coverage surrounding this statement, numerous studies have tested its validity and interpretation. Debates in this regard have focused on the selection of variables (primary commodity exports as a share of Gross Domestic Product, resource production or resource stock per capita), the specificities of the models, the robustness of findings, as well as the validity of quantitative approaches (Cramer, 2002; Marchal and Messiant, 2002; Ross, 2004b; Ron, 2005).

Overall, war onset does not seem to be robustly related to the broad category of ‘pri­mary commodities', at least defined in terms of export dependence. By distinguishing between different types of commodities and types of conflicts, however, patterns appear to emerge (Humphreys, 2005; Ross, 2006). Oil wealth seems to increase the likelihood of civil war (Fearon, 2005), especially onshore compared to off-shore oil (Lujala, 2004; Ross, 2006), while ‘contraband' goods such as gem­stones, drugs and narcotics do not increase the likelihood of conflict onset (with the exception of alluvial diamonds in relation to ethnic conflicts and for the 1990s, Lujala et al., 2005), but prolong conflicts (Fearon, 2004). Agricultural commodity production would increase the risk of conflict (Humphreys 2005), but like timber remains relatively undertested.

To explain potential relations between resources and wars, political economy perspectives have articulated three main arguments about resources: an institutional weakening effect increasing vulnerability to conflict; a motivational effect increasing the risk of armed conflict and an opportunity effect associated with resources financing belligerents (see Table 11.1). The first relates to the idea of ‘resource curse', according to which resource wealth results in economic and political underperformance as resource rents distort the economy and states rely on them rather than on broad taxation. Auty (2001; 2004), Ross (2004a,b) and Le Billon (2001; 2005) have focused on economic collapse and political instability associated with the resource curse. Demonstrating the impact of political and economic depen­dence on resource rents, Verwimp (2003)

Table 11.1 Mechanisms linking resource wealth and armed conflicts⁶

Resource dependence weakening of states and society organization

Weakstate mechanism

• Poor taxation/representation (government fiscally autonomous from population).

• Authoritarianism and corruption.

• Weak tax handle (resource sectors hard to tax due to the ease of illegal activities and poor bureaucratic control capacity).

Weak socio-economic linkages

• Low socio-professional diversification, social cohesion and regional integration.

Resource wealth and exploitation motivating armed conflict

Grievance mechanisms

• High income inequality.

• High economic vulnerability to growth collapse.

• Grievances over socio-cultural-environmental 'externalities'.

• Grievances over unfair revenue distribution.

Greedy rebel mechanisms

• 'Economic violence' by domestic groups.

• Greaterrewardsforstatecapture.

• Greater rewards for secessionism.

Greedy outsiders' mechanisms

• High (future) profits.

• Strategic leverage on competitors through resource supply control.

Resource revenues financing hostilities

• Higher viability of armed hostilities (resources financing the weaker party, but also covering for war-related budgetary expenditure).

demonstrates how the Habyarimana regime in Rwanda switched from buying political loyalty through coffee revenue redistribution to holding onto power through massive repression following the late 1980s collapse of the international coffee price. Arguing that industrial exploitation provided the state with more secure fiscal revenues than artisanal exploitation, Snyder and Bhavnani (2005) emphasise that the ‘tax handle’ character­izing the resource sector can contribute to political (in)stability. Jones Luong and Weinthal (2006) have focused on resource ownership and suggested that private owner­ship appears to reduce the risk of ‘resource curse’ and hence potentially the incidence of ‘resource wars’.

The second argument is that resources motivate rebellion because of high poten­tial gains (resource revenues) and low opportunity costs (prevalent poverty and lack of revenue alternative in many low- income and resource-dependent countries). Most prominently, Collier (2000) argued that impoverished youth fought in the hope of gaining access to resource revenues. Although the prospect of ‘loot’ has long been used to recruit and motivate fighters, many contemporary armed groups forcedly recruit fighters, especially among children and youth, questioning the whole motivational aspect. Furthermore, youth (often forcedly) integrated into rebels movements, such as the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, more frequently reported social justice, including economic equity, than individual rewards as motivational factor, with ‘conflict diamonds’ themselves inaccessible to foot soldiers and petty rewards provided by the movement on a relatively egalitarian basis (Peters and Richards, 1998). As Weinstein (2007) notes, however, economically moti­vated leaders appear to take over the control of armed groups over ideological ones in ‘resource rich’ contexts.

The third argument relates to the esca­lating, worsening and prolonging effects of resources on armed conflicts, and has received broader empirical support. Access to resource revenues ensures that more arms can be purchased, and conflicts can thus escalate. There is little evidence that resource revenues fund rebellions in their initial phase of escalation, at least in most recent cases of civil war involving financing by resources, but more evidence in terms of conflict prolongation (Ross, 2004a, b). Overall, the influence of resource revenue access on the escalation and prolongation of conflicts depends in large part on which side benefits from such access: if the weaker party benefits, then prolongation and possibly escalation is likely; if the stronger party benefits, a more rapid escalation towards its military victory is more probable. As argued by Keen (1998), however, profitable conflict stalemates are also frequent, whereby access to resource revenues by both parties appear to take precedence over military victory or conflict settlement objectives. Weinstein (2007) also found that resource contexts allowing for the financial autonomy of armed groups from the local population results in worse human rights abuses.

Political ecology perspectives

The third set of perspectives draws from polit­ical ecology and geography. It emphasizes contextualization, multidimensional power relations, and a broad characterization of resources and their mode of production, circu­lation and consumption. Through attention to historical context, identities, power relations and forms of violence, political ecology approaches recognize the chronic and multi­scalar character of many resource-related con­flicts, beyond narrow definitions of conflict onset, duration and intensity (Dunn, 2001; Le Billon, 2001; Peluso and Watts, 2001; Korf and Funfgeld, 2006). A first contribution of political ecology is a reconceptualization of resource scarcity, abundance and depen­dence, notably through attention given to uneven resource distribution and commodity production and circulation (Peluso and Watts, 2001). A second is a greater sensitivity to the materiality, commodity characteristics, and spatiality of resources. Locating conflicts and resources more precisely at the sub­national level, through spatial analyses using new subnational data and GIS, allows for a better specification of models used in large N-studies (Buhaug and Lujala, 2005; Buhaug and R0d, 2006). As suggested by a study of land conflict in the Eastern Brazilian Amazon, such analyses have to be complemented by detailed and historically grounded case studies, including at the micro-scale (Simmons, 2004). Broader spatial characteristics of resources, both physical and social, also influence their accessibility by belligerents (Le Billon, 2001), along with other resource characteristics such as legality (e.g. narcotics versus legal cash crops), transportability (e.g. weight/volume ratio) and ‘obstructability’ (Ross, 2003). The argument is that the characteristics of resource sectors provide a context for political mobilization as well as for the motivations, strategies, capabilities and behaviour of belligerents (Le Billon, 2005). Empirical testing of some of these hypotheses through quantitative studies suggest that long-standing rebellions tend to be associated with more easily accessed resources, such as alluvial or secondary diamonds (Lujala et al., 2005) or ‘contraband goods’ (Fearon, 2004); and separatist conflicts with nonfuel mineral revenues (Ross, 2006).

A fourth contribution has been recognition of a broader range of violence than geopo­litical and political perspectives, and broader connections. Peluso and Watts (2001, 5) call not only for understanding conflicts as ‘globally’ contextualized by history, power relations and material transformation taking place at a diversity of scales, but also for multiple forms of violence to be acknowl­edged in relation to resources. Beyond the coercive use of physical force to control or access resources, such studies engage with broader understandings of violence, such as Galtung’s (1990) notions of physical, cultural and structural violence, or multiscalar forms of social, economic and political violence (McIlwaine, 1999). Narrower definitions, as noted above, can overlook long histories of single-sided ‘repressive’ violence by the state, or protracted high levels of ‘criminal’ violence in the postconflict period (Pearce, 1998). Political ecology perspectives seek to be attentive to the social construction of resources and their connections with violence (Le Billon, 2006). This implies analyses of commodification (i.e. how ‘things' become resources or commodities defined by their exchange value), and fetishization (i.e. how imaginative aspects of resource production and consumption affect power relations). Commodity chain analysis and ethnographic accounts have been able to provide more nuanced accounts, and bridge site-specificity and multiscalar interconnections between resources and wars (Nordstrom, 2004). By following resources, connections are made and actors, their motivations and power relations are more easily identified; thereby allowing for some degree of accountability beyond the immediate perpetrators of physical violence. This helps to identify responsibili­ties, regulatory spaces (and absence thereof), and illicit (i.e. socially unacceptable) and illegal (i.e. legally banned) social prac­tices (van Schendel and Abraham, 2005). Human rights organizations, such as Global Witness, as well as ‘expert panels' from the United Nations, have successfully taken this approach to publicly expose resource businesses and politicians implicated in the financing of war crimes. One of the purposes of commodity chain analysis is to bridge or fold scales in order to counter the ‘localism' present in many narratives of contemporary armed conflicts. By showing the connections between ‘killing fields' and ‘shopping malls', commodity chain analysis moves from one scale to the other; broadening understandings of ‘local' forms of violence away from the most physically direct consequences capturing the interest of the media, and recasting them within much broader pro­cesses of global commodity circulation and consumption.

To sum up, mainstream geopolitical per­spectives on resources have clearly put a priority on the resource supply security of wealthy nations, to the point of calling for military invasions abroad or resource autarky at home. There is little doubt that resource supply is a major concern of ‘realpolitiks', but geopolitical narratives have often been blinded by seductive (and sometimes dubious) supply and demand statistics, articulated by an oversimplified geographic understanding of power relations and representations of potential ‘flash points'. Critical geopolitical perspectives have rightly denounced such narratives, pointing to the vested interests involved and built-in prejudices, and calling for greater contextual sensitivity and nuance towards power relations between firms, com­munities and authorities.

Studies from political economy perspec­tives have strived to find general patterns in the conditions and processes linking resources and conflicts, and for methodological rigueur through mostly quantitative studies. The methodological approach taken by these studies has often limited the scope of their historical engagement, the form of violence studied and the possible variables that could factor for the processes hypothezised. These studies have yielded major insights into the significance of resource dependence for conflict risks, and patterns of conflicts relating to particular types of resources and mode of exploitation and regulation. Finally, polit­ical ecology perspectives have emphasized contextualisation and multiscalar relations, pointing also to the specific material and social dimensions of resources. Most political studies have continued a fruitful tradition of fine-grained and historically grounded anal­ysis of largely individual case studies with a focus on nuanced analyses of power relations. Significant findings have been gained on the importance of the historical, institutional and material context of ‘resource wars'. Certain resources have been found to increase vulnerability to certain types of conflict or to prolong conflicts. Bridging and renewing conceptual and methodological approaches drawn from these three perspectives could yield yet further insights on the economic and resource causes of conflicts.