Governing the Resource-Violence Nexus (GRVN): Commodity Management and Internal Violence
The resource curse literature has argued that an abundance of natural resources depresses a country’s economic growth and spurs the risk of the intrastate war. Yet, not all resource-rich countries experience violent conflict. Understanding such variation between peace and social instability requires a systematic analysis of how states regulate access to these abundant resources and try to solve uprisings and conflicts over them. This is the basic premise of the research project “Governing the Resource-Violence Nexus” (GRVN); it advances the proposition that this puzzling diversity of outcomes can be traced with considerable accuracy to the governance of commodities and resources.
For this purpose, the GRVN project will focus on two interrelated topics, namely resource access governance and the design of natural resource management. While we will test whether the type of ownership structure (private versus public / domestic versus foreign) is associated with the conflict potential of a country or region, we further differentiate between specific characteristics of resource management designs (e.g., specific contractual terms of resource exploration, competition structure within the resource extracting sector, inclusion of the local population in managerial decisions, among others) in a more detailed manner. Thus, the project will also explore the conditions under which specific resource governance structures affect the risk of domestic conflict.
As the comprehensive analysis of resource conflicts and their avoidance requires a systematic database, we will build a global dataset on resource governance covering commodities such as oil or natural gas. Relying on a mixture of advanced tools in formal theory, econometrics and qualitative research techniques, the project intends to show which form of resource conflict management allows states to evade unjust arrangements and political violence. Internal conflict will be defined in broad terms, ranging from major civil wars over coup d’états to the exertion of violence against ethnic minorities.
Project duration: 36 months (from 2011) and extended project 01.07.2015 - 30.06.2017
Principal investigators: Prof. Dr. Gerald Schneider (University of Konstanz), Dr. Tim Wegenast (University of Konstanz)