Rent, Greed and Civil War : A Critical Evaluation of Natural Resources and Civil War

Abstract

Do natural resources cause civil war? Scholars disagree on the resource-conflict link. One common model of explanation, the greed model, asserts that natural resource provide an incentive to rebel. Natural resource, however, only increases the exposure to conflict at first. When a certain threshold of rent from natural resources is reached, the government’s control allows it to overbid the rebels in the battle for “labor”. With more resources the incumbent(s) can also spend more on defense and deterrence, thereby raising the cost of a rebellion. First, this thesis argues that the implied rent-seeking claim essential to the greed model excludes certain political determinants which could mitigate the adverse effects of natural resource dependence. Bestowed with vast amounts of natural resources leaders might induce corruption, patronage and individual rent-seeking behavior to buy off any would-be rebels. Second, it also attempt to address how the predominant measure of natural resource dependence, namely primary commodity export/GDP, is perhaps an insufficient measure of a country’s economic dependence on natural resources. Third, research on natural resources and civil war has to large extent alternated between the use of dependence and abundance measures, and treated them as identical. The analyses here investigate whether different measurements of natural resource yield different results.