This Mine is Mine! How Minerals Fuel Conflicts in Africa

Concession Stands: How Mining Investments Incite Protest in Africa

“… 4. See, for example, Berman et al 2017; Collier and Hoeffler 2004; Dube and Vargas 2013; Lujala, Gleditsch, and Gilmore 2005. …”

Resources and Governance in Sierra Leone’s Civil War

“…For example, Cotet and Tsui (2013) study the discovery of oil fields and find they do not trigger conflict. disaggregated study of the dynamics of conflict across the African continent (Arezki et al, 2015;Berman et al, 2014). 5 Starting from the premise that conflicts have a spatial dimension, and that country-year variation in conflict status may be too coarse to capture key features, both Berman et al (2014) and Arezki et al (2015) adopt a grid-based approach to investigate if mineral mines invite conflict.…”

“…The studies arrive at opposing conclusions based on the time frame under study. Where Berman et al (2014) find that minerals invite conflict (and that such conflicts may later spread to other parts of the country), Arezki et al (2015) extend the time frame and find the evidence disappears.…”

Resource concentration and civil wars

“…Natural resources and ethnic divisions are known to be correlated with civil conflict in one way or another (see e.g., Berman et al, 2014;Collier and Hoeffler, 2004;Dube and Vargas, 2013;Fearon, 2005;Humphreys, 2005;Le Billon, 2001;Lujala, 2010;Lujala et al, 2005;Montalvo and Reynal-Querol, 2005;Ross, 2004a), but the literature does not emphasize the particularly important role of resource concentration and ethnic concentration, independently and jointly. The existing theoretical studies about the effect of natural resources on conflict, by and large, do not relate to geographic concentration: Caselli and Coleman (2013) focus on the decision of the dominant ethnic group to exploit or not the other groups in terms of the proceeds from extraction of natural resources, but do not take into account how the geographic distribution and the economic features of natural resources affect the risk of ethnic conflict of different kinds; Grossman and Mendoza (2003) and Reuveny and Maxwell (2001) use a dynamic framework to predict that present resource scarcity and future resource abundance cause appropriative competition; Hodler (2006) finds that natural resources lead to more conflicts in fractionalized countries; Rohner et al (2013) predict natural resources to have a particularly detrimental effect if initial trust in a country is low; Fearon (2005) argues that natural resources can foster conflict by weakening state capacity; Bell and Wolford (forthcoming) and Besley and Persson (2011) emphasize that weak institutions, low income and large natural resources lead to a greater risk of civil war; and Rohner (2014) and van der Ploeg and Rohner (2012) study the two-way interaction between natural resource extraction and civil war, focusing on depletion speed and optimal investments of windfalls.…”