Causes of Civil Wars: The Influence of Natural Resurces Extractive Technologies on the Probability of Civil War Outbreak

• Název v anglickém jazyce: Causes of Civil Wars: The Influence of Natural Resurces Extractive Technologies on the Probability of Civil War Outbreak
• Klíčová slova: -
• Klíčová slova anglicky: civil war; natural resources; feasibility; quantitative study
• Akademický rok vypsání: 2014/2015
• Typ práce: diplomová práce
• Jazyk práce: angličtina
• Ústav: Katedra mezinárodních vztahů (23-KMV)
• Vedoucí / školitel: PhDr. JUDr. Tomáš Karásek, Ph.D.
• Řešitel: skrytý - zadáno vedoucím/školitelem
• Datum přihlášení: 16.06.2015
• Datum zadání: 16.06.2015
• Datum a čas obhajoby: 08.09.2015 00:00
• Místo konání obhajoby: IPS FSV UK, U kříže 8/661 158 00 Praha 5 – Jinonice
• Datum odevzdání elektronické podoby: 29.07.2015
• Datum proběhlé obhajoby: 08.09.2015
• Oponenti: doc. PhDr. Běla Plechanovová, CSc.

Seznam odborné literatury

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Buhaug, Halvard, and Päivi Lujala. 2005. “Accounting for scale: Measuring geography in quantitative studies of civil war.”. Political Geography 24 (4): 399–418.

Butler, Michael J. 2009. International conflict management. London, New York: Routledge.

Collier, Paul. 2000. “Doing Well out of War: An Economic Perspective.”. In Greed & grievance: Economic agendas in civil wars, eds. Mats R. Berdal and David Malone. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 91–112.

Collier, Paul, and Anke Hoeffler. 1998. “On Economic Causes of Civil War.”. Oxford Economic Papers 50 (4): 563–73.

———. 2004. “Greed and Grievance in Civil War.”. Oxford Economic Papers 56 (4): 563–95.

Collier, Paul, Anke Hoeffler, and Dominic Rohner. 2009. “Beyond Greed and Grievance: Feasibility and Civil War.”. Oxford Economic Papers 61 (1): 1–27.

Fearon, James D., and David D. Laitin. 2000. “Violence and the Social Construction of Ethnic Identity.”. International organization 54 (4): 845–77.

Humphreys, Macartan. 2005. “Natural Resources, Conflict, and Conflict Resolution: Uncovering the Mechanisms.”. The Journal of Conflict Resolution 49 (4): 508–37.

Jesse, Neal G. 2014. “Ethnicity and Identity Conflict.”. In Routledge Handbook of Civil Wars. Routledge handbooks, eds. Edward Newman and Karl R. DeRouen. Taylor & Francis Ltd., 93–103.

Klare, M. T. (2002), Resource wars: The new landscape of global conflict (1st Owl Books ed., New York: Henry Holt).

Le Billon, Philippe. 2001. “The political ecology of war: natural resources and armed conflicts.”. Political Geography 20 (5): 561–84.

———. 2008. “Diamond Wars? Conflict Diamonds and Geographies of Resource Wars.”. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98 (2): 345–72.

Lijphart, Arend. 1971. “Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method.”. The American Political Science Review 65 (3): 682.

Lujala, Päivi. 2010. “The spoils of nature: Armed civil conflict and rebel access to natural resources.”. Journal of Peace Research 47 (1): 15–28.

Lujala, Päivil, Nils P. Gleditsch, and Elisabeth Gilmore. 2005. “A Diamond Curse? Civil War and a Lootable Resource.”. The Journal of Conflict Resolution 49 (4): 538–62.

Olson, Mancur. 1971 (1965). Logic of collective action: Public goods and the theory of groups. 10th ed. Cambridge, mass.

Reno, W. (2012), ‘Insurgent Movements in Africa’, in P. B. Rich and I. Duyvesteyn (eds.), The Routledge handbook of insurgency and counterinsurgency (Routledge handbooks, New York: Routledge Chapman & Hall), 157–71.

Ross, Michael L. 2004. “What Do We Know about Natural Resources and Civil War?”. Journal of Peace Research 41 (3): 337–56.

———. 2006. “A Closer Look at Oil, Diamonds, and Civil War.”. Annual Review of Political Science 9 (1): 265–300.

Seawright, J., and J. Gerring. 2008. “Case Selection Techniques in Case Study Research: A Menu of Qualitative and Quantitative Options.”. Political Research Quarterly 61 (2): 294–308.

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Předběžná náplň práce

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Předběžná náplň práce v anglickém jazyce

The Master Thesis will be situated in the research field of conflict studies with a special focus on determining factors of civil wars. Being aware that this field is especially at interest after the end of the Cold War and thereby produced a vast amount of literature, I want refer to the natural resource literature which has extensively grown in the 2000s and still benefits from new input. The research question in particular pertains to the feasibility-hypothesis from Collier, Hoeffler, and Rohner (2009) which builds upon earlier work, namely Collier and Hoeffler (1998) and Collier and Hoeffler (2004). In this approach, the focus is not on the motivation of rebel groups which was the main ground of the grievance vs. greed debate1. In contrast, while previous work aimed to explain why civil wars break out, Collier et al. (2009) deviate from it by claiming that “instead of the circumstances which generate a rebellion being distinctive in terms of motivation, they might be distinctive in the sheer financial and military feasibility of rebellion. [...] that where a rebellion is feasible it will occur.” (ibid. 2). This means that neither greed or grievance as motivating factors are at the center of research, but rather the conditions in which rebellions can occur.

One of the determining factors of their research pertains to natural resources. Their variable “Primary Commodity Exports” is positively correlated with the probability for civil war onset in the core model of their paper, while at the same time the squared version is negatively correlated4. An inverted U-shaped relationship is calculated with a peak at 25%5. The authors offer three different interpretations which do no have to be mutually exclusive. First, natural resource abundance can create opportunities for rebels. Second, seizing natural resources can be the aim of rebel groups in order to extract rents. Third, a weak state can be the result of huge dependence on natural resources due to factors like “Dutch disease”, “resource curse” or the isolation between state and citizens, when the latter ones are not the primary tax source for the state. Since all three explanations point at different directions, the focus of my Master Thesis is on the first mechanism.
Hence, an important feature of natural resources is the ability to extract those. Available extraction technologies determine if natural resources can be harnessed by rebel groups. In order to make this argumentation clearer, there is a difference if rebel groups can access and harness resources like primary or secondary diamonds, oil, poppy fields, timber, coltan, or other material resources. In the literature review, I offer deeper insight into the difficulties of natural resource extraction and their impact on rebellions which were investigated by other authors. My hypothesis is that the easier rebels can obtain natural resources, namely the more simple the extraction technology for natural resources is, the more likely rebel groups will engage in a civil conflict based on their own motivation (e.g. greed or grievance.). Therefore, my thesis is that rebellions are facilitated by natural resources due to their financial input after extraction, however their value for rebels varies according to the structural conditions which determine how "lootable" a particular is.