© 2007 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Geography Compass 1/2 (2007): 163–182, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2007.00010.x
Geographies of War: Perspectives on
‘Resource Wars’
Philippe Le Billon*
University of British Columbia
Abstract
Natural resources ﬁgure prominently in studies of geographies of wars. This
article reviews the three main perspectives on so-called ‘resource wars’: geopolitical,
political economy and political ecology. Classical geopolitical perspectives
mostly provide ‘realpolitik’ assessments of international tensions over the supply
of ‘strategic’ resources. Such geopolitical constructs of ‘resource wars’ frequently
oversimplify power relations and provide a fertile ground for critical enquiries.
Reﬁning understandings of resource scarcity and power relations, political economy
perspectives point at resource dependence and ‘looting’ opportunities as
potential risk factors in the onset and duration of armed conﬂicts. Finally,
through greater contextual sensitivity and multiscalar analysis, political ecology
perspectives emphasise the diverse forms of violence at play in ‘resource wars’ and
stress the importance of identities and territorialities. Bridging and renewing
conceptual and methodological approaches drawn from these three perspective
could yield yet further insights on so-called ‘resource wars’ and serve broad
objectives of social and environmental justice.
1 Introduction
The term ‘resource war’ was popularised in the 1980s as a metaphor
describing renewed tensions between the USA and the Soviet Union over
the control of fuel and minerals in disputed ‘peripheries’, notably minerals
in Southern Africa and oil in the Middle East (Broad 1980; Klare 1981).
The term is most commonly understood as conﬂicts revolving over the
‘pursuit or possession of critical materials’ (Klare 2001, 25).The term has
been widely used in reference to water, petroleum and other resources
such as diamonds, timber, coltan or cod ﬁsheries. Following nineteenth
century Prussian military theorist von Clausewitz’s perspective on war,
the term is generally understood as the continuation of resource policies
through the use of military force. Mostly deployed in reference to the
international policies of states, the term has also been used to describe
the struggles of local populations against large-scale resource exploitation
projects, and neoliberal reforms in the control of resources and public
utilities (Gedicks 1993; Perreault 2006).The coercive aspects of environmental
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conservation have also led critics to argue that war has become ‘a common
model and metaphor for conceptualising and planning biodiversity
protection in Africa [shaping] a new moral geography wherein parks
and protected areas have become spaces of deadly violence’ (Neumann
2004, 813).
As with ‘ethnic war’, the term ‘resource war’ reduces conﬂicts to a
single factor, and thereby risks oversimpliﬁcation. ‘Resource war’ 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. Furthermore, it is at risk of missing some
of the political dimensions of conﬂicts if resources are reduced to their
economic (exchange) or utilitarian (use) value. For example, resources are
tied to particular places, involving a (political) sense of belonging. Other
political dimensions of resources include the social practices involved in
resource exploitation, circulation, transformation and consumption. Studies
of ‘resource wars’ should thus engage with the potential interplay of resource
related social processes, including identity formation and territorialities at
various scales (Dunn 2001; Pearce 2005).
Resource sectors inﬂuence the (un)making of places, political systems
and social movements involved in conﬂicts. Failing to do so, some
resource exporting countries may seem intrinsically ‘unstable’, without
any reference given to the historical role of the resource sectors in contributing
to such instability. The mere presence of resources should also
not be simply understood for the current or future stakes that they
represent. The signiﬁcance of oil in contemporary conﬂicts in Iraq, for
example, should be situated within their historical context such coercive
British colonialism in the early twentieth century (Atarodi 2003).
Moreover, conﬂicts over resources are often played in a ‘repeated game’,
in which the histories of past conﬂicts inform present ones. Examining
farmer-herder conﬂicts in the Sahel, Turner (2004, 878) notes that:
The land-use conﬂict engaged in by herders differs signiﬁcantly from the hereand-now
conﬂict over scarce resources invoked by standard uses of the term
‘resource conﬂict’.These are conﬂicts that are waged over the long term with
the conﬂict’s history being invoked and reworked to make moral claims in the
present.
Studies of so-called ‘resource wars’ should thus bring in a ‘thick’ historical
and geographical contextualisation, relating the past to the present, as well
as resource locales to places of belonging and spaces of social relations.
Given that many of the narratives of ‘resource wars’ are about future conﬂicts
over ‘increasingly scarce resources’, studies of (future) resource wars should
also engage with the deconstruction of particular geographies of vulnerability,
threat and insecurity (Dalby 2002).This article reviews three perspectives
on ‘resource wars’: geopolitical, political economy and political ecology.
The main arguments and methodologies, as well as contributions from
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geography, are reviewed for each one, with a particular focus on political
ecology perspectives.
2 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 inter-state rivalry and strategic
denial of access. During the mercantilist period of the ﬁfteenth century,
trade and war became intimately linked to protect or interdict the accumulation
of the ‘world riches’, mostly in the form of bullion, enabled by
progresses in maritime transport and upon which power was perceived
to be determined (Lesser 1989). Because sea power itself rested on access
to timber, naval timber supply became a major preoccupation for major
European powers from the seventeenth century onwards; a situation
comparable to the case of oil in the twentieth century. With growing
industrialisation and increasing dependence on imported materials during
the nineteenth century,Western powers intensiﬁed their control over raw
materials, leading to (along with many other factors such as political
ideologies) an imperialist ‘scramble’ over much of the rest of the world.
The signiﬁcance of imported resources, and most notably oil, during the
First and Second World Wars reinforced the idea of resource vulnerability
among European powers.
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 USA
and Soviet blocks. The decolonisation process, 1956 Suez crisis, 1973
Arab 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 conceptualisations of security had
started to incorporate issues such as population growth, environmental
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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. However, the
concept represented a skewed and controversial ‘securitisation’ 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 among local warlords, regional hegemons and international
powers was becoming a major feature of contemporary conﬂicts (Annan
1998; Klare 2001; Reno 1998). 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 militarised
control of the South China Sea (especially 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 USA-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 and Venezuela). Akin to the Cold War, interventions
have been framed upon the conﬂation of concepts of freedom and
security. Debates on oil and the USA’s security agenda have signiﬁcantly
shifted as a result of the ‘9/11’ attacks in the USA, however. If on one
side, those opposing USA 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 side, 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 a view of oil
as delivering ‘freedom’ to local populations and offsetting the cost of postinvasion
‘reconstruction’ for USA taxpayers (Le Billon and El Khatib 2004).
Nowhere was this geopolitical construct more blatant (and tragically
wrong-headed) than in the USA-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
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Beyond territorial control by military forces, Smith (2003, 265) further
argues that the latest USA-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was:
Above all, a geo-economic is not a geopolitical war. It is not a war simply to
control oil resources but rather to control the global political economy within
which the disposition of oil resources will be organised. It is a war for the
fruition of . . . USA globalism.
Like most geographers, Smith’s reading of the ‘Iraq war’ seeks to move
beyond conventional geopolitical perspectives on resource competition
through a critical geopolitical approach that deconstructs the concepts of
‘resource wars’ and ‘resource security’.
In this regard, the stereotyping of resource exporting countries plays an
important role in ‘essentialising’ 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 conﬂicts get
brushed aside. Agrarian issues in ‘diamond mining’ Sierra Leone, for
example, are overlooked in ‘resource war’ narratives (Richards 2005). As
Dodds (2003) also suggests, popular geopolitics conveyed through movies
contribute to the cultural re-production of world politics and representations
of conﬂicts. Recent James Bond movies reinforce stereotypes of
resource exporting countries, such as The World Is Not Enough (1999),
based on the control of Central Asian oil exports, or Die Another Day
(2002), linking West African conﬂict diamonds to North Korean weapons
of mass destruction. Not all mass audience Western movies reinforce such
caricatures, however. In the case of Iraq, Three Kings (1999 – working
title, Spoils of War) provided a sharp critique of USA petro-imperialist
motives and betrayal of Iraqi people during the 1991 Gulf War (ironically
providing ground for the USA-led invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam
Hussein in 2003).
Geopolitical perspectives often assert to provide a ‘big picture’ of 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 civilisations’
and ‘empire’, there remains much need for critical approaches to
geopolitical interpretations and forecasting of ‘resource wars’ (Dalby 2004).
3 Political Economy Perspectives
The second set of perspectives originate from political science and
development economics studies and are based on the assumption that the
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signiﬁcance of resources in wars is largely rooted in questions of resource
scarcity, abundance or dependence (de Soysa 2002). Until relatively
recently, the orthodoxy was that the likelihood of conﬂict increases as
resources become more scarce (Homer-Dixon 1999). According to this
‘resource scarcity’ argument, widening the scope of the (international)
security agenda to include environmental breakdown and livelihood resource
access could help provide a basis for peace (Conca and Dabelko 2002;
Myers 1993). Some of this work has received potent critiques for their
methodological approach (Gleditsch 1998), neo-Malthusian assumptions
and essentialising character (Peluso and Watts 2001) and for naturalising
an environment-insecurity nexus in the South exonerating (Northern-led)
modernity and development (Dalby 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; Mac Ginty 2004; Marchal and Messiant 2002;
Ron 2005; Ross 2004a).
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 under-tested.
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 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 (2004b) and Le Billon (2001; 2005a) have focused on
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economic collapse and political instability associated with the resource
curse (Ross 2004a). Demonstrating the impact of political and economic
dependence on resource rents, Verwimp (2003) demonstrates how the
Habyarimana regime in Rwanda switched from buying political loyalty
from coffee revenue redistribution to holding on power through massive
repression following the late 1980s collapse of international coffee price.
Arguing that industrial exploitation provided the state with more secure
ﬁscal revenues than artisanal exploitation, Snyder and Bhavnani (2005)
emphasise the ‘tax handle’ characterising 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
Table 1. Mechanisms linking resource wealth and armed conﬂicts.1
Resource dependence weakening of states and society organisation
Weak state 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
• Greater rewards for state capture
• 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)
1
Adapted from Humphreys (2005).
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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).
However, as Weinstein (2005) notes economically motivated leaders appear
to take over the control of armed groups over ideological ones in ‘resource
rich’ contexts. Although motivation can be focused on long-term objectives,
support for the hypothesis of individual ﬁnancial motivation and
‘economisation’ of armed insurgencies remains tentative. Studies should
thus be sensitive to the temporality of the conﬂict, prolonged conﬂicts
appearing to favour economic motivations.
The third argument relates to the escalating and prolonging effects of
resources on armed conﬂicts, and as 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 cases 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 are
likely; And if the stronger party beneﬁts, a more rapid escalation towards
its military victory is more probable. However, as argued by Keen (1998)
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.
4 Political Ecology Perspectives
The third set of perspectives draws from political ecology and geography.
It emphasises contextualisation, multidimensional power relations, a broad
characterisation of resources and their mode of production, circulation
and consumption. Political ecology studies have focused their attention on
ﬁne-grained analyses of ‘local’ conﬂicts, contextualised by speciﬁc histories
and ‘global’ processes. Political ecology perspectives, and more
broadly perspectives from geographers examining the political economy
of natural resources, have made contributions.
The ﬁrst contribution of political ecology has been to reconceptualise
scarcity, abundance and dependence spatially. Attention is thus given to
uneven resource distribution and commodity production and circulation,
in order to resolve the puzzle of ‘resource wars’.War itself frequently has
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a direct impact on this unevenness. Foreign investments respond to the
risk of political instability and prevalence of hostilities. Oil reserves in
Iraq, for example, have been ‘under-exploited’ since the 1980s, with the
uneven effects of increasing current oil prospecting elsewhere (e.g., Gulf
of Guinea) and the stakes of Iraqi oil control in the future (e.g., 2003
USA-led invasion of Iraq). Cambodian forests were either ‘protected’ or
‘destroyed’ between the late 1960s and 1990s according to the various
forms taken by the conﬂicts (e.g., internationally unopposed genocide or
massive USA carpet-bombing). In the early 1990s, on-going but ‘lowintensity’
conﬂict allowed many civilians and ‘self-demobilised’ soldiers to
‘illegally’ access forest resources (Le Billon 2000).As discussed below with
reference to political ecology perspectives, uneven resource entitlements
also reﬂect the antagonising effects of war on social identities, with sectarian
violence in particular reshaping conditions of access and control
over resources.
The second set of contributions drawn from geographical and political
ecology approaches relates to issues of scale. At its most basic, scale relate
to the level of process, empirical observation and analysis (e.g., national
level data versus subnational disaggregation of data). Scale also plays a
central role in interconnecting various places in order to make sense of
‘local’ or ‘global’ patterns of violence and resource ﬂows (Le Billon 2001;
O’Lear and Diehl 2007).As pointed out by O’Lear (2006), studies should
question not only at which location, but also at what scale are conﬂicts
occurring. In this respect, much of the case study literature ‘supporting’
the ‘resource scarcity’ argument has been sensitive to scale, at least in
terms of the processes involved; arguing for example that ‘environmental
scarcity contributes to diffuse, persistent, subnational violence . . . [i]t rarely,
if ever,contributes directly to conﬂict among states’(Homer-Dixon 1999, 179).
Yet, some of the political economy literature, particularly among studies taking
econometric approaches, has overlooked scale, both methodologically and
conceptually (O’Lear and Diehl 2007).
Methodologically, national-level statistics do not always adequately reﬂect
‘local’ realities.At a national scale, Russia produces diamonds and is facing
a civil war. Yet, the production of diamonds in the Sakha Republic,
Siberia, has little to do with the war in Chechnya: Russia is not affected
by a ‘diamond war’.The more literal understanding of the importance of
spatial scale has been recently addressed by locating conﬂicts and resources
more precisely at the subnational level, through spatial analyses using new
subnational data and geographic information systems that allow for a better
speciﬁcation of models used in large N-studies (Buhaug and Lujala 2005).
Two generations of spatial analyses have so far been developed to account
for subnational variations in the location of conﬂicts and resources. The
ﬁrst generation is based on deﬁning a conﬂict centre point and diffusion
radius, limited by national borders (Buhaug and Lujala 2005).The second
generation uses grid cells (100 × 100 km) and allows for a more discrete
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analysis at a meso-scale (Buhaug and Rød 2006). Geographic information
system-based regression analysis can better identify the relative signiﬁcance
of factors by using location speciﬁc meso-scale data.Yet, as demonstrated
by a study of land conﬂict in the Eastern Brazilian Amazon by Simmons
(2004), such analyses have to be complemented by detailed and historically
grounded case studies, including at the micro-scale.
Attention to historical context, identities and power relations has also
drawn on political ecology studies to recognise the chronic and multiscalar
character of many resource-related conﬂicts, rather than simple concepts
of duration and intensiﬁcation. In a study of chronic violence in oil-rich
Nigeria, Watts (2004) argues that violence does not only relates to the
territorial control of oil ﬁelds of the Niger delta, but more broadly results
from the effects of the ‘oil complex’ (conﬁguration of community, state and
ﬁrm) onto community identities; petro-capitalism undermining the project
of secular modern governance through the reshaping of incompatible
community identities, from the indigenous to national scale. Examining
the interplay of identities and civil war in Sri Lanka on access to commonpool
resources, ﬁsheries and water, Korf and Funfgeld (2006, 391) argue that:
The political geographies of war affect access regimes and entitlements to . . .
resources and thereby conﬁne the livelihood opportunities of resource users.
These dynamics of the political economy of war cross different scales and go
beyond simple place-based struggles, for they are rooted in broader spatial dynamics
of warfare creating place–space tensions in the sense that spatial dynamics of
military control impinge changing access regimes upon speciﬁc places.
Relationships between conﬂicts and resource access are of major interest
to political ecology. The question of resource access through violent
means, or for purposes of violence, has motivated research on the spatial
characteristics of commodities, in terms of location, distribution, as well
as mode of control and exploitation (Le Billon 2001; Ross 2003). Often
dubbed ‘a rebel’s best friend’ due to their high ‘lootability’, diamonds have
been subject to detailed geographically informed enquiry into conditions
of control and access to resources and implications for conﬂicts, for example
(Buhaug and Lujala 2005).
The third contribution has consisted in greater attention to the
characteristics and spatiality of resources. Although frequently absent, the
‘ecological’ aspect of political ecology also calls for greater attention to
the materiality of ecological processes and their integration with social
processes, giving way to the concept of ‘socio-nature’ (Swyngedouw 1999).
Focusing on the spatial characteristics of resource control and access,
Le Billon (2001) argues that control can deﬁne resources as ‘proximate’
or ‘distant’, while access can distinguish them as ‘point’ or ‘diffuse’ (Le
Billon 2001). The control of resources results in part from the relative
spatial position of a resource towards the centre(s) of power. Proximate
resources are close to the centre of power (i.e., ﬁrmly under the control of
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the government, whether due to a physical spatial relationship or socially
constructed one) and are less likely to be captured by rebels than those
close to a border region inhabited by a group lacking ofﬁcial political
representation. Distant resources are located in remote territories along
porous borders, or within the territory of social groups politically
marginalised or in opposition to the extant regime (i.e., under tenuous or
controversial control of the government).These criteria are thus not only
deﬁned by their ‘physical’ locational attributes, but also by their broader
political geography relating to socially constructed space.
The access to resource resources results in large part from the spatial
spread of resource production areas and mode of exploitation and control
(see also Auty 2001). Resources are more easily accessed by insurgent
movements if they are spread over a large area and produced by a
larger number of ﬁrms, rather than if they are spread over a small area
and produced by a very small number of ﬁrms that can be more easily
defended. Point resources are spatially concentrated in small areas and socioeconomically
concentrated through technological means or corporate
structures.They include mainly resources that can be exploited by capitalintensive
extractive industries, such as deep-shaft mining or oil exploitation,
which generally employ a small workforce and can be spatially concentrated
as in the case of off-shore oil platforms. Diffuse resources are spatially
spread over vast areas and access to their revenue is socio-economically
dispersed. They are often exploited by less capital-intensive industries
than point resources and include, for example, alluvial gems and minerals,
timber, agricultural products and ﬁsh, but also on-shore oil wells and
facilities. Other resource characteristics have also been examined in relation
to conﬂicts. Ross (2003) underlines the importance of legality (e.g.,
narcotics versus legal cash crops), transportability (e.g., weight/volume
ratio) and ‘obstruct ability’ (e.g., surface on-shore pipelines are more
vulnerable to attacks and ‘obstruction’ than off-shore or deep-buried
pipelines and are thus more likely to result in extortion schemes).These,
in turn, also inform control and access of resources.
Based on the four main categories outlined above, different types of
resources are more likely to be associated with different types of conﬂicts
(Le Billon 2001, see Table 2). The argument is not that oil, for example,
Table 2. Relation between resource characteristics and conﬂict types.
Characteristics Point Diffuse
Proximate Coup d’état Mass rebellion
Congo-Brazzaville (1997, oil) El Salvador (1980s, coffee)
Distant Secession Warlordism
Angola/Cabinda
(1960s-ongoing, oil)
Afghanistan
(1979-ongoing, opium)
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should ‘deterministically’ be associated with conﬂicts taking the form of
secession if oil is located in politically marginalised areas, chronic civil
unrest and warlordism if oil is on-shore, or a coup d’état if oil is off-shore;
but that the characteristics of resource sectors provide a context for political
mobilisation, as well as for the motivations, strategies and capabilities of
belligerents. If the characteristics of a resource inﬂuence the motives of
conﬂicts and balance of opportunities between opposing parties, complicity
between members of supposedly opposing groups, corruption and
involvement of government ofﬁcials or agencies in the illegal economy
are frequently blurring the boundaries of these categories.
To take an example,a point resource distant from the centre of power should
be more likely to be associated with armed secession. Point resources, such
as oil, are less likely to generate direct revenue access for local populations
than diffuse resources through local participation in resource exploitation.
Access to resource revenues thus depends on the ‘goodwill’ of the central
government, or the inﬂuence that local elites can exert on the central
government. In contrast, local populations are more likely to bear the
costs of exploitation, such as pollution and restriction in access to land.
Political marginalisation of local populations in production areas effectively
makes point resource ‘distant’ from the centre. So-called ‘sons and daughters
of the soil’ are thus more likely to be mobilised to challenge the government
through a secessionist struggle, rather than through warlordism (resource
revenues being harder to access without the control of sovereign rights)
or a coup d’état (the central state being able to afford its security
through point resource rents). Moreover, point resources tend to have a
low local employment rate with little scope to set in motion class-based
mass rebellion or ‘peasant wars’.This is not to argue that oil deposits will
automatically transform local people into armed secessionists. Yet, when
unable or unwilling to secure the control of resources through the existing
centre of power, political movements in resource production areas have an
interest in asserting secessionist sovereign claims over the lucrative periphery
they claim as theirs. No less than ten secessionist movements were active
in regions with large point resource endowments in the 1990s (Le Billon
2005b; see also Hoefﬂer and Collier 2006).
Most secession or decolonisation attempts have a pre-existing historical
basis, yet these movements have often been reinforced by the socioeconomic
and political transformations affecting resource rich regions and
by the resource stake, not to mention immediate ﬁnancial opportunities.
Most recently, the presence of large oil reserves around Kirkuk in northern
Iraq (or southern Kurdistan) signiﬁcantly heightened the stakes
around the creation of an autonomous Kurdish state in the region during
the invasion of Iraq by USA-led forces. It was clear for the Turkish
government that large oil revenues falling under Kurdish control would
constitute a threat to the territorial and political integrity of Turkey
(Peimani 2002). Because of the current reluctance of the international
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community to reshape international borders under the United Nations
Charter, nationalist claims need to be backed by historical sovereign
rights. Such formal rights for Iraqi Kurds have long been rejected by
Turkey and Western powers, even though southern Kurdistan has been a
quasi-independent country since 1991. In contrast, sovereign rights
afforded East Timor the opportunity to regain its independence from
Indonesia in 1999. Ironically, this was made possible by Australia’s military
intervention, one of the few countries that had ofﬁcially recognised
Indonesia’s illegal sovereignty over East Timor, in part to obtain a (more
favourable) settlement of territorial claims over petroleum resources in the
Timor Sea (Dubois 2000).
Beyond the likely type of conﬂict, this approach has also informed the
debate on the role of resource sectors in the duration of conﬂicts. Continued
access to resource revenues should also prolong conﬂicts, an effect
empirically supported for ‘contraband goods’ such as alluvial diamonds
and narcotics, but not for oil. Arguably oil revenues are more likely to be
accessible and concentrated by the government than by rebel groups,
although this depends in part on the accessibility of oil infrastructures and
‘racketeering’ opportunities. Empirical testing of some of these hypotheses
through quantitative studies suggest that long-standing rebellions tend to
be associated with diffuse and distant resources (‘contraband goods’ in
Fearon 2004; alluvial or secondary diamonds in Lujala et al. 2005), and
separatist conﬂicts with nonfuel mineral revenues (point resources, with
the possible exception of alluvial diamonds, see Ross 2006).
The fourth contribution has been recognition of a broader range of
violence than geopolitical and political perspectives. Peluso and Watts
(2001, 5) call not only for understanding conﬂicts as ‘glocaly’ contextualised
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 (1990) notions of physical, cultural
and structural violence, or multiscalar forms of social, economic and
political violence (McIlwaine 1999).As noted above, the form of violence
recognised by quantitative studies deﬁnes the spatiality and temporality of
armed conﬂicts studied (i.e., armed conﬂicts are not accounted for when
less than 25 people die per year directly from a battle engaging the state
against at least one recognised armed group). This can overlook, for
example, long histories of single-sided ‘repressive’ violence by the state,
or protract high levels of ‘criminal’ violence in the postconﬂict period
(Pearce 1998).
Political ecology perspectives have also contributed to the theorisation
of resource access and control in relation to conﬂicts and various forms
of violence (Peluso 1994). Deﬁning access as ‘the ability to derive beneﬁts’
using all possible means, Ribot and Peluso (2003, 173) argue that a ‘bundle
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of powers’ shape access to resource beneﬁts, not only a ‘bundle of [property]
rights’. They distinguish in turn among gaining, controlling and
maintaining access to resources, and the power relations that these entail.
Building on this work, control can be deﬁned as the ability to enforce
the rights to beneﬁt from resources, using all possible means including
various forms of violence (on the violence of property rights, see Blomley
2003). Historical analysis, in-depth interviews of individual or communal
perceptions of violence, anthropological methodological approaches and
gender-sensitive analyses can address these gaps and help to explain what
constitutes violence in relation to resources, and how resources in turn
relate to violence. Studies of opium production in Afghanistan, for example,
demonstrate the dual standards of the USA in relation to narcotics
production, as well as various dimensions through which opium relates to
the ﬁnancing of war crimes, peasant coping strategies and legally criminal
yet socially accepted ‘shadow’ economies (Goodhand 2005).
Fifth, political ecology perspectives are also attentive to the construction
of resources and their social connections with violence.This implies
analyses of commodiﬁcation (i.e., how ‘things’ become resources or
commodities deﬁned by their exchange value) and fetishisation (i.e., how
imaginative aspects of resource production and consumption affect power
relations). Political ecology perspectives have made use of commodity
chain analysis to bridge site-speciﬁcity and multiscalar interconnections
between resources and wars. At its most basic, this approach ‘follows’
resources from their point of production to their point of consumption
(and ‘disposal’). In doing so, 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. Commodity chain analysis can help identify the links
between different scales of resource production, transformation, circulation
and consumption (for examples, see Hartwick 1998 on gold; Le Billon
2000 on timber). Commodity chain analyses of ‘everyday’ commodities,
such as coffee, can reveal the structural violence at play in highly unequal
power relations (Smith 1996; Talbot 2002). It also helps to identify
responsibilities, regulatory spaces (and absence thereof), and il/licit (i.e.,
socially unacceptable) and il/legal (i.e., legally banned) social practices
(van Schendel and Abraham 2005).
Human rights organisations, such as Global Witness as well as ‘expert
panels’ from the United Nations on economic sanctions, 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
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direct consequences capturing the interest of the media and recasting
them within much broader processes of global commodity circulation and
consumption (Hartwick 1998; Le Billon 2006). Scale here intervenes as
both an analytical concept bridging the local and the global, as well as an
interpretive framework. The different forms of violence relating to
resources are better understood through the scales that resources link and
(re)produce. For example, scales entail a hierarchical power relation
between global demand (and global ﬁrms promoting it) and local sites of
supply. In turn, these hierarchical relations are matched by different forms
of violence, from the structural violence of mass consumption in retail
spaces to physical violence on the body of workers and ecosystems in
production sites. Human rights and environmental advocacy campaigns
have stressed the need for fair trade along such lines. In the case of
diamonds, multiscalar analysis has succeeded in demonstrating the structural
(e.g., inequity), cultural (e.g., racism) and physical (e.g., amputations)
forms of violence involved in the diamond sector (Le Billon 2006).
Commodity chain analyses are frequently used to examine commodiﬁcation
and its links with violence. Vertical commodity chain analyses
identify actors and processes directly involved in the successive transformation
of ‘nature’ into consumed resources. As vertical analyses follow
resources from the ﬁelds to the dumps, they seek to explain power relations
and various forms of violence along the chain, often with ethical
purposes in mind such as pointing to responsibilities hidden by distant or
publicly undisclosed connections. Horizontal analyses seek to deepen the
understanding of particular links or nodes along the commodity chain, by
studying their broader context and indirect relations (Leslie and Reimer
1999). In this way, individuals involved in mining ‘conﬂict diamonds’, for
example, are not understood simply as ‘greedy thugs’ proﬁting from war,
but as individuals and communities making choices in part dictated by
prevalent conditions of destitution and repression (de Boeck 1999).
Defetishisation is a second major approach to examining the social
construction of resources and their connections to violence.The ‘conﬂict
diamond’ campaign successfully reconnected ‘violent’ spaces of diamond
exploitation and ‘peaceful’ spaces of jewellery consumption by exposing
diamond-trading practices and deceitful diamond-marketing strategies,
and it demonstrated that many diamonds were ‘tainted’ by hatred and
grave human rights abuses. Such ‘defetishising’ of diamonds as constructed
objects of love and purity captured the attention of the media and
forced the diamond industry to accept signiﬁcant trade reforms
through the Kimberley Process Certiﬁcation Scheme against ‘conﬂict
diamonds’. Mobilising such powerful terms as ‘war’, ‘blood’ or ‘terror’ in
consumption politics can thus prove highly rewarding for advocacy campaigns
and media coverage.Yet, it may also be ambivalent in terms of their
effects on producers, consumers and the advocacy campaigns themselves.
The inclusion of racialised images of Africa in the reporting of ‘diamond
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wars’, for example, arguably burnished the ‘reputable’ character of Western
industrialised mining interests at the expense of their historical
accountability, while associating terror with artisanal diamond miners in
Africa (Le Billon 2006).
As illustrated by some narratives of ‘conﬂict diamonds’ and as more
generally argued by Castree (2001), defetishisation narratives are often
narrow and essentialise the localities and social relations constitutive of
these commodities, such as ‘places of origin’. When ‘unveiling’ the nasty
aspects of resource production and consumption for the sake of ‘getting
the message across to the public’, defetishising narratives may underplay
the positive sides of production and consumption and use images that are
themselves tainted by prejudice. Informing consumers of unethical practices
in a market full of ‘smoke and mirrors’ is ethically necessary, but such
exercise can occasionally prove counterproductive if it mostly (re)produces
prejudiced imaginative geographies and agendas (Bridge 2001; Cook and
Crang 1996). Arguably, this risk may be increased as advocacy campaigns
against ‘conﬂict resources’ rely on distant perceptions of problems and
people, co-depend on the mass-media to build seductive storylines, and
outbid each other in caricaturing situations to attract maximum attention
and public support (Freidberg 2004).
5 Conclusion
Reviewing perspectives on ‘resource wars’ is a precarious exercise. The
term itself is conceptually ‘reductionist’, especially so when arguments
exclusively relate conﬂicts to resources and take a narrow understanding
of resources focused on their exchange or use value and their physical
location. Conﬂicting perspectives have also pitted theoretical and
methodological approaches against each other. Early studies selecting
resources as ‘proxy’ variables for social processes have been criticised
for their (de)politicising effects, particularly when emphasising the
immediate ﬁnancial aspects of resource ‘looting’ at the expense of other
dimensions. ‘Resource war’ narratives have also been characterised by a
high degree of essentialism, especially with regard to the decontextualisation
and ﬁnger pointing of ‘greed-driven thugs looting resources’ frequently
reported in the public media. As a result, broader contexts, scales and
interconnections have often been overlooked. As Dalby (2002) urges,
research on resource-related conﬂicts should be self-reﬂective and clearly
question whose ‘security’ interests are actually served by the perspective
and methodologies adopted. Although academic research often lagged
behind advocacy-oriented research, academic perspectives on ‘resource wars’
continue to bear a responsibility on policy processes and the interpretation
of conﬂicts.
Engagement between different perspectives has contributed to novel
approaches to the signiﬁcance of resources for conﬂict risk, duration and
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resolution. Mainstream geopolitical perspectives 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 among ﬁrms, communities and authorities.
Studies from political economy perspectives have strived for precision
in the study of mechanisms-linking resources and conﬂicts and for
methodological rigueur within a mostly quantitative template, allowing
for some more detailed comparative case 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 hypothesised. 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.
Political ecology perspectives have emphasised 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 perspective could yield yet further
insights on so-called ‘resource wars’ and serve broad objectives of social
and environmental justice.
Note
* Correspondence address: Philippe Le Billon, Department of Geography, University of British
Columbia, 1984 West Mall,Vancouver, BC,V6T 1Z2, Canada. E-mail: lebillon@geog.ubc.ca.
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