217
11
philippe le billon
The Geography of
“Resource Wars”
Competition over natural resources has ﬁgured prominently among explanations
of armed conﬂicts, from Malthusian fears of population growth and land scarcity
to national security interests over resources deﬁned as “strategic” because of their
industrial or military use, such as oil and uranium.1
Access to natural resources
and the transformation of nature into tradable commodities are deeply political
processes, in which military force can play a role of domination or resistance.
Armed separatism within Indonesia and Nigeria, annexation attempts on Kuwait
and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, protracted civil wars in Angola and
the Philippines, and coups d’e´tat in Iran and Venezuela have all incorporated
important resource dimensions. Arguably, the radical Islamic terrorism that has
affected the United States since the early 1990s is to some extent an oil-related
“blowback”: U.S. military deployment in Saudi Arabia, criticisms against the corruption
of the Gulf regimes, and ironically, part of the funding made available to
terrorist groups.
This chapter examines relations between resources and armed conﬂicts, with
a focus on commodities legally traded on international markets (thereby excluding
drugs, as well as water and land involved, for example, in the Israeli-Palestinian
conﬂict) and on extracted resources such as oil, minerals, and timber, in particular.
Beyond a simple reading of so-called resource wars as violent modes of competitive
behavior, this chapter argues that resource exploitation and the resource dependence
of many producing countries play a role in shaping incentives and opportunities
of uneven development, misgovernance, coercive rule, insurrection, and
foreign interference. This relationship, however, is not systematic: history, political
culture, institutions, and regional neighborhoods, as well as a country’s place in
the international economy, all play a part these relations. The incorporation of
resources into an armed conﬂict has also speciﬁc implications upon its course
through their inﬂuence on the motivations, strategies, and capabilities of belligerents.
Military targets often consist of commercial business opportunities rather
than political targets, while the cost of engaging adversaries may be calculated in
218 Geographies of War
terms of ﬁnancial reward. The following sections explore the contending views
about resources and conﬂicts, the role of resource dependence among the causes
of intra-state and international conﬂicts, and the ways in which natural resource
exploitation interplays with the course of conﬂicts.2
Resource Wars Hypotheses
As noted by Peter Gleick, natural resources “have been used in the past, and will
be used in the future, as tools or targets of war and as strategic goals to be fought
for.”3
There is much debate, however, on the links between natural resources,
conﬂicts, and violence.
Strategic thinking about resources has been dominated by an equation that
links trade, war, and power, at the core of which are valuable overseas resources
and maritime navigation. During the mercantilist period of the ﬁfteenth century,
trade and war became intimately linked. Naval powers sought to accumulate
“world riches,” mostly in the form of precious metals, upon which much of the
balance of power was perceived to be based on.4
Money was the “sinew of war,”
and for political philosopher Raymond Aron, paraphrasing Carl von Clausewitz,
commerce had reciprocally become “the continuation of war by other means.”5
Since sea power itself rested on access to timber, the supply of this resource became
a preoccupation for major European powers from the seventeenth century
onward that motivated overseas alliances, trade, and indeed empire building. England
in particular pursued a policy of open seas at all costs that led to several
armed interventions in the Baltic.
With growing industrialization and increasing dependence on imported materials
during the nineteenth century, Western powers intensiﬁed their control over
raw materials. This, along with many other factors such as political ideologies and
prestige, eventually led to an imperialist scramble over much of the rest of the
world. Late imperial initiatives also inﬂuenced the Prussian strategy of consolidating
economic self-sufﬁciency by securing access to resources provided by a “vital
space,” or Lebensraum, while the potential role of railways to allow land-based
transcontinental control of resources threatened maritime-based power and motivated
the idea of containment of the “Heartland” powers advocated by Halford
Mackinder at the turn of the twentieth century.6
The signiﬁcance of imported
resources, in particular, oil, during World War I reinforced the idea of resource
vulnerability, which was again conﬁrmed during World War II. Strategic thinking
about resources during the Cold War continued to focus on the vulnerability of
rising resource supply dependence and to consider the potential for international
conﬂicts that resulted from competition over access to key resources.7
Political scientist Michael Klare notes the growth of mass consumerism and
the economization of international affairs in the 1990s and identiﬁes “resource
wars” as revolving “to a signiﬁcant degree, over the pursuit or possession of critical
materials,” with the combination of population and economic growth leading to
a relentless expansion in the demand for raw materials, expected resource shortages,
and contested resource ownership.8
Asia’s growing mass consumerism and
energy demand are of speciﬁc concern with regard to the Persian Gulf, the Cas-
The Geography of “Resource Wars” 219
pian region, and the South China Sea. If market forces and technological progress
can mitigate some of these problems, Klare remains essentially pessimistic, given
the readiness of countries that claim resources or import them, especially the
United States, to secure their access to resources through military force, as well
as the political instability of many producing regions.
Long ignored by such strategic thinking about resources and security that
focuses on the global scale, new hypotheses have focused since the 1970s on the
threat of rapid environmental degradation and its effect on local societies and have
led to a redeﬁnition of national security.9
This concept of “environmental security”
came about to reﬂect ideas of global interdependence, illustrated through the
debates on global warming, environmental limits to growth, and links to uncontrolled
migrations and political instability that could affect both the South and the
North.10
Along with “human security,” this concept also emphasized the security
interests of individuals rather than states, especially among the poor in developing
countries.11
The “green war” hypothesis associated with the discourse of environmental
security argues that a scarcity of mostly renewable resources, such as land,
water, or forests, constitutes an underlying stress that contributes to interpersonal
or intercommunal violence that possibly escalates into civil wars.12
As demand
grows and depletes environmental resources, resource capture by dominant groups,
combined with population pressure, and social frictions increase and lead to weakened
institutions, social segmentation, and, ultimately, violent conﬂicts.13
In
Rwanda, rising domestic and interpersonal violence exacerbated by growing population,
pervasive land conﬂicts, growing inequalities, and the threat of landlessness
has been linked to the civil war and genocide in 1994.14
Most analyses give particular attention to the history of local environmental
conditions and social institutions that allocate resource access while emphasizing
the signiﬁcance of land policy shifts. The long-term crisis of subsistence agriculture
in the Peruvian highlands that resulted from the displacement of Indian people
to marginal lands during the colonial period, aggravated by population growth and
by ineffective land reforms in the 1970s, played a large part in the Sendero Luminoso
insurrection.15
Similarly, in Somalia, tensions over limited riverside agricultural
lands that were aggravated by the manipulation of land legislation by Siyad
Barre as a strategy to consolidate his regime are identiﬁed as being among the
major underlying social dynamics in the factional wars that devastated southern
Somalia during the 1990s.16
While there is convincing evidence about environmental marginalization,
grievances, and popular forms of resistance, including violence, some arguments
counter the green war hypothesis. Market and solidarity mechanisms can to some
extent counterbalance localized scarcities as well as motivate and facilitate innovations
and shifts in resources and livelihoods. In this regard, resource scarcity and
population pressure can result in socioeconomic innovation, including a diversiﬁcation
of the economy, which often leads to greater food security and a more
equitable distribution of power across society.17
This argues in favor of the role of
social institutions over deterministic environmental factors. The argument that an
ingenuity gap prevents such mechanisms of adaptation because “scarcities will
often make tolerance, generosity, and cooperation less abundant” is relevant, but
220 Geographies of War
also dangerous in terms of its cultural and institutional generalization.18
Critics
have frequently denounced the underlying neo-Malthusian assumptions and Western
bias of the environmental security agenda and green wars and have stressed
the importance of unequal relations of power within local societies and the global
political economy, especially through transnational extractive companies, as well
as the site speciﬁcity of violence “rooted in local histories and social relations yet
connected to larger processes of material transformation and power relations.”19
As the Cold War receded in the late 1980s and more attention was again
devoted to the internal mechanisms and outcomes of civil wars, the view that
some countries in the South were the victims of environmental degradation gave
way to the argument that a new scramble for resources among local warlords and
regional powers had become prominent.20
According to the “greed war” argument,
rebellion is not a violent form of protest that results from grievances, but a violent
way of generating proﬁts. Rather than being driven by political motives, rebellion
would reﬂect the opportunity of seizing proﬁtable opportunities through large-scale
banditry.21
In this view, wars are driven by greed and the opportunity of looting
abundant and internationally tradable natural resources, rather than by grievances
over scarce resources mostly associated with subsistence livelihoods.
Oil, diamonds, and timber are some of the resources most frequently listed
among the primary commodities that supposedly fuel greed wars.22
Easily taxable,
such resources represent the prize of state or territorial control and would thereby
increase the risk of greed-driven conﬂicts while providing armed groups with the
“loot” necessary to purchase military equipment.23
In Cambodia, Liberia, and the
Philippines, insurgent groups have thrived from the logging of valuable tropical
hardwoods. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the control and exploitation
of natural resources such as diamonds, coltan (columbite-tantalite), gold, and timber
motivate and ﬁnance parties responsible for the continuation of conﬂict.24
Yet given the general absence of foreign state sponsors in most post–Cold War
conﬂicts as well as the frequent lack of popular support for waging war, belligerents
have to rely on commercial or predatory sources of funding that often target available
natural resources. This does not mean that belligerents are systematically
“greedy” and driven by economic agendas, but that they adapt to their new economic
environment. Furthermore, a Western-based interpretation of rebellion in
peripheral regions of the world as greed driven is somewhat revelatory of the fear
of an “anarchic revenge of the poor wanting to get rich,” in line with the nationalization
of local Western assets by many liberation movements in the 1960s and
1970s. Finally, the notions of greed and grievances are culturally dependent, if
generally widespread, and they often coexist as two sides of the same coin: a
relation of exploitation in which the greed of some is the grievance of others.
Therefore, the border between an aggrieved rebel movement and a greedy one is
often blurred as a multiplicity of individual and often ﬂuctuating motivations and
constraints gives it shape and direction.
Quantitative examinations of resource availability and armed conﬂicts conﬁrm
that an abundance of primary commodities resources is correlated with a higher
risk of war, while environmental scarcity mostly relates to low levels of violence.
Economists Paul Collier and Anke Hoefﬂer ﬁnd that large primary commodity
The Geography of “Resource Wars” 221
exporters face a higher risk of outbreak of armed conﬂict.25
This risk is maximal
when the proportion of primary commodity exports reaches 26% percent of gross
domestic product (GDP), with a risk of 23%, compared to 0.5% for a similar
country with no primary commodity exports. The risk then drops, which Collier
interprets as states being rich enough to defend themselves or deter armed opposition.
Many of these states are oil producers in a position to “buy out” social
peace from relatively small populations through populist agendas and the co-option
of political opponents. In terms of conﬂict duration, rather than outbreak, Collier
ﬁnds no correlation with resource dependence, while other scientists and most of
the case-study literature argue that continued access to abundant and valuable
resources prolongs war.26
Examining more generally the availability of resources,
rather than the level of export dependence on primary commodities, political
scientist Indra de Soysa ﬁnds that abundant renewable resources in otherwise poor
countries and nonrenewable resources in all countries increase the likelihood of
armed conﬂict.27
With regard to scarce resource wars, low levels of violence (25–
1,000 battle-related deaths per year) have a positive relation with environmental
degradation.28
Yet a scarcity of renewable resources is not associated with a higher
risk of armed conﬂict.29
Between Resource Curse and Resource Wars
The diversity of cases among resource-rich and resource-poor countries argues
against any systematic determinism of “too much” or “too little” resources on the
occurrence of armed conﬂicts. If resource dependence, rather than resource
wealth or paucity, links resources to war, Collier’s identiﬁcation of primary commodity
dependence as “the most powerful risk factor” of civil war nevertheless
requires questioning. The economic and political culture, institutional environment,
and individual personalities that create and manage resources, both locally
and internationally, are essential factors, but is there a generalized “resource curse”
beyond speciﬁc contexts? Contemporary resource-linked conﬂicts are furthermore
rooted in the violent history of resource extraction successively marked by mercantilism,
colonial capitalism, and state kleptocracy, whether these resources are
slaves, rubber, agricultural land, or oil. But are resource sectors speciﬁcally more
conﬂictual and violent than others, and if so, in which ways? Moreover, resources
present speciﬁc contexts and opportunities to belligerents through their different
physical characteristics, locations, and modes of production, so how do different
resources interplay with conﬂicts?
An alternative framework of analysis of so-called resource wars should be sensitive
to the historical processes and natural resource endowments that create a
situation of resource dependence for some countries, and to their associated economic
and political vulnerabilities. Resource dependence often reﬂects a mutual,
if unequal, relationship between supply and demand within the world economy.
At an international scale, commodity linkages between producers and consumers
can reﬂect a dual dependence, as in the case of petroleum: many oil-exportdependent
countries accrue in this way most of their foreign currency earnings,
while most other countries are oil import dependent for their energy require-
222 Geographies of War
ments.30
The concentration of supply or demand into the hands of a few countries
or companies also inﬂuences the degree of dependence. For example, the production
and marketing of rough diamonds is largely controlled by a cartel of
producers and buyers dominated by the South African company De Beers, which
was initially founded by the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes. The dependence
created by De Beers has long consolidated its controlling power over mining
towns, regional politics, or world diamond prices.31
The ﬂow of resources articulated
by such dependence is part and parcel of broader core-periphery exploitative
relationships and situations of dependence in peripheral producing countries.32
Resource dependence has important political and economic consequences
because it creates place-speciﬁc politics and inﬂuences the development path of
producing regions.33
Overall, the dominance of primary commodity exports in an
economy is largely correlated with poor economic growth, low standards of living,
corruption, and a dampening of democracy, all factors that are likely to raise
grievances and the vulnerability of a country to insurrection or violent political
competition.34
As noted by political economist Michael Moore, many poor and
conﬂict-affected states “live to a high degree on ‘unearned income’—mainly mineral
resources and development aid—and correspondingly face limited incentives
to bargain with their own citizens over resources or to institute or respect democratic
processes around public revenue and expenditure.”35
Essentially relying on
resource-dependent clientelist networks, these states and their rulers are particularly
vulnerable to economic shocks, such as resource price falls, or political shifts,
such as democratization.36
While resource rents occasionally allowed some Third
World rulers to maintain a relative political stability—if not through democracy—
increasing pressure from declining resource export revenues, as well as terms of
trade, structural adjustment, and pressure for democratization from international
donors and the frustration of a growing youth population, has led to an aggravation
of political instability.37
In this context, even the “stable autocracies” based on
resource export revenues face “politics of failure,” that is, a pattern of political
instability that results from the failure of successive governments to construct a
viable support base for themselves, given the position of the country in the world
economy, and leads to systematic disenchantment, opposition, and political turnover
through electoral and/or military means.38
In such contexts, the “politics of
failure” that characterized many Third World regimes often turned into “spoils
politics” that concentrated on proﬁtable remaining economic sectors, such as valuable
minerals and timber that require minimal investments.
A framework that analyzes resource wars should also pay attention to the
conditions of resource exploitation and its associated conﬂicts and forms of violence.
Distributional conﬂicts frequently arise that relate to the ownership of natural
resources and the allocation of the revenues and negative externalities they
generate among the state, businesses, and local communities. These conﬂicts can
be most easily read within a grid of public versus private control and local communities
versus central state. Yet these categories frequently oversimplify, because
many public ﬁgures control private interests and “local community” leaders defend
very narrow interests. An analysis of conﬂicts must therefore be sensitive to local
contexts and histories, as well as cultural values and social practices.
The Geography of “Resource Wars” 223
For example, on Bougainville Island in November 1989, a local landowner,
Francis Ona, walked out of an environmental assessment meeting at the huge
copper and gold Panguna mine that had provided nearly half of Papua New
Guinea’s export earnings during the preceding twenty years. Mining consultants
had just rejected demands for compensation for chemical pollution by his local
community on grounds of insufﬁcient scientiﬁc evidence. With no other weapons
than explosives stolen from the mining company, Ona and other militant landowners
blew up within days several electric poles at the mine site and boldly
demand $11 billion in environmental compensation payments, the closure of the
mine, and secession from Papua New Guinea.39
Initially dismissed, their actions
led to the rapid closure of the mine. Repression and a blockade by the government
turned the conﬂict into a war in which possibly more than 10,000 people died
during the next decade.
Besides distributional issues, other potential sources of conﬂict that directly
or indirectly result from resource exploitation include loss of local livelihoods due
to land-use changes, pollution, or forced displacement, as well as reallocation of
employment opportunities and participation in resource management. The
changes of social status, order, and values within communities that result from
new economic opportunities and social activities, including ostentatious consumption
by privileged groups, exacerbate social fault lines. Migration driven by resource
development and rapid urbanization often overstretches local services and
economic opportunities and can also lead to tensions among and between newcomers
and the native population. Abuses by security forces, including forced
displacement and heavy-handed law enforcement, can also be a major source of
grievance and violent escalation of conﬂicts.
Resource exploitation frequently involves speciﬁc forms of personal/physical
and structural violence, such as resource appropriation, price manipulation, forced
labor, or population displacement, as well as a militarization of both legal and
illegal exploitation schemes. The production of spaces of power and spaces of
resistance in relation to resource exploitation comes to deﬁne through material
and representational practices geographies of violence within and beyond exploitation
sites.40
Although large-scale armed rebellion is generally the exception in
comparison to other social projects, such as accommodation, low-level forms of
resistance such as pilfering, or peaceful expressions of grievances such as demonstrations
and land occupation, such geographies of violence form the background
upon which armed conﬂict may become a viable and even “justiﬁable”
alternative.41
In Chiapas, self-defense groups and the Zapatista movement staged a relatively
peaceful armed rebellion to respond to an entrenched local political economy of
dispossession and neglect toward indigenous communities, to challenge the
“global neoliberal order” that supported it, and to attract the attention of the government
and the media as a means of improving their bargaining position.42
In
that case, limited violence was the tool of political leverage and expression rather
than a direct mode of reappropriation. The much publicized conﬂicts over oil
exploitation in the Niger Delta embrace such issues as pollution from oil spills
and ﬂaring, lack of local employment opportunities and public services, forced
224 Geographies of War
displacement, and ﬁre and explosion hazards, as well as brutal repression. Used
as a justiﬁcation for political and armed resistance as well as economically motivated
crimes, these environmental or social issues have fed a speciﬁc form of
“petroviolence” that ranges from the social violence of corruption, repression, and
criminality to the ecological violence perpetrated against the environment and its
users.43
The closure of project sites also increases the risk of conﬂict by, among
other factors, raising unemployment and thickening migration ﬂows. A ﬁnal aspect
of the framework, examined in the following section, should consider how the
geography of resources and their exploitation comes to inﬂuence the course of
these wars.44
Nature, Resources, and the Geography of War
Belligerents tend to use whatever means are accessible to them to ﬁnance or proﬁt
from war. Yet the speciﬁc characteristics and geography of a resource can provide
a context that affects a conﬂict. During the forty years of conﬂicts in Angola, the
National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) armed movement
used sources of ﬁnance as diverse as foreign support from China and many
Western-aligned countries, international investments, gold, timber, wildlife, and
diamonds. In the post–Cold War context, however, the geography of oil and diamonds
came to dominate the economy of the rebel group and that of the govern-
ment.45
While the government in Luanda beneﬁted from quasi-exclusive access to
oil ﬁelds that were located offshore and thereby protected from rebel attacks, UNITA
maintained throughout the war a capacity to access diamond ﬁelds spread
over a vast territory that proved difﬁcult to fully control by the government. Similarly,
trading networks for oil were only accessible to the recognized government
in Luanda, while UNITA beneﬁted from access to a myriad of diamond smugglers,
traders, and jewelers who channeled diamonds from battleﬁelds to shopping
malls. As a result of this territorialization of their respective war economies and
networks that linked places of resource extraction to those of consumption, both
sides beneﬁted from a constant ﬂow of revenue during the twenty-six-year civil war
that devastated Angola and brought about the death of more than half a million
people.
Natural resources are particularly prominent in war economies, not only because
they are often the only economic resource in poor countries where most
wars take place, but also because their ﬁxed location, frequently in remote areas,
makes them susceptible to looting or extortion, and the infrastructures often
needed to tax, exploit, or trade them are often minimal. Unlike manufacturing
and, to some extent, agriculture, extractive activities cannot be relocated. Confronted
by war, extractive companies may decide not to invest or to disengage from
their current operations, but they generally seek to sustain their access to resources
and protect their investments by paying whoever is in power amounts that range
from a few dollars to allow a truck past a checkpoint to multimillion-dollar concessions,
with signature bonuses or resource-collateralized loans paid in advance
of exploitation, to belligerents. Furthermore, resource exploitation can often be
sustained throughout a conﬂict, either through the military protection of infrastruc-
The Geography of “Resource Wars” 225
table 11.1 Resource accessibility by rebel forces
Resource
Accessibility by rebel forces
Exploitation Theft Extortion
Price range
($/Kg)a
Alluvial gems and minerals High High High 20–500,000
Timber Medium Medium High 0.1
Agricultural commodities Medium Medium Medium 1.5 (coffee)
On-shore oil Low Medium High 0.12
Diamonds in volcanic pipes Low Medium Medium 500,000
Deep-shaft industrial metals Low Low Medium 2 (copper)
Offshore oil Low Low Low 0.12
a
Approximate price in producing country during the 1990s.
Source: Adapted from Richard Auty, “Natural Resources and Civil Strife: A Two-Stage Process,” Geopolitics 9 (2004):
29–49; and interview with Gavin Hayman, Global Witness, London, June 2002.
ture or because low-investment means prove commercially viable. Investors are
unlikely to rush to rebuild a multimillion-dollar mining venture after its destruction,
but small-scale entrepreneurs and junior companies are more likely to accept
risks to access timber and high-value alluvial minerals that can be extracted with
minimal outlays and traded without the need for massive transport capacities.
Although a resource-rich environment is generally propitious for ﬁnancing
rebellion, opportunities for government or rebel groups to access resource revenues
will also depend upon several other factors. These include the ability to secure
resource sites, which is often jeopardized by underpaid and poorly disciplined
government security forces, as well as a high level of armed banditry and criminality
associated with marginalization; the speciﬁc location and mode of exploitation
of resources, which determine the accessibility of resources through production,
theft, or extortion; the physical and market characteristics of resources,
which help determine the accessibility of markets for belligerents; and the practices
and complicity of businesses, which will determine the ease with which belligerents
can control resources. The properties and geography of resources are particularly
signiﬁcant (see Table 11.1). Required investment, technological demands for
exploitation, and price/weight ratio determine what opportunities are available to
rebel forces. Trading facilities, such as trucking and international ﬁnancial networks,
also inﬂuence the accessibility of many commodities. In areas like central
Africa, the degradation of transport infrastructures has limited economically advantageous
exploitation to the most valuable and transportable resources, mainly
precious and semiprecious minerals.
Resources can be further distinguished in terms of their proximity to the center
of power, in both spatial and political terms. Proximate resources are close to
the center of power and are less likely to be captured by rebels than those close
to a border inhabited by a group that lacks ofﬁcial political representation. Distant
resources are located in remote territories along porous borders or within the territory
of social groups that are politically marginalized or in opposition to the extant
regime. Oil resources, while usually far from a capital, nevertheless tend to be
226 Geographies of War
closely safeguarded by the state and difﬁcult to appropriate or loot on a massive
scale by opposition forces since companies will only deal with the recognized
government. Still, onshore installations, and especially pipelines, remain highly
susceptible to extortion schemes. Resources are more accessible to rebel groups if
they are highly valuable, easily transported, and spread over a large territory rather
than a smaller area that can be more easily defended. Rebel access also depends
on the degree of centralization and mechanization of production.
A broad distinction can also be made as to the nature and concentration of
the resource in terms of physical characteristics, spatial spread, and socioeconomic
linkages between diffuse and point resources.46
Diffuse resources are more widely
spread and include mainly resources exploited over large areas, often by less
capital-intensive industries that can employ a large workforce. These include alluvial
gems and minerals, timber, agricultural products, and ﬁsh. Point resources
are concentrated in small areas and include mainly resources that can be exploited
by capital-intensive extractive industries, such as deep-shaft mining or oil exploitation,
and that generally employ a small workforce.
As sociologist David Keen remarked, economically motivated violence among
rebels will be more likely when the potential rewards are great and when “natural
resources can be exploited with minimal technology and without the need to
control the capital or machinery of the state.”47
Alluvial diamonds perfectly ﬁt this
description and it is therefore not a surprise to see that they have been dubbed a
“guerrilla’s best friend” and that about two-thirds of poor countries that produce
alluvial diamonds have been affected by armed conﬂicts. In Angola, diamond
exploitation provided up to $3 billion in revenue to the UNITA rebel movement
of Jonas Savimbi during the 1990s.48
Similarly, the control of the most proliﬁc
diamond areas of Sierra Leone may have generated hundreds of millions of dollars
for the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebel movement during the same pe-
riod.49
In eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, several rebel factions operate
as intermediaries for the control of the diamonds by Ugandan interests, while the
government has granted the Zimbabwean military some of the best diamond concessions
in return for its support. Small, low in weight, and easily concealable, as
well as anonymous and internationally tradable, alluvial diamonds are not easily
amenable to government control and border-crossing checks. Accordingly, diamonds
also represent a “currency of choice” for money laundering and ﬁnancing
of clandestine activities, including those of Islamic terrorist groups such as al-
Qaeda.50
Like gold, diamonds also serve money-laundering purposes for criminal
activities, including drug cartels. The low-tech exploitation of alluvial diamonds
also facilitates illegal exploitation by networks of diggers, traders, and armed gangs,
as well as colluding civilian and military authorities. Unsurprisingly, such a situation
erodes the sovereignty and effective rule of states. In response, ruling elites
have developed modes of appropriation detached from the legal and institutional
apparatus of the state, often by creating parallel mechanisms of involvement and
control in the private or informal diamonds sector. The RUF movement argued
in its propaganda, “[W]hen a valuable gemstone is found [presidents] jump into
a plane and shoot off to Europe to sell the diamonds trusting no one but them-
selves.”51
The Geography of “Resource Wars” 227
table 11.2 Relation between the characteristics of resources and types of conﬂict
Resource
characteristics Point Diffuse
Proximate State Control/coup d’e´tat
Algeria (gas)
Congo-Brazzaville (oil)
Colombia (oil)
Iraq-Kuwait (oil)
Yemen (oil)
Peasant/mass rebellion
El Salvador (coffee)
Guatemala (cropland)
Mexico-Chiapas (cropland)
Senegal-Mauritania (cropland)
Distant Secession
Angola/Cabinda (oil)
Chechnya (oil)
Indonesia/Aceh–East Timor–West
Papua (oil, copper, gold)
Morocco/Western Sahara (phosphate)
Nigeria/Biafra (oil)
Papua New Guinea/Bougainville (copper)
Sudan (oil)
Warlordism
Afghanistan (gems, timber)
Angola (diamonds)
Burma (timber)
Cambodia (gems, timber)
DR of the Congo (diamonds, gold)
Liberia (timber, diamonds)
Philippines (timber)
Sierra Leone (diamonds)
To some extent, the geography of resources can inﬂuence the type of armed
conﬂict and its viability. The argument is not that conﬂicts in oil-producing countries
can only be secessions or coups d’e´tat because oil is a point resource, but
that resources provide a context for political mobilization as well as the strategy,
tactics, and capabilities of belligerents. In other words, because conﬂicts may need
to respond and adapt to the characteristics of available resources presented earlier
(point versus diffuse resources and proximate versus distant resources), some types
of conﬂicts are more likely than others (see Table 11.2).
Resources and Coups d’E´ tat
Because point resources are generally less lootable than diffuse resources and exploitation
and trade often depend on international political recognition for mobilizing
investors and accessing markets, they are much more accessible to governments
than to rebel movements. In the case of high-investment energy and
mineral sectors, only when staff or infrastructures are vulnerable to attacks, as with
pipelines or railways, can rebels effectively extort them. In the absence of alternative
sources of ﬁnance and a political basis for secession, the best option left to
an armed opposition movement is to capture the state through a coup d’e´tat in
the capital city.
The conﬂicts between competing politicians in the Republic of the Congo
(Brazzaville) in 1993–1994 and 1997, which took place in the context of a botched
democratization, were clearly a contest for state power exacerbated by the control
of an offshore oil sector that represented 85% of export earnings. The fact that
these conﬂicts took the shape of coup attempts in the capital city was in this respect
predictable, and the government of President Pascal Lissouba should have rapidly
228 Geographies of War
won the war through its control of the oil rent and associated military power.
However, the war in 1997 dragged on for ﬁve months before being brought to a
conclusion in favor of former president Denis Nguesso by a regionalization of the
conﬂict through military intervention of the Angolan government. An ally of
Nguesso, the Angolan government was also eager to protect its oil-rich enclave of
neighboring Cabinda, where secessionists, have opposed its rule since independence,
and to prevent the use of the Congo as a trading platform for UNITA
diamonds-for-arms deals. The stalemate in Brazzaville, which destroyed a large
part of the capital and left thousands dead, resulted from several factors. First, a
large part of the army did not engage in the conﬂict, while others supported
Nguesso, their former patron and ethnic afﬁliate. Second, both contenders beneﬁted
from access to the oil rent, as Nguesso was allegedly favoured over Lissouba
by the French oil company that dominated the sector and parallel channels supported
Nguesso’s arms purchases.52
Finally, at the street level, the conﬂict rapidly
changed in nature as the different militias supporting politicians beneﬁted from
the looting of the capital city. Urban youths on all sides used the political conﬂict
to challenge the legitimacy of a corrupt political elite that had dominated and
plundered the country for more than thirty years.53
Looting became known as
“killing the pig” or “taking a share in Nkossa.”54
Resources and Warlordism
Diffuse resources are more easily exploited and marketed than point resources by
illegal groups, especially if they are distant from the center of power. This is
typically the case with alluvial diamonds or forests located along so-called porous
border areas, hence their association with economically viable forms of warlordism.
While rebel movements generally attempt to overthrow the incumbent regime,
the existence of accessible (or “lootable”) diffuse resources distant from the center
of power can provide an economically viable fallback position in case of failure.
Rebel groups thereby create areas of de facto sovereignty imposed through violence
and deﬁned by criminal and commercial opportunities such as mining areas, forests,
or smuggling networks.
In Liberia, Charles Taylor’s bid for power in 1989 ﬁrst targeted the capital,
Monrovia. Although he failed to capture the presidential palace because of the
intervention of international troops, he nevertheless succeeded in establishing his
rule over “Greater Liberia” and took control of lucrative sectors such as timber
and rubber, as well as key infrastructure such as the port of Buchanan, which was
crucial to iron ore exports.55
Taylor did not limit his resource grab to Liberia, but
extended it to neighboring Sierra Leone, where his support for the RUF provided
him with access to diamonds. Similarly, the RUF was able to sustain a guerrilla
war that essentially targeted the civilian population during the 1990s thanks to its
control of diamond-mining areas as well as gold and cash crops. In the Philippines,
the lucrative taxation of logging sustained many insurgent groups and transformed
some from political opposition into self-interested groups.56
The Geography of “Resource Wars” 229
Resources and Secessions
Most secession attempts have a historical basis, but resource wealth offers a strong
incentive for secession to local opposition movements. The location of key oil
deposits among populations politically and economically marginalized by the central
government, as in the case of the Shi’ias and Kurds in southern and northern
Iraq, respectively, can be a powerful factor in domestic and regional politics. To
access point resources that require large-scale investments, and in the absence of
support from the central state, marginalized groups need to acquire sovereign
rights over resources for themselves and are therefore more likely to engage in
secessionism than warlordism or a coup d’e´tat if they are unable or unwilling to
gain control over the existing center of power. Although these valuable resources
can prove difﬁcult, if not impossible, to access through direct exploitation, theft,
or extortion, their existence (or in some cases the “myth of easy riches” that they
would provide to everyone) is a powerful tool for political justiﬁcation and mobilization,
and the prospect of future revenues is an additional source of motiva-
tion.
The economic and social changes associated with the development of Western
Sahara’s important phosphate industry, for example, laid “the basis for the rise of
a modern nationalist movement, setting its sights on the creation of an independent
nation-state.”57
As Saharawis recognized the prospect of an economically viable
or even prosperous country, the simplistic assumption that Morocco aimed
to capture their newfound mineral wealth served to mobilize armed resistance.
Secessionist armed movements can also emerge around the socioenvironmental
impact or wealth redistribution associated with the commercial development of
resources. Secessionism in Aceh is historically rooted in the independent sultanate,
which prevailed until the Dutch militarily defeated it in the late nineteenth century.
Yet the formation of the Aceh Freedom Movement (GAM) coincided with
the exploitation of major gas reserves in the early 1970s, and GAM’s “Declaration
of Independence” in 1976 speciﬁcally claimed that $15 billion in annual revenue
was exclusively used for the beneﬁt of “Javanese neo-colonialists.”58
Land expropriation
and exploitation of other resources such as timber by Javanese-dominated
businesses further exacerbated the conﬂict.
Similarly, the island of Bougainville has a history of separatism based on geographical
and identity distinctiveness. Yet local politicians’ demands for “special
status,” including favorable funding allocations during the period of transition to
independence, clearly centered on the economic signiﬁcance of the island’s gold
and copper mine in Panguna. The secessionist agenda set in 1989 by Francis Ona
was related to the impact of copper mining, compensation, and closure of the
mine, as well as a “Government of Papua New Guinea [that] is not run to safeguard
our lives but rather to safeguard the few rich leaders and white men.”59
Ona,
a former mine surveyor, is a local dweller but not a titleholder of the mining lease
area. As such, he had little say in the allocation of the new trust fund set up in
1980 by the mine to compensate local communities. Although Ona’s agenda “is
most reasonably understood as part of his conﬂict with his own relatives in the
230 Geographies of War
kind of land dispute . . . characteristic of [local] Nasioi culture,” his analysis nevertheless
resonated throughout the local Nasioi community, especially after repression
by governmental forces started.60
Resources and Peasant/Mass Rebellion
Diffuse resources that involve large numbers of producers are more likely to be
associated with rioting in nearby centers of power, such as a provincial or national
capital, and with support for peasant or mass rebellions that involve class or ethnicity
issues. The displacement or exclusion of peasants by agribusinesses and poor
labor conditions on large plantations have prompted political mobilization and the
expansion of revolutionary struggles in Latin America and Southeast Asia. In Nicaragua,
landlessness as well as neglect by the state and exclusion from or marginalization
within local patron-client schemes provided fertile ground for peasant
support for the Sandinista revolution. Yet the creation of state farms by the Sandinista
regime, rather than the rapid provision of individual plots, reinforced the
bonds between some landed patrons and their client peasants and rapidly increased
their support for and participation in the U.S.-sponsored Contra movement.61
In
the context of democratization and an economic downturn precipitated by the fall
of cacao prices and the liquidation of the commodity Stabilization Fund dictated
by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, the migrant labor
issue associated with agriculture was repeatedly used for political gains in Coˆte
D’Ivoire in the late 1990s. Although the media focused on coup attempts in the
capital, migrant workers were also the targets of violence, including forced dis-
placement.
Highly coercive forms of warlordism are less likely to be economically viable
than participatory forms of rebellions because of the need to sustain a large volume
of labor input and the difﬁculty of controlling workers over large areas. Conditions
of slavery and control of labor can be imposed through hostage taking over short
periods, but like most predatory economic activities, these cannot be sustained
over the long term. Over time, to minimize grassroots challenges, the armed faction
is likely to act as a protector toward local populations, even if it does so more
in the sense of a Maﬁa group than a welfare state. The Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC), for instance, provides protection to peasants on land
holdings and guarantees minimum prices for both coca and agricultural prod-
ucts.62
While there has recently been a drift toward more criminal activities,
FARC’s maintenance of a balance of threats and economic incentives to sustain
peasant productiveness has been key to the viability of the revolutionary movement
since its inception in the 1950s. Similarly, the expansion of the New People’s Army
(NPA) in the Philippines in the 1970s and 1980s largely came from a symbiotic
relation with a peasant population whose subsistence agriculture was threatened
by agribusinesses, logging companies, and hydropower projects. The NPA provided
an alternative to the regime of Ferdinand Marcos that had lost all legitimacy and
even presence among rural communities. Yet both the FARC and the NPA secured
most of their support and funding from taxation and extortion schemes that
The Geography of “Resource Wars” 231
were related to drug trafﬁcking and cattle ranches, and plantations, logging, and
mining, respectively.
Resources and Foreign Interventions
Resources and foreign interventions occur in all types of armed conﬂicts detailed
earlier and often involve indirect control over “strategic resources” such as oil or
major mineral deposits and the protection of major commercial and strategic interests.
The oil production of countries in the Persian Gulf is crucial to the international
economy, and international and regional politics have been heavily
inﬂuenced by questions of access to and control of this “black gold.” This has
been especially true of U.S. and British inﬂuence in the region, and although the
“invasion” or “liberation” of Iraq by these two countries in 2003 should not be
read through the simplistic perspective of a war for oil, regional petroleum resources
represent a key motivating factor in terms of economic and national se-
curity.63
Iraq contains the second-largest proven oil reserves in the world after Saudi
Arabia, and among the cheapest to exploit, while its economic wealth could make
it a potentially powerful enemy sheltered from the usual U.S. inﬂuence exercised
through ﬁnancial leverage via aid or market access or through international institutions
such as the IMF. Similarly, the tacit U.S. support for a short-lived coup
by business leaders and military ofﬁcers against democratically elected President
Hugo Chavez of Venezuala on April 12, 2002, demonstrated its distrust of the
government regime of a key oil supplier.
Foreign intervention can also reﬂect vested commercial interests in a regional
context, such as the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, which was in part motivated by a
dispute over the ownership of an oil ﬁeld that straddles the two countries, or the
presence and “self-ﬁnancing” of Zimbabwean, Rwandan, and Ugandan troops in
the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the late 1990s. External actors may also
intervene in secessionist attempts by manipulating local political identities into
providing access to resources. In the late nineteenth century, the discovery of gold
and diamonds in the newly created Boer republics in South Africa led to both
stronger resistance to annexation by Britain and a massive inﬂux of British prospectors.
The refusal of Boer authorities to grant political rights to these British
uitlanders (outlanders) led British entrepreneurs such as De Beers’s founder Cecil
Rhodes to arm British settlers’ militias and precipitated the Boer War.64
Despite
its political character, the Biafra secession in Nigeria and its repression by the
government were largely motivated by local oil reserves. French oil interests supported
the Biafra secession attempt, and the Nigerian army started ﬁghting in July
1967 “more than a month after the declaration of independence but only days
after Shell . . . agreed to pay its royalties to Biafra rather than Nigeria.”65
Within
the turmoil of the Belgian Congo’s independence, Anglo-Saxon and Belgian commercial
interests eager to secure their hold on copper mines in the province of
Katanga supported a secession led by Moise Tshombe that provoked military
clashes between corporate-funded foreign mercenaries and UN troops who supported
the unity of the country.66
More recently, the de facto secession of eastern
232 Geographies of War
provinces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1998 has been accompanied
by a virulent debate over the inclusiveness of Congolese citizenship and
the rights of populations from so-called Rwandan origins to access land and mineral
resources.67
Inﬂuencing the Course and Duration of Armed Conﬂicts
The availability of resources and contests over their control inﬂuence conﬂicts in
many ways. Natural resources can support the weaker party and allow it to continue
ﬁghting and to maintain access to a source of wealth, thereby prolonging
the conﬂict. Furthermore, as proﬁts take priority over politics, the conﬂict risks
become increasingly commercially driven because the belligerents are correspondingly
motivated by economic self-interest. These developments also have a significant
impact on the organization and cohesion of armed movements and thereby
on the course and duration of the conﬂict. It does not automatically follow, however,
that a war would be shorter or have a more benign impact on populations
in the absence of resources. Indeed, desperate belligerents who lack access to
resources may well intensify predation and attacks on civilian populations.
As natural resources gain in ﬁnancial importance for belligerents, the focus
of military activities becomes centered on areas of economic signiﬁcance. This
has a critical impact on the location of military deployment and intensity of confrontations.
As a complement to guerrilla strategies of high mobility, concentration
of forces, and location along international borders, rebel groups seek to establish
permanent strongholds or areas of “insecurity” wherever resources and transport
routes are located. Government troops generally attempt to prevent this by extending
counterinsurgency to these areas, and their efforts occasionally displace
and “villagize” populations. In many cases, government troops join in the plunder.
The overall effect of natural resources in such contexts is ambiguous, however.
On one hand, resources can intensify confrontations over the areas of economic
signiﬁcance. This occurred in Sierra Leone over the best diamond areas and in
Cambodia over log yards. On the other hand, armed groups can settle for a “comfortable
stalemate” in which opposing parties can secure mutually beneﬁcial deals
to produce and market resources. Territorial control by different factions or the
crossing of international borders often entails a complicity that is not expected
from “enemies” or members of the international community that are implementing
economic sanctions. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge rebel group indirectly
beneﬁted from export authorizations granted by the government to Thai companies
that were operating in Khmer Rouge–held territories.68
The rebel group also
collected fees from logging companies licensed and taxed by the government.
These fees were crucial to the viability of small Khmer Rouge groups far from
their bases.69
As both the government and the rebels beneﬁted from logging, neither
side had an incentive to change the status quo.
Beyond these ﬁnancial and military effects, resources can also prolong conﬂicts
by providing political networks of support, including “private resource diplomacy.”
In Angola, UNITA’s diamonds not only allowed the rebel movement to
buy arms, but also attracted diplomatic and logistical support from regional polit-
The Geography of “Resource Wars” 233
ical leaders.70
On the other side of that conﬂict, the Movimento Popular de Liberac¸a˜o
de Angola (MPLA) rapidly gained favor with major Western powers and
their oil companies once it was established that UNITA had lost the elections and
was unable to gain power through military means. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge
beneﬁted from the support of corrupt Thai military or politicians who used logging
revenues to ﬁnance their electoral campaigning.
Finally, resource wealth can prolong conﬂict by weakening the prospects for
third-party peace brokerage. Access to resources can act as a divisive factor among
international players. Bilateral actors are inclined to accommodate domestic interests
in order to secure commercial beneﬁts for their corporations, especially in
strategic economic sectors like oil. In addition, the ability of the belligerents to
draw on private ﬁnancial ﬂows decreases the potential leverage of multilateral
agencies (e.g., the IMF, the World Bank, and the United Nations) that is exercised
through grants and loans. In many contemporary armed conﬂicts, private capital
inﬂows have assumed greater importance than foreign assistance, especially in
comparison to conﬂicts in the Cold War era.
Although resource wealth tends to prolong wars, it can also shorten them in
several ways. Resource wealth can produce an overwhelming concentration of
revenues in one party, as oil did in the Angolan government. A government’s
greater access to resources can also motivate rebel groups to defect to the government,
provide an incentive in peace negotiations, or lure rebel leaders to the
capital. Agency problems and fragmentation can affect rebel movements as a result
of “bottom-up” resource ﬂows.71
Unless the leadership is able to monopolize the
means of exchange (e.g., vehicles, airports, roads, bank accounts, export authorizations,
intermediaries, importers) between a resource supplier and its customers,
economic space is available for its allies and subordinates to become autonomous
through commercial or criminal activities based on local resources. The inherent
risk of private appropriation can undermine trust between members of an armed
group. More generally, this pattern of resource ﬂow is likely to weaken discipline
and chains of command. In contrast, when resources are fed into the conﬂict from
outside—which tended to occur during the Cold War—leaders can maintain the
coherence of their armed movements through the tight control of the ﬂow of
foreign resources to their allies and subordinates. Complicity in resource trade
between “enemies” can also favor local peace agreements and defections. In Cambodia,
a Khmer Rouge commander noted, “The big problem with getting our
funding from business [rather than China] was to prevent an explosion of the
movement because everybody likes to do business and soldiers risked doing more
business than ﬁghting.”72
In order to prevent such explosion, or fragmentation, the
Khmer Rouge fully supported soldiers and their families and tightly controlled
trade and cross-border movements.
Finally, an armed group that exploits natural resources is vulnerable to losing
popular support and political legitimacy in the event that its adversary portrays the
group as mere bandits or criminals driven more by economic self-interest than by
political ideals. Ignoring similar “criminal” practices on the part of government
ofﬁcials or paramilitary groups thus facilitates in turn the sanctioning and political
isolation of rebel movements like the RUF, UNITA, and the FARC. Such a policy
234 Geographies of War
can, of course, run the risk of marginalizing a political resolution of the conﬂict
in favor of a military solution.
Conclusion
In the absence of strong preexisting institutions and a developed economy, a
wealth of resources is likely to result in poor governance, economic crisis, and
grievances from a population motivated by the high expectations associated with
a resource bonanza. Although the resource curse is not inevitable, the availability
of large resource rents tends to structure the choice of rulers and shape powerful
coalitions of domestic elites and foreign business interests that dampen political
accountability. In their quest for power, rulers often capture and redistribute resource
rents at the expense of statecraft and democracy and thus dangerously put
their discretionary power and ﬂuctuating rents at the core of the political order.
While a resource-rich economy is neither a necessary nor a sufﬁcient condition
for politically underdeveloped rule and resultant conﬂict, it can facilitate it.
The exploitation of resources itself also shapes conditions and motivations—
for instance, the exacerbation of competitive politics and corruption, state institutional
collapse, the delegitimization of the state monopoly on the use of force,
and the rise of sectarianism—that are conducive to localized armed conﬂicts. In
these contexts, violence often becomes the prime means of political action, economic
accumulation, or simply survival. In these ways, wars cannot simply be
related to the greed of rebels over resource grab opportunities. Yet as political
instability escalates into full-scale armed conﬂict, natural resources often come to
play a strategic role in motivating and ﬁnancing belligerents both before a conﬂict
begins and as it unfolds. Although there is no deterministic relationship, resources
can participate in shaping the type of armed conﬂict that takes place, the territorial
objectives of belligerents, their relations with populations, and the duration and
the intensity of the conﬂict. Resources can also affect the internal cohesion of
armed movements and occasionally lead to their fragmentation, as well as to instances
of collusion between adversaries.
Because of their key role as intermediaries between places of resource extraction
and markets, businesses often come to support autocratic regimes and even
war criminals. In most cases, businesses seek to maintain a proﬁtable and stable
political order rather than to intervene in a democratization process that they are
not legitimately or politically qualiﬁed to get involved in, even if many businesses
would prefer a democratic regime with a strong rule of law. Wary of uncertainty,
businesses are often distrustful of ﬂedgling democratic regimes because they fear
greater political instability, renegotiation of contracts (and possibly bribe payments),
and violence that would threaten their investments. If strongly democratic
regimes are more stable than autocratic regimes, the risk of instability and conﬂict
is actually higher for formative democracies that are typical in regime-transition
processes.73
In the context of civil strife that was affecting the Niger Delta oilproducing
region and in the wake of the execution of local activists by the Abacha
regime, a Shell manager in Nigeria bluntly argued that “for a commercial com-
The Geography of “Resource Wars” 235
pany trying to make investments, you need a stable environment. Dictatorships
can give you that.”74
The problem, however, is that even autocracies have become increasingly
unstable as a result of international and domestic pressure for democracy, transition
to market economies that are competing on the world market, declining
primary commodity prices, and decreasing international assistance. Since most
resource-dependent states tend to be autocratic, it is therefore not surprising that,
as a group, they are more susceptible to political instability. In turn, the political
economy and territoriality of resource exploitation and trade come to deﬁne, in
part, the geography of war.
Notes
1. Armed conﬂicts refer to the deployment of organized physical violence and include
coups d’e´tat, terrorism, and intra-or interstate armed conﬂict. The destructuration of many
contemporary armed conﬂicts also results in a continuum between banditry, organized
crime, and armed conﬂict. In this respect the criteria of annual number of battle deaths
(e.g., 25 or 1,000) and of political motivation are not always helpful since the number of
violent deaths can be higher in “peacetime” than in “wartime” (e.g., El Salvador, South
Africa), and economic motives play a signiﬁcant role.
2. For a more detailed analysis and examination of initiatives aimed at preventing or
ending resource-fueled wars, see Le Billon, Fuelling War.
3. Gleick, “Environment and Security,” 22.
4. Lesser, Resources and Strategy, 9.
5. Aron, Peace and War, 244–245.
6. Mackinder, “Geographical Pivot of History”; O´ Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics, 314.
7. Westing, Global Resources and International Conﬂict; Cutter, “Exploiting, Conserving,
and Preserving Natural Resources.”
8. Klare, Resource Wars, 10–25.
9. Brown, Redeﬁning National Security; Mathews, “Redeﬁning Security.”
10. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future;
Myers, Ultimate Security, 17–30.
11. On the concept of “human security,” see Paris, “Human Security.”
12. See Bennett, Greenwar; Baechler, “Why Environmental Transformation Causes
Violence”; Suliman, Ecology, Politics, and Violent Conﬂicts; Homer-Dixon, Environment,
Scarcity, and Violence.
13. Homer-Dixon, Environment, Scarcity, and Violence, 177.
14. Andre´ and Platteau, “Land Relations under Unbearable Stress.”
15. McClintock, “Why Peasants Rebel.”
16. Besteman and Cassanelli, Struggle for Land in Southern Somalia.
17. Boserup, Conditions of Agricultural Growth; Smith, Scarcity and Growth Reconsidered;
Tiffen, Mortimore, and Gichuki, More People, Less Erosion; Leach and Mearns, Lie
of the Land.
18. Homer-Dixon, Environment, Scarcity, and Violence, 44.
19. Dalby, Environmental Security; Jon Barnett, Meaning of Environmental Security;
Gedicks, Resource Rebels; Peluso and Watts, Violent Environments, 30.
20. Annan, Causes of Conﬂict; Reno, Warlord Politics and African States.
236 Geographies of War
21. Grossman, “General Equilibrium Model of Insurrections”; Keen, Economic Functions
of Violence in Civil Wars.
22. Le Billon, “Political Ecology of War.”
23. Collier, “Economic Causes of Civil Conﬂict”; Fairhead, “Conﬂict over Natural
and Environmental Resources.”
24. Presidential statement dated June 2, 2000 (S/PRST/2000/20), United Nations Security
Council Presidential Statement, New York: United Nations Security Council.
25. Collier, “Economic Causes of Civil Conﬂict,” 147. The data set includes ﬁfty-two
wars that took place between 1960 and 1999.
26. Collier, Hoefﬂer, and So¨derbom, On the Duration of Civil War; Fearon, “Why
Do Some Civil Wars Last So Much Longer Than Others?” 34. The data set includes 122
civil wars between 1945 and 1999.
27. Soysa, “Ecoviolence.” The dataset includes conﬂicts with more than twenty-ﬁve
battle deaths between 1989 and 2000.
28. Hauge and Ellingsen, “Beyond Environmental Scarcity.”
29. Soysa, “Ecoviolence,” 27.
30. In this chapter, however, “resource dependence” relates to the dependence situation
of producing, rather than consuming, countries.
31. Carstens, In the Company of Diamonds; Hart, Diamond.
32. A discussion of the political-economic concept of “dependency” is beyond the
scope of this chapter; for a discussion, see Hout, Capitalism and the Third World.
33. Karl, Paradox of Plenty; Auty, Resource Abundance and Economic Development.
34. Sachs and Warner, Natural Resource Abundance and Economic Growth; Leite and
Weidmann, Does Mother Nature Corrupt; Soysa, “Ecoviolence”; Ross, Extractive Sectors
and the Poor.
35. Moore, “Political Underdevelopment,” 389.
36. Le Billon, “Buying Peace or Fuelling War.”
37. On the case of Sierra Leone, see Reno, Corruption and State Politics in Sierra
Leone; Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest.
38. Taylor and Flint, Political Geography, 374.
39. Connell, “Panguna Mine Impact,” 43.
40. Pile and Keith, “Introduction.”
41. Scott, Weapons of the Weak; Cooke, “Vulnerability, Control, and Oil Palm in
Sarawak.”
42. Harvey, Chiapas Rebellion.
43. Watts, “Petro-violence.”
44. Le Billon, “Political Ecology of War.”
45. Le Billon, “Angola’s Political Economy of War,” 67.
46. Auty, Resource Abundance and Economic Development, 6.
47. Keen, Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars, 41.
48. Global Witness, Rough Trade, 4.
49. Smillie, Gberie, and Hazleton, Heart of the Matter.
50. Farah, “Al Qaeda Cash Tied to Diamond Trade,” A01.
51. “Footpath to Democracy: Towards a New Sierra Leone.” Revolutionary United
Front.
52. Pourtier, “1997”; interview with Pascal Lissouba, London, January 2002. Because
Nguesso controlled the north of the country, he could also have beneﬁted from logging
revenues of timber exports via Gabon and Cameroon (La lettre du Continent, January 13,
2000. Cited in “La Foreˆt Prise en Otage: La ne´cessite´ de controˆler les socie´tı´es forestie`res
transnationales: une e´tude europe´ene,” Cambridge; Forests Monitor, footnote 31).
The Geography of “Resource Wars” 237
53. Pourtier, “1997,” 7.
54. Nkossa was the name of an oil ﬁeld recently awarded to the French oil company
Elf Aquitaine. Bazenguissa-Ganga, “Milices politiques dans les affrontements,” 52.
55. Ellis, Mask of Anarchy.
56. Dan˜guilan-Vitug, Politics of Logging.
57. Hodges, Western Sahara, vii.
58. Nazaruddin, “Issues and Politics of Regionalism in Indonesia.”
59. Cited in Connell, “Bougainville,” 8. See also Boge, “Mining, Environmental Degradation,
and War.”
60. Claxton, “Bougainville, 1988–98.”
61. Horton, Peasants in Arms, 155.
62. Labrousse, “Colombie-Pe´rou,” 386.
63. Yergin, Prize.
64. Pakenham, Boer War.
65. Arbatov, “Oil as a Factor in Strategic Policy and Action,” 34.
66. Balancie and La Grange, Mondes Rebelles, 446–448.
67. Interview with Professor Se´verin Mugangu, Universite´ Catholique de Bukavu,
April 2002.
68. Le Billon, “Political Ecology of Transition.”
69. Interviews with former Khmer Rouge soldiers and commanders, Pailin and Along
Veng, January 2001.
70. United Nations, Report of the Panel of Experts.
71. On bottom-up violence, see Keen, Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars.
72. Interview with the author, Cambodia, January 2001.
73. Hegre et al., “Toward a Democratic Civil Peace?”
74. Hammer, “Nigeria Crude: A Hanged-Man and an Oil-Fouled Landscape,” 58–69.
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