Conflict, natural resources and development

The study of the link between natural resources and conflict results from the fact that many countries with an abundance of natural resource endowments have experienced violent internal conflict, in which severe civil war occurs, although this is not the case for all resource-abundance countries. For example, 'conflict diamond' has become a well-known terminology referring to a diamond mined in a (civil) war zone and internationally sold to finance an insurgency, as in Sierra Leone, Angola and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC); while in contrast, diamond abundance in Botswana does not lead to any civil war. Oil in countries such as Nigeria and Sudan fuelled secessionist civil wars, while oil in Norway and Malaysia does not. Such variations in terms of the presence of natural resource endowments and the presence/absence of civil conflict have led to investigation (systematic large-sample or in-depth case studies) of why the presence of natural resources might create a context for, be an underlying cause of, or act as a trigger for conflict. However such a discourse has to be placed within the previously established literature on the natural resource curse hypothesis that draws links between natural resource dependence/abundance, on one hand, and bad macroeconomic outcomes, on the other.