I started out working as a graduate student on the problem of deforestation in Southeast Asia, and that got me interested more generally in natural resources and how they have affected the development of Third World countries. By the time I finished my dissertation in 1996, I was burned out on the study of forests and wanted to look at other kinds of questions at the intersection of natural resources and economic development.

“...I wanted to understand the histories of each of these civil wars and see if I could figure out exactly what the role was of natural resource wealth.”

I began to read more about the issue and came across the work of two economists, Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, who published an intriguing study that suggested that natural resources like oil and minerals and other commodities tended to make civil wars more likely. In 2000, Collier, who was then at the World Bank, invited me to spend a year as a research fellow. During that time I got into the material more deeply, and that eventually led to these two papers and several others.

People like Collier and Hoeffler had examined the issue by using statistics to analyze data from numerous countries around the world. I decided that my comparative advantage might be in using case studies to approach the question from a different angle. While they found that there was a statistical correlation between primary commodities, as they put it, and civil war, I wanted to understand the histories of each of these civil wars and see if I could figure out exactly what the role was of natural resource wealth. I was dissatisfied with simply observing a statistical correlation. I wanted to find out what had actually gone on in these countries that linked these two different things.

I spent three months in Indonesia in 2000, studying two civil wars there. One in the far west of the country, in Aceh; the other in the country’s far east, an area now known as West Papua. After seeing these conflicts up close, I used secondary material like United Nations reports and books and articles from other scholars and from nonprofit organizations to learn as much as I could from other civil wars that seemed to be linked to natural resource wealth.

The paper in International Organization compiles my findings from the study of thirteen of these civil wars, and suggests a number of ways that natural resource wealth might be causally linked to the onset or the perpetuation of violent conflict.

The article in the Journal of Peace Research is a review of all the research that had been done up to that point, including both quantitative and qualitative research. That cast light on whether and how natural resources might be affecting conflict.

First of all, the issue is very timely. There are many civil wars going on now, including the war in Iraq, that are linked to natural resource wealth. People are naturally interested in understanding this. Secondly, I think people have turned to this article in The Journal of Peace Research to get an overview of the issue. That way, they don’t have to necessarily read or cite two dozen studies.

Getting first-hand information. When you study civil war, you almost never get a front-row seat in the action. You never get the opportunity to witness the phenomenon that you want to understand up close. You have to rely on secondary sources, on interviews with people long after battles have been fought, and so you’re always working with imperfect material.

Following these two papers I did a quantitative analysis of my own, which I published last year. It tries to test a whole series of ideas about natural resources and civil war. The idea is to better understand what types of resources are most likely to be linked to conflict and what types of conflicts are most likely to be linked to natural resources.

Then, more broadly, I’ve moved away from the focus on civil war and am writing a book on the resource curse, the multiple problems that resource-rich countries face: in particular, civil war, lack of democracy, and poor economic performance.

Certainly they do but, again, there is a surprisingly strong correlation between the amount of oil and other mineral wealth that a country has and the likelihood that it will be undemocratic, even after you control for many other factors.

It really has exploded, as it were. Since 1998, a whole new field of study has developed around civil wars, a lot of it inspired by the work of Collier and Hoeffler. Before 1998, there were only a handful of studies. Since then, scores of new studies have been done.

Sure. One is the end of the Cold War. People who worked on security issues generally turned their attention to issues of civil war, because it was increasingly the most important type of armed conflict in the world. A second factor is that economists have grown interested in the topic and have brought many valuable tools and insights into the field. A third factor is that there have been a series of high-profile civil wars, mostly in Africa in the 1990s, that captured the world’s attention: conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Angola. Each of these conflicts seemed to be linked to the country’s natural resource wealth, which naturally spurred a lot of interest in this topic.

I think the cutting-edge research now on civil wars has been focusing on understanding the micro-dynamics of these conflicts. What happens down at the level of the military unit itself? Why do some forces engage in what looks like random destructive behavior and other forces are more disciplined and take care to make friends among civilians?

There is also going to be more interest in explaining why some conflicts are overall so much bloodier than others. Most of the research up to this point has looked at why conflicts, big and small, break out. But we don’t know very much about why some conflicts are big and others are small. Hopefully, we’ll also see more research on how to resolve conflicts and what types of settlements are the most durable and successful.

I suppose it would be exciting to be involved in a post-conflict situation and try to run an experiment to see which type of post-conflict arrangements are most successful. For example, what’s the best way to re-integrate former combatants into society? What’s the best way to promote economic development in a war-torn region? What’s the best way to build trust and cooperation between former combatants? The reason I mention this is that a large fraction of civil wars, after ending, restart again within five years. So finding durable settlements, finding ways to make settlements more durable, could significantly cut the rate of civil wars in the world.

That civil wars are a key impediment to economic development, and the more we know about preventing them, the more we can address broader issues like poverty and development in the Third World.

Michael L. Ross, Ph.D.
Political Science Department
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA, USA