Governing the Resource-Conflict Nexus: Commodity Management an Internal Violence

Institutions
  • Department of Politics and Public Administration
  • WG Holzinger (International Politics and Conflict Management)
Publications
    Wegenast, Tim; Khanna, Arpita Asha; Schneider, Gerald (2018): The Micro-Foundations of the Resource Curse : Oil Ownership and Local Economic Well-Being in Sub-Saharan Africa

The Micro-Foundations of the Resource Curse : Oil Ownership and Local Economic Well-Being in Sub-Saharan Africa

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Empirical tests of the “resource curse” thesis have provided inconclusive evidence for the core claim that natural resource abundance lowers economic growth. Some macro-level studies argue that the key expectation holds if one controls for the level of democracy. However, even if we account for the quality of institutions, some democratic resource-rich countries experience low growth rates. We argue in line with a new contest model and recent findings that these anomalies are a consequence of different control rights regimes and that state-controlled resource production stimulates local income more than privately-controlled extraction. Our micro-level arguments are tested using information on local economic activity and a new data set that establishes the control rights over hydrocarbons at the individual extraction site of the resource. Relying on this novel data, we perform district and grid-level analyses of sub-Saharan Africa covering the period from 1997 to 2014. Our multi-level and two-way fixed effects linear models show that the presence of domestic national oil companies is associated with increased local growth, while international oil companies show no effect on economic development. We also find that state-controlled oil production particularly furthers local economic well-being under democratic institutions, good governance and low levels of corruption.

Origin (projects)

  Scharpf, Adam; Schneider, Gerald; Nöh, Anna; Clauset, Aaron (2014): Forecasting the Risk of Extreme Massacres in Syria European Review of International Studies. 2014, 1(2), pp. 50-68. ISSN 2196-6923. eISSN 2196-7415

Forecasting the Risk of Extreme Massacres in Syria

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An abundance of large data sets and improved estimation methods have enabled
conflict researchers to estimate the risk of war or terrorist incidents quite precisely. However, as in the case of the prediction of particularly violent earthquakes, forecasting extremely bloody events in continuing conflicts has been difficult until now. This article reports how power laws can be used to predict extreme massacres ex post and ex ante. The power-law distribution that we use is based on the observation that standard probability distributions like the normal distribution typically underestimate the risk of such escalations. Using fatality data until the end of February 2013, we calculate the probability of at least one single event with 250 or more dead civilians at 80% (59%–94%) and between March and May 2013 of up to 48%. We discuss the ethical and practical implications of these findings and argue that the forecasts could provide a transparent risk assessment tool to decision makers.

Origin (projects)

  Schneider, Gerald (2014): Globalization and Social Transition NEWMAN, Edward, ed. and others. Routledge handbook of civil wars. London [u.a.]: Routledge, 2014, pp. 186-196. ISBN 978-0-415-62258-5

Globalization and Social Transition

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dc.title:


dc.contributor.author: Schneider, Gerald

Origin (projects)

    Schneider, Gerald (2013): Peace through globalization and capitalism? : Prospects of two liberal propositions Journal of Peace Research. 2013, 51(2), pp. 173-183. ISSN 0022-3433. eISSN 1460-3578. Available under: doi: 10.1177/0022343313497739

Peace through globalization and capitalism? : Prospects of two liberal propositions

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The security externalities of globalization and capitalism continue to play an influential role in peace research. Typical contributions to these interrelated areas of scientific inquiry address the hope that the external openness (commercial liberalism) and the internal freedom of an economy (capitalist peace) pacify interstate as well as intrastate relations. I claim, despite the empirical support both theses have received, that they face considerable analytical hurdles. Commercial liberalism has, on a theoretical level, not yet moved much beyond the opportunity cost arguments that enlightenment philosophers first advanced more than 200 years ago. The capitalist peace research program similarly does not offer clear micro-level mechanisms explaining why the interactions between economic agents and political decisionmakers should be more peaceful in capitalist than in state-dominated economies. Drawing on the political economy literature, I argue that economic liberalism should distinguish between level- and change-effects of both globalization and capitalism and that thinking in analogies between domestic and interstate peace has prevented the field from making analytical headway. Both literatures will only profit from the advent of ‘big data’ in the case that the field addresses the theoretical challenges upfront.

Origin (projects)

Funding sources
Name Finanzierungstyp Kategorie Project no.
Sachbeihilfe/Normalverfahren third-party funds research funding program 520/11
Further information
Period: 01.04.2011 – 28.02.2014