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Extractive industries can provide great opportunities for post-conflict peacebuilding in resourcerich countries by providing revenue to finance reconstruction and set the economy back on track. However, the process of resource extraction often poses challenges for peacebuilding. This article first explains the various challenges that valuable natural resources can pose in post-conflict countries, and establishes a typology of post-conflict contexts where extractive industries, the host country, and the international community can play primary roles as peace promoters. It then elaborates on the specific roles each of these actors can play: i) what approaches are available for responsible companies that aim to be peace sensitive and even promote peace and development locally and nationally; ii) how a country that has some capacity and political will to secure long term peace and development can promote responsible exploitation; and iii) how international actors can promote responsible company and government behaviour in countries with low capacity and willingness use the natural resource base for the best of its whole population. ; Copyright © 2016 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

A number of studies suggest that prevailing narratives about the situation of the poor and vulnerable affect how they are viewed and treated. Theoretically, a potentially powerful way to make host communities more welcoming of climate migrants is to shift the blame for their situation away from the migrants themselves and onto other forces or agents. We present results from a randomized field experiment conducted among long-term residents of host communities in the Satkhira district of Bangladesh that exposed three treatment groups to narratives that shift responsibility for climate migration toward natural forces, Western countries, and local authorities, respectively. Despite statistical power to detect reasonably small effects, we find no positive effects of these narratives on host-community attitudes toward climate migrants. On the contrary, the local authorities treatment had a borderline negative effect on host-community attitudes. Our results suggest caution in attempting to influence attitudes toward migrants through attribution of blame to outside forces or third parties. Such narrative interventions may shift responsibility away from not just migrants but also the treated host-community residents and increase social identification between host-community members relative to outsiders.

Natural resources, and diamonds especially, are commonly believed to play a significant role in the onset and duration of armed civil conflict. Although there is ample case study evidence that diamonds and similar resources have been used by rebel groups to finance fighting, there are few systematic empirical studies assessing the role of lootable resources in civil conflict. This is largely due to lack of reliable data on production and location. In this article we discuss priorities for the collection of data on conflict-relevant resources and introduce a new dataset, DIADATA, that provides a comprehensive list of diamond deposits accompanied by geographic coordinates throughout the world. The dataset includes characteristics relevant to conflict such as production status and geological form of the deposit. Particularly important is the distinction between primary and secondary diamonds, because the latter are more easily lootable. The dataset incorporates a spatial as well as a temporal dimension.