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The impact of natural resources on intrastate violence has been increasingly analyzed in the peace and conflict literature. Surprisingly, little quantitative evidence has been gathered on the effects of the resource-ownership structure on internal violence. This paper uses a novel dataset on oil and natural gas property rights covering 40 countries during the period 1989-2010. The results of regression analyses employing logit models reveal that the curvilinear effect between hydrocarbon production and civil conflict onset - often found in previous studies - only applies to countries in which oil and gas production is mainly state controlled. The findings suggest that only state-owned hydrocarbons may entail peacebuying mechanisms such as specific clientelistic practices, patronage networks, welfare policies, and/or coercion. At the same time, it seems that greed and grievance are more pronounced whenever resources lie in the hands of the state. Exploring the within-country variation, further analyses reveal that divergent welfare spending patterns are likely to be one causal channel driving the relationship between resource ownership and internal violence. -- natural resources ; intrastate conflict ; minor civil war ; oil ; gas ; ownership structure ; national oil companies

The impact of natural resources on intrastate violence has been increasingly analyzed in the peace and conflict literature. Surprisingly, little quantitative evidence has been gathered on the effects of the resource-ownership structure on internal violence. This paper uses a novel dataset on oil and natural gas property rights covering 40 countries during the period 1989-2010. The results of regression analyses employing logit models reveal that the curvilinear effect between hydrocarbon production and civil conflict onset - often found in previous studies - only applies to countries in which oil and gas production is mainly state controlled. The findings suggest that only state-owned hydrocarbons may entail peacebuying mechanisms such as specific clientelistic practices, patronage networks, welfare policies, and/or coercion. At the same time, it seems that greed and grievance are more pronounced whenever resources lie in the hands of the state. Exploring the within-country variation, further analyses reveal that divergent welfare spending patterns are likely to be one causal channel driving the relationship between resource ownership and internal violence.

The literature on institutional determinants of intra-state violence commonly asserts that the presence of multiple political parties reduces the conflict potential within countries; by co-opting oppositional groups into an institutionalized political arena, dissidents would prefer parliamentarian means over violent rebellion in order to pursue their goals. The present paper shows that this proposition does not necessarily hold for fuel-abundant states. In the presence of natural resources such as oil or gas, countries exhibiting numerous non-competitive parties are actually more susceptible to internal conflict. Fortified by the establishment of legal political parties, regime opponents succumb more easily to the prospects of securing resource revenues, adopting rapacious behaviour. Fuel-related internal grievances as well as the opposition's disaffection over the lack of effective political leverage and government use of political violence provide a seemingly legitimate motive for armed rebellion. Moreover, financial means for insurgency are raised by extortion or the possibility of selling future exploitation rights to natural resources. Logit models using different estimation techniques and alternative operationalizations corroborate the proposed claim. The argumentation is further illustrated by a depiction of the Colombian case. ; Studien über die institutionellen Determinanten innerstaatlicher Gewalt legen nahe, dass die Präsenz multipler politischer Parteien das Konfliktpotential innerhalb der Länder reduziert. Es wird behauptet, dass Parteien oppositionelle Gruppierungen in eine institutionalisierte politische Arena kooptieren und somit anstatt der Anwendung gewaltsamer Rebellion die Verfolgung parlamentarischer Maßnahmen fördern. Der vorliegende Artikel zeigt, dass diese Prämisse nicht für ressourcenreiche Staaten gilt. Bei gleichzeitigem Vorhandensein von natürlichen Ressourcen wie Öl oder Gas und nicht-kompetitiver Multiparteiensysteme steigt die innerstaatliche Konfliktwahrscheinlichkeit. Gestärkt durch die Einrichtung legaler politischer Parteien und geleitet von der Absicht, die Ressourcengewinne zu kontrollieren, greifen Dissidenten eher zu Waffen. Ressourcenbezogene Missstände sowie die Unzufriedenheit Oppositioneller über mangelnde politische Einflussmöglichkeiten und die Anwendung staatlicher Unterdrückung liefern dabei offenbar legitime Motive für gewaltsame Aktionen. Zudem wird in vielen Fällen die Finanzierung rebellischer Aufstände z. B. durch ressourcenbedingte Erpressung ermöglicht. Ergebnisse von Logit-Modellen unter Anwendung unterschiedlicher Schätzverfahren und alternativer Operationalisierungen unterstreichen die vorgetragene Argumentation, welche durch die Schilderung des kolumbianischen Falls zusätzlich veranschaulicht wird.

The present paper explores the relationship between agrarian structure and human capital formation between and within Brazil's federal units. It is argued that whether states' agriculture is in plantation style, based on cheap coerced labor, or organized around family farming matters for the formulation of educational policies. According to the main claim, landlords were not interested in paying higher taxes to educate the masses and curtailed the expansion of schooling in order to keep a cheap workforce and maintain their monopoly over the decision-making process. Describing several episodes in Brazil's history of public instruction, the paper stresses the distributional conflicts over education as well as the rural aristocracy's resistance towards broadly-targeted, citizenship-enhancing educational policies. The descriptive evidence is complemented by statistical analyses employing historical as well as more recent data. It is shown that states characterized by a more egalitarian land distribution, which are not under the dominance of powerful landlords, exhibit better educational coverage and enhanced instruction quality. They also spend more on schooling.

According to conventional wisdom, strategic natural resources like oil are harmful to international peace. Nonetheless, there is little comparative work on the link between resources and interstate conflicts. Analyzing the impact of oil on militarized interstate disputes on the dyadic level of analysis for the period from 1946 to 2001, this paper shows that oil in fact influences the conflict potential between countries. Results of logistic regressions suggest that absolute oil abundance as well as oil dependence increase the risk of dispute involvement. We find that in particular oil production, oil reserves, oil dependence, and oil exports are associated with a higher risk of initiating conflict while countries enjoying large oil reserves are more frequently the target of military actions. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that the presence of large oil deposits also increase the intensity of international disputes. Relative measures of oil abundance such as per capita oil production, in contrast, do not affect countries' dispute proneness. Increased militarization, the internationalization of intrastate violence, the indulgence of an oil-dependent world community and so-called "classical resource wars"—rather than domestic political mechanisms inherent to the rentier state—are likely to explain our findings.