Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Extant research shows that the presence of natural resources can prolong civil wars. But research also indicates that as rebel groups become stronger, conflicts tend to shorten. These studies suggest an unclear association among the three variables—resources, rebel strength, and conflict duration. If resources increase the fighting ability of rebels, then why do they not shorten conflicts? To understand this relationship, we examine incidents of maritime piracy, which unlike other resources are more clearly exploited by rebel groups rather than states and offer new insight on how this might affect the persistence of civil war. The findings suggest that the use of piracy by weaker rebel groups shortens conflict but prolongs it when exploited by stronger rebel groups. We think our conditional analyses allow us to discern insurgencies driven at least in part by greedy rebels and therefore better illuminate the causal process by which resource wealth prolongs civil war.

Keywords

Armed conflict maritime piracy civil war duration civil war rebel group strength funding armed conflicts

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Alexander

(2013) Piracy: The best business model available. Report for the Joint Special Operations University. Report no. 13–7, November. MacDill, FL: AFB Fl. Available at: http://johnbalexander.com.p8.hostingprod.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/Piracy_Alexander_FINAL.324145200.pdf (accessed 24 September 2017).

Alesina

Devleeschauwer

Easterly

et al . (2003) Fractionalization. Journal of Economic Growth 8(2): 155–194.

Arreguin-Toft

(2005) How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bagozzi

(2016) On malaria and the duration of civil war. Journal of Conflict Resolution 60(5): 813–839.

Balch-Lindsay

Enterline

Joyce

(2008) Third-party intervention and the civil war process. Journal of Peace Research 45(3): 345–363.

Box-Steffensmeier

Jones

(2004) Event History Modeling: A Guide for Social Scientists. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Brandt

Mason

Gurses

et al . (2008) When and how the fighting stops: Explaining the duration and outcome of civil wars. Defence and Peace Economics 19(6): 415–434.

Brock

(2013) Nigeria’s stolen oil is sold and laundered abroad. Reuters, 19 September, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-nigeria-oil-theft-idUSBRE98I13P20130919.

Buhaug

Gates

Lujala

(2009) Geography, rebel capability, and the duration of civil conflict. Journal of Conflict Resolution 53(4): 544–549.

10.

Carvajal

(2010) Hunting for Liberia’s missing millions. The New York Times, 30 May, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/world/africa/31taylor.html.

11.

Chalk

(2009) Maritime Piracy: Reasons, Dangers, and Solutions. Testimony before the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, U.S. House of Representatives, USA, February.

12.

Collier

Hoeffler

(2004) Greed and grievance in civil war. Oxford Economic Papers 56(4): 563–595.

13.

Collier

Elliott

Hegre

et al . (2003) Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

14.

Clayton

(2013) Relative rebel strength and the onset and outcome of civil war mediation. Journal of Peace Research 50(5): 609–622.

15.

Cunningham

Gleditsch

Salehyan

(2009) It takes two: A dyadic analysis of civil war duration and outcome. Journal of Conflict Resolution 53(4): 570–597.

16.

De Rouen Jr

K R

Sobek

(2004) The dynamics of civil war duration and outcome. Journal of Peace Research 41(3): 303–320.

17.

Eck

(2015) Chasing causation: Observational equivalence in the study of civil war. Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2602291 (accessed 24 September 2017).

18.

Fearon

(2004) Why do some civil wars last so much longer than others? Journal of Peace Research 41(3): 275–301.

19.

Fearon

Laitin

D D

(2003) Ethnicity, insurgency, and civil war. American Political Science Review 97(1): 75–90.

20.

Feenstra

Inklaar

Timmer

(2015) The next generation of the Penn World Table. The American Economic Review 105(10): 3150–3182.

21.

Felbab-Brown

Forest

(2012) Political violence and the illicit economies of West Africa. Terrorism and Political Violence 24(5): 787–806.

22.

Fine

Gray

(1999) A proportional hazards model for the subdistribution of a competing risk. Journal of the American Statistical Association 94(446): 496–509.

23.

Fortna

(2015) Do terrorists win? Rebels’ use of terrorism and civil war outcomes. International Organization 69(3): 519–556.

24.

Gurses

(2015) Transnational ethnic kin and civil war outcomes. Political Research Quarterly 68(1): 142–153.

25.

Hadenius

Teorell

(2007) Pathways from authoritarianism. Journal of Democracy 18(1): 143–157.

26.

Hastings

(2012) Understanding maritime piracy syndicate operations. Security Studies 21(4): 683–721.

27.

Kalyvas

(2015) How civil wars help explain organized crime – and how they do not. Journal of Conflict Resolution 59(8): 1517–1540.

28.

Kamal-Deen

(2015) The anatomy of Gulf of Guinea piracy. Naval War College Review 68(1): 93.

29.

Kambere

(2012) Financing al Shabaab: The vital port of Kismayo. Combatting Terrorism Exchange 2(3). Available: https://globalecco.org/financing-al-shabaab-the-vital-port-of-kismayo (accessed 24 September 2017).

30.

Kemp

Shaw

(2014) From the margins to the mainstream: Toward an integrated multilateral response to organized crime. Report, International Peace Institute, USA, September.

31.

Kreutz

(2010) How and when armed conflicts end: Introducing the UCDP Conflict Termination dataset. Journal of Peace Research 47(2): 243–250.

32.

Le Billon

(2005) Fuelling War: Natural Resources and Armed Conflict. New York: International Institute for Strategic Studies.

33.

Le Billon

(2013) Wars of Plunder: Conflicts, Profits, and the Politics of Resources. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

34.

Liss

(2014) The privatisation of maritime security in Southeast Asia: The impact on regional security cooperation. Australian Journal of International Affairs 68(2): 194–209.

35.

Lujala

(2010) The spoils of nature: Armed civil conflict and rebel access to natural resources. Journal of Peace Research 47(1): 15–28.

36.

Lujala

Gleditsch

Gilmore

(2005) A diamond curse? Civil war and a lootable resource. Journal of Conflict Resolution 49(4): 538–562.

37.

Lounsbery

DeRouen

(2016) The viability of civil war peace agreements. Civil Wars 18(3): 311–337.

38.

Melander

Petterson

Themner

(2016) Organized violence, 1989–2015. Journal of Peace Research 53(5): 727–742.

39.

Murphy

(2009) Small Boats, Weak States, Dirty Money: The Challenge of Piracy. Columbia University Press.

40.

Oceans Beyond Piracy (2012) The Economic Cost of Somali Piracy. Report. Available at: http://oceansbeyondpiracy.org/sites/default/files/attachments/View%20Full%20Report_3.pdf (accessed 24 September 2017).

41.

Peters

(2013) Intersection of crime and conflict. In: Ward

et al . (eds) The “New” Face of Transnational Crime Organizations (TCOs): A Geopolitical Perspective and Implications to US National Security. New York: Calhoun. Available at: https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=733208 (accessed 24 September 2017).

42.

Reno

(1999) Warlord Politics and African States. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

43.

Reno

(2009) Understanding criminality in West African conflicts. International Peacekeeping 16(1): 47–61.

44.

Rinkel

(2015) Piracy and maritime crime in the Gulf of Guinea: Experience-based analyses of the situation and policy recommendations. Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University. Available at: https://www.ispk.uni-kiel.de/de/publikationen/arbeitspapiere/serge-rinkel-piracy-and-maritime-crime-in-the-gulf-of-guinea-experience-based-analyses-of-the-situation-and-policy-recommendations (accessed 24 September 2017).

45.

Ross

(1999) The political economy of the resource curse. World Politics 51(2): 297–322.

46.

Ross

(2006) A closer look at oil, diamonds, and civil war. Annual Review of Political Science 9(1): 265–300.

47.

Ross

(2012) The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

48.

Rustad

Binningsbo

(2012) A price worth fighting for? Natural resources and conflict recurrence. Journal of Peace Research 49(4): 531–546.

49.

Sundberg

Melander

(2013) Introducing the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset. Journal of Peace Research 50(4): 523–532.

50.

Tsvetkova

(2009) Securitizing piracy off the coast of Somalia. Central European Journal of International and Security Studies 3(1): 44–63.

51.

Ulfelder

(2007) Natural-resource wealth and the survival of autocracy. Comparative Political Studies 40(8): 995–1018.

52.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2013) Transnational Organized Crime in West Africa: A Threat Assessment. Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

53.

Watts

(2007) Petro-insurgency or criminal syndicate? Conflict & violence in the Niger Delta. Review of African Political Economy 34(114): 637–660.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.16 MB

Fueling rebellion: Maritime piracy and the duration of civil war

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References

Supplementary Material