During the last years, natural resources got almost the status of a new “master variable" in quantitative conflict research. After the study of Collier and Hoeffler, several authors support their credo that political violence can be better explained by greed than by grievance factors. In a series of different articles during the last years the research community showed that resource abundance makes countries, especially in Africa, prone to civil war. However, what at first sight looks like a strict chain of evidence might turn out to be the replication of the same wrong conclusion: geographic proximity of natural resources cause political violence. The weakness of this argument reveals in three levels: 1) None of these analyses could explain why certain resources "cause "violence in specific countries while the same resources remain untouched in others. 2.) In the years before the hype on natural resources the most important explaining factor in quantitative conflict research was ethnicity. In the current research, this and other socio-economic approaches were excluded . As a consequence, several explaining models claim validity for the very same conflicts. But no of these explaining models is related to others. Therefore it is not possible to falsify or verify these competing approaches. 3) Qualitative studies confirm an impact of natural resources on political violence. However they refer also to the complexity of causes and their interrelationship. Political proximity is here just one factor among many others. In the paper we want to bridge the gap between quantitative and qualitative analysis. The use of the new CONIS conflict database, which is based on a qualitative conflict definition and which contains several thousand manually coded and geographically referred conflict events, gives the possibility for both: to include the geographic dimension of political conflicts and to control for traditional political explaining factors.
