The paper investigates the effects of causal mechanisms which explain how rebels and third states profit from local conflicts and how natural resources influence this relationship. Generally stated, it is asked how cooperation between rebels and third states affects the probability of armed conflict in a country where rebel groups are already active or reside in a potential state to become active. Current studies have often tended to treat countries with violent civil conflicts as isolated systems, in spite of notable exceptions which include international actors or conditions prevalent in the international system into the civil conflict equation. Nevertheless, they often focus on cross-country topics like migration or climate change. The crucial notion that third states can deliberately attempt to change domestic conditions in other countries is as old as there is international conflict, but in-depth quantitative studies are only emanating for the past years. In addition to those aspects of international relations, various studies have shown that natural resources have a significant positive impact on the probability of civil war outbreak, but the proposed causal mechanisms are mainly focused on domestic actors and domestic structures, so they tend to blend out international actors like third states which might have an interest in civil unrest in certain regions of another state. In fact, the paper aims, inter alia, to analyse if effects from linkages like ethnic kin-ship between third states and ethnically related groups in foreign countries intensify when natural resources are present at the location of (potential) rebels. The general hypothesis states that the probability of civil conflict is heightened when third states have an economic incentive to support civil unrest in another country. The linkage between third states and local rebels is intensified by the presence of natural resources which the third state can use to financially benefit (and strategically weaken the other state). Civil unrest is chosen as a dependent variable, thereby using datasets which have a very low threshold (e.g. 25 deaths per year) for identifying armed political conflict. As independent variables are inter alia geographical proximity, ethnic kin-ship and other factors conceived. The paper is currently at an early state, when it is evaluated how to set up the right research design framework and how to combine various existing datasets for the purposes of hypothesis testing.
