‘The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change’, Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General, stated in the Washington Post in 2007. The idea that environmental change and resource scarcity can lead to conflict has become a wide-spread assumption. Yet, academic studies on the issue provide contradictory conclusions: While there are strong theoretic arguments and qualitative case studies supporting the link between resource scarcity and armed intra-state conflict, quantitative studies contradict these findings, finding no or weak links. This study aims to solve this contradiction by employing a two-step fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of the social, economic and political conditions in 39 resource-scarce countries, an approach that has not yet been used in the study of conflicts over scarce conditions.
In a first step, I focus on broad conditions drawn from the wider conflict studies literature and case studies: political stability, corruption, economic development and ethnic heterogeneity. This analysis shows the importance of economic development in explaining the outbreak of armed conflict. In a second step, I further analyse the role of economic development by limiting my analysis to cases with a low level of economic development and by focusing on narrow conditions that are strongly related to economic development such as poverty, agricultural dependence and the level of tertiary education, which shows that economic diversification and education have an important role in mitigating conflict in resource-scarce countries.
