Competition over resources
In the environmentally constrained but more populous world that can be expected over the course of this century, there will be greater scarcity of three key resources: food, water and energy. Demand for all three resources is already beyond that which can be sustained at current levels. Once population growth and the effects of climate change are factored in, it is clear that greater competition for such resources should be expected, both within and between countries, potentially leading in extreme cases to conflict.
Taken from the report: "Typically modest in scale, social violence over land and water in Yemen is nevertheless so pervasive and self-perpetuating that it claims thousands of lives each year and severely inhibits social and economic development. While escalating political violence in Yemen is rapidly capturing international attention, more insidious land and water-related social violence threatens to further weaken community cohesion and undermine stability. At the national level, collective land grievances are fuelling southern resentment and calls for secession."
Future historians may well agree that the twenty-first century Silk Road first opened for business on December 14, 2009. That was the day a crucial stretch of pipeline officially went into operation linking the fabulously energy-rich state of Turkmenistan (via Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) to Xinjiang Province in China’s far west. Hyperbole did not deter the spectacularly named Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, Turkmenistan’s president, from bragging, “This project has not only commercial or economic value. It is also political. China, through its wise and farsighted policy, has become one of the key guarantors of global security.”
The article investigates the inter-relation between armed conflict and natural resources and its implications for conflict resolution and peacebuilding.
Competition for access to natural resources is recognised as a contributing factor of instability in many countries. This is true where resources are scarce, but the same can also be true where resources are abundant. Diamonds, timber, minerals and cocoa have been exploited by armed groups from Liberia and Sierra Leone, Angola, Cambodia and more recently Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (EDRC) to sustain their illegal activities. In fact, a 2009 UNEP study has found that “in the last twenty years, at least eighteen civil wars have been fuelled by natural resources.”
By Oxford Research Group's Sustainable Security Programme Manager Ben Zala