Responding to the Challenge of Fragility and Security in West Africa: Natural Resources, Extractive Industry Investment, and Social Conflict
Publisher: Fragility, Conflict and Violence Group and World Bank
Author(s): Roy Maconachi, Radhika Srinivasan, and Nicholas Menzies
Date: 2015
Topics: Conflict Prevention, Extractive Resources, Livelihoods
Countries: Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone
The inability to unlock natural resource wealth for the benefit of developing countries’ local populations—a phenomenon popularly known as the “resource curse” or the “paradox of plenty”—has spawned extensive debate among researchers and policy makers in recent years.1 There is now a well-established body of literature exploring the links between natural resources and conflict, with some sources estimating that over the past 60 years, 40 percent of civil wars have been associated with natural resources (UN, 2012a). The West African subregion is no stranger to the resource curse, with numerous resource-rich states having strong links to instability and conflict (for example, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Mali, and Niger). In a number of recent conflicts, warring factions have been able to access “lootable” resources (that is, resources such as alluvial diamonds and gemstones that have a high value-to-weight ratio, and can be easily appropriated and transported by unskilled workers) through artisanal extraction, which some scholars have suggested has been particularly amenable to fuelling and prolonging “greed-based” insurgency.2
While an informative debate has coalesced around the issue of violent conflict and the artisanal extraction of lootable resources, West Africa’s recent boom in extractive industry investment has become a new object of political and economic concern. Driven by soaring commodity prices and heightened resource demands from the world’s emerging economies, the globalization of the extractive industries has also led to dramatic technological, organizational, and regulatory changes in resource-rich West Africa. Indeed, many governments have adopted new mining codes, or revised existing ones, to stimulate a flood of foreign direct investment in mineral extraction (Otto et al., 2006; Bridge, 2004).