Natural Resources and Conflict in Africa: The Tragedy of Endowment (review)

In 1989 I hitchhiked from Paris to South Africa. I was struck by the dominance of natural resources in local economies: date palms in Algeria, cattle in Niger, plantains in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), fish in Lake Tanganyika, copper in Zambia, tobacco in Zimbabwe, and gold in South Africa. Who had access to these resources and who did not—and why? What were the consequences of losing access? In accessible, readable prose this volume answers these questions, and its pan-African scope equals that of my hitchhiking journey.

Alao argues that the primary cause of conflicts involving natural resources (land, solid minerals, oil, and water) is a failure of governance over their exploitation. This failure is linked to other concerns, such as political and strategic interests, but it is only by conceptually distinguishing governance from these other factors that many conflicts can be understood. The book traces the origins of many conflicts to tensions over access to resources and distribution of resource revenue (the analysis of communal violence in Nigeria is especially compelling). Alao argues that colonial institutional legacies, the inability of states to reconcile competing legal systems (colonial-based secular laws, customary laws, and in some countries, Islamic law), and the economic interests of African political elites have created or exacerbated competition over natural resources and/or inhibited initiatives to resolve tensions. This has resulted in zero-sum competitions that produce clear winners and clear losers (the volume would more aptly have been subtitled "the tragedy of political endowment"). To support these arguments, Alao presents several useful typologies of conflicts involving natural resources, especially those relating to violence over oil.

Alao deftly explains that while ethnicity is often a factor in conflicts, its particular salience is linked to economic (and social) interests related to a natural resource. When it comes to natural resources, therefore, ethnic politics are interest politics.

But more than addressing local interests alone, Alao also argues that the interests of elites are fundamental to governments' willingness to address tension over the exploitation of natural resources. This has interesting ramifications. For example, grievances over water resources have rarely escalated into violence, because elites have not relied on popular support to remain in power and therefore have often remained indifferent to such tensions. Consequently, democratization has the potential to make elites interested in water—if only to address popular concerns. By contrast, where elites have a private stake in commercial water utilities, privatization may stimulate elite interests to different effect. Either scenario may result in increased future conflict over water, not directly because of the "usual suspects"—population growth or resource shortages—but because of the evolving political and business interests of elites.

There are some curious omissions. Columbite-tantalite (or "coltan"—a prominent focus for the struggle over resource control in central Africa today) is not mentioned, despite its topicality, nor is Lake Malawi. There is no real analysis of labor, despite the history of labor migration across Africa for the purpose of exploiting natural resources. Time-series data on resource-related conflicts would have been useful, especially to support the author's argument that there have been three historic phases in African citizens' attitudes to state accountability in resource management. Editorial glitches are an irritant and suggest poor proofreading.

A serious criticism is that Alao does not conceptually disaggregate the state, even though different state actors (the military, state-owned corporations, police, and government departments, among others) may have different agendas regarding the management of natural resources. There is also minimal discussion of the geological and market characteristics of natural resources, even though these partially account for the interest of armed groups and criminal networks in some resources (e.g., diamonds) and not others (e.g., coal).

Alao could have better distinguished and substantiated those factors that according to his argument are...