Conflict relocation and blood diamond policy shifts

Abstract

There is substantial evidence that various aspects of violent civil conflict are tied to natural resources, of which diamonds are perhaps the most notorious. While the presence of resources themselves have been given substantial attention, existing works have overlooked a key issue: substitute resources. This article focuses on the geographic distribution of violent conflict relative to natural resource sites as a provider of information on the geostrategic organization and extraction behaviors of insurgents. Using the rise of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, a multilateral regime aimed at regulating the illicit diamond trade, and accounting for the presence of potential substitute resources, empirical evidence indicates that the regulations disrupted and delocalized conflicts away from diamond sites. Moreover, the geography of violent conflict shifted and relocated toward substitute resources such as tin, tungsten, tantalum and gold. These findings suggest that such policy efforts may have adverse unintended consequences on the structure of violent conflict and the expansion of other black markets as a byproduct of regulation-induced changes in extraction incentives.