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Paradigm in Distress?

This special issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution contains six articles discussing the link between primary commodities, political instability, and civil war as well as a response essay by Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler (CH). The latter is especially welcome given that all our contributors wrestle, in one way or another, with the implications of CH’s early claim for a correlation between a country’s propensity to experience civil war and its dependence on the export of primary commodities. Although the robustness of this statistical finding is increasingly being questioned (Ross 2004; Lujala et al. 2005 [this issue]; Fearon 2005 [this issue]), we are in its debt for helping to initiate a barrage of elaborations, criticisms, and extensions. Cumulatively, these have helped reinvigorate debates over the sources of political violence, spurring the creation of new paradigms for the study of civil war and its associated resource curse (Sambanis 2004; Ross 2004). This special issue is one of the few devoted solely to the topic of natural resources and civil war and perhaps the only to contain critiques and defenses by the field’s leading figures. Our contributors represent an emerging “second generation” in the primary commodities and war subfield, bringing regimes, states, and economic institutions back into the picture. Natural resources have powerful effects on civil wars, our authors suggest, but they do so in ways that are profoundly political, a claim downplayed or undertheorized in much of the earlier work. Most important, resource abundance can create low-capacity states that are vulnerable to rebel challenge. In so