Taming the Tides of Internal Conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Role of Political Institutions and Natural Resources

This article examines the interaction effects of resource rents and political institutions on internal conflicts in a panel of 29 Sub-Sahara African countries from 1983 to 2018. Relying on the system generalized method of moments (SGMM) estimator that controls for instrument proliferation, we find robust evidence of the adverse interaction effects between resource rents and political institutions on internal conflicts. Comprehensive marginal effect analysis on both variables reveals the following significant findings. First, there is a (broad) U-shaped marginal effect of resource rents and political institutions. Second, when each component of resource rents was analyzed, only oil and mineral rents had a negative and statistically significant interaction effect with political institutions on internal conflicts. The U-shaped marginal effects hold only for oil rents (but become narrower), while mineral rents exhibit only an L-shaped marginal effect at low levels of political institutions. Our findings are robust to a broad set of alternative measures of political institutions and alternative specifications of the interaction term.