The Resources and Conflict Project analyzes combatants’ strategic and military choices during civil war. It develops new research designed to improve understanding of the dynamics of conflict and contribute to the development of policies that resolve conflicts. The project also creates new data sources at the organizational, micro-, and geographic levels that can be used by researchers and the policy community to address a wide range of issues about conflict dynamics.

Themes addressed by the project include:

Financing Rebellion: Non-state violent actors need resources—some combination of people, money, weapons, and territory—to sustain their activities. This theme develops new data on how such actors finance their violence from natural resources and crime to analyze how variation in the source and scale of such finance influences their strategic choices and violent behavior.

Natural Resources and Conflict: The project develops a new, comprehensive dataset identifying the locations and output of natural resource sites across the developing world. This data is used to determine how natural resource wealth influences the location, scale, and consequences of political violence.

Territorial Control in Civil Conflicts: This theme introduces a new methodology and set of software tools to measure territorial control by warring parties. The data produced by this theme identifies the locations controlled by warring parties at the micro-level, which is then used to analyze the consequences for conflict dynamics.