By Joel Salvador Herrera and , Cesar B. Martinez-Alvarez

A growing body of evidence suggests that criminal organizations across the Global South actively exploit natural resources in the communities where they operate with important sociopolitical consequences. In this article, we investigate the case of Mexico where the incursion of criminal groups into the mining and export-agricultural sectors impacts violence at the local level. We propose two mechanisms that explain why criminal groups diversify. First, the war-profit motive suggests that competition and state repression prompt criminal organizations to look for non-traditional sources of incomes and to build up their violence-making capacities. Second, the governance motive suggests that extracting rents from key industries represents a strategy for these organizations to establish territorial control in local communities. Using homicide data from 2007 to 2011, we demonstrate that access to primary sector revenues is associated with higher levels of violence among Mexican municipalities. Using qualitative evidence from Michoacán, we show how the introduction of criminal governance systems to rural areas was a key factor in explaining why criminal groups diversified toward mining and export-agriculture.

World Development. Volume 151, March 2022, 105769

By Jabin T. Jacob

The India-Myanmar border regions form a forgotten frontier in the Indian and global imagination. India’s frontiers to the west (Pakistan), to the north (Tibet/China) and to the south (Sri Lanka and the Indian Ocean) have always received greater attention. Today, however, the region representing the conjunction of India, China and Myanmar is returning to the centre of attention for a number of reasons both old and new. Violence (‘Guns’) has been endemic in the region since communities and peoples were rent asunder by the imposition and policing of officially demarcated borders between India and Myanmar. Yet, trade (‘Blankets’) – both formal and informal – has managed to carry on. What has added to the importance of the region in the eyes of the national capitals, is the increasing severity of transnational challenges such as drug-trafficking and the spread of diseases (‘Bird Flu’). Together, these three factors have kept both a regional identity as well as specific community identities alive. This paper is an attempt to examine the region-building properties of these factors.

Cahiers de SPIRIT, 2010. 27p,

By Environmental Investigation Agency

Since 2018, Mali has suffered two military coups, while the country has become one of the largest suppliers of rosewood to China, through the export of Pterocarpus erinaceus – commonly identified as “kosso,” “keno,” or “bois de vêne,” a species the trade of which is regulated by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), since January 2017.

The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA)’s findings indicate that China has imported the equivalent of half a million kosso trees from Mali – worth approximately US$220 million, between January 2017 and January 2022, a large portion of it being the product of illegal harvesting or illegal export. The relentless timber poaching in the Southern forests of Mali has resulted in a significant decline of the species.

Washington, DC: : EIA, 2022. 27p.

By Mähler, Annegret

This paper studies the oil‐violence link in the Niger Delta, systematically taking into con‐ sideration domestic and international contextual factors. The case study, which focuses on explaining the increase in violence since the second half of the 1990s, confirms the differentiated interplay of resource‐specific and non‐resource‐specific causal factors. With re‐ gard to the key contextual conditions responsible for violence, the results underline the basic relevance of cultural cleavages and political‐institutional and socioeconomic weakness that existed even before the beginning of the “oil era.” Oil has indirectly boosted the risk of violent conflicts through a further distortion of the national economy. Moreover, the transition to democratic rule in 1999 decisively increased the opportunities for violent struggle, in a twofold manner: firstly, through the easing of political repression and, sec‐ ondly, through the spread of armed youth groups, which have been fostered by corrupt politicians. These incidents imply that violence in the Niger Delta is increasingly driven by the autonomous dynamics of an economy of violence: the involvement of security forces, politicians and (international) businessmen in illegal oil theft helps to explain the per‐ petuation of the violent conflicts at a low level of intensity.

Hamburg: German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) , 2010. 39p.