Environmental impact of natural resources on terrorism in Africa

This paper contends that, natural resources hardly instigate terrorism but via the environmental channel. To this end, this study scrutinizes the environmental impact of natural resources on terrorism over the period straddling 1980 through 2012 for a panel of 49 African economies. The count nature of terrorism data suggests the use of a negative binomial regression as a choice estimator, in which the following findings are established. First, the unconditional impact of total natural resources per capita on terrorism is negative and consistently significant across the model specifications. Second, the unconditional influence of environment (measured with carbon emissions) on terrorism is positive across the specifications. Third, the marginal effect of interactions between total natural resources per capita and environment is steadily negative for both domestic and unclear terrorism but positive for transnational terrorism. Four, the magnifying impacts of other confounders such as the lagged value of terrorism, surface areas, physical integrity rights and population are in tandem with expected priors. What is more, the empirical findings regarding the negative impact of total natural resources per capita however, diverge for the natural resource rents-a measure of natural resource dependence. Thus, maintaining a credible, sustainable and inclusive governance of natural resources constitute a formidable bulwark to fighting terrorism.