Resource Conflicts Research Articles

Science Mapping: A Scientometric Review on Resource Curses, Dutch Diseases, and Conflict Resources during 1993–2020

Over the past few decades, the wealth of Africa has not made African wealthy. There is a voicing that Africa is cursed, whether richly poor or poorly rich. Sub-Saharan Africa is commonplace for political turbulence, as well as humanitarian and economic misery. In such a catastrophic situa-tion, political economics studies have focused on the Resource Curses, Dutch Diseases, and Con-flict Resources in this area. A systematic scientometric analysis of this field would be beneficial but is currently lacking in the academic literature. Using VOSviewer and CiteSpace, this review fills the void by analyzing the 1783 articles published in the WoS SSCI Collection between 1993 and 2020 on the “Resource Curses”, “Dutch Diseases”, and “Conflict Resources”. The author dis-cusses recent papers with disruptive potential, references with the most robust citation explora-tions, and cooperation networks between authors and institutes. Three hotspots were detected: the causes and effects of the Resource curses; the interaction among the Resource Curses, Dutch Diseases, and Conflict Resources; the factors that affect rent collection and regime resilience. While the literature on the “Resource curse” and “Dutch Disease” has been around longer, studies on “Conflict Resources” are picking up quickly. Conflict Resources were characterized by active citation exploration keywords and multiple active co-citation clusters, including possibly groundbreaking articles. There is a massive overlap between the three strings of literature, but each one has its emphasis.

Hybrid optimization model for conjunctive use of surface and groundwater resources in water deficit irrigation system.

The increasing demand for food production with limited available water resources poses a threat to agricultural activities. Conventional optimization algorithms increase the processing stage and perform in the space allocated from user. Therefore, the proposed work was used to design better performance results. The conjunctive allocation of water resources maximizes the net benefit of farmers. In this study, the novel hybrid optimization model developed is the first of its kind and was designed to resolve the sharing of water resource conflict among different reaches based on a genetic algorithm (GA), bacterial foraging optimization (BFO) and ant colony optimization (ACO) to maximize the net benefit of the water deficit in Sathanur reservoir command. The GA-based optimization model considered crop-related physical and economic parameters to derive optimal cropping patterns for three different conjunctive use policies and further allocation of surface and groundwater for different crops are enhanced with the BFO. The allocation of surface and groundwater for the head, middle and tail reaches obtained from the BFO is considered as an input to the ACO as a guiding mechanism to attain an optimal cropping pattern. Comparing the average productivity values, policy 3 (3.665 Rs/m3) has better values relating to policy 1 (3.662 Rs/m3) and policy 2 (3.440 Rs/m3). Thus, the developed novel hybrid optimization model (GA-BFO-ACO) is very promising for enhancing farmer's net income and can be replicated in other irrigated regions to overcome chronic water problems. The productivity value of policy 3 was 6.54% greater than that of policy 2, whereas that of policy 1 was 6.45% greater. Overall, the comparison shows that the better performance analysis of various optimization was done successfully.

A three-stage decomposition algorithm for decentralized multi-project scheduling under uncertainty

Decentralized management of multiple projects is a common practice in areas such as maintenance service, supply chain management, and globalized manufacturing. Nevertheless, the resolution of resource conflicts among multiple projects caused by management independence is a challenging task in generating a multi-project baseline schedule. Various unexpected events may also affect the project execution phase, leading to resource disruptions that can cause the baseline schedule to become infeasible and necessitate its repair. Here, we study the decentralized multi-project scheduling problem subject to global resource disruption, which is NP-hard. To obtain high-quality baseline schedules and effectively repair disrupted schedules, we formulated a three-stage decomposition model. Then, we developed a three-stage decomposition algorithm with a task-scoring mechanism (TDA-TS), which is generic for the processes of schedule generation and repair. Proposed new priority rules were developed that used information about the local schedules and were organized as TDA-TS to further improve its performance. A comprehensive experiment was conducted on the Multi-Project Scheduling Problem LIBrary dataset. The experimental results indicated that the proposed algorithm outperformed several existing centralized and distributed algorithms in the generation of baseline schedules and that it could effectively repair disrupted schedules even for large instances. Furthermore, we saw that the newly proposed priority rule embedded in TDA-TS significantly outperformed other priority rules in repairing the disrupted schedules. The results of this research are valuable for managers who need to effectively repair disrupted schedules in a decentralized multi-project environment facing various disruptions.

Design of Hesitation Gestures for Nonverbal Human-Robot Negotiation of Conflicts

When the question of who should get access to a communal resource first is uncertain, people often negotiate via nonverbal communication to resolve the conflict. What should a robot be programmed to do when such conflicts arise in Human-Robot Interaction? The answer to this question varies depending on the context of the situation. Learning from how humans use hesitation gestures to negotiate a solution in such conflict situations, we present a human-inspired design of nonverbal hesitation gestures that can be used for Human-Robot Negotiation. We extracted characteristic features of such negotiative hesitations humans use, and subsequently designed a trajectory generator (Negotiative Hesitation Generator) that can re-create the features in robot responses to conflicts. Our human-subjects experiment demonstrates the efficacy of the designed robot behaviour against non-negotiative stopping behaviour of a robot. With positive results from our human-robot interaction experiment, we provide a validated trajectory generator with which one can explore the dynamics of human-robot nonverbal negotiation of resource conflicts.

Social Choice Rules, Fallback Bargaining, and Related Games in Common Resource Conflicts

Due to the lack of resources, individuals, groups, or countries are more involved in common resource conflicts. This paper uses the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution methodology to model a conflict based on the Nash solution concept, General Meta-Rationality, Symmetric Meta-Rationality, Sequential Stability, Limited h Move Stability, and Non-Myopic Stability definitions and then sieve the socially optimal outcomes from the results of the graph model. We propose to add a new analytical stage as a sequential next step to the equilibria in the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution and utilize social choice voting rules such as the Borda score, the Plurality rule, the Median voting rule, Copeland’s method, Simpson’s rule, and Fallback bargaining. We also apply a new approach called Related games, where we show how the Leading game impacts the Consequential game’s outcome and equilibria. To demonstrate the proposed concepts, we applied these ideas to two case studies; (1) the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers conflict between Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, and (2) the Shatt al-Arab, which is on the border of Iran and Iraq. Results confirm that adding analytical stages in the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution and considering the Related games concept help decision and policy makers to gain a clearer insight into the conflict.

Relationship of population migration, crop production pattern, and socioeconomic development: evidence from the early 21st century

Global crop production and population distributions have undergone great changes under climate change and socioeconomic development, and have drawn considerable public attention. How to explain the similarity of the migration patterns of crop yield and population density for different countries/regions is still uncertain and worth studying. Here, we estimated the similarity between migrations of main crop caloric yield (i.e. maize, rice, wheat, and soybean) and population density using Fréchet distance, and investigated the regression relationship between Fréchet distance and related climatic and socioeconomic variables for countries/regions with different economic development stages. The results indicated that different countries/regions showed different Fréchet distances during 2000–2015, with a maximum value of 24.44 for Russia and a minimum value of 0.11 for Georgia. For countries/regions with different economic development stages, the built regression models can explain 39%–93% of the variability in the Fréchet distance. Log(land area), log(GDP), and log(land area under cereal production) were always included in regression models and had higher importance in explaining the variability of Fréchet distance. For the model for all countries/regions, both the log(land area) and log(GDP per capita) may positively link to the Fréchet distance. Possible reasons for these results are that countries/regions with high GDP (or GDP per capita) may ease the conflict of land resources between humans and crops to achieve agricultural industrialization, which causes the far connection of the migrations for crop caloric yield and population density. The complicated interactions of crop production, population dynamic, and socioeconomic development should be given greater attention in the future.

Elephant Flow Detection and Load-Balanced Routing with Efficient Sampling and Classification

SDN (Software defined networking) provides effective technical methods for optimal resource management. However, there are resource conflicts frequent and serious in current related schemes because they mix elephant and mice flows on shared transmission paths. So, controllers in SDN have to be smart enough to detect elephant flows with low cost and then reroute elephant and mice flows in a feature-aware way. However, existing elephant flow detection schemes suffer from high bandwidth consumption and long detection time; and little literature considers mice-flow scheduling. In this paper, we propose an Efficient Sampling and Classification Approach (ESCA). Our ESCA significantly reduces sampling overhead through estimating the arrival interval of elephant flows and filtering out redundant samples, and efficiently classifies samples with a new supervised classification algorithm based on correlations among data flows. Then, based on our low-cost ESCA, we propose a novel load-balanced routing approach LBRouting that sets up paths for elephant and mice flows with different mechanisms. The theoretical analysis proofs our ESCA outperforms related schemes. Extensive experiment results further demonstrate that our ESCA can provide accurate detection with less sampled packets and shorter detection time; and our routing approach LBRouting significantly outperforms related proposals.

Understanding Water Use Conflicts to Advance Collaborative Planning: Lessons Learned from Lake Diefenbaker, Canada

Conflicts around the multi-purpose water uses of Lake Diefenbaker (LD) in Saskatchewan, Canada need to be addressed to meet rapidly expanding water demands in the arid Canadian prairie region. This study explores these conflicts to advance collaborative planning as a means for improving the current water governance and management of this lake. Qualitative methodology that employed a wide participatory approach was used to collect focus group data from 92 individuals, who formed a community of water users. Results indicate that the community of water users is unified in wanting to maintain water quality and quantity, preserving the lake’s aesthetics, and reducing water source vulnerability. Results also show these users are faced with water resource conflicts resulting from lack of coherence of regulatory instruments in the current governance regime, and acceptable management procedures of both consumptive and contemporary water uses that are interlinked in seven areas of: irrigation, industrial, and recreational water uses; reservoir water level for flood control and hydroelectricity production; wastewater and lagoon management; fish farm operations; and regional water development projects. As a means of advancing collaborative planning, improvements in water allocation and regulatory instruments could be made to dissipate consumptive use conflicts and fill the under-regulation void that exists for contemporary water uses. Additionally, a comprehensive LD water use master plan, as a shared vision to improve participation in governance, could be developed to direct the water uses that have emerged over time. This study suggests that these three areas are practical starting conditions that would enable successful collaborative planning for the seven areas of water uses. Focusing on these three areas would ensure the current and future needs of the community of water users are met, while avoiding reactive ways of solving water problems in the LD region, especially as the water crisis in the Canadian Prairie region where LD is located is expected to intensify.

Reviewing the links between climate change and resource conflict

Knowledge of the relationship between climate change and resource conflict is paramount in resolving resource conflict between farmers and herdsmen in Nigeria. However, there is yet no general agreement on how climate change causes or influences resource conflict. Thus, a review of existing literature that link climate change and resource conflict was conducted for identification of the missing link. These were achieved through the review of literature published in the era of the recent global climate change from late 90s to date. Selections of papers were based on the topic and date of publication. Result showed that there is general agreement that climate change influence resource conflicts. Some of the authors agreed that climate change cannot cause resource conflict in isolation but through influences on other factors that affect resource availability, accessibility and utility. These factors are also influenced by policies and socio-cultural system. Thus, resource conflict may be a secondary or tertiary effect of climate change. Climate change solution is scares in literature that linked climate change and resource conflict. Thus, future studies should be focused on climate change solution to resource conflict.
 Keywords: Climate change, Resource conflict, Literature review, Famers

Mars Land Use Policy Implementation: Approaches and Best Methods

Sending humans to Mars has been a component of the official US space policy of multiple presidential administrations. Additional stakeholders with interests in visiting Earth's terrestrial neighbor in the coming decades include private companies and the space agencies of other spacefaring nations. Numerous motivations exist for humans to explore and settle on the Martian surface, including environmental suitability and species survival, the search for life, scientific and technological development, economic profitability, and fundamental human nature. However, if human settlement and sustainability on Mars is expected to become a reality, existing legal regime deficiencies must be addressed, six of which I have identified: (1) national jurisdiction and responsibilities, (2) resource utilization, (3) conflict resolution and central authority, (4) environmental protection, (5) future settler legal status, and (6) social justice. This article examines the feasibility of various land use policies applied to the Mars case. I conduct a policy option evaluation of the following proposed land use approaches using assessment criteria based on the identified legal deficiencies: (1) bounded first possession by landfall [Collins, 2008], (2) bounded possession with planetary parks [Bruhns and Haqq-Misra, 2016], (3) liberating Mars [Haqq-Misra, 2015], (4) a Mars tax [Collins, 2008], and (5) planetary parks [Cockell and Horneck, 2004]. Based on this analysis, I recommend approach (2), which allows for bounded possession and creates planetary parks. This approach sufficiently addresses all assessment criteria by permitting occupation and resource rights to limited plots of land on the Martian surface, advocating for a Mars Secretariat as a conflict mediation method, implementation of a planetary park system to protect valuable lands, and designating the application of laws within and outside of land claim areas. Implications of the findings presented here are valuable not only for the future exploration and settlement of Mars but other solar system bodies where human activity may be an eventual reality.

An Unintended Legacy: The External Policy Responses of the USA and European Union to Conflict Minerals in Africa

Competition over environmental and natural resources characteristically lies at the heart of armed conflicts in Africa. It is also common knowledge that some companies dealing in products such as laptops, smart phones, and jewellery import minerals from conflict-affected areas, thereby indirectly fuelling conflicts in these areas or undermining human rights. For a continent endowed with natural resources including minerals, Africa has suffered the brunt of this predicament. This state of affairs has lent impetus to the adoption of several regulations geared towards curbing irresponsible business practices by companies relying on such minerals, the goal being, amongst others, to guarantee the protection of human rights. In May 2017, the European Union adopted regulations intended to stop the importation of conflict minerals in Europe, debatably making giant strides in the direction of the protection of human rights. These regulations are to come into force in 2021. However, can these regulations advance the much-desired goal of the protection of human rights in Africa on issues pertaining to conflict minerals? By analyzing the 2017 EU regulations in light of previous regulations of a similar nature, the paper concludes that the said regulations constitute a weak normative framework and could in fact have unintended consequences on the fundamental rights of civilians in natural resource-rich conflict areas of Africa.

What do Computer Scientists Know About Conflict Minerals?

Despite low public awareness, significant social and environmental impacts are associated with computer hardware manufacturing. Particularly, many consumers do not know about conflict minerals, which are used in electronics’ components and whose extraction is associated with widespread human rights abuses and environmental destruction. The literature about these minerals focuses on explaining the conflict as well as commenting and describing the legislation and other solutions that have emerged over the years to tackle this issue. This study aims to investigate the public awareness around these topics amongst computing professionals. Through an online survey, the level of familiarity of such professionals with conflict minerals was analyzed, as well as their knowledge about other socio-environmental impacts of the electronics industry. This study unveils the ignorance in the computer science community about this issue and proposes ways in which this gap of knowledge could be filled.

Using Earned Value Management and Schedule Risk Analysis with resource constraints for project control

The main goal of project control is to measure the actual project progress such that the deviations from the plan can be identified and corrective actions can be taken to bring the project back on track. However, in resource-constrained projects, disrupted activities affect their successors due to precedence relations and the other activities due to resource constraints, both of which will result in deviations during project progress. Since the project control approaches solely focus on the deviations based on the network analysis, they do not accurately reflect the progress of resource-constrained projects.This paper extends project control approaches for resource-constrained projects to measure and evaluate whether the project progress is acceptable. Moreover, we design three scenarios considering possible resource conflicts to take corrective actions when needed. In the computational experiment, this project control process is applied to a large set of projects with different characteristics and further validated on real-life project data. The results show that the proposed scenarios and different project control approaches are efficient and reliable, but their use depends on project network structure and resource scarceness.

Simulating trans-boundary watershed water resources conflict

With the rapid development of economy, the water shortage and water intake competition have been further intensified, resulting in the conflict of water resources development. This paper, against the amount of water conflict, has respectively constructed the three-party evolutionary game model regarding the water intake condition at the upper, middle and lower reaches of the river basin from the perspective of evolutionary game theory, verified the related conclusions with the numerical simulation. The conclusions of the research are as follows: (1) There are four sets of system local asymptotic stability points P20,0,1, P40,1,1,P61,0,1 and P81,1,1 in the three-party game of amount of water based trans-boundary water resources conflict, which means there existed four sets of evolutionary stable strategies (non-cooperation, non-cooperation, cooperation), (non-cooperation, cooperation, cooperation), (cooperation, non-cooperation, cooperation), and (cooperation, cooperation, cooperation). After the verification with the numerical simulation, the most contradictory area is existed between the upper and middle reaches of the river basin. Thus, the selected choice is (non-cooperation, non-cooperation, cooperation); (2) as for the amount of water based trans-boundary water resources conflict, the cost of cooperation water intake C1 has a significant impact on the strategy evolutionary path of the water intake group. This is of great theoretical and practical significance for the scientific regulation of trans-boundary water resources conflict and the realization of water resource management goals.

How village leaders in rural Amazonia create bonding, bridging, and linking social capital configurations to achieve development goals, and why they are so difficult to maintain over time

At the dawn of the 21st century, riverine communities in the Brazilian Amazon faced natural resource conflicts, land tenure issues, a lack of basic services, and other development challenges. The solutions to these challenges required riverine leaders to not only build extensive social networks, but also forced them to create mutually reinforcing configurations of bonding, bridging, and linking social capital. A position generator survey conducted among a sample of riverine communities in the municipality of Lábrea, Amazonas confirmed that riverine leaders had more extensive linking social capital than non-leaders. Two years of ethnographic research identified the complex micro-sociological processes riverine leaders engaged in to create the configurations of bonding, bridging, and linking social capital required to achieve collective goals. These micro-sociological processes included day-to-day behaviors, actions, interactions, and complex decisions regarding how and when to activate and deactivate relationships. This research indicates that analyzing day-to-day micro-sociological processes is useful not only to understand social capital configurations, but also to understand how some people are able to create more social capital than others. However, while some micro-sociological processes facilitate social capital configurations, others complicate efforts to create and maintain them. This article also illustrates the burdens riverine leaders faced in creating social capital configurations and the challenges of maintaining them over time. This study builds on previous research regarding the role of community leadership in rural development and provides examples of how analyzing micro-sociological processes can help identify the benefits, costs, and burdens of creating the social capital necessary to achieve development goals.

Interactions between simultaneous aerobic exercise and mental rotation

While the effects of aerobic exercise during a cognitive task on the performance of said cognitive task have been extensively studied, it has not been investigated whether cognitive performance during aerobic exercise influences the physical performance. For this, it is the main goal of the study to investigate the physical and cognitive performance during a simultaneous conduction of aerobic exercise and mental rotation. Forty-one German sport students cycled at 60% intensity while simultaneously performing a mental rotation task. In a within-subject design, both physical and cognitive performances were compared with isolated cycling and mental rotation as control conditions using both objective (heart rate and pedal cadence in the cycling task, reaction time and accuracy in the mental rotation task) and subjective (RPE) cognitive and physical measures. The results analyzed with hierarchical linear modeling revealed no effect of either simultaneous cognitive tasks on objective (heart rate) or subjective (RPE) physical effort, nor of simultaneous exercise on reaction time or accuracy in cognitive performance. However, we have found lower cadence during cognitive tasks, which was also stable in time compared to an increase in cadence during exercise control. Furthermore, our results demonstrated increased cognitive effort during exercise. Our findings suggest that increased effort, both physiological and cognitive, is required during combined physical and cognitive work in support of neurological resource conflicts caused by the differing demands of exercise and executive function.

From Pine Parthenons to Pocketbooks: Frank Kidder, MIT, and the Reinvention of American Timber ca. 1862–84

Resource conflicts in late nineteenth-century America transformed cultural and technical understandings of building materials as settlers and industrialists alike brought pressure to bear on the research university. Architect-engineer Frank Kidder and his Architectural Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provide a window onto how these politics transformed the symbolic and pedagogical significance of timber. While the university’s engineers worked to expand logging amidst deforestation, its architects, like William Ware and Henry Van Brunt, devised an allied esthetics of materials that valorized forests and settlers in nationalist terms. Kidder brought these disciplines together, embodying the educated woodsman that Ware and Van Brunt sought to cultivate. His 1884 pocketbook promulgated their simultaneously rationalist and nostalgic view of timber among the new class of professional architects they trained.

Resistance Against Corporation by the Religion-Based Environmental Movement in Water Resources Conflict in Pandeglang, Indonesia

Natural resource conflicts between corporations and local communities were quite common in Indonesia. In an area in Pandeglang-Banten, a giant corporation tried to control the natural resources, especially in this case is water resource, and the local religious based community fought against the corporation’s agenda. This paper describes the formation of a religious-based community doing social movement against a big corporation in Pandeglang, Banten Indonesia. The research method uses qualitative with case study strategy. The research location was in Cadasari District, Pandeglang Regent, Banten Province, Indonesia. This paper shows that the social movement succeeded to defend their accesses to water resources through religious doctrine easily understood by local people under the leadership by the local religious leaders (Kyai) from local Islamic schools (Pesantren). They share collective identity, as victims of the company project and also a moslem. The collective identity as victims as well as moslems, linked by dense religious informal networks and corporation and local government as clear enemy made their movement successfully terminated the company project. As a main actor, Kyai played significant roles to mobilize people in this social movement. Using her charismatic character, Kyai was able to defeat legal-rational leadership such as local government and security forces.

China’s involvement in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s resource curse mineral driven conflict: an Afrocentric review

ABSTRACT Resource curse mineral driven conflicts have taken a major toll in the African continent. Observably, most of the studies which have been conducted do not address major aspects such as the international influence coming from economically powerful countries who rely heavily on Africa’s mineral resources for their economic feed. It is in this context that the current research article is driven by this scholarly major gap that China (second global biggest economy) is deployed as a test case to explore her involvements in the mineral resources curse and conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This article answers a research question on whether international major influencers such as China do have a role to play on resource curse mineral driven incessant conflicts in Africa. Equally, this article argues that China’s Sicomines deal secured with DRC is at the forefront of China’s big indirect role in the continued resource curse mineral driven conflict in the DRC’s Eastern region driven by mineral resource wealth. This argument is achieved methodologically by the deployment of document analysis and content analysis of the prevailing scholarly conversation throughout Africa.

Mandatory Disclosure for Ethical Supply Chains: A Conflict Mineral Case Study

Mandatory disclosure requirements for corporate supply chains have the potential to leverage consumer and investor sensibilities to incentivize corporations to source more ethically. Despite their growing prevalence, there are few empirical studies of their effects: whether they actually put pressure on companies remains untested. This Article supplies such evidence by examining the consumer and investor responses to corporate supply chain disclosures made pursuant to Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The act requires publicly traded companies to disclose to the Securities and Exchange Commission whether their supply chain contains “conflict minerals” (minerals important in global supply chains whose sourcing supports the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo and surrounding areas). The law aims to give customers and investors information about corporate supply chains, with the hope that they will support companies that source responsibly and punish those that do not. But whether this is actually accomplished is an open question. This Article provides an empirical study of the market responses to three years of Section 1502 disclosures, whose contents were coded to create a novel dataset. Disclosures implying that a company has a higher risk of contributing to the conflict are associated with higher revenues and stock performances than those implying a lower risk. This implies there is no market discipline of bad actors in response to the disclosures; instead, bad actors are rewarded. This is consistent with the finding that the number of companies reporting a higher risk of contributing to the conflict through their supply chains did not decrease over the three years. One potential explanation is that consumers and investors may read disclosures more for signals of a corporation’s honesty or profit-maximization skills than for information about conflict-minerals exposure, and firms disclosing a higher risk of this exposure are more likely to be honest and profit seeking. Because disclosures about supply chains will generally send these signals as well, expecting investors or consumers to discipline the supply chains in response to securities disclosures is unrealistic. But scores for the due diligence procedures and forward-looking commitments in the disclosures generated by an NGO for a subset of the companies are positively correlated with revenues, suggesting how mandatory disclosure regimes might be improved. The NGO’s success in disseminating and analyzing the information suggests that the SEC may not be the best actor for implementing supply chain disclosure requirements and the criteria for the scoring suggest that disclosure requirements should focus more on the reporting of processes so that they are less likely to send a signal about honesty.