We empirically investigate the role of natural resources, and bad governance in explaining variation in the intensity of conflict during the 1991-2002 civil war in Sierra Leone. As a proxy for governance quality we exploit exogenous variation in political competition at the level of the...

This paper argues that state weakness is broader than implied previously in the civil war literature, and that particular types of weakness in interaction with natural resources have aggravating or mitigating consequences for the risk of civil war. While in anocracies or unstable regimes natural...