​The overriding importance of political will to rebuild sound institutions, promote accountability and anti-corruption efforts, better invest revenues, and develop natural resource management strategies which address the grievances that could lead to further conflict is among the findings in the first book in a major international series on post-conflict peacebuilding and natural resource management.

The August issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution is a special issue dedicated to output from the Disaggregating Civil War project. This project (GROW) is a collaboration between CSCW (PRIO), University of Essex and ETH Zürich. This special issue is edited by Lars-Erik Cederman and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch.

Päivi Lujala defended her dissertation in economics at NTNU on Monday 16 June. Her dissertation was on ‘Natural Resources and Armed Civil Conflict’. She engaged the two opponents, Anke Hoeffler (Oxford) and Gaute Torsvik (Bergen), in a spirited debate.  Her two dissertation advisors Ragnar Torvik (NTNU) and Scott Gates (CSCW/NTNU) were extremely proud.

Recent research on armed civil conflict has suggested that oil-producing countries tend to experience conflict more often than their non-oil-producing counterparts. To facilitate more rigorous research on the possible links between hydrocarbons and conflict, this paper presents and describes a new global dataset, PETRODATA. The authors are all CSCW associates; Päivi Lujala, Jan Ketil Rød and Nadja Thieme.