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CATASTROPHE OR ADAPTATION? EXPLAINING THE IMPACTS OF RESOURCE SCARCITY AND ADAPTABILITY ON POLITICAL INSTABILITY
by
Wenyu Li
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(POLITICS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS)
May 2011
Copyright 2011 Wenyu Li
Object Description
| Title | Catastrophe or adaptation? Explaining the impacts of resource scarcity and adaptability on political instability |
| Author | Li, Wenyu |
| Author email | wenyuli@usc.edu; liwenyu81@gmail.com |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | Politics & International Relations |
| School | College of Letters, Arts and Sciences |
| Date defended/completed | 2010-02-24 |
| Date submitted | 2011 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2011-04-11 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | James, Patrick |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Rosen, Stanley Tang, Shui Yan |
| Abstract | With the rapid growth of population and human consumption, natural resource scarcity is increasingly considered as an important national security issue. A debate on the causal relationships between resource scarcity and political instability of a state, in particular civil war, has arisen in the last two decades. Although a series of case studies have been conducted by several research projects, quantitative studies on the subject still lag behind and the few existing ones have reported quite inconsistent results. This is because most of them focus on the shortage of certain natural resources and do not take into account the interaction between the natural and human system.; This dissertation creatively develops an "adaptability" model bringing four aspects of adaptability respectively as the intermediate variable to explain the linkages between resource scarcity and political instability. Conducting auto-regressions over two periods utilizing five widely-used civil war datasets, this study confirms that the risk of civil war increases when a state's resource scarcity reaches some threshold level, such as the mean and median values. It then applies principal component analysis and regression analysis to find that renewable and nonrenewable resource scarcity relate to political instability in quite different ways. The results imply that renewable resource challenge is detrimental to the political stability of states with low economic development level and/or poor political institutions, but not to states with high economic development level and healthy political institutions. However, the tests for nonrenewable resources do not find significant evidence for such relationships. To further evaluate the model, this dissertation analyzes Malawi, Mauritania and Tanzania as three worst-predicted cases. It finally identifies cultural contexts and international actors as two important factors that explain their nonconformity with the statistical model. |
| Keyword | adaptability; auto-regression; civil war; political instability; principal component analysis; resource scarcity |
| Geographic subject (country) | Malawi; Mauritania; Tanzania |
| Coverage date | 1952/1999 |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m3732 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Rights | Li, Wenyu |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Filename | etd-Li-4326 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume26/etd-Li-4326.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | CATASTROPHE OR ADAPTATION? EXPLAINING THE IMPACTS OF RESOURCE SCARCITY AND ADAPTABILITY ON POLITICAL INSTABILITY by Wenyu Li A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (POLITICS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS) May 2011 Copyright 2011 Wenyu Li |
