Award Date

5-1-2015

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Political Science

First Committee Member

Michele Kuenzi

Second Committee Member

David Damore

Third Committee Member

John Tuman

Fourth Committee Member

Bernard Malamud

Number of Pages

60

Abstract

Africa is a region of the world that has been plagued by conflict for decades. Specific civil wars in the 1990s gained worldwide attention due to the perceived source of funding for rebel groups to continue the bloodshed: diamonds. As civil society organizations and journalists exposed the role of diamonds and the diamond industry, a link between diamonds and conflict also emerged in the scholarly literature regarding the “resource curse.” In response, policymakers created the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, an institution designed to address the problem of conflict diamonds and to clean up the diamond industry. While many critics have been quick the exploit the limitations of the institution, there has been relatively no academic work empirically evaluating if the Kimberley Process is effectively reducing conflict outcomes. This thesis seeks to analytically assess whether the institution is actually proving to be an obstacle for the onset and duration of civil war. Using logit regression and a Weibull duration model, this study finds that while the Kimberley Process does not significantly effect the onset of civil war, it does decrease the length of wars for the diamond producing states it was designed to alleviate conflict in.

Keywords

Africa; Africa; Sub-Saharan; Civil war; Conflict diamonds; Diamonds; Kimberley Process Certification Scheme; Resource curse

Disciplines

African Studies | Economics | Political Science | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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