Water and land

Land grabbing, unequal land ownership, and a high concentration of land in the hands of elites have fed into multiple armed conflicts in the past, including in Colombia, Nepal, and South Africa (Zulueta-Fülscher & Murray 2024). Land reform and rights have been addressed by 129 substantive inter- and intrastate peace agreements between 1990 and 2025. The first chapter of the Final Agreement to End the Armed Conflict and Build a Stable and Lasting Peace, 24 November 2016, in Colombia, for example, comprehensively deals with rural and land reform.

In some cases, conflicts over land also intersect with competition over other natural resources, including fresh water. Drawing on interviews and its South Sudan Public Perceptions of Peace Survey data, PeaceRep has examined competition over water, land and pasture in South Sudan:

1. Flooding, intensified by climate change, has contributed to the migration of Dinka Bor herders from Jonglei State to the Equatoria region of South Sudan, resulting in conflict between migrating herders and local farmers over pasture. Livestock destroying crops and encroaching upon hunting grounds of host communities adds to the resulting inter-communal tensions (Muorwel, Pospisil & Monoja 2023).
2. This phenomenon is not limited to the Equatoria region with similar tensions around pasture and water arising in other states, such as in Warrap and Western Bahr el Ghazal, and indeed across different countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
3. The research has shown how seemingly localised conflicts are linked to climate change (Deng et al. 2024) and intertwined wider armed conflict dynamics and national-level politics. While the South Sudanese government, local, and international actors have made some targeted efforts to mitigate cattle migration-related conflict and displacement and conflict, comprehensive climate action policies are lacking, and resource constraints and a lack of political will hinder larger peace dialogues organised by civil society (Muorwel, Pospisil & Monoja 2023).

River basins

PeaceRep research on water resources and interstate conflict has found that transboundary watercourse use and management is influenced by domestic, regional, and global power dynamics as well as global and regional environmental and climatic changes. In international law, the principle of equitable and reasonable utilisation provides a basis for negotiating transboundary watercourse conflicts. Public, transparent, updated and cross-border Environmental Impact Assessments can bring a human needs perspective to watercourse conflicts that are often perceived as sovereign disputes. PeaceRep research has highlighted the need for ‘hydro-transparency’, that is, the open availability of information on the movement, storage and management of water within and across state borders. PeaceRep has used open-source software to examine surface water changes in the Euphrates-Tigris Basin from 1984–2015, focusing on Iraq, to show how data can be used for more sustainable, equitable and reasonable utilisation of basin flows between riparian sates (Mason et al 2023).

PeaceRep research has additionally outlined approaches to water diplomacy, in particular in relation to the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Nile River in Ethiopia, setting out potential dispute settlement mechanisms available to international water conflicts. Where no dispute settlement mechanisms are available, riparian states may settle transboundary water disputes by referring to other international conventions that the parties may have entered into, such as the Pact of Bogotá, the Protocol of the African Union, or arbitral agreements of general nature (Daza-Clark, 2022).

Oil

PeaceRep research has examined the role of oil in political finance and peacemaking, particularly in South Sudan (Benson 2024; Pospisil 2025). In fragile states where governance institutions are weak, politics often centres on transactional bargains among the elite rather than the rule of law. Access to or control over oil rents is key to elite actors’ ability to achieve and maintain political power. This research has shown how elites in South Sudan have sustained a predatory revenue complex built on the British-led colonial state’s fiscal policies (Benson 2024). A small group of rulers in the country’s capital, Juba, have captured oil revenues, driving corruption while disincentivising meaningful taxation reform away from a coercive and predatory system.

Our research has foregrounded the likely destabilising impact of a decrease in discretionary oil rents in the future – a real risk with oil production in South Sudan currently being projected to significantly reduce by 2035 (Benson-Strohmayer & Awani, under review), and with long-term decarbonisation efforts underway globally as part of the green energy transition. Evidence from the PA-X Database suggests that there may be a link between willingness to engage in negotiations and the extent to which dominant political actors can source funding from more valuable natural resources. Pospisil (2023) suggests that conflict parties in settings which are more oil-dependent have been more likely to negotiate and reach comprehensive agreements when participation in formal government institutions can lead to more rent extraction – that is, in times when oil prices were higher. Similarly, more limited peace agreements happen when political funds are scarce (Spatz, Sarkar, & de Waal 2023).

Forest resources

PeaceRep’s research has also challenged assumptions about how elites in South Sudan might simply transplant their approach to resource extraction from oil to other resources, such as timber and charcoal, once oil production ceases in the country (Benson-Strohmayer & Awani, n.d.). The research has underscored the difference between the geographically limited and capital-intensive extraction of oil with the much more dispersed, labour-intensive, and customarily governed extraction of forest resources. Based on 333 ethnographic interviews across thirteen sites in nine South Sudanese states, this research has shown how indigenous communities resist the encroachment of military elites and displaced populations onto their lands, suggesting that a shift from oil to forest resources in the country will not be straightforward or uncontested and, in fact, go hand in hand with negotiation, friction, and ‘moral contestation’ at the forest frontier (Benson-Strohmayer & Awani, n.d.).

Critical minerals

Minerals have featured in dozens of inter- and intrastate peace agreements across the globe over the last 35 years (see PA-X). The issue of foreign ownership of the Panguna copper mine in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, is a prominent example of a conflict related to the extraction of minerals, which was subsequently discussed during the peace process. Diamonds have also historically been associated with conflict dynamics in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Sierra Leone, among other countries. PeaceRep research has tracked the development of extractive industries in post-2001 Afghanistan, highlighting current governance challenges under the de facto Taliban government (Habibyar & Noorani 2023).

In recent years, so-called ‘critical minerals’ have received significant political and scholarly attention due to their importance for military applications, strategic digital technologies, and the green energy transition. The United States’ push for critical minerals diplomacy, aimed at reducing the country’s dependence on imports from China, has shaped its peacemaking efforts in Ukraine and the eastern DRC, in particular. The ‘US-Ukraine Minerals deal’, effectively emerged as a ‘minerals for security’ agreement in which Ukraine committed to channel US investment into energy and mining sectors in exchange for US commitment to Ukrainian sovereignty and security. Agreements mediated with the support of the US between the DRC and Rwanda in 2025 have similarly called for regional economic integration focused on transparent mineral value chains, followed by a US agreement with the DRC aimed at securing a steady supply of critical minerals, particularly cobalt and copper, to the US (Epple and Lang n.d.).

PeaceRep research has also highlighted epistemic injustices, as in a form of harm, often inflicted on non-Western peoples and communities, which involves the effective erasure or silencing of their distinctive worldviews and associated ways of living, in critical mineral extraction practices and their governing sustainability frameworks (Cotula et al. n.d.). While some of these frameworks address the rights and interests of indigenous peoples, their operationalisation and implementation hinge largely on an existing ecosystem of (private) sustainability standards. To the extent that they do so, our research has shown, they risk reproducing, and in some ways even intensifying, forms of epistemic injustices, including a Western epistemological frame for global sustainability governance, thus sidelining indigenous knowledge, interests, and experiences of extraction (Cotula et al. n.d.)