Diamonds, the Kimberley Process, and civil war in Sub-Sahran Africa

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.