Political Implications of Natural Resources Conflict in Sudan

Abstract

This paper examines several factors that can help in-depth understanding of the relationship between natural resources and politics in Sudan. These factors include: fragile state and the way of distribution of resources and wealth, Rentier state, governance efficiency, natural resource and secession wars, and peace agreements and wealth sharing issue. All these factors determine natural resource management process and state-citizen relationship in a given country. The unobtrusive research method is a qualitative method mostly applicable in social inquiry. It is a type of non-participative observation and natural work taken from the real world setting, to gather data from the research site and allows the researcher to study the reality without directly affecting the data collection process (Rubbin and Babbie 2011). Moreover, this natural characteristic of the method allows the researchers to connect between reality and the study closely, independently and in non-responsive ways and also avoid the occurrence of mistakes due to the researcher's presence (Webb et al 1966; Sechert and Philips 1979 and Raymond 2000). In practice, there are various forms of unobtrusive methods used for the purpose of analysis. These include content analysis, existing data analysis and historical analysis. The latter also contains evaluation reports, reading of historical records and longitudinal analysis (Babbie 2010).