Natural resource rents, political regimes and terrorism in Africa

The study adds to the stock of existing literature on the supposed crises-inducing role of natural resource rents, by specifically linking same to political regime and growth of terrorist attacks for a panel of forty-nine (49) African economies for the period, 1980–2012. To avail room for more policy implications, four terrorism indicators, namely: domestic, international, uncertain, and total, are used on a negative binomial regression estimator due to the count nature of terrorism data. Our findings reveal the following: first, natural resource rents have unconditional effects on transnational and total terrorism. Second, political regimes equally exert unconditional impacts on domestic and total terrorism, with both democracy and autocracy mitigating the terror-inducing effects on the one hand, with anocracy acting as a magnifying apparatus on the other hand. Third, the interaction between natural resource rents and anocracy has negative marginal effects on both domestic and total terrorism measures. Fourth, the corresponding effects of interaction, however, turned positive for both domestic and total terrorism. Lastly, the considered conditioning variables equally received extensive empirical backings but not on an equal basis. Thus, understanding the terror context of natural resource rents and the dynamics of political regimes represent formidable counterterrorist measures.