The construction of grievance: Natural resources and identity in a separatist conflict

This article makes a case for extenting social constructivist approaches to the study of grievance in natural resource conflicts. It does this by analyzing the separatist conflict in Acef. Indonesia, which is often portrayed as a paradigmatic resource conflitct due to the importance of the natural gas industry there. It is argue here, however, that natural resource exploitation promoted conflict in Acef only because it ecame entangled in wider processes of identity construction and was reinterpreted back to the pomulation by ethnic potilical entepreneurs in a way that legitimated violence. Rather than any intrinsic qualities of natural resource extraction. The key factor was the presence of an appropriate identity-based collective action frame. The argument is strenghened by comparison with two other resource-rich Indonesian provinces where resource extraction patterns were similat to Aceh but where no protracted violence occurred because similar identity resources were not available to local actors.