Project Description

Extreme poverty and intrastate conflict are increasingly concentrated in resource-dependent fragile states, where political settlements often depend on the distribution of rents through public office and coercive power. This project asks how shocks to resource rents affect political inclusion and conflict risk in such settings. It focuses on South Sudan, where a March 2024 pipeline rupture interrupted oil exports, the source of the overwhelming majority of government revenue, for more than a year. I examine whether this rent shock altered the balance between patronage, political exclusion, and violence. The project combines theoretical and empirical analysis. First, I develop a simple model of a ruler who allocates scarce rents between patronage to insiders, selective accommodation of outsiders, repression, and private consumption under the threat of contestation. Second, I construct a new panel dataset of public appointments and dismissals in South Sudan from 2018-2025, using machine-learning-assisted extraction from local news and official reporting. I then combine this with geocoded conflict data to examine whether the oil shock coincided with reshuffling of the state apparatus, narrowing of political inclusion, and changes in conflict intensity. The project aims to generate evidence on observable early-warning signals of exclusion-driven conflict and to inform nonviolent policy tools for sustaining pluralism in fragile political settlements.

Bio

Nick Wilson is a political economist focused on the dynamics of political control and ‘last mile’ development in contexts of fragility, with a regional focus on East Africa. He is currently a PhD Candidate in Economics and Teaching Assistant at the Nova School of Business and Economics in Portugal, and a Technical Advisor at OTHERwise Research. Previously, he worked in Kenya and South Sudan in international development and development research-related roles, and routinely returns to the region for research and advisory engagements.