CONWAY, Ark. (April 7, 2016) – Hendrix College senior William O'Brochta ’16 recently published his senior economics research thesis in
Journal of International Studies
, a peer-reviewed academic journal.
O'Brochta’s paper “Did Natural Resource Wealth Impact Fighting in the Bosnian War?” is a rigorous statistical investigation of whether natural resource availability could explain where fighting was most prevalent during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War.
Although the presence of natural resources was not the major cause of the War, O'Brochta found that the presence of natural resources, especially water resources, suggested higher levels of violent conflict, all else equal.
“Scholars typically classify conflicts based on how they begin, not how the conflict actually progresses once in progress,” said O’Brochta. “Conflicts over natural resources are said to be experiencing a natural resource curse, where natural resources are the
primary cause of the conflict.”
“This study innovates by assuming the Bosnian War was not begun as a fight over natural resources and, instead, attempting to explain that natural resources are an ancillary factor,” he said. “I performed both multiple regression analysis on individual measures
of natural resources and was also able to explore factor analysis to combine the individual measures into a composite index that showed the statistical importance of natural resources in the overall model. I think this research really opens up a new area of exploration in the Bosnian War literature.”
“William actually travelled to Bosnia and its libraries amassing much data on the Bosnian War and the geo-political and economic factors that may have influenced the War’s prosecution.” said Hendrix economics professor Dr. Tom Stanley. “William’s study is really quite amazing. He is the first student that I have worked with
that has published in an academic research journal all on his own.”
About Hendrix College
Hendrix College is a private liberal arts college in Conway, Arkansas. Founded in 1876 and affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884, Hendrix is featured in Colleges That Change Lives:
40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think about Colleges and is nationally recognized in numerous college guides, lists, and rankings for academic quality, community, innovation, and value. For more information, visit
www.hendrix.edu.