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Natural resources are identified as a significant variable explaining intrastate conflict since the end of the Cold War. There are sound reasons for this to be the case, as social scientists struggle to make sense of conflicts in the post-Cold War era. As climatic disruptions and climate change are predicted to create extreme conditions and adversely affect natural resources accessibility, we wonder whether the capacity of nations to govern their natural resources rent-driven economies is of explanatory value. Hence, we hypothesize that what we have termed the governance capacity curse (GCC) may play an equal or greater role in our understanding of natural resources-driven internal wars than the so-called natural resources curse (NRC). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on the collaborative work Bill and I produced. In this trajectory, I learned to appreciate Bill's work both for his empirical rigor and his elegant and witty theoretical analysis, a rare mixture in the dry world of social theorizing. Bill's work engaged in an ongoing dialog with European sociologists whose grand theorizing on risks has led to seriously flawed and empirically questionable theoretical analyses. By comparison, Bill found in the middle-range American tradition of Erikson, Perrow, Short, and others a more theoretically rigorous and empirically sound analysis of environmental and technological risks. Bill understood that high-risk technologies in general and nuclear technology in particular, tend to work properly most of the time, but with occasional failures sufficiently troublesome to lead to the creation of what Short () termed 'risk to the social fabric.' Building on his work and rich legacy, I continue this theoretical dialog and propose that although some of the most provocative sociological thinking about risks is associated with Beck and Giddens, the more nuanced views of authors such as Freudenburg and colleagues are sociologically more robust, both theoretically and empirically. The key difference is that, while Beck and Giddens see the risks of ' The Risk Society' as transcending all social boundaries, Freudenburg and others see them as ' Titanic Risks'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]