Intuitively, many of us see strong connections between natural resources, sustainable development and conflict. Popular as well as academic debates underscore the challenges in achieving agreement to manage resources in economic, social and ecological sustainable ways, highlighting for instance the consequences of climate change for urban dwellers in South-East Asia living on slippery slopes; or how land grabbing in the south relates to the quest for land to assure food security or to produce bio-fuels to meet CO2 reduction agreements. Many point to the conflict potential of natural resources, underlining for instance the importance of ‘greed’ and illegal resource exploitation as a driver of conflicts in eastern DRC or Sierra Leone. This course starts from the notion that natural resources are very important in people’s livelihoods and may be a bone of fierce political contention. However, we should be wary for assuming straightforward relationships between resource scarcity or abundance and political conflict, human (in)security and sustainable development. This course provides an introduction to debates around the nature of different resources, the ways in which they are being governed and the conflicts this involves, as well as the politics through which natural resources acquire such an important role in the economy and public imagination. All the more, the course emphasizes the connections that link local challenges of natural resource access, use and competition to global economic trends, the management of global public goods, and global civic activism.