Oil, Conflict, and Stability

According to existing literature, the presence of oil leads simultaneously to increased risk of civil conflict and exceptional regime stability. The seemingly contradictory nature of these findings—oil leading both to instability and stability—has never been systematically addressed. Cataloging the causal mechanisms underlying both relationships, I demonstrate that hypotheses linking oil to civil conflict implicitly assume a government with weak state capacity, while those linking oil to regime stability assume a government with strong state capacity. I employ data for all available countries and years since 1960, use five different measures of state strength, and address the possible endogeneity of oil production. I show that oil’s tendency to spur civil conflict disappears in the context of strong state capacity, and that oil’s tendency to stabilize political regimes disappears in the context of weak capacity. Acknowledgments: I am grateful to Chris Anderson, Anjali Bohlken, Jeff Colgan, Peter Enns, Marcela González Rivas, Stephan Litschig, Tom Morrison, Tom Pepinsky, Megan Reif, Karen Remmer, Michael Ross, David Stasavage, Chris Way, and Erik Wibbels for comments. I am also grateful to participants at seminars at New York University and the 2009 Annual Meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association. All errors are of course my own.