A Blessing and a Curse: How Oil Impacts Center-seeking and Separatist Civil Wars
Abstract: Why do oil-rich countries frequently experience civil wars? The most prominent theories on the oil-civil war relationship focus on mechanisms through which oil wealth induces government vulnerability. But oil wealth also provides an incumbent government with large revenues to spend on armaments and patronage—which dampens the propensity for civil conflict. This paper presents a formal model and empirical evidence that show how the heterogeneous effects of oil create a conditional relationship between petroleum wealth and different types of civil wars. Oil should dampen the propensity for center-seeking wars by allowing a government to invest in armaments and therefore reduce a challenger’s expected utility to fighting. Oil should increase the propensity of separatist conflicts when oil reserves are located in territory populated by groups that lack political influence in the capital. The inability of the government to credibly commit to these groups creates a bargaining friction that can be eliminated by fighting. Statistical associations support both predictions, and also demonstrate a net negative relationship between oil and civil war onset. The combined theoretical and empirical evaluation defies the general characterization of oil wealth as a "curse" for civil conflict initiation.
