Oil, domestic conflict, and opportunities for democratization

Jeff D Colgan ()
Additional contact information
Jeff D Colgan: Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University

Journal of Peace Research, 2015, vol. 52, issue 1, 3-16

Abstract: The resource curse literature suggests two stylized facts about oil-producing states (‘petrostates’) that are not easily reconciled with each other. On one hand, petrostates experience more frequent civil wars than non-petrostates. On the other hand, petrostates have more robust and long-lasting autocratic regimes. This is puzzling because one might expect that one form of instability would lead to the other, as is typical in non-petrostates. If petrostates are more prone to domestic conflict than non-petrostates, and conflicts are opportunities for regime transition and democratization, why do we not observe such transitions more frequently in petrostates? I argue that despite frequent conflicts, rebels rarely succeed in violently overthrowing a petrostate regime or otherwise forcing regime transition. This is because oil generates financial resources that can be used by both an incumbent government and rebels to fund armed conflict, and an incumbent government typically has greater access to these resources. In an analysis of non-democracies for 1946–2004, I also find that oil inhibits democratization in petrostates, but only in the context of violent domestic conflicts. Peaceful pathways to democracy remain open in petrostates. These findings significantly alter our understanding of resource curse. Many scholars argue that oil inhibits democracy because of rentier politics, but this standard interpretation is incomplete. Oil appears to inhibit democratization only in the context of violent domestic conflicts. Ten of the eleven transitions to democracy in petrostates since 1945 occurred without significant domestic conflict.

Keywords: civil war; democratization; oil; resource curse (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://jpr.sagepub.com/content/52/1/3.abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:joupea:v:52:y:2015:i:1:p:3-16

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Peace Research from Peace Research Institute Oslo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().