External Actors and the Political Resource Curse

A vast literature has debated the effects of natural resource wealth, especially oil, on democracy. Despite increasingly sophisticated methodological analyses, there is still no consensus on whether or not a so-called "political resource curse" even exists. However, there is substantial evidence for two propositions. First, significant oil wealth stabilizes authoritarian rule by bolstering rulers’ ability to pay off and/or repress dissenters and society at large. Second, oil’s effects are neither fully deterministic nor uniform across time and space. Overwhelmingly, however, existing literature characterizes the effects of oil as primarily a matter of domestic politics. However, closer examination shows that many international structures, institutions, and policy decisions shape both the impact of oil and the nature of the state. While there have been occasional acknowledgements of international factors, most notably regionalism, neighborhood effects, and great power competition for oil resources, there have been no systematic attempts at cross-case comparisons of highly resource-dependent states. This paper begins to fill this gap by looking at how international actors have influenced both regime type and the prospects for peace and conflict. Ultimately, it demonstrates that to understand the political impact of oil on governance, it is vital to look beyond domestic factors.