The Oil Blessing: Reexamining Conflict in the Muslim World

An influential conventional wisdom holds that oil causes intrastate conflict and that oil in particular explains the prevalence of domestic political violence in the Muslim world. I show that the relationship between oil and intrastate conflict in the empirical literature is more ambiguous than commonly assumed. I test to see if the various measures of the oil resource predict any dimension of intrastate conflict in the Muslim world. My results show oil resources are associated with lower levels of civil conflict, repression and terrorism in Muslim-majority countries. This supports the \u27rentier state\u27 perspective which states that regimes with significant oil resources mitigate conflict by strengthening the state relative to the populace and by distributing rent. Lastly, I argue the reasons for the concentration of conflict in Muslim world are not understood but the fact that Muslim \u27rentier states\u27 are able to effectively mitigate conflict offers some clues