Oil and War: An Exchange
Publisher: Security Studies
Author(s): Jeff D. Colgan
Date: 2021
Topics: Assessment, Extractive Resources, Governance, Monitoring and Evaluation
Countries: Iran, Iraq
Hye Ryeon Jang and Benjamin Smith argue in their article “Pax Petrolica? Rethinking the Oil–Interstate War Linkage” that, when reexamined, the historical data are “more supportive of petro-peace than of petro-aggression.”1 Their argument is a direct critique of my research on that topic, which includes my book Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War.2 They have a number of concerns, but their central claim is that “the Iran–Iraq War is singularly responsible for what was believed to have been a radical petro-aggression effect globally.”3 In various statistical models, they add a dummy variable for the eighteen country-year observations associated with the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88) and argue that this reveals a key variable from my research to be statistically insignificant. The key variable is petro-revolutionary, a dichotomous indicator for a state that is both a “petrostate” (defined as a state with net oil exports of at least 10% of gross domestic product (GDP)) and has a revolutionary government. The tendency of petro-revolutionary states to instigate interstate conflicts at a high rate is the phenomenon I label “petro-aggression.”