Oil discoveries, civil war, and preventive state repression
| Author | Peter D Carey,Curtis Bell,Emily Hencken Ritter,Scott Wolford |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00223433211047365 |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
Oil discoveries, civil war, and preventive
state repression
Peter D Carey II
Department of Political Science,
University of California Merced
Curtis Bell
International Programs Department,
US Naval War College
Emily Hencken Ritter
Department of Political Science, Vanderbilt
University
Scott Wolford
Department of Government, University of Texas
at Austin
Abstract
Anticipated shifts in power favoring one side can lead to preventive war today. When power is poised to shift towards
the state, potential rebels may launch a civil war while they retain a relative advantage, consistent with the com-
mitment problem. We argue that a government expecting a group to rebel has an incentive to prevent that challenge
by repressing the population. Repression is a government attempt to undermine and prevent dissent that would turn
into rebellion—dissent and rebellion that is more likely in expectation of power shifting in the government’s favor.
Empirical models using data on newly proved oil reserves show that states expecting an increase in oil wealth
demonstrably increase repression in the years between discovery and access. The findings imply a new connection
between natural resources and political violence: Oil wealth can encourage repression not only by reducing its costs,
but also by creating windows of opportunity that rebels hope to exploit and governments hope to close. Not only civil
war but also rising expectations of rebellion are associated with a marked increase in state-directed violence against
civilians.
Keywords
civil war, dissent, human rights, natural resources, political violence, repression
Governments repress civilians to cement their hold on
power. Yet when we observe repression, it is difficult to
separate preventive from retaliatory motives, and deter-
rent from provoked follow-on effects. Suppose a govern-
ment rounds up dissidents, shutters media outlets, or
clamps down on private communication because it
expects imminent rebellion. Without knowledge of the
government’s beliefs about the rising risk of rebellion,
such repression appears provocative when followed by
civil conflict – even if that repression limited the scope
of war and improved the state’s chances of success against
the rebellion. Motive is key to understanding why and
when governments repress, yet our hypothetical scenario
of preventive repression is observationally equivalent to
routine repression that provokes a backlash. How can we
parse the motives and consequences of state repression?
Observed repression and dissent are linked by govern-
ment and dissident beliefs about each other’s strategies
and their relative effectiveness (Pierskalla, 2010; Casper
& Tyson, 2014; Ritter, 2014). Both sides can anticipate
and move to limit each other’s actions, which means that
preventive and provocative repression can have the same
observable relationship with subsequent dissent, rebel-
lion, and civil conflict. Further, pooling preventive and
responsive repression without some means of identifying
them can lead to incorrect inferences over the causes and
consequences of political violence (Ritter & Conrad,
2016). This is especially true of the relationship between
Corresponding author:
emily.h.ritter@vanderbilt.edu
Journal of Peace Research
2022, Vol. 59(5) 648–662
ªThe Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433211047365
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