Symposium: “Oil Discoveries, Shifting Power, and Civil Conflict:” A formal and quantitative replication

[This is a post-publication review symposium] Oil is associated with all kinds of bad things: Civil war (Ross 2004, 2006), Human rights violations (DeMeritt and Young 2013), and poor economic development (Karl 1997).  These studies all examine how oil wealth covaries with these outcomes, but not how the discovery of new reserves alters the processes that produce violence or poor economies. A new paper in International Studies Quarterly by Curtis Bell and Scott Wolford, “Oil Discoveries, Shifting Power, and Civil Conflict” (2015) does just this. Bell and Wolford offer a novel theoretical claim to explain how the discovery of petroleum reserves has nonlinear effects on civil conflict.  They show that oil discoveries in poor states influence the balance of power and make regime commitments to peace less credible given a prospective shift in state capabilities. The paper also uses a formal model to generate these claims, and then a statistical model to test them. This symposium will examine the paper from two perspectives. First, Emily Ritter from the University of California, Merced replicates the formal results from the paper.  She clearly explains how Bell and Wolford expand the basic bargaining model of civil war made popular by Fearon (2003) by showing how new resources influence future bargaining. She extends their claims and suggests power for the rebels could be made endogenous to the model leading to claims beyond simple conflict onset. [...]