Replication Data for: Claimability in International Relations: Oil Discoveries, Territorial Claims, and Interstate Conflicts

Interstate conflict is rare not primarily because states settle disputes peacefully but largely because they have no serious dispute. To address this simple but oft-neglected reality, I provide a comprehensive measurement of states’ claimable areas. Focusing on three international norms that emerged after the world wars (territorial integrity, minority protection, and maritime sovereignty), I code geographical extents of states’ claimable areas for 1946-2024. I illustrate the usefulness of this dataset by applying it to oil and conflict. By leveraging the records of over 600,000 wildcat drills, natural experiments, and difference-in-differences, I demonstrate that fuel resources increased interstate conflicts only when discovered in areas claimable to multiple states. The extensive analyses of validity, heterogeneity, and mechanisms, as well as the “most-similar” case study, provide further evidence. These findings expand the emerging literature on territorial norms by providing comprehensive, rigorous, and contemporary evidence for claimability in international relations. This research uses proprietary data of wildcat drills provided by Enverus. As such, only the data aggregated at a dyad-year level are included in the replication package.Because the replication package contains many files and cannot be uploaded as a folder, the package is zipped and uploaded as a file. Please unzip the file and read README.txt.