Resource Curse: Study Suggests Oil Factors Hugely Into Foreign Wars

Feb 4, 2015 | Douglas Main, Newsweek
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Oil plays an even bigger role in influencing foreign military intervention than is generally acknowledged, according to a new economic analysis, lending support to so-called “conspiracy theorists” who claim that oil helps drive these sorts of decisions.The study, published in The Journal of Conflict Resolution, found that a country was more likely to intercede in another nation's civil war if the latter had large oil reserves, and if the intervener was a net importer with a high demand for the resource.It sounds pretty intuitive, but the theory had never before been systematically tested using a large data set, says Andrea Ruggeri, who studies quantitative methods in international relations at Brasenose College in the United Kingdom.